The seer who saw both

This is the last of six posts in which I work through the six Indian philosophical schools one at a time, writing down what I have understood. The first five were, in a sense, preparation. Sāṃkhya separated the watcher from the clay; Yoga stilled the mind so the watcher could be seen; Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika built the logic and the inventory; Mīmāṃsā defended the text. Vedānta takes the text they defended, the Upaniṣads, and asks the one question the others circled: what is the thing that does not change, and what are you to it?

The teacher I learned most of this from calls Vedānta "India's official philosophy" and, quoting Radhakrishnan, "the final phase of human thought." That is a claim, not a finding, and the post will say so where it matters. But it explains why the material is so much larger than for the other schools. Vedānta is not one system. It is a family of commentaries on the same three texts, and the family quarrels. Śaṅkara read the Upaniṣads as saying that only Brahman is real and the world is appearance. Rāmānuja read them as saying that the world and the souls are real and are God's body. Madhva read them as saying that God, souls and matter are three, and stay three. Vallabha read them as saying that everything is God and there was never any need for the word "appearance" at all. The post gives Śaṅkara the first half, because the other three define themselves against him, and then lets each of them speak.

A note on what this is. I am not a scholar of Vedānta; I am a compiler. This page is my learning, written down in the order it made sense to me, from the teachers and books listed at the end. The most useful device I picked up along the way, a three-circle diagram that rearranges itself for each school, is redrawn here in my own form and made interactive. Where I add a date, a name or a standard reading my teachers did not give, I say so in place, and where my sources contradict each other or the textbooks, I note the disagreement rather than smooth it over. The diagrams are mine.

The word

The end of the Veda, the end of knowing

Vedānta वेदान्त has two meanings, and both matter. It is the end portion of the Veda: the Upaniṣads, the texts that come last and ask "why?" after the hymns have praised and the manuals have prescribed. And since veda comes from the root vid, to know, it is also the end of knowledge, the parākāṣṭhā, the maximum, "the point beyond which no man can think." The word "end" needs care. If the Veda is infinite, how can it have an end? The answer is that "anta" here means the summit, not the stopping place.

The word Upaniṣad उपनिषद् unpacks as upa, ni, sad: sitting down, close, at the teacher's feet. What was taught there was not grammar or ritual but one question, and a story I was told fixes it. When the young Dayānand, who would found the Ārya Samāj, reached the door of the blind teacher Virajānand and knocked, the voice inside asked, "Who is it?" Dayānand answered: "That is exactly what I have come to find out: who am I?" The door opened. That, I was taught, is the whole of the Upaniṣads.

Where it sits

Three layers, three pillars

The Veda is layered. First the hymns, which take the powers of nature as gods: Indra who sends rain, the Sun who gives life. Then the manuals, the Brāhmaṇas, which say how each is to be honoured. Take the example of why water is offered to the Sun: because the Sun silently takes water from our drying clothes and rivers and returns it as rain, so the offering says "keep this, and give it back when we need it." That middle layer was Mīmāṃsā's whole territory. Then, at the very end, a part that asks why, and what the benefit is. "This questioning makes philosophy." That part is the Upaniṣads, and the school built on it is Vedānta.

Vedānta also has a canon of three, the prasthāna-trayī: the Upaniṣads, which hold the knowledge of Brahman; the Gītā, where action is dominant; and the Brahma Sūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, which, in my teacher's words, "squeezed all the Upaniṣads and set up their essence," removing the contradictions among them that the Buddhists had pointed at. And a rule: nobody may be seated as ācārya, or saluted as one, who has not written a commentary on all three. Call him paṇḍit jī, sant jī, mahātmā jī, but not ācārya. The rule is why Vedānta's history is a history of commentaries, and why every quarrel in it is a quarrel about what a sentence means.

Step 1

The creed, and the word everyone misreads

The whole of Advaita is said to fit in a half-verse: brahma satyaṃ jagan mithyā jīvo brahmaiva nāparaḥ. Brahman is real; the world is mithyā; the individual self is Brahman and nothing else. The second clause took a surprising share of my teacher's time, because, as he put it, "foolish people" have read mithyā as "non-existent" and concluded that Śaṅkara denies the world. He does not. "Śaṅkara nowhere in all his works called this world asat." Asat is the son of a barren woman, the lotus in the sky: things that never were. Mithyā is something else: what exists but is not as it appears. The Sun looks like a plate; it is a sphere. For all practical dealing, vyavahāra, the world is real. Its fault is only that it keeps changing, and what changes cannot be what is.

That last step needs a definition of "real," and the one I learned is borrowed from Guru Nanak: ādi sach, jugādi sach, hai bhī sach, hosī bhī sach. What was at the beginning, through the ages, is now, and will be: that is sat. Everything else is name and form on something that lasts. Make the gold into a bangle, melt it, make an earring: bangle and earring come and go, gold stays. Devadatta sits, stands, lies down: the postures change, Devadatta remains. Even relationships, my teacher adds with some bitterness, are name and form: the sister who visits while the money lasts. And there is a distinction that the English word "truth" hides. Śaṅkara wrote sat, not satya: not logical truth, "two and two make four," but existence. Brahma satyam means Brahman alone exists.

Start with the word māyā as it is used in ordinary Hindi conversation: after the breakup, after the friend walks out of the company you built together, someone says "sab moha māyā hai," it is all illusion. Both my teachers make the same correction: "the world is not a fraud; you simply cannot see it as it is." The example I prefer to the plate is the sunrise. Every morning you see the Sun rise in the east. It is in your experience, it repeats, it is not nothing; and one piece of knowledge, that the Earth turns, sublates it without making it go away. The school's two-part test, as a formula: if the world were real it could not be sublated, and it is; if it were unreal it could not appear, and it does. So it is the third thing.

Step 2

What Brahman is: a chain of negations that ends in bliss

The word Brahman ब्रह्मन् comes from the root bṛh, to grow: "that than which nothing is bigger." Everything else is derived from the size, one step at a time, and the derivation is worth following because each later school accepts or rejects a specific link in it. If Brahman is the biggest it has no end, since anything beyond an end would be bigger: ananta. What is infinite can have no shape, since a shape is a boundary: nirākāra. It is everywhere, because wherever anything exists, existence is there: vibhu. It cannot be divided, because what can be divided can be destroyed: akhaṇḍa, "like a circle, with no place you can call its beginning." It cannot change, because change would make it something it was not: nirvikāra. Here the argument turns on the atomists of the previous two posts. What separates one atom from another? If the separator is real, then reality is continuous and there is no separation; if it is unreal, then unreality has become as real as reality. Either way a world of separable atoms cannot be the ground. Nor can space or time apply: "where is Brahman?" and "since when?" both break it into pieces.

Then the step that matters most for what follows. What cannot change can have no qualities, because qualities are the three guṇas of Sāṃkhya's prakṛti and the guṇas are change itself: tamas is darkness and darkness cannot cover it, rajas is motion and it does not move. So Brahman is nirguṇa, beyond the guṇas, and therefore anirvacanīya, beyond language. The Vedas themselves only say what it is not: neti neti, not this, not this, not the galaxy, not the nebula. The explanation of why language fails is the passage I value most in the whole argument. To describe anything, language splits it into a subject and a predicate and glues the halves with "is." "The rose is red": the rose and the redness were one thing until grammar divided them. Brahman is the knower, the known and the knowing at once; there is nothing to put on the other side of "is." You cannot say "Brahman is," which is no sentence, and if you say "Brahman is red" you have limited it to red. Simples cannot be defined, only shown: try explaining the taste of rabṛī to someone who has only eaten jaggery, or yellow to a man born blind.

