Awareness Monism (10/11): Advaita Vedānta
[This blogpost is a part of the series Awareness Monism, originally my Master’s thesis. Go to the disambiguation page here.]
Advaita Vedānta
Brahma satyam jagan mithyā jīvo brahmaiva nā'paraḥ.
(Brahman is real, the world is illusory, the self is not-different from Brahman.)
‒ Śaṅkara, Brahma Jnānāvalī Mālā, verse 20
Advaita Vedānta (AV)[1] is an ancient Indian non-dual mystical-philosophical teaching or school (Deutsch: “philosophy and religion”[2]). It is a variant of Vedānta (meaning “end of the Vedas”), one of the six orthodox (āstika) philosophical schools (darśana). Āstika schools accept the authority of the Vedas[3]—unlike the heterodox (nāstika) schools, which include Buddhism and Jainism. The most well-known scholar of AV is Śaṅkara (the dates of his birth and death are uncertain, but he probably lived in the 8-9th century).
“A-dvaita” meaning “not-two”, i.e. non-duality, refers to AV’s claim of the identity of personal soul (ātman) and Brahman, the ground of being and consciousness; as well as the identity of Brahman and the world, and thus the illusory nature of all distinctions. A person achieves liberation (mokṣa) by realizing this absolute oneness of all—that is, the identity of their own self with everything. It is not really an attainment of a union, or a personal transformation—it is a mere realization of what has always been the case.
The nature of Brahman is that of saccidānanda—sat, absolute and pure being, the ground of being of all beings; cit, consciousness, or the witness of being; and ānanda, bliss, or the principle of value. These are not its qualifying properties, but attributes expressive of its nature, as it is apprehended by humans. Śaṅkara further describes[4] Brahman as (among other things) eternal, indestructible, changeless, free from attachment and agitation, ever liberated, formless and beyond all categories, self-luminous, all-pervading, immutable, devoid of parts, actionless, without any support, the support of all, and without any desires. In the same way that pot and wall are nothing but clay, and gold can be turned into different ornaments, the entire universe is nothing but Brahman in its myriad manifestations.
From the standpoint of absolute reality, there are no distinctions (including the distinction between subject and object)—they are all revealed as illusory. Thus, Brahman is undifferentiated, ungraspable by reason, and ultimately indescribable. The characteristics are apophatic—rather than affirming what Brahman is, the description serves to help guide the unrealized mind to the realization of Brahman by denying their opposites.
Brahman can be considered in two modes: with qualities (Saguṇa Brahman), which corresponds to a determinate spiritual experience (savikalpa samādhi), and wherein all qualities are harmonized; or without qualities (Nirguṇa Brahman), which is revealed in the indeterminate spiritual experience (nirvikalpa samādhi) without any distinctions, and about which nothing can be said.
AV considers non-subratability to be the criterion of reality. Subration is an axio-noetic process whereby, based on some new understanding (experience), something previously held as real and valuable is revealed as less real and less valuable in comparison. The unsubratable is thus absolutely real and valuable; there is no other object outside of it that could subrate it. This absolute reality is Brahman. The changeable is subrated by the unchanging and absolute, of which it is a manifestation, and which it thereby obscures.
The individual, empirical self (jīva) and the other parts of the phenomenal universe (empirical world) are considered real inasmuch as they are considered from their own level—they are subratable, and thus from the level of higher reality (viz. Brahman), they are mere appearances. They are thus illusions, real to the unrealized—but ultimately just manifestations of Brahman, the ultimate reality that grounds them. From this higher standpoint, their reality is only apparent (vyāvahārika). Brahman is their material and efficient cause, but they are also not distinct from it—effect and cause are one, in the same way a piece of cloth just is the warp and woof of threads that constitute it. In becoming the world, Brahman neither transforms itself, nor creates something distinct from itself.
Misperception of the apparent (the world) as the real is ignorance (avidyā), which consists in superimposition (adhyāsa)—the ascription of some previously perceived qualities not actually present (i.e. what is remembered) onto the occurrent state (i.e. what is currently perceived). A stock example of superimposition is mistaking a rope for a snake. On the level of the individual, superimposition amounts to mistaking the psycho-physical, individual human being for our true self; and on the level of the world, mistaking the phenomenal, empirical world for absolute reality. The apparent is an illusion (māyā) that is the result of this misperception of absolute as multiplicity, of self as non-self (and non-self as self); it has no reality from the absolute point of view.
Jīva (the empirical self) can be understood either as a reflection of ātman (theory of reflection, pratibimba-vāda, favored by the Vivarana School of Advaita), or its limitation (avaccheda-vāda, of the Bhamati School of Advaita). As a reflection, the character of jīva is determined by the state of avidyā through which it is reflected—the less polluted by individual characteristics ātman appears, the clearer the mirror, the more perfect is the match between jīva and ātman. As a limitation of ātman, the way it appears is determined by the particular qualifying conditions (upādhis) imposed on it[5]. In both cases, the misperception of the single ātman present in all as a particular individual psycho-physical being is due to ignorance. Ātman is obscured by its coverings, whereby a human’s essential nature (which is the ātman) is hidden from her, and she identifies only with a particular form[6].
Ātman—our true and highest self, our true nature, which is the same for everybody—is pure consciousness, pure subject, and identical with Brahman, the ground of all. It is simple and without form, and so unknowable and unperceivable. It is this non-difference that is expressed in the famous Upaniṣadic great saying (mahāvākya) tat tvam asi—“thou are that”.
