Liberation in early Advaita Vedanta

by Aleksandar Uskokov | 2018 | 195,782 words

This page relates ‘The Categories of “That” and “You”’ of the study named “Scripture and the Hermeneutics of Liberation in Early Advaita Vedanta” which highlights how liberation (in Sanskrit: Moksha) is posited as the “highest good”—i.e., it represents freedom from the cyclical process of birth and rebirth. It further shows that Shankara’s doctrine emphasizes that liberation is solely derived from knowledge of Brahman.

Go directly to: Footnotes.

5. The Categories of “That” and “You”

[Full title: The Categories of “That” and “You” and the Notions of Brahman and the Self]

The problem of how language may express the supersensible Brahman did not concern the word brahma itself, or several other words that Śaṅkara would have considered full synonyms, such as sat or Being, īkṣitṛ or Brahman that visualizes the world to set it in motion, or īśvara, God, all standing for Brahman’s causal function in regard creation.[1] It is common for Śaṅkara to say that these words denote Brahman in their primary signification function.

This also implied that Brahman was not quite unknown: the word had its direct meaning, derived from the root bṛṃh and standing for that which makes things grow, the cause of the world in the most general sense.[2] In any case, Brahman had to be a known thing, linguistically expressible, for language to be meaningful, because words cannot convey that which is fully beyond experience.

Brahman as such a cause of the world, that great ground of Being which makes things grow, was also the topic of an Upaniṣadic passage that posits its being, the textual basis of the Brahma-Sūtra definition of Brahman as the source of creation, sustenance and destruction of the world, Taittirīya 3.1.1: “That from which these beings are born, on which, once born, they live, and into which they return—know that distinctly: it is Brahman.” The problem with the denotation of words like brahma and with its corresponding description was that they were incomplete, “with a remainder” that still needs to be stated. They present Brahman in a vague, insufficient, imprecise way.[3] They throw Brahman in and posit its relation to creation, but they require more.

So, while Brahman is directly signified by words such as brahma, īśvara, sat, they do not say much about its essential, peculiar nature. It may well be that the pradhāna of Sāṅkhya is denoted and intended in such passages. The specific nature of Brahman must be stated, and this nature comes in three sets of qualities presented in Upaniṣadic texts. The first are positive attributes from texts such as satyaṃ jñānam anantaṃ brahma and vijñānam ānandaṃ brahma, Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.1 and Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.9.28.7, and Śaṅkara says that they present Brahman as the light of consciousness. The second and the third are negative attributes that deny change in Brahman on the one hand, and possession of the attributes of its gross products on the other.[4] They are presented in texts such as adṛṣṭaṃ draṣṭṛ, avijñātaṃ vijñātṛ, ajam ajaram amaram, asthūlam anaṇu, ahrasvam adīrgham, from Yājñavalkya’s teachings to Gārgī in Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.8.[5] The predication of such qualities to Brahman obtains through the mode of co-referentiality, the substantive-attribute relation, and it is very much like the construction of the notion of Brahman the uniform meditational counterpart in the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa brahma-vidyās. These collectively are evidently the texts that ascertain the nature of the supreme Self from our classification.[6]

Now, such combination of words to obtain definite knowledge, not the mere positing of the general category, causes the apparent problem of presenting Brahman as a sentential reference, a vākyārtha, a denoted referent as something of a kind, a member of a class that is specified by the qualifying properties. Think of nīlotpalam, the blue lotus, the flower in my garden belonging to the class of lotuses and made particular through the attribution of blue color and other qualities. This could not work in the case of Brahman, because Brahman is one-off, it does not have a class from which it could be delimited through attribution. Thus, Brahman the padārtha is too general, uninformative, and the substantive-attribute relation seems impossible because Brahman cannot have a class. Śaṅkara’s solution to this riddle was to propose that the viśeṣya-viśeṣaṇa-bhāva does not need to be restricted to the substantive-attribute type that produces a sentential reference through definite description. It was possible to interpret it as a definiendum-definiens relation, a lakṣya-lakṣaṇa-bhāva. How are the two different? Well, the second is a subtype of the first, but while the first delimits a member from its class, the second delimits a something from everything else.