And yet Brahman is not nothing. Existence is showing itself everywhere, so Brahman is self-manifesting: cit. It knows itself complete, and that completeness is ānanda. Hence the one positive name, saccidānanda. One more argument closes the chain: there cannot be two infinities, because where one ended the other would begin, and both would have an edge. So the infinite is one, ekam evādvitīyam, one without a second.

Step 3

How one appears as many

If Brahman has no name and no form, where do names and forms come from? Śaṅkara's answer is adhyāsa, superimposition: seeing, on an unchanging base, something remembered from elsewhere. The stock example is the rope taken for a snake in poor light. The rope does not change into a snake; that would be Sāṃkhya's transformation, pariṇāma, and Advaita rejects it. The rope stays a rope, and a snake is seen on it. Bring a light, and the snake does not die; it was never there. So with the world: Brahman stays Brahman, and on it name and form are seen. The power that does this is māyā, which a folk etymology glosses as mā yā, "that which is not" as it appears. Māyā works in two strokes. First āvaraṇa, covering: the base is hidden, as the Īśa Upaniṣad says the face of truth is hidden by a golden lid, and as Kabīr's great cheat roams with her noose of three strands, "speaking sweet words." Then vikṣepa, projection: a remembered form is thrown onto the hidden base. The question that tells the two strokes apart: granted that the rope was hidden, "why did you see a snake, and not a cable, or a wire, or any other long thing?" The hiding is āvaraṇa; the choice of what is seen instead is vikṣepa, and the world's manifoldness is its work. Where the snake came from, nobody can say; the doors were locked. So māyā too is anirvacanīya, like railway tracks that seem to meet though they never do, and this is why "Brahman cannot be known by inference: the pervasion can never be established."

Where the hero figure comes in. The question "then what is real?" gets three answers, not one, and Janaka's two nights hold all three. The dream was real while it lasted and vanished on waking: prātibhāsika, apparent. The court is real as long as the dealings of the world run, the queen serving, the guards standing: vyāvahārika, practical. And the one who saw the kite in the dream and sees the queen in the morning, the same witness on both nights, is the only thing that was there both times: pāramārthika, absolute. "In the dream state that alone was real; in waking, this is; and when complete knowledge comes there is no wife and no minister, only the self." The three levels are the key to the whole school, because they let Śaṅkara say both things his critics accuse him of refusing to say: the world is real, and the world is not finally real.

One consequence my teacher draws out with relish. If māyā creates the world, then God does not. "People say God made the world. God did not create it; God is niṣkriya, inactive; he neither does nor enjoys; he is only the seer, watching the change happen and laughing at those who see difference where there is none." Difference is māyā's view; non-difference is knowledge. And difference, he adds, includes caste and colour: "we called you śūdra and me brāhmaṇa, you dark and me fair; is Brahman dark or fair?" The moon in five basins shows how one becomes many and the many perish: disturb one reflection and the others are untouched; break a basin and the moon shines on.

Step 4

Who you are: the knower that cannot be denied

The third clause of the creed, jīvo brahmaiva nāparaḥ, needs a proof that there is a self at all, and Śaṅkara's comes with two Western witnesses beside it. Whoever says "I am not" is the one saying it; the denial refutes itself. Descartes reached the same place by a different road, cogito ergo sum, and Kant by another: every judgement, "the rose is red," is incomplete until you add the hidden clause, "I know that the rose is red." The "I" never appears in the sentence and is present in every sentence, like the eye that sees everything and cannot see itself. That knower is the ātman, and the ātman is Brahman. The Veda says so in four sentences, the mahāvākyas, one in each Veda: prajñānaṃ brahma, knowing is Brahman; ahaṃ brahmāsmi, I am Brahman; tat tvam asi, you are that; ayam ātmā brahma, this self is Brahman. (The story behind the third of these, and the three ways the schools read it, is in Step 12.)

Then what is the difference between the jīva, the individual, and the ātman? "Only a little," I was told, and the little is everything. The ātman seen as limited is the jīva; limitation is bondage; and bondage, not the world, is the cause of sorrow. The point lands socially before it lands metaphysically: the man confined to his own family is the unhappiest man in the village, because nobody outside it will send food when the ration runs out; the man with many friends suffers less; expansion is the cure. "Brahman means grown, growing. Make this self that big." The Upaniṣadic image is the two birds on one tree: the lower one eats the fruit, bites the sour lemon, suffers and enjoys; the upper one only watches. Māyā made the watcher into an eater by superimposition, and the work of Advaita is to make the eater a watcher again.

Two pictures do the explaining, and I was given both without either being named. One moon shines in five basins of water: five moons, all apparently real, each perishable, the moon untouched. One space fills a crore of pots: break a pot and the space inside it was never separate from the space outside. The first says the many are reflections of the one; the second says they are the one, limited. Both will be attacked later, from opposite sides.

Step 5

The road, and why at the end there is nothing to do

Śaṅkara, as I learned it, was strict about who may be taught this; my own teacher said he taught it at the university "out of compulsion, because it is in the course," since the text says a teacher who gives the knowledge of Brahman to an unpurified mind goes to hell himself. The reason is the upturned pot: pour a maund of milk on it and not a drop goes in. A long story makes the danger vivid. A preacher gives a king the doctrine of non-difference, "whoever sees a difference between this and that is ignorant," and leaves. The king goes home and tells the queen that tonight it makes no difference to him whether she or their daughter comes to his bed. The queen sends for the preacher. He comes to court, has himself seated on the throne, has the king seated where the peons sit, and when the food comes peels a banana and drops the skin on the king's plate. The king draws his sword on the minister. "Fool: today you see a difference between a king and a minister, between a banana and its peel, and yet between queen and daughter you saw none? The mistake was mine. First purify the inner organ."

So there is a road before the knowledge, and it was laid out for me in full. Two ways to purify the antaḥkaraṇa, the inner instrument of intellect, mind, ego and memory. One is long: Mīmāṃsā's road of duty, athāto dharma-jijñāsā, household, the five daily sacrifices, sons to offer the ancestral rice; "dharma is not needed for release, Brahman has no dharma, but it is needed to purify the body." The other is renunciation, and it begins by naming the three cravings that keep a man in the swamp of the world, a swamp in which "even an elephant sinks," a fever like the three-day fever that leaves only with the patient's life. The craving for sons, which makes a father hold the examiner's feet and bribe the master with sweets. The craving for wealth, which mixes horse dung into the coriander and ends, as the saint Jambheśvara said, with the money going either to doctors or to dacoits. The craving for fame, which survives the other two and brings down great sādhus: the politician photographed holding the broom upside down; the old student who wanted his name on all three blades of the fan he donated.

