Meaning of the term BRAHMAN
Deriving from the Sanskrit root brḥ-, the literal meaning of brahman is “growth” or “expansion.” It becomes a central notion in the Upaniṣads. Although it is used in different ways across these texts, such as a “formulation of truth” and as a “pure realm,” its primary aim seems to be to stand for some ultimate wholeness, which can integrate all existence. In many contexts in the Upaniṣads, it is a formal term that indicates an absolute principle, something that itself does not depend on further investigation. The Upaniṣads tend to treat brahman in two different ways (see Brereton, 1990, 129). In one way, it is a principle of explanation for why reality is the way it is; here brahman functions as the source from which all things emerge, on which they subsist and into which they go back. In the other, it is a principle of experience, as that which is the essence of the seeker’s being, that onto which the self of the seeker can be mapped; understanding and cognizing it, all of reality is understood and cognized. Repeatedly, it is presented as something that is elusive in a variety of ways, and requires great and systematic investigation, before the power of its presence is grasped by the seeker. Of course, these two approaches are intimately related. The crucial interconnection is the repeated teaching that brahman is in some profound way ātman , the essential self of the seeker. As an explanation, this locates the seeker of knowledge in a holistic world; as experience, it strips away layers of ordinary senses of individuality until the holistic relationship with brahman is present in the consciousness of the seeker. Very often, when the Upaniṣads are ostensibly talking about the nature of this ātman, they in fact talk about the integrated whole within which ātman is truly to be found, so that, even when they do not mention brahman, both traditional and modern scholarship has understood them to be dealing with it (e.g. the conversation between Āruṇi and his son Śvetaketu [ChāU. 6]).
Treating brahman as an explanatory principle requires it to be characterized in particular ways, even paradoxically, because as a purely formal term it would convey nothing. The Upaniṣads offer a range of characterizations of brahman as the source of the world and presence within it, while some characterizations are put in far more personal terms than others. In some passages and contexts, brahman is cause; in others, creator. In some brahman is the ground of being; in others its sustainer. In some brahman is the supportive nature of all being; in others, the being that supports all nature. In short, the Upaniṣads have both impersonal and personal conceptions of brahman; and this was to have important consequences for the development of Hindu thought much later. As experiential principle, brahman foregrounds an important feature of Hindu thought – the centrality of cultivating self-consciousness and cognitive analysis, simultaneously in philosophical study and spiritual cultivation. It is in looking inward into consciousness that the whole of reality is realized, and that is because, in a fundamental way, brahman is a cognitive concept. The realization of the connection between self and brahman is a transformation in consciousness, for brahman is itself characterized by consciousness. In the phrase that became famous in later thought, it is satcitānanda or being-consciousness-bliss.
Although the Upaniṣads are a complex collation of genres, ideas and orientation, the commentators who, over a millennium later, derived their views (called Vedānta or “The End of the Vedas,” the name given to the Upaniṣads) from them, looked at these texts as yielding a core of consistent meaning about brahman. This meaning was seen as lying in a series of statements scattered through the corpus, which came to be called the mahāvākyas or “great statements.” Enigmatic in themselves, they allowed different commentators to provide often radically different elaborations of their meaning. Some of them are: “I am brahman” (aham brahmāsmi; BĀU. 1.4.10); “this self is brahman” (ayam ātmā brahma; BĀU. 4.4.5); “brahman, (that) you see, is the whole world (sarvam khalvidam brahma; ChāU. 3.14.1); “that (is how) you are” (tat tvam asi; ChāU. 6.8.7).
The Brahmasūtra or Vedāntasūtra of Bādarāyana (c. 1st cent. BCE), written some centuries later, make their primary purpose the investigation into brahman. The thinkers who focused on the elucidation of brahman generally tended to do so by commenting on the Brahmasūtra but also directly on the major Upaniṣads. Their treatment of brahman ensured that it became a central feature of the Hindu philosophical tradition up to today. Bādarāyana’s enigmatic statements on the investigation (jijñāsana) into brahman led the commentaries (the earliest extant works of which date many centuries later) to explore the relationship between this unitary principle of brahman on the one hand and the evidently manifold world of the inanimate world and the animate self on the other. This exploration led to theories of the causal connection between brahman and world, the personalized characterization of brahman as “God” (especially in the sectarian form of Viṣṇu), the metaphysical status of the world in relation to brahman, and the identity of the individual self.