–But, a substantive is distinguished by shunning other (possible) attributes, as in the case of blue and red lotus. When there are several substances that belong to the same class and can have one attribute, only then is an attribute meaningful, not in regard to a unique thing, because there is no possibility of an alternative attribute. Just like the yonder sun is one, likewise is Brahman. There are no other Brahmans from which the one is to be singled out, as in the case of the blue lotus.

–There is not that fault, since the attributes are for definition, not qualification.

–And what is the difference between definiens-definiendum relation on the one hand and the qualifier-qualificandum relation on the other?

–The qualifiers distinguish a substance from things of its class, while a definiens from everything, as in “space is that which provides room.”[7]

Compare the following two statements:

-) The lotus is blue, large, and fragrant;
-) Space is that which gives room.

The first is a definite description obtained through attribution of color and other qualities to a class, while the second is a definition. The distinction is eminently clear in English because of the definite article, but it is not so in Sanskrit. Śaṅkara claimed that the predication of characteristics to Brahman in the Upaniṣads is an instance of a definiendum-definiens relation.

In claiming this, which amounts to a crucial distinction from the account of Maṇḍana and other prasaṅkhyāna-vādins in which Brahman ended being a sentential reference, Śaṅkara clearly took a cue from the tradition of Nyāya. Vātsyāyana, the author of the Nyāya-Bhāṣya, said that the method of Nyāya as a discipline had three parts. The first, called uddeśa, is the mere positing of a category by way of stating its name. The second is definition, lakṣaṇa, or stating the property of the posited category that differentiates it as a thing. The last is parikṣā, examination by means of reliable warrants whether the stated definition is applicable to the defined thing or not.[8] Precisely the first two were happening at the beginning of the second chapter of the Taittirīya, where Brahman is posited as something to be known in the statement brahmavid āpnoti param, “The knower of Brahman attains the highest,” but its specific nature is not stated. The immediately following statement satyaṃ jñānam anantaṃ brahma is a definition of the posited category that distinguishes its nature from everything else by the attribution of the three characteristics of Being, consciousness, limitless.

In doing so, the three characteristics that serve as definiens of Brahman the definiendum are predicated of Brahman serially, not simultaneously, which should further prevent the definition from being confused for a definite description. In a definite description, all attributes that are predicated of the substance need to be understood simultaneously for the sentential reference to obtain. Consider the expression, “a blue hardcover book of five hundred pages.” For this to be a single expression, it must be syntactically tight. There is no such requirement in satyaṃ jñānam anantaṃ brahma. Śaṅkara says that these are, really, three separate statements, satyaṃ brahma, jñānaṃ brahma, anantaṃ brahma, that progressively refine the definition of Brahman. Brahman is, then, not a sentential reference, but is identified with individual words that stand for three separate categories: in effect, it is not identified with attributes at all, but with substantives that share the denotation with it. Brahman is not real or conscious: it is Being and consciousness.[9] The three do eventually restrict one another, but there is no requirement that they do so simultaneously: the serial predication amounts to a gradual refinement of the notion of Brahman. Whereas for the unique lotus a full definite description is required, Brahman is already single.

The profit from this mode of predication is obvious: Brahman becomes known in its specific nature, not just as a padārtha, but is no longer a relational entity, a particular obtained by a collocation of a noun and adjectives, a sentential reference. Śaṅkara hoped in this way to avert what he saw as the pitfall of the prasaṅkhyāna formulation of the notion of Brahman: it turned out a saṃsargātmika entity, a verbal composite like the funny bird that we named Jewelfowl.

Let us very briefly go through the three parts of the definiens and see what they contribute to defining Brahman in its specific nature.

Satyam –that is true which does not alter its nature which is fixed by itself. If a thing alters its self-constituted nature (i.e., becomes what it is not), it is unreal. Therefore, a transformation is unreal; “The transformation is a verbal handle, as being it is only clay;” only being is real. Therefore, saying “Brahman is Being,” [the Upaniṣad] guards Brahman from transformation. From this it follows that Brahman is the cause.[10]

Now, we already knew that Brahman was the cause through the etymology of the word, “it is that which makes things grow,” so there must be more to the statement that satyam tells us how Brahman is the cause. The operative idea here is that Being is changeless, like clay that persists being clay throughout its different shapes.

