Adi Shankara

The teaching

Taught from his commentaries on the Brahma Sutras, the Upanishads and the Gita, with the Thousand Teachings.

The teaching in one line

Brahman alone is real; the world of separate things is how it appears; the self is not other than brahman. How the Upanishads teach this, the great sayings, the rope taken for a snake, the levels of truth, the five sheaths, the pupil's fourfold readiness and the threefold way of hearing, reflection and contemplation, is taught on the page of Vedanta and non-duality, among the mystics. What follows is Shankara's own reasoning, as his books give it.

I and you

His commentary on the Brahma Sutras opens with the root of the trouble. The subject, the one who says I, and the object, everything that can be called you or this, are as opposed as light and darkness, and neither can take on the nature of the other. Yet everyone joins them by a natural error, saying I am this and this is mine, mixing the real with the unreal. That error is superimposition: the appearance in one thing, as if remembered, of something seen elsewhere, as mother of pearl shines as silver, or one moon seems two.

The marks of the body are laid on the self when one says I am fat, I am thin, I stand, I go; those of the senses when one says I am deaf or blind; those of the mind, desire, doubt and resolve, when one says I want, I doubt. And the self, the witness of all these, is laid in turn on the mind, so that the mind seems to know. This mutual superimposition has no beginning; it is ignorance, and its undoing, by telling the self apart from what is not the self, is knowledge. All the dealings of the world, every means of knowing, every rite and every scripture that speaks of duty work within it.

Why only knowledge frees

Freedom cannot be the fruit of any act. An act can produce something, reach something, change something or cleanse something, and whatever is produced, reached, changed or cleansed passes away. Freedom is the eternal nature of brahman, which is the self, and so it is not made but known. Knowledge does not create it; it removes the ignorance that hid it.

Action and knowledge cannot be joined as two halves of one means, for action rests on the sense of being a doer, which knowledge removes as light removes darkness. Yet works have their place: done as worship of the Lord and without craving for their fruits, they purify the mind and make it fit for knowledge. So his commentary on the Gita reads Krishna's teaching of action as the way that prepares, and knowledge as the way that frees.

Scripture and reason

Brahman is not an object, so no perception reaches it and no inference proves it, for the self is what perceives and infers. The means of knowing it is the Upanishad, whose sentences, heard by a prepared pupil, give the knowledge directly. Reason serves scripture, testing doubts and removing them; but scripture does not teach against experience in experience's own field, and a hundred texts, he says, could not make fire cold or dark.

The cause of the world

Brahman is that from which the world is born, by which it stands and into which it dissolves, and it is both the stuff of the world and its maker, as if one being were at once the clay and the potter. The world is names and forms, which can be called neither brahman nor other than brahman: as pots and plates are only clay, their names coming from speech, so the world is brahman named and shaped. The Lord who makes it is brahman seen through maya, the power of appearance, as a magician is seen through his magic and is untouched by it. And he makes it as play, lila, from no need, as a king whose every wish is met still plays, or as one breathes.

The witness in waking, dream and sleep

Waking, dreaming and deep sleep come and go, and the self is present in all three and touched by none. In waking it witnesses the world of the senses; in dream, the world the mind makes; in deep sleep there is no object at all, yet on waking one says, I slept well and knew nothing, and that memory shows that awareness was there. What is present in every state and changes with none of them is the self; what comes and goes is not.

How a teacher leads a pupil

The Thousand Teachings begins with the teacher's work. The teacher is calm and self-controlled, compassionate, learned in the scriptures and established in brahman; the pupil has turned from what passes, come in the proper way and asked to be taught. The teacher keeps teaching until the knowledge is firm, beginning with the sentences of the Upanishads on the oneness of the self.

He shows the method in a dialogue. Who are you? the teacher asks. The pupil names his family and caste, says that he was a student and is now a wandering monk, and that he longs to cross the sea of birth and death. When you die, the teacher answers, your body is eaten by birds or turns to earth here, so how can it cross? You are not the body: its family, caste and rites are laid upon you, who are other than it. And when the pupil says that he still feels pain, the teacher leads him to see that the pain is in the body and mind, which are known, and that he is their knower.

The meditation of one who has heard

For one who has heard the teaching and wants it to take root, the Thousand Teachings gives a meditation. Take each kind of object in turn, sound, touch, form, taste and smell, and consider: this is known, and so it is not the knower; it neither helps nor harms the one who knows it; and the knower is pure awareness, unchanging, without a second, touched by no object. Desire and aversion weaken as this is seen again and again.

Renunciation, and the worship of the Lord

Knowledge goes with the giving up of all works, and Shankara reads the Gita's last counsel, to abandon all duties and come to the Lord alone, as the renunciation of action by one who knows. For those not yet ready, the worship of brahman with qualities, as the Lord, and the meditations the Upanishads prescribe lead by stages along the path of the gods to the world of Brahma, and from there to freedom at the end of the age. Knowledge of brahman without qualities frees here and now: the knower goes nowhere, for brahman is not a place.