1. Liberation and the Highest Good

“Where female parrots shut in cages at the door discuss intrinsic and extrinsic validity, debate whether action or the unborn Lord is the giver of results, and deliberate if the world is permanent or impermanent, know that place to be the abode of the learned Maṇḍana.”^[1]

There is an odd, curious textual structure in the commentary of Śaṅkara Bhagavatpāda (ca. 650- 800 C.E.) on the first chapter of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad. The commentary contains one of Śaṅkara’s most comprehensive accounts of the doctrine of liberation, mokṣa—we may for the time being understand it simply as freedom from the cycle of transmigration or embodiment—which is here explicitly called “the highest good,” paraṃ śreyas. This account, however, is broken in two parts, one consisting of the full introduction to the commentary, and another one which is attached to a rather pedestrian gloss on the first chapter of the Upaniṣad. One almost gets the sense that Śaṅkara did not say all that he wanted to say on the topic of liberation and its attainment in the Introduction, and having performed duly his rather tedious commentarial duty on that part of the Upaniṣad whose topic would have hardly piqued his interest—cosmic relations between phonetics and ritual—he decides to conclude with an extemporaneous smash, as the “real Upaniṣadic deal” begins only in the second chapter: “We present now this deliberation for the purpose of distinguishing between knowledge and action: Is the highest good attained solely through action; or, through action assisted by knowledge; or, rather, through knowledge and action together; or, through knowledge assisted by action; or, through knowledge alone?”^[2]

The two comments together, odd in their structure, can hardly be seen as odd in meaning. Looking carefully at Śaṅkara’s Upaniṣadic commentaries, one would inevitably notice that he generally begins all of them by discussing knowledge of Brahman or the Self as the means of liberation, which he commonly calls “the highest good,” not in isolation, but specifically contraposed to ritual action and its combination with “knowledge,” that is, meditation on Brahman. The introductions to his Upaniṣadic commentaries univocally announce that, to Śaṅkara’s mind, all that matters in the Upaniṣads, all that they are about, is liberation, the highest human good, and that it is necessary to clarify that the sole means of liberation is knowledge of Brahman. “Sole” is not an emphatic here nor a general negation, but specifically conveys that knowledge of Brahman is the means of liberation without the aid of ritual and meditation.

What is, nevertheless, exceptional in this quirky introduction is Śaṅkara’s thoroughness on the topic of liberation, through which he does two things that I would like to emphasize here. First, he implicitly tells us what constitutes, to his mind and for his time, the pertinent and full scope of the discourse on liberation; to put it differently, he selects his interlocutors, and points out which accounts of liberation he finds deserving of attention and rebuttal. Second, through contrast with his interlocutors, he shows how his understanding of liberation is an absolute novelty for this pertinent scope at this point in history.

Saving thorough analysis for chapters three through five, I now note that in the Introduction and Conclusion to the first chapter of Taittirīya-Bhāṣya, Śaṅkara presents and refutes several accounts of liberation, all of which concern the question of the combination of knowledge and action, and most of which can be directly associated with Vedic theologians who were his close predecessors or contemporaries: (1) liberation is just the state of being the Self, attained by the performance of ritual, a doctrine whose direct advocate was Kumārila Bhaṭṭa and which was identified as such by Śaṅkara’s immediate student and commentator Sureśvara; (2) liberation is “heaven,” svarga, a state of unexcelled felicity in the hereafter, attained by the performance of ritual, a doctrine that can be traced to the Mīmāṃsakas Śabara and Kumārila; or alternatively by ritual aided by knowledge, which was in some way, shape or form the doctrine of various Vedāntins and Mīmāṃsakas; (3) liberation is attained by a “stream” of ritual and knowledge, that is, by the practice of continual meditation, a doctrine that was advocated by the proponents of the extremely influential prasaṅkhyāna-vāda (on which more later), prominent among whom were Bhartṛprapañca and Śaṅkara’s contemporary Maṇḍana Miśra; (4) liberation involved going to a different place in the hereafter, a doctrine found in many Upaniṣads, but, importantly, the doctrine of liberation of the Brahma-Sūtra itself.

