Vedanta and non-duality

The teaching

As Advaita Vedanta from the Upanishads to Ramana Maharshi teaches it.

Brahman

The Upanishads name the ground of all things brahman, and Advaita, the teaching of non-duality, takes them at their word. Brahman is being, consciousness and bliss, sat, chit and ananda: not a thing among things but what all things are. The Taittiriya calls it truth, knowledge and the infinite. Because it is beyond every description, the Brihadaranyaka speaks of it best by negation: neti, neti, not this, not this.

The four great sayings

Each of the four Vedas holds a sentence that the tradition calls a great saying, and together they are the heart of the teaching. Consciousness is brahman, from the Aitareya Upanishad of the Rig Veda. I am brahman, from the Brihadaranyaka of the Yajur Veda. That thou art, from the Chandogya of the Sama Veda. This self is brahman, from the Mandukya of the Atharva Veda. A teacher gives them to a prepared student, and the work of Vedanta is to understand them until they are not believed but known.

That thou art

In the Chandogya, Uddalaka teaches his son Shvetaketu with things at hand. He has him leave salt in water overnight and bring it back in the morning: the salt cannot be seen, but the water tastes of it at the top, in the middle and at the bottom. He has him break open the fruit of a banyan, then one of its tiny seeds, and asks what he sees; nothing, says the boy; from that subtle essence, says the father, the great tree stands. Rivers that flow into the sea no longer know which river they were. Each lesson ends the same way: that subtle essence is the self of all this; that is the real; that is the self; that thou art, Shvetaketu.

The rope and the snake

If the self is brahman, why does it seem a small and separate person? Shankara answers with superimposition, adhyasa. In poor light a rope is taken for a snake, and the fear, the jump and the racing heart are real though the snake never was. So the one consciousness, through ignorance, is taken for a body, a mind and a separate life. Other images say the same: silver seen in mother-of-pearl, water seen in a mirage. Knowledge does not destroy the rope; it ends the snake. Nothing has to be reached or made, only seen rightly.

Two levels of truth

For this reason the world is not called a nothing. Advaita distinguishes levels of reality. The absolute level is brahman alone. The practical level is the world of experience, of persons, duties and things, real for every practical purpose and to be lived in rightly. Below both is the merely apparent, like a dream or the snake in the rope. A half verse given to Shankara gathers the teaching: brahman is real, the world is appearance, and the individual self is none other than brahman.

The five sheaths

The Taittiriya Upanishad shows the self as if wrapped in five sheaths, from the outer to the inner. The sheath of food is the body. The sheath of breath is the life force that moves it. The sheath of mind is the stream of thought and feeling. The sheath of understanding is the intellect that judges and knows. The sheath of bliss is the deep joy known in dreamless sleep. The student is taught to see each in turn as something known, and so not the knower: the self is the witness of all five, and touched by none.

The fourfold readiness

The teaching is for a prepared student, and the tradition names four qualifications. Discrimination, viveka, between the lasting and the passing. Dispassion, vairagya, toward the fruits of action here and hereafter. Six virtues: calm of mind, restraint of the senses, withdrawal from needless activity, forbearance, faith in the teacher and the scriptures, and settledness of attention. And mumukshutva, the longing for freedom. The method assumes them, and it is carried on inside a life of duty and devotion.

Hearing, reflection and contemplation

The Brihadaranyaka says that the self is to be seen, to be heard of, to be reflected on and to be meditated upon, and the tradition makes these its method. Shravana is hearing the teaching from a teacher who knows the scriptures and stands in the truth. Manana is reflection, turning it over and testing it by reason until every doubt is answered. Nididhyasana is contemplation, abiding in what has been understood until the old habit of taking oneself for the body and mind wears away.

Free while living

The one who knows is free while still alive, a jivanmukta. The body goes on until the karma that made it is spent, but nothing binds: it is like a rope that has been burned, which keeps its shape and can tie nothing. The space inside a pot, the teachers say, was never different from the space outside it, and when the pot breaks nothing goes anywhere. So the self was never other than brahman, and freedom is not a journey but the end of an error.

The other schools

Not all Vedanta is non-dual. Ramanuja's qualified non-dualism teaches that brahman is the personal God, Vishnu, full of every good quality, and that souls and the world are real, related to God as a body to the soul that lives in it; freedom comes by devotion and surrender, and the freed soul serves God for ever, like Him in nature but never the same as Him. Madhva's dualism teaches five real differences: between God and souls, between God and matter, between one soul and another, between souls and matter, and between one piece of matter and another.

Who am I?

Ramana Maharshi taught a direct form of enquiry. Of all thoughts the first is the thought of I. When any thought arises, do not follow it but ask: to whom has it come? The answer is: to me. Then ask: who am I? Turned back toward its source, the I-thought subsides, and what remains is the self. The enquiry, he said, destroys all other thoughts and at last destroys itself, like the stick used to stir a funeral pyre, which is burned at the end with the rest. It is meant to quiet the mind, not to unsettle it, and anyone it unsettles should stop and speak to a teacher or a doctor.