Bhāmatī

Vācaspati Miśra wrote commentaries for nearly every school of Indian philosophy, and in the closing verses of this one he counts them up: three named books, then his treatises on Nyāya logic, on Sāṃkhya, on Yoga and on Vedānta. The Bhāmatī is a sub-commentary, or ṭīkā: it explains, phrase by phrase and through all four of its books, Ādi Śaṅkara's commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, the aphorisms that arrange the teaching of the Upanishads. Only Vācaspati's own text is given here, not Śaṅkara's commentary, which it explains. Vācaspati worked in Mithilā, in what is now northern Bihar; one of his books carries a year that reads as 841 or as 976 depending on the calendar era meant, so scholars place him in the ninth or the tenth century. The same closing verses name the king under whom he wrote, Nṛga. What sets the book apart is that it reads Śaṅkara alongside Maṇḍana Miśra, the eighth-century Advaita author who was better known than Śaṅkara until about the tenth century. More than once it sends the reader to Vācaspati's own commentaries on two of Maṇḍana's books: the Nyāyakaṇikā on the Vidhiviveka, a treatise on Vedic commands, and the Brahmatattvasamīkṣā on the Brahmasiddhi. The question it answers most influentially is where ignorance resides, if Brahman, the ultimate reality, is all there is. Its answer is the individual self, the jīva. Ignorance belongs to the self, and Brahman is only its object: Brahman is never ignorant, and governs ignorance as the Lord. It also gives meditation the leading part in the path to liberation. The other line of later Advaita grew from Prakāśātman's tenth-century Vivaraṇa, a commentary on the Pañcapādikā of Padmapāda, a pupil of Śaṅkara, and it made Brahman itself the seat of ignorance; later Advaita is usually described as divided between these two, the Bhāmatī and the Vivaraṇa schools. The commentaries kept accumulating. Around 1300 Amalānanda wrote the Kalpataru on the Bhāmatī, and in the sixteenth century Appayya Dīkṣita wrote the Parimala on the Kalpataru. Tradition gives the title as the name of Vācaspati's wife.