Among the most highly revered of the sages of India, Sankara ranks second only to Gautama Buddha.1 He represents the flowering of the Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, the last of the six schools which developed from extremely ancient foundations.2 Sankara’s system of thought is known as Advaita, a term that classifies it as nondualistic. Its central theme is an examination of the relation between Brahman, the divine power of the cosmos, and atman, the individual human self. Sankara held that reality is ultimately one and that the apparent plurality of the individual selves and entities of empirical existence is illusory: what seems to be an individual self, or atman, is in fact not essentially different from the one Self (Atman), just as the space contained in an individual jug or pitcher is not different from space as a whole. The one Self, he maintains, is identical with Brahman and the aim of the individual human being must be to obtain release from the illusory conceptions of the differentiated self by achieving a full realization of the identity of Self with Brahman. The western understanding of Hinduism is largely derived from Sankara’s Vedantic thought.
Sankara was born in Kaladi, in what is now Karala state, in southern India. His family was of the priestly class, the Brahmin, and in due course he became a disciple of Govindapada, a wellknown teacher. The details of Sankara’s short lifetime are few, although it is evident that during it he achieved much, exerted a charismatic influence on his followers and became widely revered. Like other gurus, he is regarded by his biographers as having supernormal, though not super-natural, powers. He was a highly skilled dialectician, a religious reformer and a gifted writer of devotional hymns. He regarded all these activities, along with ritual, meditation and other religious practices, as stages of an ascent to a higher experience that would transcend not only personal existence but also traditional Hindu thought and customs.
The foundation of Hindu thought is the unquestioning acceptance of its tripartite doctrine of samsara, karma and moksha. Briefly, samsara is the wheel of continual rebirth or transmigration of souls; karma is the principle, or law, of action and consequence, a kind of causal destiny, believed to condition the types of rebirth an individual undergoes; moksha is the liberation or salvation from samsara, achieved by means of union with Brahman. It is on the basis of this doctrine that Sankara built his philosophical conception of the nature of things.
The source of many of Sankara’s ideas was the Brahma Sutra, a collection of writings that dates from the first century CE and that provides an interpretation of the Upanisads. The Upanisads are the reputedly ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’ teachings that are attached to the primary Hindu scriptures, the Veda, which are regarded as infallible. Sankara derives much of his account of the nature of things from parts of the Upanisads that assert that there is a sense in which Brahman and Atman are one. But within this fundamental unity he develops the notion of comprehending the world at two levels or from two points of view. This distinction permeates all his thought and provides the basic structure for his account of the nature of reality and human experience. At the higher level of comprehension, he maintains, it is possible to comprehend the ultimate oneness of reality; at the lower level, everyday experience leads us to think of reality as a multiplicity of individual persons and things and at this lower level there is no escape from samsara. Moksha, the release from samsara, is obtained only by an experiential realization of oneness at the higher level of comprehension.
According to Sankara, the lower level of experience is maya, often translated as ‘illusion’. It is important to understand exactly what is meant by this. The Indian philosopher R. Puligandla has pointed out that the word maya has at least three meanings which have to be understood in relation to each other. In a psychological sense maya is the human tendency to regard appearance as reality and reality as appearance. In an epistemological sense it signifies human ignorance concerning the difference between appearance and reality. In an ontological sense it refers to the creative power of Brahman. Maya is, Puligandla says, the creative power of reality by virtue of which the world of variety and multiplicity comes into existence. Sometimes maya as the creative power of reality is referred to as ‘the sheer cosmic playfulness (lila) of reality’.3 On this understanding of maya, Sankara’s ‘illusory’ world of individuated phenomena is not without a foundation in reality, for the illusion that is maya refers to the way in which reality appears from the lower-level point of view. It is not a deception, nor is it a falsehood, but rather an erroneous or inadequate conception of reality, the result of a misunderstanding which vanishes when it is ousted by knowledge. Sankara maintains that the world of appearances is neither real nor unreal. It is simply an incorrect conception of the true reality.
Sankara employs the concept of sublation in order to develop his account of the human person’s progress from error to truth, or from appearance to reality. Sublation is a process of correcting errors of judgement. An erroneous conception of something is sublated when experience enables it to be replaced by a less erroneous conception. Thus, a person draws closer to reality through successive sublations of appearances. For Sankara, appearances are of three kinds of existents: real existents, existents and illusory existents. To experience a mirage of an oasis in the desert is to experience an illusory existent, and the perception is sublated by the discovery, on arrival at the place, that there is no such oasis. Existents are items of common-sense or conventional knowledge which may be sublated by more general or more scientific principles, as when the conception of a rainbow as a coloured arc in the sky is sublated by a description of it in terms of the prismatic refraction of light through drops of water. This scientific principle, along with other general principles such as the law of contradiction, is a real existent. Real existents are sublatable only by reality itself; that is, by being wholly transcended in the experience of an ultimate unity that obliterates all subject–object distinctions. Reality itself, since it is one and undifferentiated, and since sublation requires distinct objects, is unsublatable. At the other end of the scale is unreality, or non-being. Unreal objects are contradictions such as square circles, married bachelors and so on. Unreality cannot be sublated because it cannot be experienced.