Ātman encompasses in itself particularity (it is particular), universality (it is universal)—and so also their unity. It is all individuals. It is spaceless and timeless, as time and space are properties of the phenomenal, i.e. apparent world. It does not take place in the world, but is rather the where of the world taking place. It is self-luminous (svayaṁ-prakāśa)—it is, essentially, the revealing of itself to itself; like light, which reveals all colors as their medium, and in this revealing reveals itself, even though it is itself invisible[7]. So ātman is the principle of manifestation, of self-revealedness. It is the changeless witness (sākṣin) of all mental contents (vṛttis), the eternal presence that grounds all change, the formless substrate that reveals all forms—not distinct from, but united with them in the act of witnessing[8], i.e. consciousness; it is the very taking place of experiences, of their presence—which is just how experiences are.
Liberation necessitates a shift of attention from the apparent, i.e. the ever-shifting forms, to that which underlies them. Focus on any particular this obscures the eternal this-ness that is its unchanging, empty ground—the silence that manifests all sounds[9], the light that reveals all color, the here that is at any particular place, the now that is at any particular time, the this of any particular thing, i.e. the pure, formless being. When we cease to identify with anything particular, we are revealed to ourselves to be that which lies underneath all particulars, that which is all particulars. And this self is the self of all. [10]
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The claim of the identity of ātman and Brahman central to AV clearly seems to be an expression of the same insight that AM is an expression of. Awareness, the dimension of manifestation or realization (i.e. the being) of experience that is equally present in all experiences, of all people, i.e. of which there is only one, seems to be a name for the same “thing” that Brahman (and ātman) are names for. From the phenomenological standpoint, awareness is the ground of the world (i.e. of content). The world in its myriad forms is just an expression, a qualitative modification of its omnipresent, unchanging common denominator, i.e. awareness.
AV’s insistence on the merely apparent (from the absolute standpoint) reality of the world, rather than expressing a “truth” (or a factual claim that could be false), seems to me to be simply a way of drawing attention to what AV is interested in and aims to communicate. Thus, it isn’t a statement with which it makes sense to disagree with. To insist that, no, the world is not merely apparent, it’s actually real, so AV is mistaken, would be to miss the point. Given the soteriological aspirations of AV, the point of ascribing a greater reality to something is to admit a greater value to it, to guide one’s attention away from that which is deemed irrelevant or outright harmful—and towards that the realization of which is believed to achieve liberation. Again, it’s simply a way to say “look here—not there”.[11]
[1] Sources consulted for this overview include: Deutsch 1969; Fasching 2010, 2016, 2020; Maharaj 1973; Grimes 1996; Loy 2019; Albahari 2002.
[2] Deutsch 1969
[3] The three primary doctrinal sources of AV are the Upaniṣads, the Brahma Sūtras, and the Bhagavad Gītā.
[4] Śaṅkara, Brahma Jnānāvalī Mālā
[5] “Just as space (ākāśa) is really one but is seen through limitations as if it were divided into particular spaces like the space in a pot or a room, so is the Self‒‒it is one but is seen through limitations as if it were multiple.” Deutsch 1969, p.53
[6] “This ‘self-experience’ as a particular psychophysical being means that we identify a certain special sphere of what is experientially given to us as ‘ourselves’: that is, we constantly distinguish within the realm of phenomenal contents between what belongs to ‘ourselves’—one’s body, one’s thoughts, and so on—and what is located ‘outside of ourselves’. […] This is what is called adhyāsa (‘superimposition’)” Fasching 2010. Also cf. Kolak’s notion of identifying as (a part of one’s phenomenal world, a body-mind)—the “superidentified consciousness contained within superobjectified consciousness”. And in the words of the nondualist guru Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981): “The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness; you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it.” And so: “Stop searching, and see ‒ it is here and now ‒ it is that 'I am' you know so well. All you need to do is to cease taking yourself to be within the field of consciousness.” (Maharaj, 1973)
[7] “Self-luminosity thus means the capacity of being ever present in all our acts of consciousness without being an object of consciousness.” Dasgupta 1975, p. 474
[8] Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, I.4.10: “[T]here is no further conscious seer apart from the seeing” (quoted after Ram-Prasad 2001, 172)
[9] Nisargadatta Maharaj (1973): “The silence before the words were spoken, is it different from the silence that comes after? The silence is one and without it the words could not have been heard. It is always there ‒ at the back of the words. Shift your attention from words to silence and you will hear it.”
[10] Fasching (2020): “[…] it is one and the same absolute that, as it were, looks at the world from the perspectives of all the innumerable experiencing creatures of the universe”.
[11] It also occurs to me that some of the dogmatic metaphysical disputes between Advaita and other schools‒‒e.g. the disagreement over the independent reality of effects and their cause with other āstika and nāstika schools; or more particularly with the Samkhya School about whether the world is an actual transformation of Brahman (Pariṇāmavāda theory of Satkāryavāda of Samkhya), or whether the manifestation is only apparent (Vivartavāda theory of Satkāryavāda of Advaita Vedānta); or the dispute over the existence of self with Buddhism‒‒‒do not amount to a substantial disagreement, but are simply different conceptual schemas describing either the same reality using different models, or different aspects of reality altogether.