Our concept of Brahman is refined through understanding that Brahman as Being is changeless, but in effect that presents Brahman as the material cause of the world, upādāna-kāraṇa, and that brings two dangers. First, a material cause or the stuff that things are made of is, in our experience, an insentient thing, like clay the material cause of pots, pitchers, and the like. Second, an insentient cause requires a sentient agent, a separate nimitta-kāraṇa or an efficient cause. The second attribution, that of jñāna or knowledge, prevents these two from obtaining. “Since a cause, being a thing, requires causal factors, as in the case of clay, its being unconscious may obtain. Therefore, it is said, Brahman is knowledge.”[11]

The further attribution of ananta, infinite, along with the prior fact of Brahman’s being satyam the singular Being, prevent jñānam to be taken in the sense of a cognitive agent:

Consciousness is knowing, awareness. The word “consciousness” refers to the verbal action, not the agent of knowledge, because consciousness is a qualification of Brahman along with truth and infinite. The two are impossible when there is an agent of knowing. How can that which is transformed as being the cognitive agent be Being and infinite? For, that is infinite which is not cut off from anything. If it is the agent of knowledge, it is separate from the knowable and from knowledge—how could it be infinite?[12]

First, that Brahman is changeless Being and limitless, satyam anantam, jointly prevent the common distinction of agent, object, and action of knowing to obtain. The agent-object distinction presupposes limits, and is otherwise known: scripture would not be informative if it were to uphold it. Brahman is just knowing that does not involve agent and object. Second, the attribution of ananta prevents this knowledge that does not involve the agent-object distinction to be limited, as knowledge otherwise is. Brahman thus becomes omniscient, and we have arrived at Śaṅkara’s common definition of Brahman/Īśvara as the omnipotent and omniscient cause of the world. I should like to note that this is a very curious form of omniscience that a captious mind may be tempted to call omni-ignorance, were it not clear that in Śaṅkara’s eyes it is not an epistemological category at all.

Now, in the passage that I have been following here, Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.1, there seems to be a shift in the argument when Śaṅkara points to the identification of this Brahman with the Self, which the Upaniṣad does by the typical anaphoric-cataphoric use of the pronouns, tasmād vā etasmād ātmanaḥ, which is followed by an account of creation. This is no longer just the “tat-padārtha” context, and that is also evident from Sarvajñātman’s Pañca-Prakriyā which we will consider in Chapter Ten: it is the tat = tvam context. I will come back to this passage later.

For now, we should point out that the definition of Brahman as satyaṃ jñānam anantam relates through the individual categories to other Upaniṣadic passages in the texts about the causal Brahman that present Brahman as the sole Self in our classification. Śaṅkara clearly identifies satyam with sat from the 6th chapter of the Chāndogya, and that text is used to bring home the point that Brahman in its causal role does not undergo transformation, but just is that great thing out there, coordinated with everything. Elsewhere (Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 2.1.14), as we saw in the previous heading, he goes at great length to show how the creation passages are illustrations of how the world of multiplicity does not proceed from Brahman, but is Brahman; in other words, how Brahman the cause is changeless. Any textual locus that discusses satyam/sat can be used to elaborate on Brahman’s nature as the unchanging Being from which creation proceeds, and these include, for example, the 1st of Aittareya and the 2nd of Taittirīya itself. Brahman’s feature of jñānam anantam, on the other hand, is elaborated in passages such as the section of the bhūma-vidyā where the Upaniṣad says, “where one does not see, hear or cognize another, that is plenitude.”[13]

Thus, the texts about Brahman as the sole Self, ātmaikatva-pratipādana-paraṃ vacana-jātam, seem to be individually related to the categories that form the definiens of Brahman as their elaborations, and on their part, use the descriptions of creation to teach what kind of Being and consciousness Brahman is. The three are in a close synergy.

We can begin to form some idea of hierarchy of Upaniṣadic passages on the side of the tat-padārtha:

-) brahma-vid āpnoti param posits Brahman as that thing which should be known; it is known in general through the etymology, and its incomplete characterization is given in yato vā imāni bhūtāni jāyante, yena jātāni jīvanti, yat prayanty abhisaṃviśanti, tad vijijñāsasva, tad brahma;

-) satyaṃ jñānam anantaṃ brahma defines this Brahman essentially;

-) satyaṃ brahma is elaborated in texts such as sad eva somyedam agra āsīd ekam evādvitīyam of Chāndogya Upaniṣad, and ātmā vā idam eka evāgra āsīt of Aitareya Upaniṣad, as well as in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2; the descriptions of creation in these texts are used to teach Brahman as satyam;