Then the four means, the sādhana-catuṣṭaya, each purifying one part of the inner organ. Discrimination between the lasting and the passing, viveka: at the preacher's own funeral, after a lifetime of saying the world alone is real, his disciples carried him out chanting "Rām's name is the truth." Dispassion toward enjoyment here and hereafter, virāga: worship done for the rivers of honey and the dancers of heaven is trade, not worship. The six treasures: calm, śama, like Vibhīṣaṇa wishing the brother who kicked him well; restraint of the senses, dama, which like a horse or a switched-off car run happily downhill and strain on every climb; endurance, titikṣā, of heat, cold and rain without the cooler, the heater or the flight to Kashmir; detachment, uparati, like the Meghalaya market where no shopkeeper sits and the buyer leaves money in a box, or like the lotus leaf the water never wets; settledness, samādhāna, the removal of doubts, since "the doubting self perishes"; and faith, śraddhā, without which an hour with a book is wasted. Last, the wish to be free, mumukṣutva, illustrated by the fisherman's daughter who falls ill in her sister's flower garden and is cured by a basket of fish set beside her. Someone who loves the smell will not thank you for the garden.

And when all four are done? "Nothing. No act remains." This is the point of the whole road, and the reason Advaita calls itself the path of knowledge. Bondage is not a rope, to be cut with effort; it is darkness, and darkness is not fought, it is lit. (Hold on to that image: Rāmānuja will say that bondage is a rope after all.) The purified disciple hears one sentence from the teacher, tat tvam asi, and "the teacher strikes the match." What follows is not an attainment. Think of the old man who woke screaming that dacoits had come for his diamonds; the servants lit a lamp; the diamonds were in their box and there had never been any dacoits. Release is prāptasya prāptiḥ, parihṛtasya parihāraḥ: gaining what you always had, losing what was never there. It can happen before death. The potter lifts his hand and the wheel keeps turning for a while; the body of the freed person runs on its old momentum, eating when food comes and not minding when it does not, and the self is untouched. The disciple's answer to the teacher's sentence is the disciple's own: ahaṃ brahmāsmi, so'ham, which read backwards gives haṃsa, the swan, the name of the one who has crossed. Does it wear off? Think of a marble on a green cloth: it looks green; lift it once, for half a second, and see that it is clear; put it back, and you will never again ask whether the marble is green. Knowledge sublates once.

Step 6

The concession that opened a door

My teacher closes his account of Śaṅkara with a superlative ("no one has given, or can give, anything higher") and then, almost in passing, with the concession that made the next three schools possible. Śaṅkara accepted that the ordinary person cannot hold a Brahman without qualities. So for the person who lives inside māyā, Brahman seen through māyā's three strands appears as a God with qualities, Īśvara, and as three Gods: Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Śiva. Worship of this saguṇa Brahman is permitted. It also, as he says drily, "changes nothing: offer the formless as many laḍḍūs as you like." A back door for devotion, kept on sufferance. "So Śaṅkara saved both sides," as I was taught it, "and Rāmānuja developed the second."

The critics went through the door. Śaṅkara's Brahman, they said, is dry, nīrasa: it cannot be prayed to, cannot be loved, cannot answer. My teacher quotes Radhakrishnan to put the complaint at its strongest. A God who is to be worshipped must share our sorrow, must go to Vibhīṣaṇa's house, must go to Ahalyā turned to stone, and a formless Brahman can do none of that. In the South, the Ālvār poets were already singing to Viṣṇu in Tamil, among them a woman and several men born outside the twice-born castes, and the man who married their singing to the Brahma Sūtra was Rāmānuja.

Step 7

Rāmānuja: one person, whose body is souls and matter

Rāmānuja's first move, as I learned it, is a question about the word "difference." Difference comes in three kinds. Between members of one kind, sajātīya: a white horse and a red one. Between kinds, vijātīya: a horse and a cow, whose hoof is split. And within one thing, svagata: the finger and the eye of a single body. Brahman has no difference of the first kind, because there is no second Brahman, and none of the second, because there is nothing other than Brahman. But the third it has, and must have, because a thing with no internal articulation at all, no quality and no form, "is nothingness; we could neither reason about it nor experience it." Put more briefly: being experienced is itself a quality, so a Brahman that can be known is not nirguṇa.

From that one admission the whole system follows. Brahman is one, but it is a whole with parts, and the parts are two: inert matter, acit, and conscious selves, cit. They are its body, as a hand and an eye are ours, and it is their soul. So there are three reals, not one: "Brahman is real, the conscious jīva is real, the inert prakṛti is real, because they are parts of Brahman, and nothing made of the unreal can be real." The world is not superimposed on Brahman; it is prakṛti transforming, and since prakṛti is Brahman's limb, it is Brahman transforming, "as the form of our body keeps changing and it remains our body." Sāṃkhya's prakṛti is absorbed whole, satkāryavāda and all: you get oil from sesame and never from water, so every form in the world was already latent in matter and is drawn out by Brahman's will. "This typewriter too is Brahman." Brahman is therefore saguṇa, sākāra, the doer and not only the seer, and Brahman and Īśvara are one and the same: Viṣṇu, Vāsudeva. Because two qualifiers, viśeṣaṇa, are inseparably attached to the one, the school is called Viśiṣṭādvaita, non-dualism of the qualified.

What becomes of māyā? Rāmānuja's charge, in my teacher's words, is that "Śaṅkara calls dvaita advaita": a Brahman plus a coverer is two things. The same charge as a dilemma: either ignorance is part of Brahman, and then Brahman is not the pure truth it is said to be, or it is not part of Brahman, and then there are two things and no non-dualism. He pressed the point with a battery of objections, anupapatti, untenabilities, of which I was given the two thought strongest. What is māyā made of, who made it, how does it conceal? Śaṅkara, says Rāmānuja, is silent and escapes behind the word "indescribable." And the decisive one: Brahman is consciousness, light upon light; māyā is ignorance, darkness; and darkness cannot cover light. Śaṅkara's reply that clouds cover the sun is rejected, because everyone knows the cloud will pass and never touched the sun. So what Advaita calls māyā, Rāmānuja calls līlā: the creative play of a Brahman that is ānanda and, like a performer, delights in taking many forms. The rope that looks like a snake is not an error laid over Brahman; it is Brahman's own power to appear.

Five ways the one Brahman manifests, its five forms: as para, the supreme, Vāsudeva, who runs the world from above and prompts the man to build a roof against the hail; as vyūha, the three emanations Saṅkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna and Aniruddha, strength, splendour and the granting of boons; as vibhava, the visible abundance of the world, the fruit-heavy tree, the bird's song, the river's sound, and in human form the avatāra; as antaryāmī, the inner controller who sits inside every being, "the mind's secret is not hidden from you"; and as arcā, the consecrated image, which is not God but the form the devotee conceived and asked God to enter. On the last, Tulsī and the Gītā say the same thing: as one's feeling is, so one sees the image; "in whatever form they approach me, I meet them in that form." Every name is a raindrop, and every drop reaches the ocean by some stream. I was taught to take this as far as it will go: the Christian's Jesus, the Muslim's Allah, even a book, if that is the form chosen.

A technical footnote: Rāmānuja cut Śaṅkara's six means of knowing to three, perception, inference and testimony, arguing that presumption (fat Devadatta eats at night) and comparison (the nīlgāy is like the cow) are only inference under other names, and that "the pot is not here" tells you nothing about a pot. Those who read the Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā posts will recognise the argument from the other side.

