It is the repudiation of religion as a set of beliefs and practices and as a path to a goal that can be attained by ritual or devotional means.

At the beginning of his commentary on the Bhagavadgītā, the Bhagavadgītābhāsya, → Śankara (c. 700 CE), with his contemporary Mandanamiśra (one of the founding fathers of Advaita Vedānta), gives mythic voice to an opposition that has been thought by some to be the key to understanding Indian religion. That opposition is manifested in the dialogue between “the man in the world,” who gains merit by following the public vedic religion (→ dharma) of ritual acts and social duties, and the renouncer, who has abandoned religious prac-tices and social involvement in order to pursue his or her own salvation through gnosis ( jñāna; see → wisdom and knowledge).

The Lord produced the cosmos, and desiring to establish its perpetuation, he first created the Lords of Creatures and gave them the active path of social and religious duties (pravr ttidharma) that is sanctioned by the Vedas. Then he made others, and gave them the path consisting in the renunciation of ritual acts and social duties (nivrttidharma) that is characterised by gno-sis and dispassion . . . The aim of the teaching of the Gītā is the Supreme Good, understood as the final cessation of rebirth and its causes. The Supreme Good arises from commitment to intuiting one’s true identity (ātmajñāna), preceded by the renunciation (samnyāsa) of all ritual acts and social duties. The religion of activity is prescribed for members of castes and stages of life who are intent on prosperity and it may be the cause of the attainment of the world of the gods. When practiced in an atti-tude of devotion to a personal godhead, with-out any interest in the benefits of ritual acts, it produces purity of mind. The pure minded per-son approaches the efficient cause of the attain-ment of the Supreme Good – that cause being the onset of gnosis expressed in the enlightened mode of living. (trans. Sadhale, 2000, 2–4)

Advaita means nondualism or monism. Monism is the doctrine that only one kind of thing really exists. According to Advaita, that basic reality is consciousness. Vedānta is the systematic exege-sis of the → Upanisads, those parts of the infallible and unauthored Vedic scriptures (Śruti; see → Vedas) that according to orthodox vedic Brah-mans are the sole means of knowing (pramāna) about anything that transcends sense perception and inference. In short, the scriptures are the only way of knowing about the → brahman, → ātman, and the way to release from the series of embodied existences in the here and now. The founders of the different vedantic schools understood themselves as interpreters of the Upanisads and the → Bhagavadgītā and as expositors of the epito-mes of the upanishadic teachings called the Brahmasūtras.

For Advaitins, the focal teaching of the Upanisads is that one’s true nature (ātman) is identical with the brahman, which is understood as static and objectless consciousness. Advaitins believe that we are mistaken when we think that there are any basically real individual entities. The latter are constructs, limiting conditions (upādhi) superimposed on the foundational con-scious reality. → Liberation (moksa) from rebirth (→ samsāra) means an intuitive realization of the coincidence of undifferentiated being and tran-quil consciousness. Advaita is inspired by scrip-tures such as “at first the world was just being, one only, without a second” (ChāU. 6.2.1), “I am the brahman” (BĀU. 1.4.10), “this whole world is the brahman” (ChāU. 3.14.1), and “whatever is the finest essence, that is the true nature of every-thing, that is authentic reality, and that is what you are (tat tvam asi)” (ChāU. 6.8.7). Liberation is just the elimination of mistaken thinking in terms of differentiation and the immediate realization that one’s true nature is nothing other than tran-quil, transcendental consciousness. Advaita can be seen as a sort of gnosticism. Intuitive knowl-edge will set you free from bondage to the cosmos.

Vedānta

Advaita Vedānta and the Schools of Vedānta

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Śankara was one of those who followed the way of renunciation of ritual and social engagement. Advaita Vedānta is the philosophical articulation of that outlook. One of Śankara’s primary concerns is the justification of the path of detachment and inactivity in the face of mainstream Brahmanical orthodoxy, which holds that it is the ritual actions of select human agents that keep the cosmos going. But Śankara was also a mystic. The medita-tor absorbed in profound contemplation and sealed off from the world of experience has nei-ther thoughts nor feelings. There is just motion-less, undifferentiated awareness that does not seek to accomplish any purposes. This is the state that Advaitins call pure consciousness or mere know-ing. It knows no fluctuations and is neither about nor directed toward objects. It is not conscious-ness of anything, and it has no specific content. It is blissful, for it lacks nothing. There is no sense of selfhood or personal individuality: there is merely being conscious. This is the authentic reality – the brahman – the coincidence of being and blissful consciousness. It is on this nondiscursive experi-ence that Advaita is founded. This is the experi-ence that is meant by upanishadic statements such as “tat tvam asi” and “I am the brahman” that are held to assert the identity of the brahman and the ātman. When the practitioner emerges from the state of absorption, the world around him or her, with all its frustrations, its changes and chances, and its means and ends, seems thin, frus-trating, and unsubstantial. The Advaitin rejection of the categories of differentiation, relation, change, and individual substance can be seen as flowing from a serene and self-authenticating contemplative experience, in which personal individuality and one’s sense of oneself as an agent are obliterated. The construction of personhood and our sense thereof (ahamkāra) as well as our engagement with a diversified material world are attributed to the work of beginning-less ignorance (→ avidyā). Broadly speaking, ignorance can mean either simply not knowing something or being mistaken. The latter sense includes fundamental misconceptions about the nature of the world and of oneself. It is that sense with which the tradition is concerned. Encouraged by the tradition’s use of metaphors comparing everyday experience to a mirage, to things seen in dreams – a rope mis-taken for a snake or mother-of-pearl taken for silver – a tendency exists to characterize Advaita as illusionism. But this is to take the metaphors literally. The description, however, is apt, if it is

understood as meaning that nothing in the world that we inhabit and know really matters, since all unenlightened experience is conditioned by innate misunderstanding. The extent to which the vision is subversive of mainstream Brahmanical orthodoxy must be emphasized. It follows from Advaitin premises that the beliefs that life is samsāra subject to → karman, that the Vedas can point us to the summum bonum, and that caste distinctions are important are all mistaken.

Central to Śankara’s position is a distinction between authentic reality that is eternal and unchanging and the sort of existence that charac-terizes matters of everyday experience. The latter exist for the time being. They may be a succession of phases, though no one such temporal part is wholly present at more than one time. Such things may have different properties at different times. They begin and end. We do not perceive them as constant, and we acknowledge that they come and go. They are not what Śankara means by authenti-cally real. To be authentically real means to be wholly present without beginning and end. Such reality is not subject to time and change. The only candidate that fits the bill is consciousness per se. Such is the ātman, and such is the brahman, and they are the same.

Why do we believe that there is a diverse cos-mos? Why do we think that we are individual embodied conscious agents? In the first part of his Upadeśasāhasrī, Śankara says that the brahman, unchanging in itself, activates a nonconscious world-creative principle that depends on it. This primary substrative cause is called undeveloped name and form (nāmarūpa), and it is inexpress-ible (anirvacanīya) as this or that, as one thing or another. This is because entities have not yet been actualized, and there is nothing that could be identified. In the subsequent tradition, this idea will be reformulated as inexpressible as being or not being, and it will be taken in a variety of ways to mean that the world and its cause are ontologi-cally indeterminable. Later writers will say that avidyā means the causal principle of the cosmos. When Śankara describes “name and form” as “having the nature of avidyā,” he just means that it is other than consciousness. From the substra-tive cause emanate the basic elements constitut-ing the differentiated cosmos – where things with determinate identities can be called this or that. Śankara holds that the products (vikāra) of the primordial causal substrate are less than fully real (anrta). In other words, they are not the authentic

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reality or the genuine article. Whatever the sense in which the cosmos proceeds from its source, the source is unchanged. The brahman cannot change. If it did, it could not be a fully accomplished or perfect reality, because it would always be becom-ing something else, becoming what it was not.

Inexplicably, there is the universal delusion, present prior to any possible experience of the world, that the one true purely conscious nature (ātman identical with the brahman) is divided into individual centers of consciousness, attached to bodies and social status and actively engaged with an objective and differentiated world. As such, we misunderstand ourselves as different from the brahman, and in our innate ignorance (avidyā), we are subject to transmigration and all our woe. Śankara is not really interested in ques-tions about the ontological status of avidyā. To the question “to whom does it belong?” he replies, “you, the questioner who does not know.” All our everyday secular and religious transactions (vyavahāra) that involve thinking in terms of individual subjects, objects and relations, agents, actions, and results are infected by error. It fol-lows that ritual and salvific gnosis are incompati-ble. Belief in the efficacy of ritual presupposes that an event (kriyā), the multiple factors (kārakas) of agency and action of which it is composed, and its result are independent entities connected by rela-tions. But gnosis concerns only the undifferenti-ated absolute consciousness, knowledge of which reveals that the plurality of factors implicit in rit-ual action is the work of avidyā.