-) jñānam anantaṃ brahma is elaborated in yatra nānyat paśyati of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad

The next part of the definition of Brahman is the text vijñānam ānandam from Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.9.28.7, presenting bliss as the fourth characteristic that defines Brahman’s nature. The interpretation given of knowledge applies to bliss as well: Brahman is not an object of experiential happiness, because that would bring about the same basic cognitive duality of action, agent, and patient.[14] This attribute also calls for an elaboration passage, but Śaṅkara’s immediate choice is not to point to the Taittirīya Brahmānanda-valli chapter that an Upaniṣadic scholar would immediately think of. The Taittirīya, all-important for the history of Vedānta as it gave the paradigmatic injunction of brahma-vidyā, brahma-vid āpnoti param, and the satyaṃ jñānam anantam brahma definition of Brahman, was not a text without challenges for Śaṅkara, because the injunction and the definition were followed by a peculiar statement of result: “A man who knows [Brahman as Being, knowledge, infinite] hidden in the cavity, the highest heaven, attains all desires together with the wise Brahman.” This was the paradigmatic statement of the nature of liberation in the Brahma-Sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa, but from the perspective of para-vidyā such passages for Śaṅkara were statements of praise, arthavāda or Vedic propaganda meant to make liberation appealing.[15]

For Śaṅkara, the normative description of ānanda was Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.3.32, which is a part of a section that shared something important with the 2nd of Taittirīya. Both texts contain descriptions that attempt to make a stratification of bliss, which goes roughly like this: the highest possible human pleasure is the basic measure of bliss. That highest human bliss times one hundred equals the bliss in the world of the Gandharvas, and thus progressively to the bliss of Prajāpati, which is one hundredth of the bliss of Brahman. While the Taittirīya culminates in claiming that this bliss of Brahman is beyond thought and words, evidently because there is no further standard of comparison, the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad proceeds to say that this is “the highest goal, the highest attainment, the highest world, the highest bliss,” but of the kind that one cannot experience because it pertains to the state of samprasāda, deep calm characteristic of deep sleep, where Brahman is the sole entity and no cognition can obtain. Bliss is what Brahman is, thick, solid bliss, the ground that makes possible the experience of any form of pleasure, but which is itself not experienced.[16]

We can, now, appreciate Śaṅkara’s statement that this positive definition of Brahman presents Brahman as the light of consciousness, and as nothing more. It is, however, a bit more difficult to appreciate what new information could provide the other kinds of Upaniṣadic statements about Brahman, those that deny change in Brahman on the one hand, and possession of the attributes of its gross products on the other. We saw their important hermeneutic role with regard to the statements about the causal Brahman and the descriptions of creations: Brahman cannot really transform into the creation because it is a permanently changeless entity. As for the definition of Brahman, however, they don’t seem to contribute much, since Śaṅkara’s positive characteristics were so “positive” that there was nothing left to deny. Or rather, there was, as we shall soon see, but only at the level of the identity statement, not on the tat-padārtha side.

Let us see what we have achieved through the definition of the tat-padārtha. The indeterminate notion of that thing which makes everything grow that we are empirically acquainted through understanding causality and growth with has become essentially defined and known in its specific nature through identification with individual categories. The procedure made it possible to avoid presenting Brahman as a relational entity, which was one of the two major reasons why prasaṅkhyāna-vādins wanted Upaniṣadic knowledge to be followed by meditation. We did not quite avoid the problem of supersensible Brahman and language.

Brahman was still defined by words, and we have not seen any reason why such attribution could not happen through the direct signification function: we will have to come back to this problem. But for now, Brahman was not expressible in sentences in the manner that class members were, and this is an important point to absorb: Śaṅkara found a way out where prasaṅkhyāna-vādins could not: the mode of predication was through lakṣaṇa. This was still a type of the viśeṣya-viśeṣaṇa-bhāva, general co-referentiality through predication, but the prediction was definitional, not descriptive.

The second category in the identity statements was the tvaṃ-padārtha, the category of “You.” Here is Śaṅkara’s definition: “The category of ‘You’ is the inner Self, the listener, regarded as the inner Self starting with the body and ascertained as culminating in consciousness.”[17] The definition is a bit cryptic, but it is clear nevertheless that the category refers to a student to whom the instruction in the identity statement is repeated, and who can potentially identify with anything that one may consider “the Self,” beginning with the body and culminating in pure consciousness.