Step 8

Rāmānuja's road: duty, song, surrender

If the world is God's body and not an error, there is nothing to renounce in it. This is where my teacher's Rāmānuja parts from his Śaṅkara most sharply, and he plainly enjoys it. No swamp of three cravings; "for me there is no need to renounce these things." The road is karma, the duties the Veda prescribes, because "by knowledge one can know but not attain," and because, in the line the Mīmāṃsā post ended on, the Vedas do not purify a man without conduct. Duty is assigned by capacity, not birth: the professor cannot drive the plough in the noon of Jyeṣṭha and the ploughman cannot teach the university, and the four orders of society are four kinds of work, the thinker, the protector, the grower and trader, and the labour without which "no factory runs and no harvest is cut." Rāmānuja, I was told, erased caste by his own conduct: he built the first temple that asked nobody's gotra, and after his bath he would change his clothes in a śūdra disciple's hut, "so that the pride of being a Brāhmaṇa goes out of me and I see him as Brahman." Whatever the duty, it is done with niṣṭhā, and the Gītā's promise is that the one absorbed in his own work reaches perfection. My teacher's example is the sweeper of the Vālmīki colony where he lived, whose drain ran so clear before dawn that the water could be seen moving. "You are a true yogī." "Sir, I am no yogī; cleaning before you wake is my duty."

Duty is the floor; bhakti is the house. The Ālvārs sang, and their singing has three things in it: rāga, the melody that draws; śṛṅgāra, the adornment of the image, because God is splendour and "if you put rags on him where is the splendour?"; and bhoga, the food offered first. There is the story of Rāmakṛṣṇa, who loved the young Narendra's singing and sent away the tuneless friend Narendra brought along: "what draws toward God is bhajan; what divides is vibhājan." And then the step that Rāmānuja is remembered for, prapatti, surrender. Knowledge breeds pride; the first word out of the knower's mouth, in ahaṃ brahma, is "I." Bhakti has no "I" in it. Kabīr: when I was, Hari was not; now Hari is, and I am not; the lane of love is narrow and two cannot pass. The mechanism is a pot in a pond. A pot stuffed full takes in no water; empty it, "I am nothing, I am a particle, I am your servant," and the water comes in by itself. "When you have surrendered, God himself brings the boat." Gandhi's commentary on the Gītā supplies the ethical version: the man who buys cheap, wormy okra and remembers that it is for God's offering throws it away without being told; make everything an offering first and the inedible drops out of a life on its own.

Why does Rāmānuja need action and grace after knowledge, when Śaṅkara needed neither? The shortest answer I have is the one planted in Step 5. For Śaṅkara bondage is darkness, and one match ends it. For Rāmānuja matter is a real part of Brahman, so a soul caught in its whirl is tied by a real rope, and knowing that you are tied does not untie you: "I am Brahman, I am Brahman, but my tail is burning." The rope is cut by acting, without self-interest, and the cutting is finished by grace. My teacher's set-piece for the three roads is Tulsī's bridge to Laṅkā. The monkeys built the bridge with great labour, and it was narrow and crowded; that is the ritual road, costly and jammed, "and nowadays the altar that should not be iron is iron." The strong monkeys did not bother with it; they flew across the sky; that is the road of knowledge, "Vivekananda did no ritual, Dayānand did no ritual." And the weak ones, with no money for the first road and no wings for the second, saw that the creatures of the sea had crowded in for a sight of Rāma until the water could not be seen, and crossed on their backs. That is bhakti. Then Sugrīva's question: why did you not stand on the shore first and spare us the labour? And Rāma's answer, which my teacher treats as the whole doctrine of prapatti: I stood in the middle of the bridge you built; the effort was yours, the grace is mine; "remember me, and fight." Surrender, he says, "is not a five-rupee prasād and 'Hanumān-jī, do my exam.'"

What release is, on this road, is not becoming Brahman. "No one can become Brahman. The man will remain man, the jīva will remain jīva, because all three are real and cannot turn into one another." It is the end of birth and death, in four fruits, each tied to a cause: nearness, God's hand on you, for duty done in full; God's world, for duty done with more devotion; God's form, "four arms like his," for total surrender; and the merging of your light into his, in which "you will not become God, but you will become like God." Nothing need be renounced but the ego; the householder stays in the household. And the road did not stay in the South. In a well-known couplet, bhakti was born in the Dravida country and Rāmānanda brought it north, to Kabīr the weaver, Nāmdev the printer, Pīpā, and Dhannā the Jāṭ: "no one asks caste; whoever worships Hari is Hari's."

Step 9

Madhva: the world is exactly as perceived, and difference is real five times over

I was introduced to Madhva as the critic for whom "Śaṅkara seems to be his greatest enemy": half of his commentary on the three texts refutes Advaita and half establishes its opposite. The first argument is the one Advaita can least afford to lose. Knowledge requires a knower and a known. The sentence "I am Brahman" has someone saying it and something said about; "I know myself" has two I's in it; a consciousness with nothing before it to know is indistinguishable from a table. So the difference between knower and known can never be abolished, and the mahāvākya, read closely, "itself shows dvaita." Western phenomenology, for what it is worth, lands in the same place: the subject remains subject, the object object. The second argument is from perception. The jīva is plainly seen working; matter is plainly seen; God is "there anyway"; "how did they become māyā?" And even a māyā that depends on ignorance is a second thing: until the knowledge comes, "both the rope and the snake are."

The two birds return, read the other way. The lower bird eats the rotten fruit and falls ill; it does and it suffers; it is the jīva. The upper bird only watches; it is Īśvara. There are two birds in the Upaniṣad, says Madhva, not one bird and its shadow. Difference, bheda, is then catalogued five times: between God and souls, God and matter, souls and matter, soul and soul, and one piece of matter and another. The soul-and-soul difference gets the most modern illustration: "the experiences I have had, ask someone to WhatsApp his to you; that phone does not run." One jīva's dream cannot be another's, and one jīva's karma cannot be transferred to another. The whole system fits in one sentence: the clay can do what it likes, it will never become the potter.

Madhva then sorts everything into two: the independent, svatantra, which is Viṣṇu alone, and the dependent, paratantra, which is everything else; the school is also called Tattvavāda for this. God is saguṇa, with every quality there is, because "a God without qualities would need a second God to make the qualities." He is the instrumental cause of the world, the potter, not its material: "keep the clay lying there; how will it become a pot?" Matter, prakṛti, is God's will-power, supplying the stuff when he wills water or a mountain; one portion of it is the ignorance that covers the jīva so that it forgets itself and thinks "I am Mohan Lal, father of three"; the rest is his consort Lakṣmī, in three faces, land, wealth and power, Bhū, Śrī and Durgā. My teacher's gloss on fickle wealth is pure village sermon: the same Lakṣmī enters the house God means to ruin and the house he means to bless; in one she turns to drink, dice and hired guns, in the other to wells dug and poor relatives schooled; "the day your two-crore lottery comes, that day begin the prayer for good sense." Souls are infinite and come in three kinds: those fit for release, of godly disposition, who lie awake because they could not even help a blind man across the road; those bound for darkness, into whose lives "light never comes"; and the ordinary soul in the middle, with no fixed nature, who goes either way by his acts. God's own power is inconceivable, like the elephant to the blind men, and three more powers come from Madhva's categories: the power placed in a thing, as fire makes cold iron burn and consecration makes a stone an image; the natural power to act, present in every creature; and the power of a word, which is why "oh you" and "jī" land differently and why mantras work at all.

Release, for Madhva, is unbroken bliss, and it is reached by surrender and received by grace: "do as much tapasyā in as many forests as you like; without his kṛpā, no release." The purified mind that Śaṅkara relied on is, to Madhva, a mind that has let "I" in. In release the soul becomes like God and never God: "one bhakta will remain and one Bhagavān," the servant and the served, and the relation is the point rather than the obstacle. Even tat tvam asi is re-read: not "you are that," which would make a man identical with God, but, in a devotional paraphrase, "you alone are; you are the master of everything; you, you, you."