The first major extant work in which brahman is central, however, does not go back to the Brahmasūtra. Instead, brahman is presented by the grammarian and linguistic philosopher Bhartṛhari (c. 6th cent. CE) as śabdabrahman – the supreme word – from which all reality, essentially constituted by language, is manifested. The ultimate reality is a universal consciousness whose cosmic vibration (spanda) creates the physical world and its linguistic meaning. Integral to the individual consciousness of all beings is the language of thought (sphoṭa). The language principle that is śabdabrahman devolves into the things of the world but also the human capacity to comprehend them in thought and speech. Grammatical analysis (which takes up the bulk of Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya) is ultimately gnoseological, as insight into the nature of language is also the attainment by the consciousness of the individual self (in whom language is found) of the consciousness of śabdabrahman (which is the source of all reality-constituting language).
Śaṅkara’s Brahmasūtrabhāṣya, the commentary on Bādarāyana, inaugurates a tradition of commentary, subcommentary, and glosses amongst a variety of competing Vedānta systems focused on reading the Upaniṣads and offering their interpretation of the notion of brahman. Śaṅkara offers a sweeping and uncompromising reading of the Upaniṣads on brahman: it is the ultimate, singular principle of supportive reality, of the nature of consciousness. The individual self, which appears to itself to be a locus of limited consciousness, is in fact not other than brahman itself; the gnoseological goal of this limited consciousness is to free itself of its individuatedness. As consciousness is not an object but always the subject of knowledge, brahman cannot be known through standard epistemological means (the pramāṇas of perception, inference, testimony, and the like). Instead, individual consciousness must lose its sense of separateness. Strictly speaking, ātman does not become brahman, as it is always brahman. But it can rid itself of its primordial misunderstanding ( avidyā ) about its own nature. Of brahman, Śaṅkara asserts that it alone is the truth (tadeva satyam), everything else is untrue (anṛta; MuUBh. 2.2.21). This means that not only is the self fundamentally not other than brahman – since both are consciousness as such – but so too the world. Whatever its ontological status, the physical world is not ultimate, because at some level of existence, it too is not independent of or different from the universal consciousness that is brahman. It was left to his successors to develop the nonduality (advaita) of brahman on the one hand and self and world on the other. Given the manifest plurality of beings and things, the claim that nothing is other than brahman – and that that is what the experience of the upanishadic seers ( ṛṣis ) testify – needed considerable defending.
On the nonduality of brahman and ātman, the Advaitins embarked on three broadly different enterprises. One was a phenomenological analysis of consciousness, since they held that ātman–brahman was not an entity that possessed the distinguishing quality (guṇa) of consciousness but was consciousness simplicter. This was considered important because the analysis of the individual consciousness was also part of the transformative technique through which consciousness would be purified of the primal misunderstanding (avidyā) of its own nature as limited to the locus of a body. Another direction of inquiry was into the cosmogonic explanation of why individualized consciousness does not realize itself as brahman. The answer to this went back to Śaṅkara’s doctrine of māyā , “illusion,” or, more carefully, the persistence of experience that misleads as to what is real. The complication in Advaita, of course, is that all experience – understood as the subjective undergoing (anubhava) of objective things and events – misleads, because it presents a manifold world of beings and things. Upon the reattainment of brahman consciousness, experience ceases. The advaitic consensus became that māyā is both a concealment (āvaraṇa) of the universal presence of brahman from the individual consciousness and a projection (vikṣepa) of a manifold of beings and things in experience. The third direction of inquiry was into the ontological relationship between individual consciousness and brahman. Here, the Vivaraṇa school, emphasizing the ultimacy of brahman, said that each individual consciousness was a “counter-image” (pratibimba) of brahman, derivative yet correlative of the original, as the images of the sun on water are in relation to the sun itself. The Bhāmatī school, emphasizing the phenomenal sense of difference in individual consciousness, said that each such consciousness was a limitation (avaccheda) of brahman, like the water contained in different fields was the same water that flowed everywhere (for the different Advaita schools).