In the introduction to his Brahmasūtrabhāsya, Śankara defines the existential ignorance (avidyā) that is natural to the human condition as mutual superimposition (itaretarādhyāsa). He basically means by this the misattribution of the properties of one thing to something else. More elaborately, it is the superimposition of the purely conscious internal sphere on what is objective, insentient, and mutable and the superimposition of the objective sphere on consciousness, the inner iden-tity, and the detached witness of all experiences. Mutual superimposition is the misconception that one’s true nature (ātman) is what it is not. This happens when the reflection of the radiant light of consciousness, one’s true identity, is cap-tured in the mind (buddhi), which is both mate-rial and active. The mind assumes the character of consciousness, as a crystal assumes the color of a proximal object, and the intrinsically static con-sciousness appears to become active. The basic

case of mutual superimposition is self-under-standing as an individual center of consciousness and agency (ahamkāra) and self-misidentifica-tion as an embodied person having a caste status. Furthermore, there is the misconception that the accumulation of merit and demerit through the performance of intentional actions really influ-ences one’s true identity. The superimposition of the subjective on the objective occurs when we attribute consciousness to the activities of the material mental apparatus. This beginningless and endless innate practice of superimposition, whose nature is misconception, causes agency and enjoyment of finite experiences. It is the pre-condition of all secular and religious activities, of all behavior (vyavahāra) involving means of knowing (pramāna) and knowable objects, and of all the scriptures, whether concerned with ritual injunctions or liberation from rebirth. In every-day life (vyavahārika), where what are ultimately false beliefs are current, the world is treated as dif-ferentiated, and the distinctions between knowers and what is knowable, between experiences and what is experienced, and among agents, actions, and outcomes are taken for granted. Given that scripture is recognized as pramāna, and if the pramānas belong to the arena of avidyā, how can it convey knowledge about the brahman? The answer is that the existence of the brahman, a state of pure knowing ( jñaptimātra), is self-revealing and self-established and thus needs no pramāna. In any case, the pramānas yield intellectual know-ledge, rather than liberating experience that trans-forms one’s view of reality and one’s way of living. The purpose of scriptural exegesis is primarily to demonstrate that Advaita does not conflict with the scriptures. It is not to be expected, however, that Śankara seriously entertained the possibility that the liberating awareness that is unmediated experience of the brahman could happen for one who was not familiar with the Advaita scriptures. His position seems to have been that the liberat-ing awareness happens to one who has reflected on and internalized certain scriptures and whose mentality has been purified thereby. In short, scripture prepares the ground for liberating expe-rience, although it does not bring it about.

The intuition of one’s true nature or identity (ātman) happens to one who has had formerly mistakenly understood himself or herself as a cen-ter of experience and agency, one whose mental life is a stream of ever-changing perceptions of and affective responses to external objects, and

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who has deemed himself or herself subject to caste duties and ritual obligations. The intuition reveals that one’s everyday sense of individual personality (ahamkāra) as the center of that arena conceals our true nature as tranquil, objectless consciousness. It reveals that one is not essentially an individual agent of actions. The existential transformation occurs simultaneously with the nondiscursive awareness “I am the brahman.” This knowledge obliterates karman and prevents the accumulation of fresh karman. Such is the condition of one who is liberated while still alive (→ jīvanmukti), one who is the witness of, rather than a participant in, the stream of mental events and mundane transactions. The brahman’s being the true nature of beings who wrongly believe that they are individual agents is an already established fact. Knowledge of the brahman, like all know-ledge, depends on something already given as a reality. Liberation is not an achievement. It is not something to be brought about by religious striv-ings. It is simply the removal of an unenlightened mentality and thus does not require, indeed is antithetical to, anything that might be regarded as religious praxis, since the latter presupposes mis-taken belief in the reality of differentiation, of means and ends. Gnostic insight destroys error and reveals the truth that one is nothing other than permanently unchanging and non-inten-tional or pure consciousness. The permanent background consciousness, one’s true identity, both establishes its own existence and reveals itself as the unchanging witness of changing men-tal states. Everything other than consciousness needs consciousness for its revelation or manifes-tation by the means of knowledge. But conscious-ness is unique in that it needs nothing outside itself. It is simply given and undeniable, for only consciousness can deny anything. It is not subject to temporal limitations, for it may have a perspec-tive on the past, the present, and the future all at once and is thus eternal. It is not limited by exter-nal objects, for it can imagine that things are other than what they are. Once the scriptural teaching that the brahman is one’s true nature is internal-ized, the misconception that there are individual selves with their own identities no longer oper-ates. On that constitutive misconception was founded the belief that the entire matrix of worldly life (vyavahāra) has its own self-sufficient reality.

Difference means limitation, so it cannot char-acterize the primal, unconditioned reality. The brahman is the transcendental precondition of

there being anything at all. It transcends the deter-minations characteristic of finite beings. It is prior to all oppositions such as subject and object, knower and known, and cause and effect. It has no features (→ nirguna) and is exempt from actions and changes (niskriyā). Since it neither owes its existence to anything else nor is conditioned by anything outside itself, it is beyond the catego-ries of being and nonbeing that apply only to property-bearing entities that belong to kinds. It follows that the brahman eludes conceptual or linguistic description, because the foundational reality is not a being or a something distinguish-able from other finite things. This understanding of ātman and the brahman repudiates an already-established tradition of vedantic theological inter-pretation called parināmavāda that propounds the monism of a single, self-transforming divine substance that really constitutes itself as all indi-vidual souls and material entities.

Śankara thinks that most of the scriptures speak of the brahman considered to be the precondition of our experience of finite entities. But the brahman per se cannot be signified by words for kinds, actions, attributes, or relations; it may be approached along the path of negation by denials of what it is not. A sophisticated variety of the via negativa can be found in Śankara’s commentary on the statement in the Taittirīya Upanisad:

satyam jñānam anantam brahma

The brahman is reality, consciousness, infinite. (TaiU. 2.1.1)

Some Vedāntins construe this as meaning that the brahman has features – it is saguna rather than nirguna – and thus is not simple. Śankara thinks that when properly understood, the Śruti makes an identifying reference to the brahman, without implying that it is complex. It does this because the three predicates are used definitionally rather than descriptively. He thinks that descriptively used predicates distinguish something from other members of the same class, while definitionally used ones demarcate their subject from every-thing else. The predicates are used to exclude their normal meanings and function together to intimate the brahman, even though it is really beyond the range of linguistic meanings. Śankara resolves the Śruti into three distinct identity state-ments: “The brahman is reality,” “The brahman is consciousness,” and “The brahman is infinite.” The predicates control one another, but the state-

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ment does not generate a complex sense. He explains the statement as having an impartite sense (akhandārtha). The three predicates, albeit functioning in different ways, mean the same thing – the foundational reality that is infinite consciousness.

Śankara begins by asserting that something is real, when it does not deviate from the form that is known to be its own. So the real is constant and immutable. Something is called unreal, when it does so deviate. Hence, modifications are unreal. The definition “the brahman is reality” excludes modifications from the nature of the brahman. It also means that the brahman is the ultimate cause of the cosmos. Now the theory of causation termed satkāryavāda – the idea that effects preexist as potentials in their causal substrate prior to their actualization – suggests that effects are ontologi-cally continuous with their causal substrate. This may be taken as implying that substrative causes share the nature of their effects. Given that the effected cosmos is in part material, the impression may follow that the brahman contains in potentia elements of materiality. Hence, it is said that “the brahman is consciousness.” Śankara says that the word for consciousness ( jñāna) here has a stative sense of pure awareness ( jñaptimātra), when it is a predicate of the brahman.

