The Hidden Lives of Brahman: Sankara's Vedanta through His Upanisad Commentaries, in Light of Contemporary Practice

Conclusion

 Brahman as Center and PeriPhery To those familiar with Śaṅkara’s teaching primarily via later interpreters, the culturally particular practices highlighted in preceding chapters might initially seem peripheral to Śaṅkara’s central concern with realizing brahman, the expansive, mysterious interconnection of all things, regarded as each individual’s true nature. It is by working in from the periphery, however, that one locates the center. Admittedly, the interdependent notions of center and periphery lose their meaning for one who perceives that brahman is everywhere and in everything, including most importantly oneself. But for those affected by blindness to brahman’s true nature, fixation on the center to the exclusion of the periphery may very well end up reinforcing rather than dispelling dualistic thinking. The examples of Śaṅkara’s commentarial teaching featured throughout this study, supported by the more systematic surveys of Marcaurelle and Suthren Hirst referenced in connection with those examples, show that Śaṅkara’s use of diverse, limited, admittedly peripheral, yet undeniably powerful means to teach about brahman’s transcendence is considerably richer than is suggested by the colorless label “non-dual (a-dvaita) vedānta,” widely used to designate Śaṅkara’s radical commitment to brahman as transcending all duality. While Śaṅkara did commonly use the qualifier “advaita” to designate brahman’s freedom from all diversity and limitation, Hacker (1995) points out that Śaṅkara uses only the terms “veda,” “vedānta,” “brahma” and “ātman” when identifying the focus of his teaching. My hope is that readers of this study, considered alongside the work of Marcaurelle, Malkovsky, and Suthren Hirst, will no longer let stand unchallenged the claim that Śaṅkara’s vedānta teaching is indifferent to the details of saṁsāra—the minds, bodies, methods, goals, and efforts inherent in life’s cycling from one limited experience to the next. I have joined the abovementioned authors in arguing that, while Śaṅkara undoubtedly urges those he addresses to renounce saṁsāra, he also makes good use of saṁsāra’s diversity and limitation. He assumes that a brāhmaṇa’s mind, effort, and practices are powerful tools for preparing to perceive what lies beyond the diversity and limitation of saṁsāra. Conclusion the hidden lives of brahman 348 Śaṅkara’s focus on brahman and his rejection of saṁsāra make the most sense when one reconstructs the real life contexts in which he likely taught, and in which some of his followers continue to transmit his teaching. To draw attention to such contexts, I have emphasized that “brahman” designates not only the expansive mystery that holds all things together, but also the concrete experience of vedic recitation and ritual, and the divine beings whose actions serve as prototypes for such ritual. I have demonstrated that, as the multivalence of the word “brahman” suggests, Śaṅkara’s teaching about transcendent reality presupposes ancient and long-lived forms of brāḥmaṇa pedagogy and practice, especially the practice of attending to richly varied, limited forms of brahman, and of “adorning” and analyzing those vedic sources through independent verse and commentarial composition . Viewed in this light, one important reason for the persistence and popularity of Śaṅkara’s teaching up to the present day, quite apart from its philosophical merits, is arguably that it harmonizes easily with the pedagogical and ritual environments in which brāḥmaṇa learning has been preserved for over two millennia. Building on the work of the above-mentioned authors, I hope that this study will further encourage others to take Śaṅkara’s upāniṣad commentaries more seriously as a distinct and vitally important genre. My work confirms those authors’ suggestion that it is upāniṣad commentaries such as the TUbh and BUbh that most directly reveal the influence of brāhmaṇa pedagogy and practice. I will be especially pleased if this study inspires others to undertake fresh translations and comparative study of Śaṅkara’s upāniṣad commentaries; and also to follow Marcaurelle and Malkovsky’s lead in comparing those commentaries to the BGbh and to Sureśvara’s work. Finally and most broadly, I hope this study will suggest new combinations of ethnography and textual study to scholars examining traditions that may initially appear too abstract for sociological analysis. As already suggested by the work of Heilman (1983), such abstraction is often only the tip of a fascinating iceberg, which rests on worlds of embodied experience and...