On the nonduality of brahman and the physical world, a succession of Advaitins sought to express in what way the latter could be the obvious manifold object of experience and yet not be different from the universal consciousness that is the former. Here too, the Vivaraṇa school was bolder in denying ontological status to the world in the face of brahman’s ultimacy, arguing that the world could be shown to be dependent on consciousness. The logical culmination of this view was the doctrine that perception is creation (dṛṣṭisṛṣṭi), which argued that the experienced world was created by consciousness, and ultimately by brahman itself. The Bhāmātī school sought to complexify the status of the world as both operational (vyāvahāra) in experience and yet lacking in ultimacy, by developing the case that its status was indeterminate (anirvacanīya) between those things that failed ordinary tests of valid cognitions (impossible objects like the horn of a hare or psychotic objects like hallucinations) and the ultimately real (brahman). The most complex analysis of the world as something more than mere dreams or hallucinations but less than brahman, as “less than real” (mithyā), was given by Madhusūdana Sarasvatī in the Advaitasiddhi, and became the consensual advaitic view of the world vis-à-vis brahman.
One final issue for Advaita with regard to brahman concerned the obviously more personalistic descriptions of brahman in the Upaniṣads, in the face of its uncompromisingly impersonal reading. The advaitic strategy was to distinguish between nirguṇa brahman – brahman simplicter, transcending all qualities – and saguṇa brahman – brahman possessing the maximal good qualities for which it is praised in the sacred texts. Since the world is penultimate in contrast to brahman, and language is part of the world (even the sacred language of the Veda), qualities, being linguistic entities, must always fail to capture brahman. At the same time, there is a world of worship, ritual and devotion, which has an object different from the individual worshipper or ritualist. As object of ritual or worship, this must be accessible in this world and in language – and that is brahman approached through qualities. As such, it must be understood as a personal God (Īśvara), conceivable in and through this less-than-real world. Śaṅkara was contented with the implication that such a deity (devatā) would be part of the ordinary world of transmigration (BrSBh. 3.3.37, p. 824); but later Advaitins struggled to reconcile piety with metaphysics, seeking to develop the concept of qualitied brahman into the divine intercession of brahman in the world. But the Vedānta schools that came after Śaṅkara were quick to realize that, if brahman was to be read as a personal God, the advaitic vision of it as the impersonal absolute of explanation and experience would be compromised.
It is in the works of Rāmānuja that we find, in a fully developed sense, a theological reading of brahman. He unambiguously identified brahman as Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa, the supreme God. This had major consequences for the interpretation of brahman. Whereas the Advaitins maintained that brahman alone was ultimately real and that individual beings and the world were not different from it, Rāmānuja argued that, brahman being God, (conscious [cit]) beings and (nonconscious [acit or jaḍa]) world were both ontologically dependent on and inhered by brahman. Rāmānuja’s challenge was to find ways to establish what he considered to be the proper understanding of the nature of the relationship between brahman on the one hand and both conscious and nonconscious entities (individual selves and the world) on the other – a relationship characterizable as “qualified non-dualism” (viśiṣṭādvaita). Rāmānuja drew on a wide variety of approaches to defend this reading. Three major formulations should suffice to indicate the position of Viśiṣṭādvaita.
In one, Rāmānuja argued from the grammatical rule of sāmānadhikaraṇya (having the same case ending), which regards using different words with different applications to the same substratum. This rule of coreferentiality allowed Rāmānuja to say that the upanishadic characterization of brahman as “truth, knowledge, infinitude” (satyam jñānam anantam: TaiU. 2.1.1), though referring to the unitary being that is brahman, nevertheless indicated a plurality of qualities. Through this, he contrasted himself with Śaṅkara, who denied that there was plurality in brahman, and was therefore forced to twist the rule of coreferentiality to mean the use of plural qualities only for the purpose of indicating an identity statement regarding brahman and the qualities we necessarily use to think about it.
