The Upanisads are written in the language of the seer or visionary: inspired, poetic, symbolic and of inexhaustible resonance. To this day, their words leap from the page, informed and shaped by the pressure of intense spiritual experience. What these profound texts are not is orderly or systematic, and over time the need was felt to draw together their insights into a philosophical system. The goal of Badarayana in composing the masterpiece for which he is remembered, the Brahma Sutra,1 was to construct precisely such a system. Together with the Vedas and the Upanisads this work forms the basis of the Indian orthodox philosophical tradition, and sets out to be a coherent statement of the philosophy implicit in the second of these works. The Brahma Sutra in turn has been commented on by almost every major figure in the Indian tradition and many of lesser importance also: it would be possible to trace much of the history of Indian philosophy by examining the commentaries on this work alone. Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva, for example, all commented at length on it, finding in it confirmation of their own philosophical beliefs. The extensiveness of the body of subsequent commentary on this work is not grounded solely in its authority, however, but is also partially a result of its style. Each of the 552 propositions (each referred to as a sutra) in the work is terse and usually grammatically incomplete, generally such as to be not fully intelligible without accompanying exegesis. Since the Brahma Sutra deals with the ultimate questions of philosophy, it is not surprising that it has generated an uninterrupted stream of interpretation.
Of Badarayana nothing at all is known, and even his dates and authorship of the Brahma Sutra are disputed. The date of the second century BCE for the composition of the work is the one which has attracted more support among scholars than its rivals, in a range between 500 BCE and 200 CE. Internal evidence – in terms of the other schools of thought referred to in the text – make it unlikely that it could have been written before 200 BCE. The fact that Badarayana refers to himself in the third person in the work does not entail that he cannot be its author, since such a practice is not unparalleled in this tradition.2 It is unlikely that certainty will be reached on these questions, short of a major textual discovery.
Before approaching the philosophy of the Brahma Sutra, it is necessary to take account of an important principle which is taken for granted in the text, and which forms one of its basic presuppositions. This principle rests on the distinction between sruti and smrti. Sruti is sacred knowledge, derived from the religious experience of the Vedic seers. It is recorded in the Vedas and the Upanisads. With regard to the realm beyond the samsara, its authority is absolute. Smrti is knowledge based on memory, tradition or inference, or a combination of these. The distinction can also be stated by saying the sruti is intuitional, self-evidential insight, whereas smrti is evidentially based ratiocination. In sruti, the distinction between knower and known is transcended, and the two become one. Should there arise a conflict between sruti and smrti, the former is always to be preferred, and this principle is constitutive of Vedantic orthodoxy. The nearest western analogue to sruti is revelation, which is accorded the same ultimate and unquestionable status in the Judaeo- Christian tradition. The parallel is not exact, however, since revelation need not involve the transcending of the distinction between knower and known.
The Brahma Sutra begins from the most important insight of the Vedic tradition, that reality is not the ordinary world of everyday experience, the world of individuals causally related in space and time, the world of relentless mutability which is the samsara, but instead is a perfect, changeless, eternal oneness or absolute, Brahman, from which everything (in some way to be explored) arises: ‘(Ultimate Reality is that) from which origin, etc., (i.e. subsistence and destruction) of this (would proceed).’3 There is abundant authority in sruti texts for this, a very clear example being a passage in the Taittiriya Upanisad: ‘That, verily, from which these things are born, that, by which, when born they live, that into which, when departing, they enter. That, seek to know. That is Brahman.’4 Of the major questions raised by such a metaphysic, the first is to find a motive for Brahman’s bringing forth of the universe. Brahman has no unsatisfied longings, is perfect and therefore lacks for nothing. Why, then, does the universe come about at all? The answer begins from the assertion that, in so far as anything can be said meaningfully about the nature of Brahman, that nature is bliss (ananda). Badarayana is scrupulous to point out that because Brahman is an absolute unity, bliss is not an attribute of Brahman but is Brahman: ‘If it is said (that anandamaya) does not (denote the highest Self) since it is a word denoting modification, it is not so on account of abundance’;5 i.e. Brahman isbliss immeasurable. The coming into being of the universe is the spontaneous outpouring of this bliss. The closest approximation to this in human terms is play or sport (lila): ‘as in ordinary life, creation is mere sport (to Brahman).’6 This should not be taken to imply that Brahman acts (so to speak) lightly: to do this is to take the notion of lila in too anthropomorphic a sense. The point is rather that lila is the least misleading way that can be found of stating why there is a universe at all.