Some difficult questions are generated in reflecting on Sankara’s philosophical point of view; in particular, in connection with the relationship of his notion of two levels of knowledge to his claim concerning the ultimate oneness of reality. For how is it that maya, the world of particular, individual entities, can have come into existence? The oneness of reality precludes any attribution of maya to an alien or separate power and Sankara clearly did not want to think of it as some sort of wilfully deceptive act of Brahman. He therefore describes it briefly as without beginning and concentrates his attention on an analysis of how things are rather than on how they came to be as they are. Perhaps maya is best thought of by reference to the description of it as the generative power of Brahman; as a kind of spontaneous creativity that provides the possibility of the phenomenal word, and that is the necessary condition of any kind of human experience of a subject–object sort. Thus Sankara points out that Brahman is the ‘basis of this entire apparent world . . . while in its true and real nature . . . it remains unchanged’.4 Essentially, Brahman is formless and beyond description. It is a totality of pure knowledge and the variety and flux of the phenomenal world ‘are names only . . . in reality there exists no such thing as modification’.5
Further difficulties arise concerning the relation of the individual self, or atman, to the one Self. Sankara holds that each person is a being who is essentially and fundamentally an aspect of the changeless Self, arguing that this is so because when we are conscious of the empirical self it is the Self in us that is aware. But at the lower level of understanding, a person takes herself or himself to be an individuated being, subject to karmic destiny and reincarnation, and inhabiting a world of individual and perishable entities. But the task of each person, Sankara maintains, is to aspire to a participation in the oneness of Brahman. This cannot be a matter of becoming a radically different being, for it already is the case that the apparently individual self is really Self or Brahman. It must therefore be a matter of dispelling maya; of shedding one’s illusory conception of things by means of a progression of successive experiences of sublation, and thereby proceeding from an inadequate conception of reality to knowledge of it. Yet the achievement of this higher state does seem to embody something of a contradiction. For the loss of individuality involved means that there can be no sense or awareness of the achievement of union. There is release from the thraldom of the desires and propensities of the empirical self and from the possibility of a continuing cycle of rebirth; but if such release is total then it can only be lived and not contemplated as an object, since there remains no subject capable of the awareness that one exists in the bliss of union with Brahman. Multiplicity, change and individuation constitute the conceptual conditions that make experience possible. These conditions are abolished by the notion of oneness with Brahman, so that it is impossible to conceive of the experience other than in terms of a total negation or nothingness.
Various affinities between Sankara’s ideas and those of western thinkers have been pointed out by commentators on his philosophy. His notion of a progress from illusion to knowledge is reminiscent of Plato’s account, in The Republic, Bk 7, of the ascent from the illusions and appearances of the cave to the direct, intuitive knowledge that is noesis. There are clear affinities, too, in Sankara’s philosophy, with Spinoza’s account of inadequate and adequate ideas; with Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal; and, in the claim that it is Self, or Atman, in us that is aware of the empirical self, with Descartes’ argument for his existence as a thinking substance or consciousness. But the western philosopher whose thought has most in common with Sankara’s is Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). In particular, Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the quieting of the individual will and the resulting attainment, through the nullification of individual striving, of ecstasy, rapture, illumination, union with God, bears a very close resemblance to Sankara’s views concerning the recognition and experience of unity with Brahman. For Sankara, the attainment of moksha, through a discipline of asceticism, study, reflection and meditation, had similar results, effecting a transformation of one’s relationship with the world and an intuitive realization that one’s essential being is imperishable, and untouched by either life or death.
Sankara’s thought became extremely influential during his lifetime and has remained important in the Indian tradition through subsequent centuries. But its unequivocal nondualism provoked a reaction: an interpretation of Vedanta that argued the necessity for differentiation within the unity that is Brahman. In this new interpretation, atman (the personal self) and Brahman were regarded as capable of union and so of being one, but also as able to be distinguished one from the other.
1 See the essay on the Buddha in this book, pp. 43–47.
2 The Vedantic school was founded by Badarayana (see pp. 47–52 in this book). Vedanta is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘the end of the Veda’, the Veda being the primary revealed text of the orthodox Hindu tradition. The Upanisads, the hidden, or secret, teachings, were added to the hymns and rituals of the Veda, and Vedanta doctrine is an exegesis of the Upanisads. There are three main Vedantic schools, each of which lays claim to a correct exposition of doctrine: see Ramanuja and Madhva in this book for accounts of the other two main schools, the Visistadvaita (qualified nondualism) and the Dvaita (dualism).
3 In R. Puligandla, Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy, New York, Abingdon Press, 1975, p. 217.
4 Quoted in Keith Ward, Images of Eternity, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1987, p. 11.
5 op. cit., p. 12.
Sankara wrote commentaries on the following:
The Brahma Sutra
The Upanisads
The Bhagavad Gita
See: Leggett, Trevor, The Complete Commentary by Sankara on the Yoga Sutras (a full translation of the newly discovered text), London, Kegan Paul, 1990
Sankara’s philosophical standpoint is clearly expressed in:
Johnston, Charles (trans.), The Crest Jewel of Wisdom, London, John M. Watkins, 1925 (a translation of Sankara’s Viveka Cudamani)
Badarayana, Ramanuja, Madhva
Lott, E.J., Vedantic Approaches to God, London, Macmillan, 1980
Radhakrishnan, S., Indian Philosophy, 2 vols, London, Allen & Unwin, 1923–1927
Zaehner, R.C., Hinduism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1962