In another formulation, Rāmānuja described brahman as both that from which the world arises – the substantial cause (upādānakāraṇa) – and that which determines that and how the world arises – the instrumental cause (nimittakāraṇa). Deploying this within the theory of satkāryavāda – the doctrine that the effect preexists in the cause – Rāmānuja managed to both differentiate causal brahman from the caused world and integrate that world within brahman’s being.
In another and related formulation, Rāmānuja talked of brahman as the mode possessor (prakārin) who has modes (prakāra). By modes, he meant broadly something that both specified the mode-possesser and was realized only through its relationship with the latter. Understood thus, both conscious beings and nonconscious things are modes of brahman; and this relationship is expressed through the trope of their constituting brahman’s body (śarīra; ŚrīBh. 1.4.23; 2.3.18). It was left to the tradition following him to clarify the concept of “body” appropriate to this use.
In these and other ways, Rāmānuja developed a theology of brahman unambiguously identified as God. For him, brahman was not the universally constituting, impersonal consciousness, but the supreme person (Puruṣottama) – called variously, including Viṣṇu or Nārāyaṇa or Vāsudeva – who possesses consciousness. He frequently identified brahman (which he said meant “greatness”) with God (bhagavat, whose general meaning according to Rāmānuja was “worthy of worship” (pūjya; Carman, 1974, 158–164).
After Rāmānuja, accounts of brahman became almost exclusively theological, focusing on brahman as the personal deity, Viṣṇu-Nārāyana-Hari, and looking at the nature of the relationship between brahman and the rest. In this, a general divide can be seen between Advaitins (or at least the earlier ones following Śaṅkara) and all other Vedānta schools (Lott, 1980, 121). The most significant of these views was espoused by Madhva, whose views are called Dvaita (dualist) Vedānta, primarily because of his insistence on the fundamental distinction between brahman/Hari, who alone is independent (svatantra) of all conditions and individual beings and the material world, which are dependent (paratantra) on him. Madhva’s starting point was that, when the Vedāntasūtra (Brahmasūtra) starts by calling for an inquiry into brahman, it just is about Viṣṇu (BrSBh. 1.1.1); Viṣṇu is called brahman, which Madhva interpreted to mean perfection on the possession of boundless (optimal) qualities (amitaguṇa; BrSBh. 1.1.2). Rāmānuja had tried to preserve the ontological status of the world and individual beings by saying that they were real because they were modes of brahman’s being, thereby also preserving a sense in which they were not completely different from brahman. Madhva presented a much more direct strategy for preserving the ontological status of individual beings (jivas) and the material world ( prakṛti ): they are eternally existent and separate from brahman, who is therefore not their substantial cause. At the same time, brahman/Viṣṇu is the instrumental cause (nimittakāraṇa) of their manifestations. Madhva’s brahman, therefore, is emphatically neither creator god nor ground of being. Rather, he is the perfect being, whose immutability and purity would be compromised by any substantial (as opposed to instrumental) relationship with individuals and the material world (e.g. Anuvyākhyāna 1.4.59). The Mādhva school of Vedānta therefore preferred to interpret the upanishadic passages on nonduality as metaphorical statements of the dependency of selves and world on the divine brahman, for all of brahman is, in fact, talk of Viṣṇu.
There were other attempts to clarify the nature of brahman’s relationship with individual selves and the material world. Perhaps the best known of these was Nimbārka’s. Although unlikely to have known of the work of Rāmānuja, he certainly knew of Advaita. Like other Vedāntins apart from Śaṅkara, Nimbārka too identified brahman with the supreme personal God, in his case, specifically Kṛṣṇa (seen in many contexts as an avatāra or embodied descent of Viṣṇu to earth, but also often as simply another name and form of Viṣṇu). Kṛṣṇa was denoted by the term “brahman,” inherently the causal power of the world (VedPSau. 1.1.1). Nimbārka also wrestled with the problem of how to relate a theological vision of brahman as a personal God with the material world (Agrawal, 1979, 12–20). Like Rāmānuja, he too maintained that brahman was both substantial and instrumental cause of the world (VedPSau. 1.4.23–27). But his followers like Mādhava Mukunda (Dasgupta, vol. III, 1922–1955, 426–444), who came to know of Rāmānuja’s work, sought to distinguish Nimbārka’s account from the former, concentrating on a critique of the vishishtadvaitic notion that individual selves and the material world were qualified manifestations of the divine brahman. Instead, they articulated a position in which the nonduality of brahman and the rest was shown by the former being the entire causal source of the latter, but a certain duality was established by the latter being entirely dependent for their attributes on brahman while yet being distinct in their created nature from him. Mediating between brahman and the rest was brahman’s power: it was this which, modified, became the world and its impurities, while brahman remained unmodified and pure.