The definition “the brahman is infinite” excludes the possibility that the sort of knowing predicated of the brahman is ordinary cognitive agency that involves diversification by particular cognitions and objects of cognition. So when the knowing is being used as a definitional predicate of the unchanging brahman, this is in an extraordinary sense different from the everyday meanings that are derived from the root sense of the verb. Śankara explains the everyday process of cogni-tion of which the soul (ātman) is the unchanging witness as follows: the embodied mind (buddhi), a limiting condition (upādhi) wrongly superim-posed on the ātman, becomes informed by sense-mediated phenomena such as sounds and colors. When those phenomena are irradiated by the light of the ātman consciousness, they become its objects. Such limited presentations to the ātman consciousness are what is usually meant by words for awareness and knowing. They are the root meanings of the verb “to know.” Such changing events are wrongly supposed by the unenlight-ened to be real properties of the ātman.

“Infinite” also means that the sort of reality attributed to the brahman is unconditioned by

space and time. The brahman is also infinite or unlimited with respect to its ontological status. Its reality is not like that of entities that belong to kinds and that are the possessors of various prop-erties such that they may be spoken of as different from one another. For example, a cow is not a horse and vice versa. Also, individuals within each kind differ with respect to their physical charac-teristics. Differences of that kind cannot apply to the brahman. Meanwhile, the brahman is said to be not other than everything else (sarvānanyatvam brahmanah), since it is the substrative cause of all entities. Does this mean that the brahman is the same as the cosmos? It does not. Rather, it means that the brahman does not differ from finite enti-ties, because it has nothing in common with them. A cow and a horse share the nature of animality and differ because they are varieties of it. A man can be taller than another in terms of height. Red things differ from green ones in terms of their shared nature of being colored. But there is no shared nature in terms of which the brahman may differ from the world of entities. It is in this sense that it is not other than everything else.

One might wonder how statements such as “I am the brahman” and “tat tvam asi” mean the identity of the brahman and the ātman, given that the personal pronouns usually designate embod-ied centers of agency, thinking, and feeling. Śankara says that when they are purified of such connotations and used in grammatical coordina-tion with terms signifying the absolute, whose connotations of remoteness are similarly elimi-nated, they can discriminate the simple identity state. For instance, reflection on the pronoun “I” may lead to an intellectual conclusion that the embodied ego is not the soul, because it is objecti-fiable, and nothing that one can objectify can be one’s true identity. We shall see below that such modifications are seen as illegitimate by those who interpret the scriptures theistically and claim to be following their literal senses.

The other founding father of Advaita Vedānta, Śankara’s contemporary Mandanamiśra, author of the Brahmasiddhi, concurs that our true nature is identical with the brahman that is other than conditioned reality – pure consciousness, blissful, unique, imperishable, and ungenerated. If the source is undifferentiated, so must be its products. All plurality is a function of beginning-less innate error (avidyā). While Śankara tends to characterize the brahman as pure conscious-ness, Mandanamiśra prefers to formulate it as an

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absolute unity of undifferentiated being that is the universal identity common to all things. The abso-lute is given as such in every act of preconceptual, prediscursive perception. Initial perceptual expe-rience is nonconceptual and relates only to being as such. It is the ensuing conceptual cognitions that comprehend particularities. Everyday think-ing, which prompts activity and presupposes that there are real differences among individual enti-ties, is mental construction (vikalpa). Construc-tive cognitions or representations (avabhāsa) that involve differentia and oppositions are erroneous (bhrānti) in that they disguise rather than disclose the nature of pure being. The organizing struc-tures of our minds (this is different from that, this is the difference between the two) derive from an inherited beginning-less supply of constructive ideas. Mandanamiśra argues that no sense can be made of the notion of difference as an entity, either substantive or attributive, in its own right. Difference, and hence the finite individuality of demarcated entities, is not substantial (nihsvabhāva) and does not enter into the fabric of reality. It is simply manifested by constructive thoughts and language and as such cannot be truly real. The world of differentiated individual entities is a fab-rication, manifested due to beginning-less error (anādyavidyā). Like Śankara, he thinks that it is the ultimately unreal individual selves, mistak-enly constructing themselves as centers of aware-ness and agency different from the brahman, that are the bearers of avidyā. Its object (visaya) is the brahman, whose nature we misunderstand by viewing it as the source of real plurality. By con-trast, most later Advaitins following Padmapāda (700–750 CE) and his contemporary Sureśvara say that avidyā is a causal force, analogically called → māyā (illusion – it is what the magician pro-duces), responsible for the complex, shared vir-tual reality that is the cosmos, and that it is a power (→ śakti) of the brahman. But Mandanamiśra says that it is the individual identities ( jīva) that are polluted by error, not the brahman that is always pure and constant light. Mandanamiśra thinks that there is a mystery here, since the very consti-tution of individuality is a case of avidyā. But he is explicit that if error belonged to the brahman’s nature, it would never cease, and there would be no possibility of release from rebirth. More-over, it would be the brahman that transmigrates and the brahman that is released from rebirth. Further, the release of one would entail the release of all, because by seeing plurality, it is just the

brahman that transmigrates, and by seeing non-difference, it is released. Hence, it is the individu-als transmigrating due to error that are released by knowledge.

After around 950 CE, two schools of thought about this question appear. One is called the Bhāmatī school, named after Vācaspatimiśra’s (950–1000) commentary on Śan kara’s Brahma-sūtrabhāsya, and the other is called the Vivarana school, named after Prakāśātman’s commentary on Padmapāda’s Pañcapādikā, the Pañca-pādikāvivarana. The Bhāmatī school follows Mandanamiśra and says that it is the individual selves that are the substrate of avidyā, and that the brahman is its object. There is a problem. How can the individual selves be the substrate or sup-port of avidyā, when the experience of individual selfhood is itself a product of avidyā? They do not exist in advance, unaffected by ignorance, in such a way that they could be its substrate. Rather, they are constituted by ignorance. The response is sim-ply that the association between individuals and avidyā is beginning-less. In other words, it is something for which there is no explanation. The Vivarana school says that since the brahman is the sole reality, it has to be both the substrate and the object of avidyā. In this, they can appeal to the authority of Sureśvara, who makes the point that since the jīva is a product of avidyā, it cannot be its support. But is it not a contradiction to hold that the brahman, which is pure knowing, is the very basis of ignorance? The reply is that the problem is only apparent. The brahman is the substratum of error only in the sense that it is the substratum of all cognition and the precondi-tion of all subjective and objective experiences. One might suggest that the view of Sureśvara, Sarvajñātman, Padmapāda, Prakāśātman, and their followers to the effect that the brahman is both the substrate and the object of avidyā is an aspect of a mentality that understands cosmic variety, whose nature and occurrence are mysterious, as ulti-mately having a transcendent source. The alterna-tive view, articulated by Mandanamiśra and Vācaspatimiśra, is perhaps more inclined to blame the tendency of imperfect beings to con-ceive themselves as separate from the source of their being.

Śankara had applied the expression inexpress-ible (anivacanīya) as one thing or another to the amorphous primary causal state that is prior to the differentiation of names and forms. Mandanamiśra modifies the formula to mean

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inexpressible as real or unreal, and applies it to avidyā and its consequences. He says that error is neither the nature of the brahman nor anything else. It is not absolute nonbeing, like a pure fiction, because erroneous cognitions (bhrānti) occur and have practical consequences. But it is not an authentic reality, because errors are corrected. Were it real in an absolute sense, it would never cease, and liberation would be impos-sible. It would be another reality in addition to the brahman – indeed, one that is antithetical to the nature of the brahman. But were we to say that it is nonexistent, it would be difficult to explain the phenomenon of bondage to rebirth and our everyday experience of practical transactions (vyavahāra). To count as real, something must have a determinate identity. But that is what error lacks, and hence it is indeterminable as real or unreal. Mandanamiśra thinks that to be inex-pressible is to be unintelligible, and that what is unintelligible cannot be authentically real. We see here the origin of what will become the established principle that the working of avidyā and the very occurrence of the differentiated cosmos are essen-tially mysterious. Evidently, any philosophy say-ing that the complex world (including persons) as we know it is the consequence of error and that the authentic reality is simple consciousness is bound to acknowledge that the occurrence of error is a mystery. Cognitive errors are also mys-terious in the sense that until they are corrected by knowledge, they seem perfectly real and are accepted as true for the time being. The magician’s illusions are convincing while they last. Dreams are only recognized for what they are from the standpoint of the waking state. There is the phe-nomenon of “brainwashing,” or the spontaneous social construction of myths that condition the minds, language, behavior, and purposeful activi-ties of almost everyone. Cultures entertain long-standing beliefs that turn out to be false, but they enabled people to inhabit the world. Such cases of operative false beliefs or uncontradicted assump-tions about the nature of things the tradition will call samvrtisatya or vyavahārikasatya. Those expressions mean provisional, conventional, and everyday reality in contradistinction to some conception of ultimate reality. The argument that the success of everyday beliefs requires only an ultimately false assumption that reality is as it ordinarily appears to us – an argument pri-marily directed at the → Nyāya-Vaiśesika realists who maintain that knowledge is only knowledge

if it refers to a structured domain of objects exist-ing prior to and independently of cognition – was developed by Śrī Harsa (1125–1180) in his Khandanakhandakhādya. It should be noted that after Prakāśātman, most Advaitins are care-ful to distinguish the fictions and illusions (prātibhāsika) from long-standing uncontra-dicted false beliefs.