I will say much more about this in the context of the identity statement, but now let us note that just like the characteristics of Brahman that are elaborated in separate Upaniṣadic passages, the category of tvam is also taken up for deliberation in the Upaniṣads, such that its scope is gradually restricted so that it can become possible to present it as the pure light of consciousness. In the Taittirīya chapter that defined Brahman, this is done through the famous teaching of the five sheaths of the Self, pañca-kośa, namely man as the Self that is made of food (anna-rasamaya), life-breath (prāṇamaya), mind (manomaya), cognition (vijñānamaya), and bliss (ānandamaya). In Śaṅkara’s reading, which is quite uncontroversial except for the fifth sheath, these are the physical human body consisting of the different limbs; the vital Self consisting of the various forms of prāṇa; the mental body that is constituted by the Vedic mantras that one can recite internally; the cognitive Self that forms correct ideas from the Vedas as its pramāṇic field so that it could perform proper sacrifice; and the blissful Self, that is, the Self that enjoys “bliss,” the results of ritual and meditation. The last two obviously stand for the categories of kartṛ and bhoktṛ as specifically Vedic categories, the ritual agent and the one to whom the results of Vedic acts accrue.[18] We should bear in mind that agency was the symptom of ignorance, the root of transmigration, and transmigration was suffering. Although I haven’t seen a statement directly spelling this out, the blissful Self that is in closest proximity to Brahman as bliss thick and solid is, really, the miserable Self, the transmigrating Self that thinks itself an agent. Sarvajñātman will explicitly identify ānandaṃ brahma with nirduḥkha, absence of suffering that we need to understand in the wider sense of transmigration.

The pañca-kośa, thus, are sheaths enveloping the Self with all the possible points of identification in the natural and the Vedic sphere, and Śaṅkara says that the Upaniṣad uses this teaching to unveil Brahman as the innermost Self, one’s own Self, by progressively removing the sheaths that are created by ignorance, in the manner of the gradual winnowing of grain of the kodrava species that has several layers of husk.[19]

Footnotes and references:

[back to top]

[1]:

tat-padena ca prakṛtaṃ sat brahma īkṣitṛ jagato janmādi-kāraṇam abhidhīyate. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 4.1.2, III.769.

[2]:

brahma-śabdasya hi vyutpādyamānasya nitya-śuddhatvād ayo’rthāḥ pratīyante, bṛṃhater dhātor arthānugamāt, Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 1.1.1, I.8. brahmavit brahmeti vakṣyamāṇa-lakṣaṇam, bṛhattamatvāt brahma, Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.1, VI.59.

[3]:

annādi-brahmaṇaḥ pratipattau dvāraṃ lakṣaṇaṃ ca yato vā imāni ity-ādy uktavān. sāvaśeṣaṃ hi tat, sākṣād-brahmaṇo ‘nirdeśāt. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 3.1.1, VI.127.

[4]:

tatra ajādi-śabdair janmādayo bhāva-vikārā nivartitāḥ. asthūlādi-śabdaiś ca sthaulyādayo dravya-dharmāḥ. vijñānādi-śabdaiś ca caitanya-prakāśātmakatvam uktam. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 4.1.2, III.770.

[5]:

Adṛṣṭaṃ draṣṭṛ and avijñātaṃ vijñātṛ are from 3.8.11, asthūlam anaṇu, ahrasvam adīrgham from 3.8.8. Ajam ajaram amaram seems to be based on the Madhyandina recension, in Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 14.6.8, but it does not correspond fully as ajam is not there.

[6]:

Later Advaita Vedānta classified the two kinds of characteristics of Brahman, its general causality in Taittirīya Upaniṣad 3.1.1 and its distinguishing characteristics, in taṭastha-lakṣaṇa and svarūpa-lakṣaṇa, non-essential and essential characteristics. See, for instance, in Deutsch 1969.