In sum, the long history of brahman offers resources for a variety of approaches to metaphysics as much as to theology, and offers a distinctive Hindu narrative about the most fundamental questions of existence, nature, and origin.
Treating brahman as an explanatory principle requires it to be characterized in particular ways, even paradoxically, because as a purely formal term it would convey nothing. The Upaniṣads offer a range of characterizations of brahman as the source of the world and presence within it, while some characterizations are put in far more personal terms than others. In some passages and contexts, brahman is cause; in others, creator. In some brahman is the ground of being; in others its sustainer. In some brahman is the supportive nature of all being; in others, the being that supports all nature. In short, the Upaniṣads have both impersonal and personal conceptions of brahman; and this was to have important consequences for the development of Hindu thought much later. As experiential principle, brahman foregrounds an important feature of Hindu thought – the centrality of cultivating self-consciousness and cognitive analysis, simultaneously in philosophical study and spiritual cultivation. It is in looking inward into consciousness that the whole of reality is realized, and that is because, in a fundamental way, brahman is a cognitive concept. The realization of the connection between self and brahman is a transformation in consciousness, for brahman is itself characterized by consciousness. In the phrase that became famous in later thought, it is satcitānanda or being-consciousness-bliss.
Although the Upaniṣads are a complex collation of genres, ideas and orientation, the commentators who, over a millennium later, derived their views (called Vedānta or “The End of the Vedas,” the name given to the Upaniṣads) from them, looked at these texts as yielding a core of consistent meaning about brahman. This meaning was seen as lying in a series of statements scattered through the corpus, which came to be called the mahāvākyas or “great statements.” Enigmatic in themselves, they allowed different commentators to provide often radically different elaborations of their meaning. Some of them are: “I am brahman” (aham brahmāsmi; BĀU. 1.4.10); “this self is brahman” (ayam ātmā brahma; BĀU. 4.4.5); “brahman, (that) you see, is the whole world (sarvam khalvidam brahma; ChāU. 3.14.1); “that (is how) you are” (tat tvam asi; ChāU. 6.8.7).
The Brahmasūtra or Vedāntasūtra of Bādarāyana (c. 1st cent. BCE), written some centuries later, make their primary purpose the investigation into brahman. The thinkers who focused on the elucidation of brahman generally tended to do so by commenting on the Brahmasūtra but also directly on the major Upaniṣads. Their treatment of brahman ensured that it became a central feature of the Hindu philosophical tradition up to today. Bādarāyana’s enigmatic statements on the investigation (jijñāsana) into brahman led the commentaries (the earliest extant works of which date many centuries later) to explore the relationship between this unitary principle of brahman on the one hand and the evidently manifold world of the inanimate world and the animate self on the other. This exploration led to theories of the causal connection between brahman and world, the personalized characterization of brahman as “God” (especially in the sectarian form of Viṣṇu), the metaphysical status of the world in relation to brahman, and the identity of the individual self.
The first major extant work in which brahman is central, however, does not go back to the Brahmasūtra. Instead, brahman is presented by the grammarian and linguistic philosopher Bhartṛhari (c. 6th cent. CE) as śabdabrahman – the supreme word – from which all reality, essentially constituted by language, is manifested. The ultimate reality is a universal consciousness whose cosmic vibration (spanda) creates the physical world and its linguistic meaning. Integral to the individual consciousness of all beings is the language of thought (sphoṭa). The language principle that is śabdabrahman devolves into the things of the world but also the human capacity to comprehend them in thought and speech. Grammatical analysis (which takes up the bulk of Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya) is ultimately gnoseological, as insight into the nature of language is also the attainment by the consciousness of the individual self (in whom language is found) of the consciousness of śabdabrahman (which is the source of all reality-constituting language).
