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Chapter seven AdvaitaVedānta:TheWorldasIllusoryAppearance Within Hinduism, it was the Advaita or “non-dual” school of Vedānta that most closely examined the reality-status of the world.1 It was largely through this school that from about the sixth century onward, the Hindu tradition was able to produce an adequate response to the intellectual challengepresentedbyMah āyānaBuddhism.Duringthesamecenturiestherapidly expanding devotional (or bhakti) movement provided a counterweight to the spiritual and emotional appeal of the Bodhisattva ideal, with the result that the energies that had brought about the flowering of the Mahāyāna in India were gradually drawn back into the Hindu stream. It was partly for this reason that when, in the eleventh century, the Muslim assault on India took place, Buddhism rapidly disappeared while Hinduism did not.2 The leading proponent of Advaita Vedānta was the philosopher and theologian Śam . kara. He is widely regarded as the most penetrating and influential thinker within the Hindu tradition, and it is primarily with his ideas that we are concerned in the present chapter. Śam . kara’s high reputation in the West goes back to the nineteenth century and Paul Deussen’s study of his thought, The System of the Vedānta.3 Drawing the idea of a convergence of Greek, Indian, and Kantian thought directly from Schopenhauer, Deussen compared Śam . kara’s vision of the world to that of Parmenides and Kant. He writes that all three thinkers, widely separated in time and space, arrived at essentially the same conclusion (although by very different routes), this being that “all empirical investigation and knowledge amounts in the end only to a great deception grounded in the nature of our knowing faculties.” It is this deception that it is the task of metaphysics to overcome, and Deussen argued that the Indians attained this knowledge in a form that was, “if not the most scientific, yet the most inward and immediate expression of the deepest secret of being.”4 Advaita Vedānta: The World as Illusory Appearance 79 Deussen’s book was a landmark. Nevertheless, our understanding of Advaita Vedānta has gained considerably since he wrote; it was only in 1950 that a start was made on separating Śam . kara’s authentic writings from the inauthentic works traditionally attributed to him.5 Śam . kara was not a detached thinker like Kant or Schopenhauer. He was practically engaged in the religious life of his times and first and foremost a commentator on the Vedic texts (only one independent work has survived, the relatively brief Upadeśa Sāhasrī). These texts were held to be infallible, and yet an apparent conflict existed between those that advocated ritual activity as the purpose of life and those that regarded knowledge alone as the source of salvation (moks .a). Śam . kara’s importance for the Hindu tradition lies in the manner in which he admits this conflict and then succeeds in resolving it by the application of a single exegetical principle: that of the ultimately unreal nature of the world, which, he maintains, has never truly come into being and exists only in appearance. This is the doctrine of non-origination or “birthlessness” (ajāta-vāda), to which we will return below. It maintains that there is no duality, absolutely nothing that stands over against the one reality of Brahman : “On the dawn of knowledge, no duality is left,” writes Śam . kara in commenting on the Mān d ūkya Upanis .ad.6 Since duality, in the shape of the empirical world, nevertheless appears to exist, this gives rise to a teaching of two standpoints, or dr s t i, broadly similar to the Two Truths of the Madhyāmika philosophers. The “Two Standpoints” in Advaita Vedānta The two standpoints are the standpoint of knowledge (or non-duality) and the standpoint of ignorance (or duality), and they constitute a distinction between absolute truth and apparent or empirical truth. The distinction is rooted in earlier Hindu literature. In the Br hadāran yaka Upanis .ad we read that “Verily, there are two forms of Brahman, the formed and the formless, the mortal and the immortal, the unmoving and the moving, the actual and the true”; and in the Mun d aka Upanis .ad it is said that “two kinds of knowledge are to be known . . . the higher as well as the lower.”7 For Śam . kara absolute reality, Brahman—which is also ātman or the true [3.15.221.136] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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