The accounts that Śaṅkara presents in the Taittirīya-Bhāṣya were, in fact, part of a single discourse, because their proponents had what I will later call a shared sphere of commitment. To anticipate briefly, these were all accounts of “Vedic theologians,” that is, of Mīmāṃsakas and Vedāntins who shared a very specific notional intersection that set them apart from their intellectual peers, namely the conviction that the Vedas were the sole authority on the questions of dharma—which we may for the time being translate fairly imprecisely as appropriate ritual and social behavior—and liberation; that, in other words, questions of liberation can be debated solely through recognizing scripture as a form of argument. To paraphrase one of the most orthodox among them, Kumārila Bhaṭṭa: everything that pertains to dharma and liberation has its origin in the Veda, and wherever it may be found, it must be adjudicated through the Veda.^[3] Indeed, a careful study would show that throughout his writings Śaṅkara generally does not debate liberation with Buddhists, Sāṅkhyas, Naiyāyikas, and the like, for the simple reason that they do not belong to this shared sphere of commitment that accepts the Vedas not only as valid, but as conclusive argument. To his mind, the proper discourse on liberation was absolutely restricted to the Vedas. More generally, when Vedic theologians did debate others on liberation, as Kumārila did, for instance, debate Sāṅkhyas, it was when these others made a “Vedic claim,” that is, tried to justify their accounts by an appeal to the Vedas.

We should note not only the pertinent, but also the full scope of the discourse. Śaṅkara talks about liberation as the highest good, and the highest good in Vedic theology was a wider set of values that included not only liberation, but “heaven” or svarga as well. Modern scholars tend to see the two as strikingly different, indeed incommensurable values. Johannes Bronkhorst had in recent years, for instance, attacked the commonly accepted idea of an original unity of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta through the assumption that from the very beginning Mīmāṃsā was all about heaven and none about liberation, whereas Vedānta was all about liberation and none about heaven.^[4] Nothing could be farther from the truth in Śaṅkara’s eyes: he read the Mīmāṃsā doctrine of heaven as a competing account of liberation that deserved due rebuttal. In fact, throughout the history of Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta, svarga and mokṣa were often defined in the same terms, niratiśaya-prīti/sukha/ānanda, the highest happiness. The scope of the notion of the highest good spanned both unsurpassed happiness and total absence of suffering, and svarga and mokṣa were sides of a single coin: while everyone accepted the second, many were skeptical about the possibility of the first.

The second thing that I want to extricate from the Taittirīya-Bhāṣya comment is that Śaṅkara in this discourse on liberation stood alone in claiming that liberation was achieved simply through knowledge of Brahman, knowledge qua knowledge, attained when the teachings of the Upaniṣads were fully understood. Such doctrine was a novel phenomenon in this shared sphere of commitment that I call Vedic theology. While already in the Brahma-Sūtra some Upaniṣadic texts were interpreted as deliberate fancy and classed under the rubric of symbolic meditations, but others as presenting factual ontological relations between Brahman on the one hand and the world and the Self on the other, there just wasn’t the notion that liberation could follow simply on understanding what those Upaniṣadic texts that present real ontological relations say. While such understanding was obviously necessary, it was just a prerequisite for proper meditation on Brahman, and it was not liberating knowledge. Even Śaṅkara’s contemporary and intellectual next-of-kin Maṇḍana Miśra affirmed that the propositional knowledge of the Upaniṣads had to be followed by meditation on Brahman, because mere intellectual understanding does not remove ignorance. So far as can be ascertained from the available textual evidence, all Vedāntins in Śaṅkara’s context would have held that meditation on Brahman that is facilitated by the Upaniṣads, and generally accompanied by Vedic ritual, was the characteristically Vedāntic soteriological practice.