Śaṅkara’s Brahmasūtrabhāṣya, the commentary on Bādarāyana, inaugurates a tradition of commentary, subcommentary, and glosses amongst a variety of competing Vedānta systems focused on reading the Upaniṣads and offering their interpretation of the notion of brahman. Śaṅkara offers a sweeping and uncompromising reading of the Upaniṣads on brahman: it is the ultimate, singular principle of supportive reality, of the nature of consciousness. The individual self, which appears to itself to be a locus of limited consciousness, is in fact not other than brahman itself; the gnoseological goal of this limited consciousness is to free itself of its individuatedness. As consciousness is not an object but always the subject of knowledge, brahman cannot be known through standard epistemological means (the pramāṇas of perception, inference, testimony, and the like). Instead, individual consciousness must lose its sense of separateness. Strictly speaking, ātman does not become brahman, as it is always brahman. But it can rid itself of its primordial misunderstanding ( avidyā ) about its own nature. Of brahman, Śaṅkara asserts that it alone is the truth (tadeva satyam), everything else is untrue (anṛta; MuUBh. 2.2.21). This means that not only is the self fundamentally not other than brahman – since both are consciousness as such – but so too the world. Whatever its ontological status, the physical world is not ultimate, because at some level of existence, it too is not independent of or different from the universal consciousness that is brahman. It was left to his successors to develop the nonduality (advaita) of brahman on the one hand and self and world on the other. Given the manifest plurality of beings and things, the claim that nothing is other than brahman – and that that is what the experience of the upanishadic seers ( ṛṣis ) testify – needed considerable defending.
On the nonduality of brahman and ātman, the Advaitins embarked on three broadly different enterprises. One was a phenomenological analysis of consciousness, since they held that ātman–brahman was not an entity that possessed the distinguishing quality (guṇa) of consciousness but was consciousness simplicter. This was considered important because the analysis of the individual consciousness was also part of the transformative technique through which consciousness would be purified of the primal misunderstanding (avidyā) of its own nature as limited to the locus of a body. Another direction of inquiry was into the cosmogonic explanation of why individualized consciousness does not realize itself as brahman. The answer to this went back to Śaṅkara’s doctrine of māyā , “illusion,” or, more carefully, the persistence of experience that misleads as to what is real. The complication in Advaita, of course, is that all experience – understood as the subjective undergoing (anubhava) of objective things and events – misleads, because it presents a manifold world of beings and things. Upon the reattainment of brahman consciousness, experience ceases. The advaitic consensus became that māyā is both a concealment (āvaraṇa) of the universal presence of brahman from the individual consciousness and a projection (vikṣepa) of a manifold of beings and things in experience. The third direction of inquiry was into the ontological relationship between individual consciousness and brahman. Here, the Vivaraṇa school, emphasizing the ultimacy of brahman, said that each individual consciousness was a “counter-image” (pratibimba) of brahman, derivative yet correlative of the original, as the images of the sun on water are in relation to the sun itself. The Bhāmatī school, emphasizing the phenomenal sense of difference in individual consciousness, said that each such consciousness was a limitation (avaccheda) of brahman, like the water contained in different fields was the same water that flowed everywhere (for the different Advaita schools).
On the nonduality of brahman and the physical world, a succession of Advaitins sought to express in what way the latter could be the obvious manifold object of experience and yet not be different from the universal consciousness that is the former. Here too, the Vivaraṇa school was bolder in denying ontological status to the world in the face of brahman’s ultimacy, arguing that the world could be shown to be dependent on consciousness. The logical culmination of this view was the doctrine that perception is creation (dṛṣṭisṛṣṭi), which argued that the experienced world was created by consciousness, and ultimately by brahman itself. The Bhāmātī school sought to complexify the status of the world as both operational (vyāvahāra) in experience and yet lacking in ultimacy, by developing the case that its status was indeterminate (anirvacanīya) between those things that failed ordinary tests of valid cognitions (impossible objects like the horn of a hare or psychotic objects like hallucinations) and the ultimately real (brahman). The most complex analysis of the world as something more than mere dreams or hallucinations but less than brahman, as “less than real” (mithyā), was given by Madhusūdana Sarasvatī in the Advaitasiddhi, and became the consensual advaitic view of the world vis-à-vis brahman.