Step 10

Vallabha: if everything is Brahman, say so, and drop māyā

Vallabha, the last of the four, studied all three of the others and then, as I learned it, asked why anyone needed the extra machinery. Śaṅkara's reflection, Rāmānuja's parts: if the world and the souls are Brahman, call them Brahman. A fire has flames, sparks and embers, and to see them as different things "is our foolishness; it is fire." Vallabha's objections to Advaita come as a numbered list, and they are aimed at the reflection picture of Step 4. The Upaniṣads themselves call Brahman sat, cit and ānanda, which are qualities, so "without qualities" is not scriptural. The Brahma Sūtra says the world is born from Brahman and dissolves into it, so to call the world false is to say "my mother is barren." If the world is false, the Vedas are in the world, so the Vedas are false, and so is their account of Brahman. A reflection cannot see itself: if we are Brahman's reflections, who is looking, and if the looker is Brahman, then Brahman has fallen into māyā. A thing with no quality, colour or form casts no reflection. And if māyā is as all-pervading as Brahman, there is no room left for a reflection to form; if it is not, there are two domains and two things. One more that bites: an illusion needs a cause, and if the cause of the world's illusion is māyā, then māyā is an illusion too, an illusion made from an illusion.

His own picture is a Brahman that breathes. With one power, āvirbhāva, it manifests the world and the souls; with the other, tirobhāva, it draws them back. When it manifests a soul it gives the soul all its own properties, "but in limitation: not the full intelligence, not the full will." The limited soul cannot see its own all-pervading nature, "and from here māyā is born": not a separate principle, not even a direct quality of Brahman, but a by-product of the limit. Within the limit the soul is free, and Brahman has made rules such that the soul's own acts decide whether it returns into Brahman or is manifested again. Everything is Brahman; nothing is a part and nothing is a reflection; hence Śuddhādvaita, the pure non-dualism, and the Brahman it names is Kṛṣṇa.

The practice that goes with this is the Puṣṭi-mārga, "the way of grace." Puṣṭi is God's kṛpā, "without which, do as many works as you like, all your efforts fail." It is won, if won is the word, by three offerings: rāga, the best music, because "Kṛṣṇa means the one who attracts" and a bhajan that does not attract is not a bhajan; bhoga, the purest food, offered before it is eaten; and śṛṅgāra, the adornment of the image that makes people come from afar to look, which is why, my teacher says, the temples of Vṛndāvana dress their images the way they do. The eight poets of the Aṣṭachāp, Sūrdās first among them, set this to music, and the whole Bhāgavata, with its enchanting līlās of Kṛṣṇa, is its text. The one condition is the one Kabīr set: not a trace of "I." "In love there is no selfishness and no I; if I comes, it is not love, it is an attempt to take possession."

Step 11

Potter, clay, pot: one frame, six arrangements

One of my teachers holds all of this in one device, and it is good enough to borrow. Any making has three terms: the maker who wills it, the potter; the stuff it is made from, the clay; and the thing made, the pot. Call them the instrumental cause, the material cause and the creation. For the world, the darśanas name them Īśvara, jīva (or ātman, cit) and jagat. "The relations among these three give rise to the different darśanas. If you have understood this, you will understand all of them." Advaita merges potter and clay and calls the pot an appearance. Rāmānuja makes clay and pot the body of the potter. Madhva keeps the potter apart and the other two together below him, dependent. Vallabha melts all three into one fire. Two more schools that I know only in outline fit the same frame: Nimbārka's Dvaitādvaita, where the soul is to God as the wave is to the ocean, different and not different; and Caitanya's Acintya-bhedābheda, where God is apart from souls and world yet controls them, directly when he wishes and through his powers when he wishes to stay apart, "like the spider that can pounce or let the web do the work," and how both can be true is inconceivable. Press the names below and watch the circles move.

The same comparison, laid out as a table, drawn only from what I was taught.

Step 12

The sentence and the boy

Every Vedānta school, in a phrase I learned, "flowered on" four words: tat tvam asi, you are that. The sentence comes from the sixth chapter of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, and here is the frame story. The sage Uddālaka saw that his small son Śvetaketu had no mind for Vedic study and sent him away to a teacher. The boy came back after twelve years knowing everything, and with the pride of knowing everything. His father asked him one question: did you learn that by which everything else is known? The boy had not heard of such a thing. Have you not seen the clay outside the potter's house, said the father; know the clay and you will recognise every pot he ever makes. Know gold at the goldsmith's and every ornament is gold to you. So with Brahman: know it, and whatever you see you will recognise, because Brahman is in everything, "and in you too." And then the sentence.

Why Śaṅkara read it as identity and not as resemblance. Two passages in the same chapter give Brahman both of the potter-and-clay roles from Step 11: the one that says that in the beginning there was only being, one without a second, and that being desired to become many (so the wish, the potter's role, arises inside Brahman); and the one about the clay (so the stuff, too, is Brahman). Brahman is "the absolute cause," maker and material at once. The jīva, meanwhile, is finite and bound. How can the two be one? Only, says Śaṅkara in this telling, by peeling the attributes off both. The air in a balloon has a shape, a volume and a temperature, and the air in the room has others; take the properties away and "essentially it is just air."

Then the other readings of the same four words, in the schools' own grammar. Viśiṣṭādvaita objects first with a dilemma: either ignorance is part of Brahman, in which case Brahman is not the pure truth it is claimed to be, or it is not, in which case there are two things and no Advaita. Its own reading uses a device from Pāṇini's grammar, sāmānādhikaraṇya, co-reference: two words that pick out one thing by different attributes. A conch is called white, and it is called sea-born; not everything white is from the sea and not everything from the sea is white, but both words point at the one shell. So "that" and "you" both name the one Brahman, the first as all-knowing and unlimited, the second as little-knowing and limited. Identity of the whole, with the attributes kept on. And Dvaita, from Step 9, re-parses the sentence so that it says difference: "you alone are; you are the master of all."

Two smaller things on the same sentence. Why are there two sayings that seem to say one thing, "I am Brahman" and "you are that"? Because the first, taken alone, breeds an ego: "I am Brahman and the rest of the world are puppets in my hand." The second turns the same claim outward, to everyone else, and the consequence follows: "when you dirty society you are dirtying yourself." And the sentence is not only in books. At Sabarimala in Kerala the words tat tvam asi stand over the sanctum, at the top of the eighteen steps that only a pilgrim who has kept the forty-one-day vow may climb; the reading is that the vow strips away name, colour and form until only the knower is left, and then the pilgrim reads what he is.

Step 13

The debate as a ladder of proofs

Both my teachers tell the story of Śaṅkara's debate with the Mīmāṃsaka Maṇḍana Miśra, and Step 1 of the Mīmāṃsā post gave one version: the well, the Sanskrit-speaking women, the parrot and the mynah arguing self-validity at the door. The other gives the debate itself, and it is the thing I value most in this part, because it shows how an Advaitin argued rather than what he believed. The setting, as told: Māndhātā island in the Narmadā, "about 1300 years ago," thirty-two days, the loser to become the winner's disciple for life, Śaṅkara vowing to leave sannyāsa and marry if he lost, Maṇḍana vowing to renounce if he did, and Maṇḍana's wife, the scholar Ubhaya Bhāratī, made judge. The quarrel is the one these posts have already met: a Mīmāṃsaka holds that the Veda is self-valid, that an act carries its own fruit without any God to pay it out, and that the world is eternal; a Vedāntin holds that the fruit needs a giver, that the world is appearance, and that the Veda's last part outranks its middle.