Śankara insists that gnosis is both necessary and sufficient for release from rebirth, an existen-tial transformation that may be the condition of one still living ( jīvanmukti). Indeed, for him con-tinued engagement with religious practices of any sort is antithetical to enlightenment. (The matter is elaborately dealt with in the Brahmasūtrabhāsya [1.1.4.]) By contrast, Mandanamiśra believes that the repeated practice (abhyāsa) of ritual actions and meditation on one’s discursive understand-ing of the mahāvākyas (scriptural statements) are useful in that they intensify the insights received from those scriptural statements of nonduality and counteract the still forceful residual traces of ignorance. This difference between the two semi-nal figures will remain controversial in the subse-quent tradition, for it concerns the questions of the role of scripture and whether a basically lin-guistic understanding that occurs within the arena of avidyā can produce enlightenment. There is also the more general question about the impor-tance of religious practices: the “radicals” follow Śankara and hold that the observance of obliga-tory ritual duties is unnecessary for the enlight-ened person, while those of a more conservative disposition say that the performance of social and religious duties is still required.

Developments in the TraditionPadmapāda belonged to the generation after Śankara and composed the Pañcapādikā on the first five parts of his mentor’s Brahmasūtrabhāsya. Whereas Śankara had understood not knowing (avidyā) as error and the confusion of one’s true identity with what it is not, Padmapāda is innova-tive in treating avidyā as a basic metaphysical category, when he says that its is the power of mis-conception in the transcendental consciousness that appears as the objective world. He also intro-duces the terminology of vivarta (phenomenal manifestation), expressing the idea that effects are less real (visamasattā) than their causal substrate (upādāna). This is interpreted as meaning that the

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cosmos is an apparent transformation of its cause rather than a real one ( parināmavāda) where the effects have the same degree of reality as their sub-strative cause. Basically, we see here the idea that what truly is – the coincidence of being and con-sciousness – appears as something other than what it is. This notion of vivarta is congruent with the idea that the world and its source are inex-pressible as one thing or another. From the point of view of the brahman, the cosmos is false or unreal (mithyā), but from our point of view, it exists. This leads naturally to the formulation that avidyā and its works are indeterminable as real or unreal. The notion of falsity (mithyātva) is per-haps evaluative rather than primarily ontological. To say that the physical and mental domain with all its changes, imperfections, and limits is false is to say that it is not authentically real or that in the final analysis it is not what really matters. This is not to deny that it exists. It seems that this is what they are trying to capture in the formula-tions that the world and its source are neither real nor unreal.

Padmapāda says that the brahman is the root cause on the basis of which the proliferated cos-mos unfurls or appears (vivartate). The pure brah-man is the substrate of the appearance of the infinite number of individual centers of experi-ence ( jīva) that are constituted due to established avidyā without beginning. It is avidyā that is responsible for phenomenal plurality, and avidyā is a power (śakti) of the brahman. It is sometimes called māyā. Padmapāda characterized avidyā as a nonconscious ( jada) principle. The rationale is that if avidyā is other than vidyā and vidyā has the nature of consciousness, then avidyā can-not be conscious. We might consider here the familiar modern claim that there are noncon-scious, or subconscious, psychological functions, over which we have no control. Perhaps the Advaitins would be prepared to put natural and inherited avidyā in this category. This causal avidyā is the substrative cause both of the world appearance and of mundane cases of misconcep-tions. Avidyā thus construed veils the luminous nature of the brahman nature present in the mis-taken construction that is the individual soul. In association with the workings of karma and the mental apparatus, it produces the experience of limited selfhood that is the substrate of individual experience and agency. Śankara had identified avidyā (error) as the mutual superimposition of the subjective and the objective. It is a universal

human failure, a constitutive imperfection in human nature. But for Padmapāda, it is rather the cause of the notion of the individual ego, of the process of superimposition, and of all miscon-ceptions. Most significantly perhaps, we see here the first statement of the view, rejected by Mandanamiśra and Śankara, that it is the brah-man that is the ultimate substratum of avidyā and the consequent mistaken belief that we are individual personal agents.

The doctrine that the cosmos is a phenomenal manifestation (vivarta) of the transcendent brah-man, understood as objectless, undifferentiated consciousness, when it is concealed by a power called avidyā, becomes explicit in the works of the 10th-century thinkers Prakāśātman, Vimuktātman, and Sarvajñātman. Prakāśātman (c. 950 CE) wrote the Pañcapādikāvivarana on Padmapāda’s Pañcapādikā and developed that thinker’s views. His most influential innovation is the reification of avidyā as something positive and effective (bhāvarūpa), rather than as a privation of knowledge. Ignorance as something positive, as opposed to the mere absence of knowledge, is exemplified by cases where we recognize that we do not know some matter of fact. The example is held to explain that ignorance does not obliterate the light of consciousness. The point is that igno-rance construed as such is not opposite in nature to knowledge. Hence, it is compatible with it and will not be eliminated by the pure knowing that is the brahman.

Sarvajñātman (c. 950 CE), the author of the Samksepaśārīrakam and the Pañcaprakriyā, explicitly states that the distinctive mark of monis-tic Vedānta is its view that the plural cosmos is a phenomenal manifestation (vivarta) of its causal substrate (vedāntapaksas tu vivartavādah), rather than a real transformation or self-differentiation of the one divine substance. He calls this phenom-enal manifestation the “state of avidyā.” When that obtains, the pure brahman appears to be the ultimate cause of cosmic plurality through the instrumentality of the principle of positive igno-rance and its effects. That power of misconception depends on the brahman, which is also its object. Avidyā has two functions: it conceals the nature of the absolute as the pure light of consciousness (tirohita), and it projects phenomenal diversity (viksepa). In chapter 5 of the Pañcaprakriyā, Sarvajñātman propounds the theory that the pure brahman appears to be the efficient cause of the material cosmos, the presiding deity, and the

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internal witness known to each individual con-scious being. In other words, it appears to be diversified as the plural world, it appears to be the divine creator and regulator, and it appears to be the innermost constitutive element in the individual selves ( jīva). The real inner soul (pratyagātman), which is nothing other than the purely conscious brahman, becomes individuated as a knower, an experiencer, an agent, and one who is subject to Vedic mandates in virtue of con-nection with the physical elements constituting the cosmos. The true self is just the brahman that is implicated in finite conditions (brahmaiva samsarati) due to its own avidyā, and it is the brahman that is released thanks to its own knowl-edge. The samsāra of the brahman means its being the substrate of the plural cosmos, its being the sovereign divinity, and its being the individual souls. Liberation is the destruction of those condi-tions. Avidyā is held to belong to the brahman that is its ultimate substrate, because otherwise it would be an independent rival principle. It is only in virtue of its modality as the inner identity of the finite selves (jīva), its being the precondition of finite experiences, that the brahman is said to be the substrate of knowing and not knowing. Sarvajñātman argues that the view that it is the jīva that is the ultimate subject of knowing and not knowing lacks explanatory value, because the jīvas are constituted as such due to the workings of avidyā. In addition, the view that it is the finite selves that are the ultimate substrata of avidyā implies that they are realities in their own right, identities distinct from the brahman.

Vimuktātman (c. 950 CE) wrote the Istasiddhi, where much attention is paid to discussions of cognitive error. The work contains a succinct statement of the monistic metaphysic: what is unreal never comes into being. Whatever is, is indestructible. Hence, being is always just being. Hence, being never changes. Hence, it does not show itself in virtue of a connection with anything else. Hence, when it appears, it is self-luminous consciousness and free from duality. Hence, material things that are complex and changing are manifested due to avidyā. They seem as if real, like things in dreams before one wakes up.