One final issue for Advaita with regard to brahman concerned the obviously more personalistic descriptions of brahman in the Upaniṣads, in the face of its uncompromisingly impersonal reading. The advaitic strategy was to distinguish between nirguṇa brahman – brahman simplicter, transcending all qualities – and saguṇa brahman – brahman possessing the maximal good qualities for which it is praised in the sacred texts. Since the world is penultimate in contrast to brahman, and language is part of the world (even the sacred language of the Veda), qualities, being linguistic entities, must always fail to capture brahman. At the same time, there is a world of worship, ritual and devotion, which has an object different from the individual worshipper or ritualist. As object of ritual or worship, this must be accessible in this world and in language – and that is brahman approached through qualities. As such, it must be understood as a personal God (Īśvara), conceivable in and through this less-than-real world. Śaṅkara was contented with the implication that such a deity (devatā) would be part of the ordinary world of transmigration (BrSBh. 3.3.37, p. 824); but later Advaitins struggled to reconcile piety with metaphysics, seeking to develop the concept of qualitied brahman into the divine intercession of brahman in the world. But the Vedānta schools that came after Śaṅkara were quick to realize that, if brahman was to be read as a personal God, the advaitic vision of it as the impersonal absolute of explanation and experience would be compromised.
It is in the works of Rāmānuja that we find, in a fully developed sense, a theological reading of brahman. He unambiguously identified brahman as Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa, the supreme God. This had major consequences for the interpretation of brahman. Whereas the Advaitins maintained that brahman alone was ultimately real and that individual beings and the world were not different from it, Rāmānuja argued that, brahman being God, (conscious [cit]) beings and (nonconscious [acit or jaḍa]) world were both ontologically dependent on and inhered by brahman. Rāmānuja’s challenge was to find ways to establish what he considered to be the proper understanding of the nature of the relationship between brahman on the one hand and both conscious and nonconscious entities (individual selves and the world) on the other – a relationship characterizable as “qualified non-dualism” (viśiṣṭādvaita). Rāmānuja drew on a wide variety of approaches to defend this reading. Three major formulations should suffice to indicate the position of Viśiṣṭādvaita.
In one, Rāmānuja argued from the grammatical rule of sāmānadhikaraṇya (having the same case ending), which regards using different words with different applications to the same substratum. This rule of coreferentiality allowed Rāmānuja to say that the upanishadic characterization of brahman as “truth, knowledge, infinitude” (satyam jñānam anantam: TaiU. 2.1.1), though referring to the unitary being that is brahman, nevertheless indicated a plurality of qualities. Through this, he contrasted himself with Śaṅkara, who denied that there was plurality in brahman, and was therefore forced to twist the rule of coreferentiality to mean the use of plural qualities only for the purpose of indicating an identity statement regarding brahman and the qualities we necessarily use to think about it.
In another formulation, Rāmānuja described brahman as both that from which the world arises – the substantial cause (upādānakāraṇa) – and that which determines that and how the world arises – the instrumental cause (nimittakāraṇa). Deploying this within the theory of satkāryavāda – the doctrine that the effect preexists in the cause – Rāmānuja managed to both differentiate causal brahman from the caused world and integrate that world within brahman’s being.
In another and related formulation, Rāmānuja talked of brahman as the mode possessor (prakārin) who has modes (prakāra). By modes, he meant broadly something that both specified the mode-possesser and was realized only through its relationship with the latter. Understood thus, both conscious beings and nonconscious things are modes of brahman; and this relationship is expressed through the trope of their constituting brahman’s body (śarīra; ŚrīBh. 1.4.23; 2.3.18). It was left to the tradition following him to clarify the concept of “body” appropriate to this use.