This is not to say that ideas about liberation that is a result just of intellectual understanding were not present in Śaṅkara’s wider intellectual context. Liberation was a “hot topic” of the day, and Śaṅkara’s doctrine contraposed to the rest of Vedic theology was, ultimately, derivative on the old divide between sāṅkhya and yoga, not the two philosophical schools that we associate with Īśvarakṛṣṇa and Patañjali, but the two general approaches to soteriology within the Hindu traditions. In his groundbreaking paper “The Meaning of Sānkhya and Yoga,” Franklin Edgerton had shown that sāṅkhya and yoga in the early Indian history did not stand for any philosophical or metaphysical system, but for two distinct ways of conceptualizing salvation, sāṅkhya standing for the soteriological scheme which understands liberation as a result just of knowing a truth, knowing how things are, whereas yoga referring to the pursuit of liberation by some form of action or practice that is ultimately non-intellectual.

This divide persisted in the philosophical Sāṅkhya and Yoga, but Edgerton was right in concluding that Śaṅkara was as much an heir to sāṅkhya as was the Sāṅkhya-Kārikā.^[5]

In the Vedic theology of his time, however, the systematic exegesis of the Vedas through commonly accepted canons of interpretation, Śaṅkara was somewhat of a maverick in claiming that liberation was a result just of knowing Brahman: whether or not the Mīmāṃsakas and Vedāntins who formed Śaṅkara’s intellectual context saw any value in knowing qua knowing, ultimately they all understood the pursuit of liberation as a form of yoga in which the soteriologically most significant element was non-intellectual. The first major argument of this dissertation, therefore, is that Śaṅkara’s interpretation of the Upaniṣads to the effect that liberation was a result just of knowing Brahman, knowing that is neither accompanied by ritual nor succeeded by meditation on Brahman, was a new thing in Vedic theology.

By developing this argument, my intention partly is to illuminate one important question that had intrigued students of Advaita Vedānta and Indian philosophy. The question concerns the proper understanding of Śaṅkara’s significance in Indian intellectual history. The significance I have in mind is not that of the received Śaṅkara, the Śaṅkara of the hagiographies and the monasteries; the royal Śaṅkara who rules India as a Śaṅkarācārya from his seats at the four cardinal points; the Śiva born to join forces with Kumārila and banish Buddhism from India; the universalist Śaṅkara of Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda, and Dr. Radhakrishnan; the Śaṅkara of the first feature film ever shot in Sanskrit; and that model Indian philosopher whose public image embodies and accommodates all things Sanskrit and, indeed, Hindu.

I do not have in mind the received, but rather the historical Śaṅkara, although the first must have at least in some respect been derivative on the second. What I have in mind, then, is the significance of that Śaṅkara of whom, to use the image pained by Allen Thrasher, thinkers “as acute as Sureśvara,” his own immediate students, thought so highly as to consider themselves belonging to his school, rather than the school of some earlier teacher.^[6] The question I intend to illumine, then, concerns the significance of Śaṅkara in terms of some beginnings, some novelties, in his own intellectual context. What was he, really, about?

The question of Śaṅkara’s significance has been asked by his most assiduous modern students. Sengaku Mayeda, for instance, proposed that Śaṅkara was not a “particularly original philosopher,” but rather a very bright commentator, as well as a “pre-eminent religious leader and a most successful religious teacher.”^[7] Mayeda was likely echoing Daniel Ingalls, who argued that what was original to Śaṅkara’s philosophy seems to have been the concept of Brahman without qualities; the other elements of his system were old, stated in various places, but the specific synthesis he made of them was “something quite new in the history of Indian philosophy.”^[8] For Allen Thrasher, on the other hand, there was no question that the philosophy of Śaṅkara’s Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāṣya was highly original, even if as a synthesis: the proper question of Śaṅkara’s significance was to ascertain whether this philosophy presupposed Maṇḍana Miśra’s Brahma-Siddhi, or it was, rather, the other way around. Whodunnit? Thrasher argued for the first, because,