Four exchanges, each a rung higher. First, the word. Asked for proof that the self and Brahman are one, Śaṅkara cites tat tvam asi. Maṇḍana answers that the same Upaniṣads say "worship the mind as Brahman," and food, and the Sun; so the sentence means "treat every being as Brahman," not "every being is Brahman." Śaṅkara points to the verbs. Upāsīta, "let one worship," is an injunction, a matter of ritual; asi, "you are," is the verb to be, and what is, is at all times. Second, reason. Maṇḍana grants the grammar and asks for proof of identity rather than resemblance. Śaṅkara asks what the resemblance would be in. If in consciousness, that is universal and needs no teaching; if in omnipotence, then note that only one thing can be all-powerful, since two powers would limit each other, so "your statement proves itself." Third, perception. Maṇḍana, as a Mīmāṃsaka, wants the strongest proof, and perception tells him plainly that he is not God. Śaṅkara asks whether the self is all-pervading or atomic; whichever he picks, no sense can perceive it, so perception has nothing to say and the question passes to scripture. Fourth, scripture against scripture, where the Mīmāṃsaka feels at home. Maṇḍana produces the two birds on one tree, one eating and one watching, plainly two. Śaṅkara produces the Kaṭha Upaniṣad: whoever sees them as many "goes from death to death." Two texts conflict; which wins? The one, says Śaṅkara, that states a fruit, because a text with a consequence attached is the stronger; and the birds, he adds, are the jīva and its intellect, not the jīva and God.

In the last days, as the story goes, Maṇḍana's questions were a disciple's. What is the relation of the self to Brahman? That of the Sun to everything in its system. If Brahman is in me, why can I not see it? Dissolve a spoon of salt in a glass of water: can you point to the salt? Brahman is in every being as the salt is in the water, present everywhere and beyond the senses. Maṇḍana conceded and took the vow; and then, in the detail the telling saves for last, his wife, the judge, debated Śaṅkara herself for as many days again "and almost defeated him."

Step 14

One book under all the roofs

The longest single stretch of my learning here was on the Brahma Sūtra itself, and it answers a question these posts have been circling: why is the quarrel between the schools a quarrel about one text? Because the text was built to settle quarrels. The Upaniṣads, read side by side, seem to contradict one another, and the Buddhists said so. Bādarāyaṇa, whom the common reader knows as Vyāsa, took exactly the passages where a contradiction showed, "gave them one thread," and resolved each. A parallel from Tulsīdās: critics said the poet counted the monkey army as uncountable in one place and as eighteen padma in another, and the defenders answered that the two lines belong to two speakers, one who saw and one who heard, and that the eyewitness's word weighs more. Reconciling is ranking. That is the same move Śaṅkara makes on the fourth rung of the debate, where the text with a fruit outweighs the text without one.

The architecture, as I learned it: four chapters of four quarters each. Samanvaya, reconciliation, where the nature of Brahman is settled, with or without qualities, with or without change, and what sat, cit and ānanda mean. Avirodha, non-contradiction, where the law books and the reasoners are answered: "reasoning has no firm footing," and the stock example of a reasoner's slip is the man who converts "all crows are black" into "all black things are crows." Sādhana, the means, where the roads are compared, Yoga's, Nyāya's, the law books', the long road and the short, and where Śaṅkara's four-fold purification is given as the best. Phala, the fruit: release, release while alive, and which road arrives sooner. In all, by my teacher's count, 191 topics and 555 aphorisms, "eight or ten pages to explain each." The first four aphorisms are the keystone, the catuḥsūtrī, and he returns to them repeatedly as the place where sat, asat and mithyā are told apart: the chair whose leg breaks is "existent, but not in the form it had"; the goldsmith melting a ring says "for you it is a ring, for me it is gold"; and "those who say the world is a dream do not know Sanskrit; Śaṅkara never said that."

Step 15

The afterlife: Advaita for a hungry country

Was Vivekananda's "Navya Vedānta," the Vedānta he carried to Chicago in 1893, a betrayal of Śaṅkara? The answer, as I understand it, is that it was Śaṅkara with two settings changed. Vivekananda was more drawn to Advaita than to anything else he read, because it made religion universal; and he also knew, from the India of his time, what hunger was. "Vedānta is an ideal, true philosophy, but it is not practical. If a man is hungry for bread, to put philosophy in his hand is to mock him." So the first setting: the world is not called mithyā but relatively real, and the grain comes from this relative world before the philosophy does. The second: the means is not knowledge alone but knowledge joined to action, "jñāna-karma-yoga," which is why he set the young to schools and service rather than to sannyāsa. The line I keep returning to: "only by walking the road of māyā is it possible to go beyond māyā." And the one to end on: "Vedānta is not the right only of those who have roti, kapḍā and makān."

There is a newer afterlife, and one of my teachers is part of it: the habit of explaining māyā through quantum physics. His account of Kṛṣṇa's māyā sets out the doctrine well, with the sunrise, the two-test formula and the marble on the green cloth, and then turns to the uncertainty principle, the mostly empty atom, and "the field" from which matter comes and goes, as pictures of a world that "is not as it appears at the gross level." He himself calls this the objective view and says philosophy must add the subject. That is the right label for it: analogy, not evidence. The school's own claim was never that physics would confirm it, but that whoever is asking the question is already the answer.

Step 16

Two charges: a hidden Buddhist, and an eclipse

Two questions put to my teacher close his account of Vedānta, and both are worth keeping because he does not quite settle them. The first is old: was Śaṅkara a pracchanna bauddha, a Buddhist in disguise? Rāmānuja's camp said so, and my teacher states the charge in its sharpest form. Nāgārjuna had argued that every thing is "empty of properties," meaning not that it is nothing but that no predicate can be attached to it without limiting it. Śaṅkara's Brahman is that to which no predicate can be attached, and he called it anirvacanīya. Same idea, new word, and even the same example: "the rose" is not a judgement, "the rose is red" is one, and the moment the predicate lands the rose is fenced in. He then offers his own account of how Buddhist method reached Śaṅkara, which is the Kumārila legend from the Mīmāṃsā post seen from the other end: Kumārila learned the Buddhists' logic undercover, handed everything to Maṇḍana, and Śaṅkara took it from Maṇḍana after the debate. The questioner offers two defences, that one refutes an opponent with his own tools, and that every age argues in the medium of its time, and my teacher accepts both and leaves the matter open: "it can be seen both ways."

The second question, put to my teacher from America: did Śaṅkara's Vedānta eclipse the other schools, and why did no new darśana arise after it? His answer is that nothing was suppressed and that the question has its history backwards. Vedānta did not begin with Śaṅkara, who "only wrote a commentary"; it began in the Upaniṣads, and every other school came after the Veda. What happened to the rest is what happens to the lentils when the kheer with dry fruit is served: they move aside on their own. The other schools are small lamps and the Upaniṣads are the sun, and when the sun rises nobody has to remove the lamps. He quotes the Ṛgveda's licence for plurality, "truth is one, the wise speak of it variously," and insists that Śaṅkara banned nothing: "if the Naiyāyikas have a higher darśana, let them bring it and bring Vedānta down; there is no bar; no one has yet been born who can think above it." The questioner adds the observation that makes the second half of this post possible: the earlier schools stayed in the seminar room, and Vedānta alone was lived by ordinary devotees.