[7]:

nanu, viśeṣyaṃ viśeṣaṇāntaraṃ vyabhicarad viśeṣyate, yathā nīlaṃ raktaṃ cotpalam iti; yadā hy anekāni dravyāṇi eka-jātīyāny eka-viśeṣaṇa-yogīni ca, tadā viśeṣaṇasyārthavattvam; na hy ekasminn eva vastuni, viśeṣaṇāntarāyogāt; yathā asāv eka āditya iti, tathā ekam eva brahma, na brahmāntarāṇi, yebhyo viśeṣyeta nīlotpala-vat. na; lakṣaṇārthatvād viśeṣaṇānām. nāyaṃ doṣaḥ. kasmāt? lakṣaṇārtha-pradhānāni viśeṣaṇāni, na viśeṣaṇa-pradhānāny eva. kaḥ punar lakṣaṇa-lakṣyor viśeṣaṇa-viśeṣyayor vā viśeṣaḥ? ucyate. sajātīyebhya eva nivartakāni viśeṣaṇāni viśeṣyasya; lakṣaṇaṃ tu sarvata eva, yathā avakāśa-pradātr ākāśam iti. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.1, VI.61-2.

[8]:

trividhā cāsya śāstrasya pravṛttiḥ, uddeśo lakṣaṇaṃ parīkṣā ceti. tatra nāmadheyena padārtha-mātrasyābhidhānam uddeśaḥ. tatroddiṣṭasya tattva-vyavacchedako dharmo lakṣaṇam. lakṣitasya yathā-lakṣaṇam upapadyate na veti pramāṇair avadhāraṇaṃ parīkṣā. Nyāya-Bhāṣya on 1.3.

[9]:

satyādi-śabdā na parasparaṃ sambadhyante, parārthatvāt; viśeṣyārthā hi te. ata eva ekaiko viśeṣaṇa-śabdaḥ parasparaṃ nirapekṣo brahma-śabdena sambadhyate–satyaṃ brahma jñānaṃ brahma anantaṃ brahmeti. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.1, VI.62.

[10]:

satyam iti yad-rūpeṇa yan niścitaṃ tad rūpaṃ na vyabhicarati, tat satyam. yad-rūpeṇa yan niścitaṃ tad rūpaṃ vyabhicarati, tad anṛtam ity ucyate. ato vikāro 'nṛtam, vācārambhaṇaṃ vikāro nāmadheyaṃ mṛttiketyeva satyam [Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.1.4], evaṃ sad eva satyam ity avadhāraṇāt. ataḥ satyaṃ brahma iti brahma vikārān nivartayati. ataḥ kāraṇatvaṃ prāptaṃ brahmaṇaḥ. Ibid.

[11]:

kāraṇasya ca kārakatvam, vastutvāt, mṛdvat, acid-rūpatā ca prāptā; ata idam ucyate—jñānaṃ brahmeti. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.1, VI.62-3.

[12]:

jñānaṃ jñaptiḥ avabodhaḥ,—bhava-sādhano jñāna-śabdaḥ—na tu jñāna-kartṛ, brahma-viśeṣaṇatvāt satyānantābhyāṃ saha. na hi satyatā anantatā ca jñāna-kartṛtve saty upapadyete. jñāna-kartṛtvena hi vikriyamāṇaṃ kathaṃ satyaṃ bhavet, anantaṃ ca? yad dhi na kutaścit pravibhajyate, tad anantam. jñāna-kartṛtve ca jñeya-jñānābhyāṃ pravibhaktam ity anantatā na syāt. Ibid.

[13]:

Chāndogya Upaniṣad 7.24.1.

[14]:

Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.9.28.7.

[15]:

Ibid.

[16]:

Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.5, Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.9.28.7

[17]:

tathā tvaṃ-padārtho’pi pratyag-ātmā śrotā dehād ārabhya pratyag-ātmatayā sambhāvyamānaḥ caitanya-paryantatvenāvadhāritaḥ. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Brahma-Sūtra 4.1.2, III.770.

[18]:

See Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.1 through 2.5.1.

[19]:

annamayādibhya ānandamayāntebhya ātmabhyaḥ abhyantaratamaṃ brahma vidyayā pratyag-ātmatvena didarśayiṣu śāstram, avidyā-kṛta-pañca-kośāpanayanena aneka-tuṣa-kodrava-vituṣī-karaṇeneva taṇḍulān prastauti. Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.2.1, VI.75.

Let's grow together!

I humbly request your help to keep doing what I do best: provide the world with unbiased sources, definitions and images. Your donation direclty influences the quality and quantity of knowledge, wisdom and spiritual insight the world is exposed to.

Let's make the world a better place together!

Like what you read? Consider supporting this website: