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WorkĀdi Śaṅkara

Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya

Vedānta's founding aphorisms explained against the rival schools, behind a preface arguing that all experience mistakes the body and mind for the self.

by Ādi Śaṅkara1,376 passages held

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Original language
Sanskrit

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Overview

Before explaining a single aphorism of the Brahma Sūtras, this commentary stops to ask why anyone should need to be told what they themselves are. Its answer, set out in a preface on adhyāsa, or superimposition, is that all ordinary experience confuses the self, which is pure awareness, with the body and mind it witnesses, as mother-of-pearl is taken for silver or a single moon is seen as two. The aphorisms themselves are 555 compressed lines ascribed to Bādarāyaṇa that arrange the teaching of the Upanishads into a system and say little without a commentary. Śaṅkara's bhāṣya, a commentary that explains them one by one, was composed in the first half of the eighth century and is the oldest on them that survives. It reads them as teaching Advaita Vedānta, or non-dualism: Brahman, the ultimate reality, is one, the self is Brahman, and the world of many things belongs to ignorance. Against the Mīmāṃsā ritualists, who held that scripture exists to command acts, it argues that the Upanishads describe something already real, which no act can produce. Its second book takes the rival schools in turn and finds each incoherent: the Sāṃkhya, the atomists of Vaiśeṣika, the Buddhists and the Jains. The Sāṃkhya's unconscious matter, it argues, cannot by itself produce an ordered world. Until the tenth century, though, the better-known Advaita author was Maṇḍana Miśra, Śaṅkara's older contemporary. Later Advaita divided into two schools, each grown from a commentary on this book: one from the Pañcapādikā of Padmapāda, one of Śaṅkara's own pupils, the other from the Bhāmatī of Vācaspati Miśra. Rāmānuja and Madhva later wrote commentaries on the same aphorisms against it.

Key concepts

What is superimposition, or adhyāsa?

It is seeing the features of one thing in another, as when mother-of-pearl is taken for silver. Śaṅkara finds this error at the root of all ordinary experience: people take the body and mind for the self and lend the self their changes, saying 'I am stout' or 'I am blind'. Since the self was never altered, freedom means removing the error, not improving the self.

What are the Brahma Sūtras, and why do they need a commentary?

They are 555 aphorisms, ascribed to Bādarāyaṇa, that arrange the teaching of the Upanishads into a system. Each line is so compressed, often a few words, that it says almost nothing without an explanation. Śaṅkara's commentary, the bhāṣya, supplies the argument behind each one, so the aphorisms become a framework on which he lays out a whole philosophy and its quarrels with other schools.

What is the difference between the higher and the lower Brahman?

The higher Brahman is reality without any qualities, known only when ignorance ends. The lower Brahman is the same reality thought of with qualities, as the Lord who creates and rules, so that people can worship and meditate on it. Meditation on the lower leads to heavenly worlds and to freedom only gradually. Knowing the higher is freedom itself, at once.

What is the Sāṃkhya school, and why is it the main opponent?

Sāṃkhya is a dualist school: it counts many conscious selves and one unconscious primal matter, which unfolds by itself into the world as milk turns into curds. Śaṅkara treats it as the most serious rival because it also claims the Upanishads for its side. His reply is that scripture says the cause of the world thought before creating, and unconscious matter cannot think.

How can Brahman be both the stuff and the maker of the world?

In the commentary Brahman is the world's material cause, what it is made of, and its operative cause, what makes it. A potter needs clay outside himself, but Brahman needs nothing besides itself. The Upanishads' image is clay: once one lump is known, every pot is known, because the pots are only clay with names. So the many things are Brahman under names and forms.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Mistake in Every Experience

Why should anyone need to be told what they already are? Because every waking act, the preface answers, already confuses the self with the body and mind it watches, and the whole commentary exists to undo that confusion.

Śaṅkara calls the error adhyāsa, superimposition: the features of one thing seen in another, as silver is seen in mother-of-pearl. Subject and object are as opposed as light and darkness, so the confusion has no justification, yet it runs through all ordinary life, perception, the rites and scripture included. In daily dealings the learned behave as a cow does before a raised stick. Knowledge does not repair the self, which was never touched. It removes the mistake, and a seen-through error may linger for a while, like a double moon.

  • self
  • ignorance
  • nonduality
  • knowledge
  • consciousness
  • perception
  • epistemology
  • identity
  • self-knowledge
  • embodiment
  • liberation

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Scripture That Describes What Is

Can a text change a life without telling anyone to do anything? The commentary stakes everything on the claim that the Upanishads inform rather than command.