The verdict

Six schools, one question

My first teacher's verdict is not in doubt: Śaṅkara's is "the authorised Vedānta," only Advaita and Viśiṣṭādvaita are "real Vedānta" to scholars, and "the rest merged into bhakti." My second teacher's is gentler: monism is where the mind's search for fewer building blocks has always pointed, from a hundred elements to seventeen particles, and Advaita is the name of the one it hopes to find. Neither verdict is binding on a reader, and my teachers themselves supply the counter-case. Rāmānuja's objection that a Brahman nobody can experience is "nothingness," Madhva's that a knower always has a known, Vallabha's that a reflection cannot see itself: these are not devotional sentiment dressed as philosophy. They are arguments, and the tradition kept them because they were hard to answer.

One question put to my teacher asked him to set Vedānta beside the school these posts began with, and his answer closes the loop. Sāṃkhya and Advaita share one law, that nothing comes from nothing, and read it two ways. Sāṃkhya reads it as a seed: what is inside prakṛti comes out, and the world evolves. Advaita reads it as a curtain: nothing is produced; a covering falls on what is, and a world appears. "Sāṃkhya has evolution; Vedānta has a covering." Sāṃkhya has countless watchers, each with experiences that cannot be transferred; Advaita has one moon in many pots. The Vedāntins, he adds, were not polite about it: where Sāṃkhya called its matter pradhāna, "the chief," they called it pradhāna-mala, "the chief filth." And yet the two agree on the strangest point of all: in release nothing is gained. The puruṣa was light before and is light after, "not a lantern that light enters"; the self was Brahman before and is Brahman after. Rāmānuja, who took Sāṃkhya's prakṛti whole and made it Brahman's body, sits exactly between them.

What these six posts set out to find was the thread through all six schools. It is one question, asked six times: what is the thing that does not change, and what are you to it? Sāṃkhya answered with two things, the watcher and the clay. Yoga answered with a practice for seeing the watcher. Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika answered with a proof that there is a self and a list of what else there is. Mīmāṃsā answered with a text and the unseen fruit of an act. Vedānta answered with Brahman, and then spent a thousand years disagreeing about the second half of the question: whether you are it, or its body, or its servant, or its spark. Janaka's teacher would say the question answers itself, since whoever is asking it was there on both nights. The three who came after Śaṅkara would say that the one asking and the one asked about are not, and never will be, the same, and that this is good news rather than bad. My teacher's own last word on the two roads is fairer than his superlatives: "the hardest means on the road of knowledge, the simplest on the road of devotion, and the goal of both is the same: to come to your own nature."

In one piece

The argument, start to finish

1. Vedānta is the end of the Veda and, its teachers say, the end of knowing; its one question is "who am I?" Dayānand at the blind teacher's door. Three layers of the Veda, and the question lives in the last.
2. Three texts and a rule: Upaniṣads, Gītā, Brahma Sūtra, and no title of ācārya without a commentary on all three. Which is why every school is a reading, and every quarrel is about a sentence.
3. Śaṅkara's creed in a half-verse: Brahman is real, the world is mithyā, the self is Brahman. Mithyā is not "non-existent"; it is the Sun that looks like a plate. Real means what is in all three times.
4. From "the biggest" everything follows: endless, shapeless, everywhere, undivided, changeless, beyond the guṇas, beyond language; and yet sat, cit, ānanda, and one. Language splits what is one; simples can only be shown.
5. The many appear by superimposition: māyā covers the base and projects a remembered form; the rope never becomes the snake. Three levels of the real, taught through Janaka's two nights; only the seer is on both.
6. You are the knower that cannot be denied, and the knower is Brahman; the jīva is Brahman seen limited. The four great sayings; the two birds; the moon in basins and the space in pots.
7. The road is purification: drop the three cravings, practise the four means; at the top there is nothing to do, because bondage is darkness and the teacher's word is a match. Release is gaining what you had and losing the dacoits who were never there.
8. Śaṅkara's concession: for the ordinary person the formless appears with qualities, as Īśvara, and may be worshipped. The critics walked through the door: a God who cannot feel our sorrow cannot be prayed to.
9. Rāmānuja: Brahman has difference within itself, like a body; souls and matter are its limbs; three reals; māyā is God's play, not his cover. Darkness cannot cover light. The road is duty, song and surrender: the emptied pot.
10. Madhva: a knower always has a known, so "I am Brahman" itself proves two; difference is real five times over; the clay never becomes the potter. God independent, all else dependent; release by grace, like God and never God.
11. Vallabha: if the world and the souls are Brahman, say so; no reflection, no parts, no māyā but the limit under which Brahman manifests. A Brahman that breathes; grace sought with song, food and adornment, and love without "I".
12. One frame holds them all: potter, clay, pot, rearranged six ways. Seed or curtain: the same law of cause and effect read as transformation or as appearance.
13. The sentence has a story (a proud boy, clay, gold) and three grammars; the debate is a ladder of proofs ending in salt water; the book under all the roofs has four floors. The afterlife: Vivekananda's diagonal through the world; a charge of hidden Buddhism "that can be seen both ways"; an eclipse that was really a change of prestige.
14. Six schools, one question: what does not change, and what are you to it? Whoever is asking was there on both nights; whether the asker is the answer is where the schools part.

Terms

Glossary

The school and the texts

वेदान्त vedānta

The end portion of the Veda, the Upaniṣads; and the summit of knowledge, "the final phase of human thought" in a phrase my teacher takes from Radhakrishnan.

उपनिषद् upaniṣad

Sitting down close, at the teacher's feet; the knowledge of the self given there.

प्रस्थानत्रयी prasthāna-trayī

Upaniṣads, Gītā, Brahma Sūtra: the three pillars; a commentary on all three earns the title ācārya.

ब्रह्मसूत्र brahma-sūtra

Bādarāyaṇa's distillation of the Upaniṣads "with their contradictions removed"; Śaṅkara's Vedānta is a commentary on it.

महावाक्य mahāvākya

The four great sayings, one per Veda: knowing is Brahman; I am Brahman; you are that; this self is Brahman.

ब्रह्म सत्यं जगन्मिथ्या जीवो ब्रह्मैव नापरः brahma satyaṃ jagan mithyā jīvo brahmaiva nāparaḥ

Advaita in a half-verse. Attributed to Śaṅkara (my addition: it is from the Brahmajñānāvalīmālā or Vivekacūḍāmaṇi, not the Brahma Sūtra).

Real, apparent, and in between

सत् · असत् · मिथ्या sat · asat · mithyā

What is, in all three times; what never is, the barren woman's son; what is, but not as it appears, the Sun as a plate.

प्रातिभासिक · व्यावहारिक · पारमार्थिक prātibhāsika · vyāvahārika · pāramārthika

Apparent (the dream), practical (the court), absolute (the seer): the three levels of the real.

नामरूप nāma-rūpa

Name and form: the bangle and the earring on the gold.

अध्यास adhyāsa

Superimposition: seeing a remembered thing on an unchanging base; "mithyā is adhyāsa."

माया · आवरण · विक्षेप māyā · āvaraṇa · vikṣepa

The power that makes one appear as many; its two strokes, covering the base and projecting a form onto it.