The first part of the Istasiddhi identifies the unconditioned reality (the brahman) as con-sciousness (anubhūti) that establishes its own existence. As such, it is independent of anything else (ananyādhīna). As has been said above, the undeniable fact of consciousness is unique in

that while everything else requires consciousness for the revelation of its existence, consciousness does not need anything outside itself. Intrinsically reflexive consciousness is self-establishing. Vimuk-tātman argues that were consciousness ever the object of experience in the way in which physical objects such as pots are, its insentience would be entailed. He argues that what establishes its own existence exists necessarily. Hence, it is not origi-nated and is exempt from modifications and cessation. What are perceived as different objects are not properties of consciousness. Being free from limitations, it cannot be measured (ameya). Having no finite properties, it is infinite. Finally, what is not originated can have no intrinsic parts, because there is no possibility of composition out of preexisting factors. Hence, consciousness is simple. He continues to say that nondual (abheda) consciousness is a single (ekam) reality that does not differ from anything else, because there is nothing else. It is never the object of knowledge, because that would entail its dependence on something else and the denial that it is “without a second.” As has been said, consciousness is self-revealing and self-establishing. Its singularity is not a property. But an undifferentiated and featureless reality may be signified by the word “one.”

Some dazzling dialectic follows – a style of rea-soning that will be deployed at great length and to great effect by Śrī Harsa (1125–1180 CE) in his Khandanakhandakhādya. Vimuktātman argues that it is not possible to specify a difference between subject and object, between the perceiver and the perceived, because the former, being sim-ply given but never perceived, cannot be identi-fied in relation to anything else. The suggestion that the perceiver differentiates itself in virtue of its being self-revealing introduces a discussion about the nature of difference. If difference were the same as the essential nature as an entity, then it would not require correlatives. It would also fol-low that nothing would really be separate from everything else, entities effectively merging into one another. Difference understood as essential nature serves to only prove identity. If it cannot be the essence, then it would be a property, and understood by a distinct mode of cognition: there would be difference perception parallel to taste perception and color perception. But if being dif-ferent is a further real property (dharma) of an entity parallel to its color and so forth, then it would have to be different (another property)

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from its substrate. This would be to treat differ-ence as an entity that is different from the entities that differ. Each case of difference would require the postulation of further differences. An infinite regress results, and the notion of difference becomes inexplicable. In the light of this, it is difficult to see how we could say that there is any difference between the perceiver and the per-ceived, between subjectivity and objectivity. The foundational reality of intrinsically reflexive con-sciousness is indubitably self-established. If there is no difference between consciousness and what is experienced, then experienced diversity must have the nature of consciousness. But this seems to introduce variety and change into conscious-ness, which is supposed to be uniform. In response, Vimuktātman says that experiential variety is insubstantial or not truly real (avastu). Experien-tial variety is fabricated like a magical illusion (māyā): it is insubstantial, but we are still taken in. He uses an analogy in which permanent back-ground consciousness is likened to a wall, and the manifold contents of experience are likened to a picture painted upon it. The wall does not contrib-ute to the matter of the picture painted on it. The picture is not a modification of the wall in the way that pots are modifications of clay. Nor is it a change in the qualities of the wall. The wall was there before the picture and will remain after it has been washed away. But the painting needs the wall.

Experiential variety is attributed to an error-generating metaphysical power (avidyāśakti). Its operation explains why there are experiences of matter and plurality, when the truth is that reality is just pure consciousness. Neither the avidyāśakti nor the world of experience that it produces is authentically real, nor are they nonexistent. It is knowledge of the brahman, understood as the self-manifestation of transcendental pure con-sciousness, that counteracts the avidyāśakti, destroys misconceptions, and leaves conscious-ness shining in its own radiance. For everyday purposes, the means of knowledge (pramāna) operate successfully in the sphere where oblivion of the truth of nonduality prevails. But since scripture (Śruti) is such a means of pseudoknowl-edge, how can it reveal the truth? We see the answer here. The truth is self-revealing and needs no pramāna. Scripture as a means of knowing does not produce anything: it simply destroys misconceptions by conveying the falsity of the experience of duality. It does not need to tell us anything new.

Mention has been made of Śrī Harsa and his Khandanakhandakhādya. The method of that work is one of negative dialectic. He does not think that conceptual thought can reveal the truth, and he seeks to demolish the arguments of those who think that reason can establish the nature of a genuinely real mind-independent world. He does this by demonstrating that all the definitions of the means of knowing, varieties of correspon-dence theories of truth, and basically real catego-ries offered by realists are incoherent. Common sense revolts against the amazing Advaitin claim that authentic reality is static undifferentiated consciousness. So he sets about demonstrating that the commonsense worldview is infected by contradictions and cannot be true. Śrī Harsa does not offer any theories of his own, being content with the one unassailable truth that consciousness is the sole self-revealing and self-authenticating reality.

A typical line of argumentation runs like this: difference may be understood as a sort of relation; but under analysis, it can be seen as something that unites rather than separates. If two or more items are internally related, their being so con-nected is an aspect of their natures. Since the rela-tion is a two-way affair, they are really united and not different. So the notion of internal relations leads to monism. If we say that relations are exter-nal, meaning that they connect two different items without affecting the natures of their terms, then it is not clear that they are really related at all. If we want to avoid this conclusion, then we might say that relations are realities in their own right: a + relation R + b. But now we need other real rela-tions to connect R to a and R to b. An infinite regress results, and it follows that nothing can ever be connected. So all relations are internal, and monism must be true.

Citsukha (1250–1300) developed Śrī Harsa’s antidualistic dialectics, subjecting Nyāya catego-ries and concepts to critical scrutiny. He also con-tributes the understanding of the phenomenology of consciousness. Identity (ātman) is undeter-mined self-revealing consciousness. He follows Padmapāda and Prakāśātman in saying that when it is confronted and conditioned by external objects, consciousness is called experience (anub-hava). But purely subjective consciousness has a special kind of immediacy (aparoksatva) that dif-fers from the subjective character of states such as desires and feelings whose phenomenal nature derives from their referring to objects.

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Scriptural ExegesisWe have seen that Advaitins believe that some mahāvākyas, such as “that thou art” (tat tvam asi) and “I am the brahman” (aham brahma asmi), mean the undifferentiated character of reality and the identity of the soul and the brahman. Many of those statements have a grammatical form known as co-referentiality or grammatical coordination (sāmānādhikaranya). The grammarians define this as the reference to one thing of a number of words having different grounds for their opera-tion ( pravrttinimitta). The interpretation of such statements is central to vedantic theological dia-lectic. It is central, because it is the language of the scriptures that provides the only means of knowl-edge of anything that transcends the bounds of sense perception and a fortiori inference. But lan-guage is often susceptible to different interpreta-tions, so a philosopher’s theory of meaning, of how language works and what verbal formula-tions convey to the understanding, will exercise a considerable influence on this metaphysics. The Advaitin position here is that certain scriptures, albeit on the surface exhibiting complex linguistic form, have a unitary simple meaning (akhandārtha) and thus convey a nonrelational and featureless essence. Where the sāmānādhikaranya construc-tions are concerned, the Advaitins put the empha-sis on the unity of reference and construe the co-referential constructions as statements of identity. They have a simple, impartite sense (akhandārtha). They maintain that this is com-patible with the words’ having different grounds for their operation. A distinction can be made between what a word or sentence refers to and the mode or modes under which it presents the refer-ent. Their view is that an expression may include different such modes of presentation while signi-fying a single simple reality. They also appeal to a familiar distinction between what is usually, liter-ally, and primarily meant by words (mukhyārtha) and what is nonliterally or secondarily indicated (laksanā), in order to explain how certain scrip-tural statements convey an undifferentiated essence, despite surface appearances. In certain circum-stances, a nonliteral interpretation of a statement is the only possible one. The stock examples illus-trating nonliteral usages are the expressions “Devadatta is a lion,” whose purport (tātparya) of course indicates that he is brave, and “the village on the Gangā,” which indicates that it is on the bank of the river. In both cases, the literal sense is

impossible and is thus suppressed. The impossi-bility or absurdity of the literal sense triggers a transference from the literal semantic content to a nonliteral one.

The Advaitin theory is that in the case of co-referential constructions whose purport is an undifferentiated essence, incompatible primary senses are superseded in the process of semantic transference, while those aspects of the primary meanings that are compatible are retained. Advaitins such as Sarvajñātman and Prakāśātman say that co-referentiality is the nonliteral refer-ence to a single entity by means of the discrimina-tion of the referent. The semantically modified terms in grammatical coordination are held to indicate obliquely a unitary sense (akhandārtha) and convey an undifferentiated essence. This form of partial oblique predication is technically termed jahadajahallaksanā. They use the statement of identity about a person, “this is that Devadatta” (so’yam devadatta), as an example of this nonlit-eral semantic function. The demonstratives this and that primarily signify different times and places. So taken literally, the statement would mean something like “this man standing in front of me now is the same one whom I saw yesterday in the market.” They hold that the grammatical coordination of the two pronouns means simple essential identity (svarūpaikya). For each to denote just the man Devadatta, purely referen-tially, the pronouns have to be understood nonlit-erally. When the meaning components expressing the different times and places are eliminated, the terms co-refer to the individual essence of Deva-datta. In this way, the statement is understood as having a unitary sense.

This may be illustrated by examples from chapter 2 of Sarvajñātman’s Pañcaprakriyā. He says that release from rebirth follows only from understanding the meaning of the principal scrip-tural statements (mahāvākya) such as “I am the brahman.” Understanding such a statement arises from discriminative knowledge of the meanings of the two terms “I” and “brahman.” There are two sorts of meaning: the literal and usual (vācya), and what is nonliterally indicated (laksya). The former is complex and the latter pure and simple. The word “I” is complex in that it literally signifies both the inner conscious reality and the body, mind, and senses with which it is wrongly associ-ated. The word “brahman” is complex in that it literally signifies nondual blissful consciousness when it is associated with the avidyā that is

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the causal substrate of embodiment. Because the nondual blissful consciousness signified by the word “brahman” is imperceptibly associated with the inner conscious reality signified by the word “I,” the meanings of “I” and “brahman” can be coordinated and refer to the same state (sāmānādhikaranya) without any conflict. This is because when the incompatible elements of mean-ing peculiar to each are eliminated, they both indicate (laksyete) a pure and simple meaning. When the connotations of embodiment are elim-inated, the part of the meaning that is inner aware-ness is indicated by “I.” By eliminating the meaning of causal avidyā that is responsible for embodiment, the word “brahman” indicates non-dual blissful consciousness. The coalescence of the suitably purified indicated meanings produces an understanding of undifferentiated conscious essence that culminates in the unitive experience that is release from rebirth enjoyed by one who is still alive in the world.

In the case of tat tvam asi (that thou art), which may be construed either as a relational statement or as one of identity, the two pronouns appear to differ in their literal senses. Accordingly, the Advaitin has to eliminate aspects of those mean-ings in order to secure an impartite sense. Sarvajñātman says that the word tat literally expresses the brahman as associated with avidyā and hence is understood as the cause of the cos-mos. The personal pronoun tvam (thou) usually means the individual self (jīva) that is misidenti-fied with the body. But in another aspect of its meaning, it signifies the purely conscious inner identity ( pratyagātman). The individual self, as the passive witness that is distinct from its experi-ences, really shares the same nature as the supreme identity or the pure brahman (tat) in that both are without features (nirguna), impartite, without attachments, eternally pure consciousness, always released, authentically real, and supremely bliss-ful. When the term tat is purified of connotations of cosmic causality through avidyā, and the term tvam is purified of connotations of personal indi-viduality and finite experience, they are under-stood together in the identity statement “that thou art” as obliquely indicating the nature of the purely conscious reality. The procedure here is parallel to that applied in the case of so’yam deva-datta as seen above.

Some CritiquesFrom within the Vedānta tradition, the most tren-chant critiques of the advaitic outlook are offered by followers of the Viśistādvaita, inaugurated by → Yāmunācarya (950–1000 CE) and → Rāmānuja (1050–1139) and developed by thinkers such as → Vedānta Deśika (1270–1350), and the Dvaita schools, inaugurated by → Madhva (1238–1317 CE). Viśistādvaita (the term means the unity of a com-plex reality) is the theoretical articulation of the South Indian → Śrīvaisnava tradition of ritual and devotion to → Visnu. Both Viśistādvaita and Dvaita are theological and philosophical expres-sions of fundamentally devotional religions (bhaktimarga) believing in a personal god who is the creator of a differentiated real world. Both rec-ognize the reality of personal individuality, even in the state of release, and hence the difference between god and the individual souls. Both main-tain that a real difference between the divine object of religious devotion and its human practi-tioners is essential if → bhakti religion is to make any sense. Moreover, the experience and practice of bhakti, worship and deeply felt devotion, occur in this world. If the world is not real, then nor is that experience. Both insist that the pronoun “I,” which ordinarily designates the embodied social self, also ultimately refers to the true individual self ( pratyagātman). Individual persons (jīva) are basic substantial identities. Although bearers of properties, chiefly cognisership and agency when involved in samsāra, they are not individuated by their properties. Each is known to oneself in an immediate and special way. They are not functions of the conditioning of pure conscious-ness by avidyā. Nor are they ultimately differenti-ated by their bodies and broadly environmental circumstances.

Central to bhakti theism is the belief that it is the individual liberation seeker’s aspiration to the enjoyment of unlimited bliss and freedom that actuates him or her to follow the scriptures. If salvation through gnosis means the destruction of personhood, the individual would have no inter-est in it. So it is not surprising that at times the arguments between gnostic Advaitins and their theistic opponents have the air of people talking different languages at cross-purposes. It must be remembered that the basic question behind all the arguments is whether the scriptures teach nondu-alism or pluralism.

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Yāmunācarya was the teacher of Rāmānuja’s teacher. His views, expressed in the Ātmasiddhi, Īśvarasiddhi, and Samvitsiddhi, exercised a con-siderable influence on Rāmānuja’s thought. The Samvitsiddhi is primarily concerned with refuta-tion of advaitic doctrines. The primary targets of his polemics, and those of Rāmānuja, are Prakāśātman, Vimuktātman, and Sarvajñātman. It is Rāmānuja who is the dominant figure in the tradition. In his commentaries on the Brahmasūtras (called the Śrībhāsya) and the Bhagavadgītā, as well as in his Vedārthasamgraha (Compendium of the Teachings of the Scrip-tures), he elaborated metaphysical and epistemo-logical doctrines that put devotional religiosity on a firm intellectual basis. Most influentially, he developed an account of the cosmos of individual souls and material entities as constituting the body of god. This means that there is real onto-logical continuity between the brahman and the domain of finite entities. The world is a real trans-formation (parināma) but not of the essential divine being. Rather, the modifications occur in the sphere of the body of the brahman, identified as the god Visnu. The “soul-body model” of the relationship between god and the world enables Rāmānuja to harmonize those upanishadic scrip-tures asserting the unity of the brahman and the ātman (and the brahman and the world) with those saying that they are different. The leading idea, derived from the Brhadāranyakopanisad, is that the relation between god and the world is analogous to the relation between finite souls and their physical bodies. The latter are modes (prakāra) essentially dependent on the conscious souls, in the sense that a lump of matter only becomes an organized corporeal entity when it is appropriated by a soul. Bodies are subservient to and function in the interests of souls by enabling them to experience and thus annul the fruits of their karman. Moreover, bodies are subject to control by our wills. But crucially, bodies are dis-tinct from the souls embodied in them. Analo-gously, the cosmos of souls and matter is distinct from the brahman (understood as the personal god Visnu) who creates and sustains it. The uni-verse of entities, understood as essentially depen-dent modes of the brahman, would not exist in the form that it has, unless regulated and supported by god. In relation to god, souls are comparable to bodies, in that they exist only to worship and grat-ify him. So the notions of divine immanence and

divine transcendence can be held together. The cosmos of souls and matter is inseparably united (apr thaksiddha) with god, in that it is essentially dependent on him, but god is neither dependent on nor united with the cosmos, which exists sim-ply for his delight (→ līlā). This notion of insepa-rable unity enables the Viśistādvaitin exegetes to provide theistic explanations of the scriptural statements such as “that thou art,” “I am the brah-man,” and “all this is the brahman,” which are construed by the Advaitins as statements of iden-tity with an impartite sense (akhandārtha).