If the Brahma-Siddhi was written in ignorance of Śaṃkara’s works, and represents a current in pre-Śaṃkara Advaita, we must drastically reduce the usual estimate of Śaṃkara's originality. We must say that the commanding importance he has in the history of Vedānta, so great that all works before him except the Brahma-Sūtras themselves, the Gaudapāda-Kārikās, and possibly the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa, have disappeared, was due not to any newness in his ideas or his combination of ideas into a system, but to some other cause—perhaps to his zealous activity as an "evangelist" of Advaita Vedānta against the Buddhists, and the adherents of other systems within the Hindu fold, or to his activity in setting up maṭhas to carry on the tradition he followed.^[9]

These accounts present a dichotomy of possibilities: Śaṅkara was either a great philosopher, even if not terribly original, or he was a religious leader and a teacher. I don’t doubt that he was most of this, although “pre-eminent religious leader” as an epithet for a man who was as elitist as they make them and who thought that there were very few deserving to be led directly by him sounds overly generous on the side of imagination.

Be that as it may, seeing his major significance either as a philosopher or a religious teacher, or as both, disregards the overwhelming bulk of his writings, or what he himself was most concerned with. My argument here is that Śaṅkara’s significance for his own context was that of a theologian of liberation; that, in other words, what astute intellectuals like Sureśvara found so appealing about him as to see themselves as members of his school was a novel model of soteriological causality that he developed and its formidable defense. This novel model said that liberation the highest human good was attained solely by knowledge qua knowledge, and that the competent aspirant after liberation did not need to practice ritual and meditation, indeed, that he could not possibly practice them if he was really qualified. While, as I said, this was not a novelty in the wider intellectual context, it was very much so in Vedic theology.

In a sense, Daniel Ingalls had already recognized this, albeit implicitly, in his article “The Study of Śaṃkarācārya,” where his final word about Śaṅkara’s significance was that his novelty and original synthesis were “directed not so much against Buddhism, which is the traditional claim, as against the Mīmāṃsā and against schools of a more realistic Vedānta such as the Bhedābheda which flourished in Śaṃkara's time.”^[10] Ingalls still thought of contribution mostly in terms of metaphysics, ergo, philosophy, but he rightly identified Śaṅkara’s interlocutors. My study takes Ingalls’s insight and extends it over the highest good.

The method through which I approach my study, on the other hand, on which more under the heading of “The History of Ideas,” turns illuminating this question into writing the history of the highest good in Vedic theology before and including Śaṅkara.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

svataḥ pramāṇaṃ parataḥ pramāṇaṃ kīrāṅganā yatra giraṃ giranti |
dvārastha-nīḍāntara-sanniruddhā jānīhi tan maṇḍana-paṇḍitaukaḥ ||
phala-pradaṃ karma phala-prado ‘jaḥ kīrāṅganā yatra giraṃ giranti |
dvārastha-nīḍāntara-sanniruddhā jānīhi tan maṇḍana-paṇḍitaukaḥ ||
jagad dhruvaṃ syāj jagad adhruvaṃ syāt kīrāṅganā yatra giraṃ giranti |
dvārastha-nīḍāntara-sanniruddhā jānīhi tan maṇḍana-paṇḍitaukaḥ. Śaṅkara-Dig-Vijata 8.6.8.

[2]:

atraitac cintyate vidyā-karmaṇor vivekārtham–kiṃ karmabhya eva kevalebhyaḥ paraṃ śreyaḥ, uta vidyā-saṃvyapekṣebhyaḥ, āhosvid vidyā-karmabhyāṃ saṃhatābhyām, vidyāyā vā karmāpekṣāyāḥ, uta kevalāyā eva vidyāyā iti. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 1.11.4, VI.46-7.

[3]:

atra yāvad dharma-mokṣa-sambandhi tad veda-prabhavam. Kumārila’s Tantra-Vārttika on Śabara’s Mīmāṃsā-Sūtra-Bhāṣya 1.3.2, I.166.

[4]:

Bronkhorst 2007b.

[5]:

Edgerton 1924:34.

[6]:

Thrasher 1979:120.

[7]:

Mayeda 2006b:6.

[8]:

Ingalls 1952:12-3.

[9]:

Thrasher 1979:119.

[10]:

Ingalls 1952:13.