अनिर्वचनीय anirvacanīya

Indescribable, inexplicable by reasoning: Brahman, and māyā, and the railway tracks that seem to meet.

नेति नेति neti neti

"Not this, not this": the Veda's only definition of Brahman.

परिणाम · सत्कार्यवाद pariṇāma · satkāryavāda

Real transformation, and the view that the effect pre-exists in its cause; Sāṃkhya's and Rāmānuja's, not Śaṅkara's.

Brahman and the self

ब्रह्मन् brahman

From bṛh, to grow: that than which nothing is bigger.

सच्चिदानन्द saccidānanda

Being, consciousness, bliss: Brahman's one positive name; for Vallabha, its three qualities.

निर्गुण · सगुण nirguṇa · saguṇa

Without the three guṇas; with qualities. The link in the chain Rāmānuja and Madhva cut.

एकमेवाद्वितीयम् ekam evādvitīyam

"One only, without a second": two infinities would bound each other.

द्रष्टा draṣṭā

The seer; the one who saw both of Janaka's nights.

आत्मा · जीव ātman · jīva

The self unlimited, which never suffers; the self seen limited, which does: "to be limited is bondage."

ज्ञाता · ज्ञेय jñātā · jñeya

Knower and known: one in Advaita; never one, says Madhva.

ईश्वर īśvara

For Śaṅkara, Brahman seen through the guṇas by those inside māyā; for Rāmānuja and Madhva, Brahman itself, as Viṣṇu; in the frame of Step 11, the potter.

The road

अधिकारी · अन्तःकरण adhikārī · antaḥkaraṇa

The one entitled to the teaching; the inner organ (intellect, mind, ego, memory) that must first be purified.

प्रवृत्ति · निवृत्ति pravṛtti · nivṛtti

The long road of duty (Mīmāṃsā's) and the short road of renunciation.

एषणा eṣaṇā

Craving; the three, for sons, wealth and fame, "the three-day fever."

साधनचतुष्टय sādhana-catuṣṭaya

The four means: discrimination, dispassion, the six treasures, the wish to be free.

शम · दम · तितिक्षा · उपरति · समाधान · श्रद्धा śama · dama · titikṣā · uparati · samādhāna · śraddhā

The six treasures: calm, restraint, endurance, detachment, settledness, faith.

मुमुक्षुत्व mumukṣutva

The wish for release; wanting out of the fish-smell.

जीवन्मुक्ति jīvan-mukti

Release while alive; the potter's wheel still turning.

प्राप्तस्य प्राप्तिः परिहृतस्य परिहारः prāptasya prāptiḥ parihṛtasya parihāraḥ

"Gaining the gained, dropping the dropped": release as Advaita defines it.

सोऽहम् · हंस so'ham · haṃsa

"I am he"; reversed, the swan, the name of the one who crossed.

Rāmānuja

सजातीय · विजातीय · स्वगत भेद sajātīya · vijātīya · svagata bheda

Difference within a kind, between kinds, within one thing; Brahman has only the third.

चित् · अचित् cit · acit

Conscious selves and inert matter: the two limbs of Brahman's body.

विशिष्टाद्वैत viśiṣṭādvaita

Non-duality of the qualified: one Brahman inseparably qualified by souls and matter.

लीला · अनुपपत्ति līlā · anupapatti

God's play, which is what Advaita's māyā really is; and the untenabilities Rāmānuja charged māyā with.

पर · व्यूह · विभव · अन्तर्यामी · अर्चा para · vyūha · vibhava · antaryāmī · arcā

The five ways the one shows: supreme, emanations, splendour, inner controller, image.

प्रपत्ति · शरणागति prapatti · śaraṇāgati

Surrender, taking refuge: the emptied pot that fills by itself.

राग · शृङ्गार · भोग rāga · śṛṅgāra · bhoga

Song, adornment, offered food: the three services of bhakti, shared with the Puṣṭi-mārga.

Madhva and Vallabha

स्वतन्त्र · परतन्त्र svatantra · paratantra

Independent (Viṣṇu alone) and dependent (everything else); hence Tattvavāda.

पञ्चभेद pañca-bheda

The five differences: God and soul, God and matter, soul and matter, soul and soul, matter and matter.

मुक्तियोग्य · नित्यसंसारी · तमोयोग्य mukti-yogya · nitya-saṃsārī · tamo-yogya

Souls fit for release, ever-worldly, and bound for darkness.

अचिन्त्य · आधेय · सहज · पद शक्ति acintya · ādheya · sahaja · pada śakti

Four powers: God's inconceivable power; power placed in a thing, as fire in iron; the natural power to act; the power of a word.

सारूप्य · सायुज्य sārūpya · sāyujya

Taking God's form; merging into God: my teacher gives Madhva the first and denies him the second.

शुद्धाद्वैत śuddhādvaita

Pure non-duality: everything is Brahman, no parts, no reflection, no māyā.

आविर्भाव · तिरोभाव āvirbhāva · tirobhāva

Brahman's two powers: to manifest the world and the souls, and to draw them back.

पुष्टि puṣṭi

Grace, nourishment; "without puṣṭi no release"; the name of Vallabha's path.

अष्टछाप aṣṭachāp

The eight poets of the Puṣṭi-mārga, Sūrdās first among them.

द्वैताद्वैत · अचिन्त्यभेदाभेद dvaitādvaita · acintya-bhedābheda

Nimbārka's wave on the ocean; Caitanya's spider and web.

The sentence, the debate, the book

तत्त्वमसि tat tvam asi

"You are that," Uddālaka to Śvetaketu in the Chāndogya; read by peeling (Advaita), by co-reference (Viśiṣṭādvaita), or re-parsed as "you alone are" (Dvaita).

सामानाधिकरण्य sāmānādhikaraṇya

Co-reference: two words naming one thing by different attributes, as a conch is "white" and "sea-born."

जहदजहल्लक्षणा jahad-ajahal-lakṣaṇā

Advaita's device for the sentence (my addition): drop the incompatible parts of the two words' meanings, keep the common ground.

उपासीत · असि upāsīta · asi

"Let one worship" (an injunction, hence ritual) against "you are" (a statement of what is): the first rung of the debate.

बाध · प्रतीति bādha · pratīti

Sublation, being proved false by later knowledge; and appearance. The school's test for mithyā uses both: sublated, yet it appeared.

चतुःसूत्री catuḥsūtrī

The first four aphorisms of the Brahma Sūtra with Śaṅkara's commentary on them, including his preface on superimposition; "the keystone."

समन्वय · अविरोध · साधन · फल samanvaya · avirodha · sādhana · phala

The four chapters of the Brahma Sūtra: reconciliation, non-contradiction, means, fruit.

प्रच्छन्न बौद्ध pracchanna bauddha

"A Buddhist in disguise": the charge against Śaṅkara, resting on anirvacanīya as Nāgārjuna's "no predicate" under a new name.

परिणाम · विवर्त pariṇāma · vivarta

Transformation (the seed: Sāṃkhya, Rāmānuja) and appearance (the curtain: Śaṅkara), two readings of "nothing from nothing."

ज्ञानकर्मसमुच्चय jñāna-karma-samuccaya

Knowledge and action together; the name for why, for Rāmānuja, "I am Brahman, but my tail is burning."

नव्य वेदान्त navya vedānta

Vivekananda's practical Vedānta: the world relatively real, knowledge joined to action, "not the right only of those who have roti, kapḍā and makān."