In these and other ways, Rāmānuja developed a theology of brahman unambiguously identified as God. For him, brahman was not the universally constituting, impersonal consciousness, but the supreme person (Puruṣottama) – called variously, including Viṣṇu or Nārāyaṇa or Vāsudeva – who possesses consciousness. He frequently identified brahman (which he said meant “greatness”) with God (bhagavat, whose general meaning according to Rāmānuja was “worthy of worship” (pūjya; Carman, 1974, 158–164).
After Rāmānuja, accounts of brahman became almost exclusively theological, focusing on brahman as the personal deity, Viṣṇu-Nārāyana-Hari, and looking at the nature of the relationship between brahman and the rest. In this, a general divide can be seen between Advaitins (or at least the earlier ones following Śaṅkara) and all other Vedānta schools (Lott, 1980, 121). The most significant of these views was espoused by Madhva, whose views are called Dvaita (dualist) Vedānta, primarily because of his insistence on the fundamental distinction between brahman/Hari, who alone is independent (svatantra) of all conditions and individual beings and the material world, which are dependent (paratantra) on him. Madhva’s starting point was that, when the Vedāntasūtra (Brahmasūtra) starts by calling for an inquiry into brahman, it just is about Viṣṇu (BrSBh. 1.1.1); Viṣṇu is called brahman, which Madhva interpreted to mean perfection on the possession of boundless (optimal) qualities (amitaguṇa; BrSBh. 1.1.2). Rāmānuja had tried to preserve the ontological status of the world and individual beings by saying that they were real because they were modes of brahman’s being, thereby also preserving a sense in which they were not completely different from brahman. Madhva presented a much more direct strategy for preserving the ontological status of individual beings (jivas) and the material world ( prakṛti ): they are eternally existent and separate from brahman, who is therefore not their substantial cause. At the same time, brahman/Viṣṇu is the instrumental cause (nimittakāraṇa) of their manifestations. Madhva’s brahman, therefore, is emphatically neither creator god nor ground of being. Rather, he is the perfect being, whose immutability and purity would be compromised by any substantial (as opposed to instrumental) relationship with individuals and the material world (e.g. Anuvyākhyāna 1.4.59). The Mādhva school of Vedānta therefore preferred to interpret the upanishadic passages on nonduality as metaphorical statements of the dependency of selves and world on the divine brahman, for all of brahman is, in fact, talk of Viṣṇu.
There were other attempts to clarify the nature of brahman’s relationship with individual selves and the material world. Perhaps the best known of these was Nimbārka’s. Although unlikely to have known of the work of Rāmānuja, he certainly knew of Advaita. Like other Vedāntins apart from Śaṅkara, Nimbārka too identified brahman with the supreme personal God, in his case, specifically Kṛṣṇa (seen in many contexts as an avatāra or embodied descent of Viṣṇu to earth, but also often as simply another name and form of Viṣṇu). Kṛṣṇa was denoted by the term “brahman,” inherently the causal power of the world (VedPSau. 1.1.1). Nimbārka also wrestled with the problem of how to relate a theological vision of brahman as a personal God with the material world (Agrawal, 1979, 12–20). Like Rāmānuja, he too maintained that brahman was both substantial and instrumental cause of the world (VedPSau. 1.4.23–27). But his followers like Mādhava Mukunda (Dasgupta, vol. III, 1922–1955, 426–444), who came to know of Rāmānuja’s work, sought to distinguish Nimbārka’s account from the former, concentrating on a critique of the vishishtadvaitic notion that individual selves and the material world were qualified manifestations of the divine brahman. Instead, they articulated a position in which the nonduality of brahman and the rest was shown by the former being the entire causal source of the latter, but a certain duality was established by the latter being entirely dependent for their attributes on brahman while yet being distinct in their created nature from him. Mediating between brahman and the rest was brahman’s power: it was this which, modified, became the world and its impurities, while brahman remained unmodified and pure.
In sum, the long history of brahman offers resources for a variety of approaches to metaphysics as much as to theology, and offers a distinctive Hindu narrative about the most fundamental questions of existence, nature, and origin.
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