Against the Mīmāṃsā ritualists, for whom every Vedic sentence serves a command to act, Śaṅkara argues that the Upanishads report a reality already present, Brahman, which no act can make, reach, change or purify. Whatever an act produces also ends, so a liberation produced by works would not last. Rites and meditations keep their place for those who want results within the world. Freedom, though, is knowledge, and knowledge follows its object rather than anyone's will, as seeing a rope for what it is depends on the rope.

  • scriptural interpretation
  • scriptural authority
  • hermeneutics
  • ritual
  • ritual action
  • karma
  • meditation
  • interpretation
  • scripture
  • language
  • action

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One Cause, Against Every School

If one conscious reality causes everything, what becomes of matter, of unequal suffering and of the rival accounts of how the world arose?

Brahman, the second book argues, is both the stuff of the world and its maker, as clay is the stuff of pots, and then the rivals are taken in turn. Sāṃkhya's unconscious matter cannot arrange an ordered world with no mind behind it. The atomists cannot say how partless particles combine, and the Buddhists and Jains fall into contradictions of their own. Objections to Brahman are answered too: creating is play done for no purpose, and the unequal lots of beings follow their own past deeds, not the creator's partiality.

  • causation
  • cosmology
  • brahman
  • creation
  • metaphysics
  • objection
  • analogy
  • Buddhist philosophy

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
1,376
distinct concepts
550
by passages held, corpus-wide
#46

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “brahman” and “scriptural interpretation”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 76 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
brahmanscriptural interpretation185
meditationscriptural interpretation119
scriptural interpretationself102
brahmanself73
cosmologyscriptural interpretation71
brahmanliberation60
liberationscriptural interpretation57
brahmanmeditation54
liberationself49
causationcosmology44
brahmanscriptural authority43
causationscriptural interpretation38
liberationscriptural authority30
brahmancausation29
brahmancosmology28
causationscriptural authority26
cosmologyscriptural authority26
scriptural authorityself22
meditationself20
liberationmeditation18
meditationscriptural authority17
cosmologyself14
causationliberation12
causationself12
cosmologyliberation7
cosmologymeditation4
causationmeditation1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. A Thousand Teachings (Upadeśasāhasrī)

    The one treatise of his that is not a commentary and that scholars widely accept as his own: the place to see how he taught, not only what.

     SA
  2. Aitareya Upanisad, with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Aitareya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya)

    Three chapters of the Aitareya Āraṇyaka, a ritual text of the Ṛgveda tradition, that tell a creation story; for Śaṅkara its point is that Brahman is consciousness.

     SA
  3. Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya you are here EN
  4. Brhadaranyaka Upanishad with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya)

    Sureśvara, his pupil, wrote verse commentaries on two of Śaṅkara's Upanishad commentaries, this one and the Taittirīya; the Bṛhadāraṇyaka is by far the larger of the two.

     SA
  5. Īśa-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

    One of his shortest commentaries, in which the case against combining ritual and knowledge that the longer commentaries argue at length is made on a single disputed verse.

     EN
  6. Kaṭha-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

    The Kaṭha is a poem from the Black Yajurveda tradition, two chapters of three sections each; Śaṅkara's prose commentary follows it line by line.

     SA
  7. Māṇḍūkya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

    A commentary on a commentary: Śaṅkara glosses both the Upanishad and the verses of Gauḍapāda, his teacher's teacher in the tradition, whose Kārikā scholars count as the earliest surviving systematic treatise of Advaita.

     EN
  8. Praśna-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

    A teaching dialogue from the Atharvaveda tradition, six questions put to one teacher, which Śaṅkara follows from the origin of living beings to the nature of the knower.

     SA
  9. Śrīmad Bhagavad Gītā Bhāṣya (Bhagavadgītā-bhāṣya)

    One of the three commentaries on which Advaita rests, beside those on the Upanishads and the Brahma Sūtras, and the one in which Śaṅkara must draw a case for giving up action from a text that urges a warrior to fight.

     EN
  10. Taittiriya Upanisad with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Taittirīya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya)

    The source of the five selves, or sheaths, that later Advaita manuals such as the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi teach at length; here Śaṅkara reads them in the Upanishad itself.

     SA
  11. Vivekacūḍāmaṇi

    A teaching manual copied in many Advaita monasteries; tradition counts it as Śaṅkara's, and most modern scholars doubt it is his.

     SA
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