Obviously, all this is worlds away from Advaita, although derived from the same scriptures. Rāmānuja devotes much energy to a critique of Advaita metaphysics and epistemology, especially in the extended initial portions of the Śrībhāsya (which runs to 156 pages in Thibaut’s english translation) called the Mahāpūrvapaksa and the Mahāsiddhānta. In the course of the latter, he argues that the Advaitins cannot appeal to any of the established means of knowing (pramāna) in order to validate their claims that the brahman is a nondifferentiated purely conscious reality (nirviśesacinmātravastu). The Advaitins are hardly in a position to appeal to the scriptures in support of the doctrines, because those scriptures, as well as the other pramānas, are held to belong to the sphere of avidyā.

Rāmānuja insists that all the means of knowing relate to entities characterized by generic and spe-cific properties. It is a fundamental phenomeno-logical fact that conscious experience reveals a world of differentiated entities. The facts of perception cannot be contradicted by scripture, because their spheres are mutually exclusive. Rāmānuja also accepts the realist idea that there is a structural isomorphism between the elements of language and thought and the world that they are about. The structure of language reveals the struc-ture of its objects. Language, including the language of Śruti, is composite. Even individual words are complexes. A sentence is an aggregate that expresses a specific association of the meanings of its component words. Nor can perception, and a fortiori inference, refer to an undifferentiated reality. Advaitins such as Mandanamiśra had sug-gested that the nonconceptual form of perception (nirvikalpakapratyaksa) reveals undifferentiated pure being. Following him, Vācaspatimiśra has argued that there is no pramāna that grasps differentiated or individual objects. Rāmānuja

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denies that perception or any other pramāna reveals undifferentiated being as such. He claims that nonconceptual perception (nirvikalpakapratyaksa) always grasps differentiated objects and states of affairs, although it does not explicitly register the recurrent nature of repeatable features such as generic property and color. An example would be perceiving something for the first time, when there is no awareness of similar instances with which it might be compared. In conceptual per-ception (savikalpakapratyaksa), there is appre-hension of the generic and other properties as features of other things as well. For instance, we might see an individual cow without the recogni-tion that it belongs to a kind. We might see that it is black without thinking that other cows are black, or black and white, or brown. If preconcep-tual perception were to apprehend only pure being, why would someone looking for a horse not be satisfied with a buffalo?

The Advaitins think that some expressions for knowing or consciousness mean undetermined, self-luminous, and objectless awareness rather than the subject’s active cognitive relations to objects. An example would be the formula jñaptimātra (pure knowing as such). Rāmānuja responds that this is unconvincing, because that expression’s derivation from the verbal root jñā-, “to know,” implies that it means a specific action with an agent and an object. He defines knowing or consciousness both as self-illuminating or intrinsic and as intentional. It establishes its own existence simply in virtue of its own nature, which is to establish the nature of other things. Con-sciousness is an essential property of a subject to whom it belongs. As such, it is internal to but not exhaustive of the identity of the soul. Conscious-ness, solely in virtue of its own being, manifests itself to its subject in virtue of establishing the existence of objects. The essential property con-sciousness, however, is susceptible to contraction and expansion caused by the karman of the indi-vidual. This is sufficient to explain the occurrence of error and ignorance.

It has been shown above that Advaitins such as Sarvajñātman and Prakāśātman appeal to the linguistic phenomenon of nonliteral meaning (laksanā) in order to explain how certain complex scriptural statements convey an undifferentiated purely conscious reality. I mentioned their inter-pretations of the coreferential construction “this is that Devadatta.” The import of the grammatical

form is simple essential identity (svarūpaikya), but the two pronouns literally mean different times and places. In order to eliminate the contra-diction, the pronouns are taken in secondary or oblique senses and thus communicate the unity of a simple essence. Rāmānuja rejoins that there is not a whiff of nonliteral meaning here, because there is no contradiction. The contradiction between the two different locations is eliminated by the two different times. The Advaitins say that the mahāvākya “tat tvam asi” conveys a non-relational essence, when the two co-referential pronouns are understood in nonliteral senses. Rāmānuja says that by discarding the proper meanings of the pronouns so that they have the force of conveying the essence of a featureless reality, one is abandoning the primary sense of the expression. He is appealing to the principle that it is only legitimate to adopt a secondary sig-nification, when the primary one is impossible. This illustrates the point made above about the two traditions talking at cross-purposes. It also demonstrates how an interpreter’s theory of meaning determines his or her metaphysics. The Advaitins insist that co-referential constructions convey simple identity, while Rāmānuja’s tradi-tion maintains that they mean the sort of unity that obtains among a number of distinct realities, when at least one is inseparably related to another. He construes co-referentiality as the reference of words to one reality on the basis of its modes (prakāra). He says that the word “thou” (tvam) designates something that had formerly under-stood itself only as an embodied agent but that is really a mode of the deity, existentially culminat-ing in the deity, insofar as it belongs to the deity’s body. Given Rāmānuja’s principle that the signifi-cation of words for essentially dependent modes, for example bodies, extends to the mode pos-sessor, the word tvam also designates the inner controller of the individual selves, who has them as its modes. The brahman is the referent of the words tat and tvam, when they function in co-referentiality. The former refers to the brahman as the cause of the cosmos. The latter refers to the same brahman as the inner controller of the individual selves that are its modes. Thus the two terms refer to the one brahman under differ-ent descriptions by having two different grounds for their operation ( pravrttinimitta). Hence, there is no need for the pronouns to have nonliteral senses.

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The same principle applies to the exegesis of co-referential statements such as “satyam jñānam anantam brahma,” whose literal meaning indi-cates that the brahman is characterized by proper-ties. It is not the case that the statement conveys the pure identity of an undifferentiated and non-relational essence. This is because co-referential-ity means the specification of an entity by means of several words expressing its properties.

It will come as no surprise that on the subject of avidyā, Rāmānuja has much to say. Most of it is to be found in the Mahāsiddhānta of Śrībhāsya (1.1.1), but the matter is also treated in section 2.1.15 of that work. The opposing views are largely drawn from the works of Prakāśātman, Sarvajñātman, and Vimuktātman. What follows here is a selec-tion of points that Rāmānuja raises against the developed versions of advaitic error theory.

The Advaitins hold that the entire plural world is constructed due to a defect on the undifferenti-ated self-illuminating ultimate reality. The defect is beginning-less avidyā, inexpressible as real or unreal, that projects diversity and conceals the proper form of the brahman. Avidyā is responsible for the phenomenal manifestation of (vivartate) the cosmos, whose mutable nature means that it is neither genuinely real nor totally unreal (sadasadvilaksana).

However avidyā is construed, as a subjective affliction or as a cosmic power, we need to specify the subject or substrate to which it belongs. But it cannot be the jīva, because its existence is con-structed by avidyā. Nor can it be the brahman, because that is opposed to avidyā in virtue of its essential nature as self-illuminating knowing. The latter point is fundamental to the Viśistādvaitin response. By the time of Yāmunācārya and Rāmānuja, it had become a virtual commonplace among Advaitin thinkers that avidyā was a metaphysical principle responsible for cosmic plurality and the delusions of individuality and differentiation. But it is surely impossible that it should somehow coexist with the brahman, given that the natures of the brahman and causal avidyā are incompatible.

The Advaitin understands the brahman as a state of undifferentiated knowing. It is reflexive consciousness that has neither objects nor con-tents, nor is it a property of a subject. But, as for instance Sarvajñātman says, the brahman experi-ences plurality within itself, when its essential nature is concealed (tirohita) by obscuring

(ācchādya) ignorance. Rāmānuja responds that concealment is the removal of illumination. If it operates on an essential nature that is pure luminosity, that nature would be destroyed. If knowledge, synonymous with illumination, is per-manent and is concealed by avidyā, this can mean one of two things: either the origination of illumi-nation is prevented, or existing illumination is destroyed. Given the assumption that illumina-tion is not originated, its concealment means its destruction.

And matters are not helped if the Advaitins say that obfuscating avidyā is a defect causing the concealment of the brahman’s essential nature. Insofar as that defect is false (mithyārūpa), its operation requires an explanation – just as the Advaitin offers avidyā as an explanation for the appearance of the plural world. The ultimate explanation cannot itself be in terms of a defect, because that would involve an infinite regress of defects requiring explanation. Avidyā cannot be blamed on imperfect finite selves, because they are one of its products. It follows that the defect must pertain to the brahman, which would then be the root cause of all consequent misconcep-tions. Since the brahman is eternal and absolutely real, the operation of avidyā, falsely conceived by the brahman, would be both eternal and ineradi-cable. Hence, there would be no possibility of release from rebirth.

