Vedanta and its schools

Overview

Recall questions on the origins of Vedanta and the Upanishads, Shankara's Advaita and maya, Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita, Madhva's Dvaita and how the three compare, Neo-Vedanta and Vivekananda, other schools of Hindu philosophy, bhakti, and moral action in Vedanta.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What does the word Vedanta mean, and where did the tradition come from?

   Model answer

   Vedanta means the end or culmination of the Veda, and it refers in the first place to the Upanishads, which stand at the close of the Vedic literature. As a school of thought it developed out of the attempt to make those texts into a consistent system, since taken separately they say many things that appear to conflict. It is also called the later inquiry, as distinct from the earlier inquiry into ritual, and its founding text is a set of extremely compressed aphorisms on Brahman which are almost unusable without a commentary. That is why Vedanta exists as a set of rival interpretations rather than as a single doctrine.

2. 2

   What is Vedanta actually about?

   Model answer

   Its subject is Brahman: what the ultimate reality is, how the individual self stands in relation to it, what the status of the world is, what binds a person and how release is achieved. Everything else in the system follows from the answers given to those questions. It is philosophy in the sense that it argues, defines terms and answers objections, but it is not detached inquiry, because the point of establishing the truth about Brahman is that knowing it is held to liberate. Vedanta therefore treats reasoning as something done under the authority of scripture rather than independently of it.

3. 3

   How closely is Vedanta tied to the Upanishads?

   Model answer

   The Upanishads are its source and its constraint. Every Vedanta school must show that its position is what the Upanishads teach, and no school may simply set aside a text it finds inconvenient; it must explain it. This is what produced the schools' characteristic methods, since each has to argue that the passages favouring its rivals are secondary, figurative or addressed to a lower level of understanding, while its own proof texts are literal. The recognised procedure was to write commentaries on the three foundations, namely the Upanishads, the aphorisms on Brahman and the Bhagavad Gita, and a thinker who had not done so was not taken to have founded a school at all.

4. 4

   Why is Vedanta significant for Hinduism as a whole?

   Model answer

   Because it supplied the intellectual framework in which most later Hindu theology was conducted. The great devotional traditions attached themselves to Vedanta schools rather than remaining purely devotional, so that temple worship acquired a philosophical justification. It also produced the monastic orders and teaching lineages that still exist, and it gave Hindus a way of arguing with Buddhists, Jains and later with Muslims and Christians on their own ground. When Hinduism came to be explained to the outside world in the modern period, it was very largely explained in Vedantic terms.

5. 5

   Summarise Shankara's Advaita Vedanta.

   Model answer

   Shankara, whose name is also written Sankara, taught non-dualism: Brahman alone is truly real, and Brahman is without attributes, without parts and without any second thing alongside it. The self is not similar to Brahman or a portion of Brahman but is Brahman, and the appearance of many separate selves is produced by ignorance. The world is not a fabrication that does not appear, but it has only a provisional reality, and the personal Lord who creates and governs belongs to that same provisional level. Bondage is beginningless ignorance and nothing else; liberation is the removal of that ignorance by knowledge, in which nothing new is acquired because the self was never in fact bound.

6. 6

   How does Shankara use maya and the levels of reality?

   Model answer

   Maya is the power by which the one appears as many, and it explains how a real Brahman can be misperceived without any second reality having to exist. Shankara's standard illustrations are seeing a snake where there is a rope, and silver where there is a shell: the mistaken object is genuinely experienced and can genuinely frighten, yet it is cancelled the moment the truth is seen, and nothing has to be destroyed. He accordingly distinguishes what is absolutely real, which is Brahman alone, from what is real for practical purposes, which is the whole ordered world including God, souls and moral law, from what is merely illusory, such as a dream or a mirage. The middle level is what allows him to affirm that religion, ethics and everyday knowledge are valid without conceding that the world is ultimately real.

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