A system of belief based on the thesis that reality is an absolute involves some of the profoundest philosophical difficulties, and it is Badarayana’s chief purpose to address these, showing that the Upanisadic insights form a coherent and defensible whole. The central difficulty is known as the problem of the one and the many which, in the terms in which it presented itself to Badarayana, is as follows: Brahman (the absolute) is eternal, immutable and perfect (lacking nothing). How can that which is eternal, immutable and perfect be related to what is temporal, mutable and imperfect, i.e. the everyday world of human experience, the samsara? Is the universe a property of Brahman, or an effect of Brahman, or numerically identical with Brahman? Each of these major options involves a difficulty: if Brahman has properties, then conceptual distinctions apply to Brahman, and this is logically impossible in the case of an absolute. Again, the view that Brahman causes the universe appears to presuppose a change in Brahman, which is impossible if Brahman is eternal. Finally, if the universe is numerically identical with Brahman, then Brahman must share its imperfections, and this again is incompatible with the perfect nature of an absolute. An especially acute form of these difficulties occurs in the case of the relation of the individual soul to Brahman. The individual soul cannot be numerically identical with Brahman, since then either Brahman would be imperfect or each soul would be God, and neither is the case. Conversely, if the individual soul is distinct from Brahman, then it becomes impossible to articulate a conception of moksa or release, the condition of the unity of soul and Brahman: if the individual soul is distinct from Brahman, then its joining Brahman in moksa would constitute a change of Brahman, and this is impossible. The core of Badarayana’s philosophical enterprise is to try to find a solution to these multiple dilemmas.
He begins by tackling the issue of the precise relation of Brahman and the universe, and his initial response, at first sight, appears to make this difficulty even more acute. He makes use of a standard philosophical distinction between material cause and efficient cause. The efficient cause of a clay pot is the action of the potter; the material cause of the pot is the unformed clay. Badarayana asserts that Brahman is not only the efficient cause of the universe but the material cause also: ‘(Brahman is) the material cause also, for this view does not conflict with the (initial) statement and illustration.’7 The ‘statement and illustration’ to which he refers occur in the Chandogya Upanisad where it states that there is that as a result of the knowledge of which the unhearable is heard, the unperceivable perceived and the unknowable known, in the same way as ‘by one clod of clay all that is made of clay becomes known, the modification being only a name arising from speech while the truth is that it is just clay’.8 Thus Badarayana has the authority of sruti for the claim that Brahman must stand to the universe as clay does to things made of clay, i.e. as material cause. He addresses at once the objection that this assertion is inconsistent with other sruti passages which state that the universe is reabsorbed into Brahman at the end of time, and that therefore Brahman would be polluted by all the imperfections of the samsara. Badarayana replies that this is not what reabsorption consists in. As gold items become simply gold when melted down, so the universe will lose its particular qualities when reabsorbed.9 The view that Brahman is the material cause of the universe appears odd at first to westerners, but it is to be borne in mind that the idea of creation ex nihilo (from nothing), which is part of Christian orthodoxy, does not occur in Hindu thought.
The assertion that Brahman is the material as well as the efficient cause of the universe has, however, exacerbated the basic difficulty, since it appears to imply that both temporality and change apply to Brahman. Badarayana’s reply is one of the key doctrines of the Brahma Sutra, and it is that cause and effect are non-different.10 To claim that cause and effect are non-different is not the same as to say that cause and effect are identical. Later commentators on the Brahma Sutra explain non-difference by reference to the relation between foam, waves and bubbles on the one hand, and the sea on the other; or again, referring back to the passage from the Chandogya Upanisad cited above, between the clay and the clay pot, the latter being not identical with the former but equally not different from it. Since causes and effects are uniformly non-different in this way, Brahman must be non-different from the universe.
Having established to his satisfaction a sense in which Brahman can be said to cause the universe, Badarayana uses it to deal with a further important question which arises in absolutist systems. In order for a world of physical individuals to be possible, there must be space, since it is by spatial location that physical items are individuated. The question arises whether space is co-eternal with the absolute or is an effect of it: the former option is unattractive, since it is in danger of collapsing either into the view that space is a property of Brahman, or that it is co-ultimate with Brahman, and neither of these is acceptable. Granted his analysis of causality, however, Badarayana can assert that space (akasa; also translated as ‘ether’) is an effect of Brahman,11 and can construe in this way an important statement in the sruti, ‘From this Self [i.e. Brahman], verily, ether arose.’12 Space is therefore not co-eternal with Brahman but a nondifferent effect of Brahman.
Analogous questions arise over one of the central issues of Vedanta philosophy, that of the relation of the individual soul (atman) to Brahman. Badarayana’s difficulty is all the more pressing because different sruti passages appear to suggest different approaches to this question. In the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad it is stated that ‘He who dwells within the understanding, yet is within the understanding, whom the understanding does not know, whose body the understanding is, who controls the understanding from within, he is your self, the inner controller, the immortal’.13 This passage suggests a distinction or difference between Brahman, ‘the inner controller’, and the understanding, an attribute of the normal self. Other passages in the Upanisads, however, appear to suggest a more intimate relationship between atman and Brahman: ‘You [i.e. Brahman] are woman. You are man. You are the youth and the maiden too. You, as an old man, totter along with a staff. Being born you become facing in every direction.’14 Badarayana cannot opt for the view that atman and Brahman are numerically identical, since this would entail that the karma of the individual soul pertains to the absolute, which is logically impossible.15 Badarayana’s solution is to propose that the individual soul is ‘a part (of the Lord)’,16 not as a part of a machine stands to the whole of which it is a part, but as a spark is related to a fire. As will become clearer from later essays in this book, this question was one which continued to fascinate, and divide, later Vedantins. Sankara, for example, insists that the distinction between atman and Brahman cannot be absolute, but is akin to that between space and a space. By contrast, Ramanuja considers that the soul and Brahman must be different, the latter being indwelling within the former.
This issue is closely related to another serious problem in absolutist thought, the problem of evil. If reality is Brahman, then must it not follow that pain and evil are Brahman too? Put in another way, if the individual soul is identical with Brahman, then ‘there would attach (to Brahman) faults like not doing what is beneficial to others and the like’,17 i.e. evil would be attributable to Brahman. Badarayana has two lines of reply to this problem, each of which has to be consistent with his view that the soul is, in his sense of the phrase, a part of Brahman. Since the soul is in his sense of the term a part of Brahman, Badarayana must adopt the position that what we call evil and pain are conditions predicable only of the individual soul in the condition of avidya, spiritual blindness without awareness of Brahman.18 When the true nature of the soul is revealed in moksa, it is seen that it is free from what is usually called both good and evil. Elsewhere, Badarayana makes use of the doctrine of karma. We build up karma by the exercise of our free will, and we get what we deserve, be it suffering or reward, and so ‘Inequality and cruelty cannot (be attributed to Brahman) for (his activity) has regard to (the works of souls)’,19 i.e. we create what we call the evil we suffer by means of our own karma. Brahman being eternal is independent of karma, which remains our responsibility. Both these lines of reply, that what we call evil appears so only because of ignorance, and that evil is a consequence of our having free will, are often used in western responses to analogous forms of this problem.
The goal of life in this philosophy is release (moksa), and this is identical with direct awareness or knowledge (vidya) of Brahman. In this type of insight, the distinction between knower and known collapses: the knower does not know Brahman, but is Brahman, as is stated in the Chandogya Upanisad:
Where one sees nothing else, hears nothing else, understands nothing else, that is the infinite. But where one sees something else, hears something else, understands something else, that is the small (i.e. the finite). Verily, the infinite is the same as the immortal, the finite is the same as the mortal.20
In this condition all distinctions are transcended, including that between self and not-self: it is liberation alike from time and desire, and brings perfect inward peace. When knowledge of Brahman is attained, karma cease to be accumulated. Only karma in the process of being worked out continue to be operative, and when these are exhausted the Brahmana (knower of Brahman) attains the condition of jivanmukta (one who is free while living). Such a Brahmana is said to be one with Brahman.21 Since liberation is the state of being freed from ignorance, it follows that it is not the coming into being of a new property of the soul, but rather the revealing of its original nature after being freed from the illusions of avidya.22
The means by which moksa is approached is meditation: while the performance of works and duties is useful, neither is sufficient to bring knowledge of Brahman.23 That sruti passages differ over details of meditational technique is unimportant, for the essential message, and the end result, is the same in all cases. The only invariant recommendations are that it should be conducted in a seated position, and be repeated at any times which are propitious. The choice of symbols or other devices to still the process of ratiocination and bring the mind to onepointedness is an area in which variation can be allowed.24 Most importantly, meditation is to be carried on until death, since the thought that occupies the mind at the moment of death is declared in the Bhagavad Gita to be of determining significance for the future: ‘Thinking of whatever state (of being) he at the end gives up his body, to that being does he attain . . . being ever absorbed in the thought thereof.’25
The Brahma Sutra is a work of great philosophical acumen, and the product of a tradition which was already well developed, rigorous and subtle. It articulates and faces up to the difficulties involved in one of the styles of philosophy to which the human mind feels impelled to return again and again, a monism based on the transcendental insights which haunt us. It was not, of course, the last word, and a great tradition has been devoted to refining its philosophy: the thought of Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva each in its way shows how these ideas have been diversely criticized and interpreted. This is not surprising: if Badarayana had said the last word on the matters he considers, he would have solved most of the riddles of existence single-handed.
References to the Brahma Sutra are given by part, subsection and individual sutra, e.g. I.4.12, as is standard. Radhakrishnan’s version (London, Allen & Unwin, 1960; New York, Allen & Unwin, 1968) is used throughout.
References to relevant Upanisadic texts are given in the same way, preceded by the name of the Upanisad in question e.g. Chandogya U., III.3.3. P.U.= S. Radhakrishnan (ed. and trans.), The Principal Upanisads, London, Allen & Unwin, 1953.
1 The text is also known as the Vedanta Sutra, since it sums up Vedanta philosophy, and as the Sariraka Sutra (S: sarira = body) since it deals with the embodiment of Brahman.
2 Badarayana refers to himself, e.g. at III.2.41; III.4.1; III.4.8; III.4.19; IV.3.15; IV.4.7; and IV.4.12.
3 I.1.2. cf. I.3.10; III.2.11–21.
4 Taittiriya U., II.1, P.U., p. 553.
5 I.1.13. There is a clear statement of this in the sruti texts in Taittiriya U., II.8.1, P.U., pp. 550–552.
6 II.1.33.
7 I.4.23.
8 Chandogya U., VI.1.4, P.U., pp. 446–447.
9 II.1.8–9.
10 Discussed at II.1.14–20.
11 II.3.2.
12 Taittiriya U., II.1.1, P.U., p. 542.
13 Brhad-aranyaka U., III.7.22, P.U., p. 229.
14 Svetasvatara U., IV.3, P.U., p. 732.
15 II.3.47 sqq.
16 II.3.43. There is a basis for this in the Bhagavad Gita, XV.7: ‘A fragment of My own self, having become a living soul, eternal, in the world of life’, etc. (Radhakrishnan’s 2nd edn, London, Allen & Unwin, 1949, p. 328).
17 II.1.21.
18 cf. II.1.22.
19 II.1.34.
20 Chandogya U., VII.24.1, P.U., p. 486.
21 IV.1.13; IV.1.19; IV.2.16; IV.4.4.
22 IV.4.1. There is no real difference between moksa in this tradition and the nirvana of Buddhism.
23 III.4.26–35.
24 IV.1.1–11; III.3.1–2 and 59.
25 Bhagavad Gita, VIII. 6 (Radhakrishnan’s edn, p. 229). The view that the thought occurring at the moment of death is vitally important occurs also in Buddhist sources, cf. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, ed. W.Y. Evans-Wentz, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 89 sqq. Western parallels are also noted in this work.
Badarayana’s name is linked with a single great work, the Brahma Sutra.
The Buddha, Sankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Aurobindo, Radhakrishnan
Badarayana, The Brahma Sutra, ed. and trans. S. Radhakrishnan, London, Allen & Unwin, 1960; New York, Allen & Unwin, 1968
See also:
Radhakrishnan, S., Indian Philosophy, 2nd edn, Vol. II, ch. VII, London, Allen & Unwin, 1929 and many subsequent impressions
Radhakrishnan, S. (ed. and trans.), The Bhagavad Gita, 2nd edn, London, Allen & Unwin, 1949 and many subsequent impressions
Radhakrishnan, S. (ed. and trans.), The Principal Upanisads, London, Allen & Unwin, 1953
Thibaut, G., The Vedanta Sutras with the Commentary by Samkarasarya, Vols XXXIV and XXXVIII, Oxford, Oxford University Press, Sacred Books of the East series, Pt I, 1890, Pt II, 1896
Thibaut, G., The Vedanta Sutras, with the Commentary of Ramanuja, Vol. XLVII, Oxford, Oxford University Press, Sacred Books of the East series, 1904