It has been shown above that following Prakāśātman and Sarvajñātman, many Advaitins characterized the indeterminable avidyā as some-thing positive (bhāvarūpa) that is responsible for the differentiated cosmos (a theory characterized by Yāmunācārya as “mere babble”).

This reified avidyā conceals the true nature of the brahman and inexplicably causes the super-imposition of the manifold of thoughts and things on transcendental consciousness. Positive avidyā is different from the mere absence of knowledge, which would not be effectual. But what is meant here is something that brings about the superim-position of the distinctions among personal sub-jects, cognitions, and external objects on the transcendental consciousness. It is an indication of the currency of this theory and also the persua-siveness of the suggestion that ignorance and mis-conception are real forces in the world, that Rāmānuja’s counterarguments are extensive. Suf-fice it to say here that he denies that any of the means of knowing reveal ignorance as a

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positive entity. Whether characterized as positive or otherwise, ignorance is still a matter of not knowing and is eliminated by knowledge. Since the brahman is pure knowing, ignorance as some-thing positive cannot be associated with it.

Advaitins such as Vimuktātman, Sarvajñātman, and Prakāśātman had tried to account for the relation between the brahman and causally effective avidyā by saying that both the latter and its effects are indeterminable as real and unreal (sadasadanirvacanīyatva) or as different in kind from the real and the unreal (sadasadvilaksanatva). For this, Rāmānuja, as a realist, has little time. Something either exists, or it does not. A proposi-tion is either true or false, although we may not know which. The developed Advaitin theory of cognitive error is that when we mistake a shell for silver or the magician induces us to see a rope as a snake, the cognition in question is neither true, because it is subsequently contradicted by a valid cognition, nor simply false, because it has practical consequences and lasts for a time. This microcosmic account is transferred to the charac-terization of causal avidyā. Rāmānuja responds with an extreme version of the Nyāya anyathākhyāti theory of cognition, according to which a cogni-tive error is a case of something real appearing as otherwise from what it is due to environmental influences or defects in the sensory apparatus. But Rāmānuja’s position is more radical. He denies that there are any perceptual errors. Perceptual cognitions are always of objects existing exter-nally to minds. When one mistakes a piece of shell for silver, one is perceiving silver elements in the shell. He tries to explain away all kinds of cogni-tive error in a realist spirit that does not involve recourse to the notion of the indeterminability of error.

The founding father of Dvaita Vedānta, Madhva (1238–1317 CE), is a resolute opponent of Advaitin monism and gnosticism. Madhva and his followers were also opposed to emanationist theories such as that of Rāmānuja, which they saw as positing too close an association between god and the world. Madhva denied that god is the sub-strative cause of the cosmos. God is the efficient cause in that god actuates and organizes an inde-pendent material principle that is subject to god’s governance. Madhva wrote commentaries on the Brahmasūtras (also called Brahmasūtrabhāsya) and the Bhagavadgītā (Gītābhāsya). His most accessible work is the Visnutattvanirnaya. He

taught that the sole independent and self-deter-mining reality is the unsurpassably great divinity Visnu. On him depend the sentient and insentient realities. The complex universe is a real creation that has no intrinsic tendency to continue in exis-tence. It persists only because it is known and sus-tained by god. The cosmos is structured by five types of real difference: the difference between god and individual souls, that between material objects and god, differences among souls, differ-ences between souls and material objects, and differences among the material objects. Were the cosmos constructed due to error, it would cease. But it does not. An attitude of common-sense direct realism pervades his thought. The basic principle is that in direct acquaintance with the already and always present environment, our minds are receptive rather than creative and con-structive. In the liberated state, each soul retains its unique individual identity. Liberation is the manifestation of innate consciousness and bliss focused on the divinity. Its attainment requires a combination of intense devotion and divine favor. But only Visnu saves: liberation is not a human achievement.

Later Dvaitins produced a number of closely argued logical treatises seeking to undermine the conceptual basis of Advaita. Jayatīrtha (1365–1388) and Vyāsatīrtha (1460–1539) are notable here. The 16th-century Advaitin Madhusūdhana Sarasvatī’s Advaitasiddhi is a rejoinder to the latter’s work. In the period between Jayatīrtha and Vyāsatīrtha, there is Visnudasācārya’s (1390–1440) Vādaratnāvalī, which is mainly directed against doctrines of the Vivarana school as pro-pounded by Prakāśātman and in Citsukha’s (1250–1300) Tattvapradīpikā. The Vādaratnāvalī includes a refutation of the theory that Śruti teaches the falsity (mithyātva) of the world, a demonstration that there is a real difference between mental content and objects, a proof of the difference between Visnu and the individual souls, and dualist exegeses of the scriptures favored by Advaitins. There is also an argument for the view that difference is not a relation but is constitutive of the nature of each individual entity. It is grasped whenever we perceive an object. Chapter 3 contains a critique of the Vivarana school’s notion that avidyā, having the brahman as its substrate, is a positive causal force respon-sible for the diversified cosmos.

For further developments see below.

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BibliographyGranoff, P., Philosophy and Argument in Late Vedānta: Śrī

Harsa’s Khandanakhandakhādya, Dordrecht, 1978.Halbfass, W., ed., Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker

on Traditional and Modern Vedānta, Albany, 1995.Lipner, J., The Face of Truth, Basingstoke, 1986.Mesquita, R., Yāmunācāryas Samvitsiddhi, Vienna, 1988.

Sadhale, G.S., ed., The Bhagavad Gita with Eleven Com-mentaries, Delhi, 2000.

Thibaut, G., The Vedānta-Sūtras with the Commentary of Rāmānuja, Oxford, 1904.

Thrasher, A.W., The Advaita Vedānta of Brahma-Siddhi, Delhi, 1993.

Christopher Bartley

come new followers. Moreover, it has demon-strated a capacity to adapt itself to cultural conditions remote from its eastern Mediterra-nean origins without sacrificing its integrity. Above all, inclusivity is at its heart. Since Saint Paul, Christianity has proclaimed itself to be of universal or catholic significance, transcending cultures, histories, and particular traditions of praxis. In short, it is for everyone regardless of gender, ethnicity, or social status. In contrast, “Hinduism” operates a sort of “double exclusiv-ity.” There are the segregations imposed by caste, which among many other restrictions means that only members of the higher three castes (varnas) are entitled to participate in the mainstream orthodox vedic religion. Further, in the case of particular theistic traditions of ritual and devo-tion, the grace or favor of the presiding deity is available only to those who have undergone ini-tiation into the sect. (It might be noted that those engaged in the propagation of the Gospel could point to copies of the New Testament, little books easily and economically produced, and say that contained in them is all you need to know about Christian faith. By contrast, the Brahmans had the sprawling vedic literature, which could not be reduced to a handbook. In these circumstances, they seized upon the → Bhagavadgītā from the → Mahābhārata epic as a sort of rival to the New Testament because it could similarly be produced as a slender volume.)

Turning to more secular thinking, the western-European “Enlightenment” disseminated the val-ues of political freedom, brotherhood, and equality, none of which is particularly prominent in Indian traditions of thought (or hitherto in European ones for that matter). It posited the

Describing his state of mind as a student at Madras Christian College during the first decade of the 20th century, S. → Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), one of the most notable exponents of modern Vedānta, wrote,

I was strongly persuaded of the inferiority of the Hindu religion to which I attributed the politi-cal downfall of India . . . I remember the cold sense of reality, the depressing feeling of defeat that crept over me as a causal relation between the anaemic Hindu religion and our political failure forced itself on my mind. (Radhakrish-nan, 1936, 475)

The sense of disillusionment can be traced back to the early decades of the 19th century. Confronted by interventions and eventually political and administrative dominance on the part of a confi-dent and technologically superior European power, members of the intelligentsia, particularly in Bengal (the epicenter of British rule), perceived an inertia and passivity in their fellow country-men. Some of them attributed this to a degenera-tion in a religion that had encouraged an attitude of apathy and indifference to worldly life. In addi-tion, the presence of Christian missions invited unwelcome comparisons with the present state of indigenous traditions (see also → Hinduism and Christianity). For Christianity was the faith of the conquerors, a fact reflected in the introduction of versions of Anglican diocesan structures and the construction of cathedrals as well as more modest churches. Two features of Christianity are rele-vant here. Jesus told his disciples to go out and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christianity has always sought to spread the Gospel and to wel-

Modern Vedānta