Advaita Vedanta (nondualism)

Advaita means not-two, and the negative formulation is deliberate. Shankara, working in roughly the eighth century, is not asserting that everything is one thing in the sense of a collection unified; he is denying that there are ultimately two, that there is any real distinction between the self and the absolute.

The argument proceeds from the Upanishads, which he read as a coherent teaching rather than an anthology. Four sentences carry the weight, the mahavakyas: that thou art; I am Brahman; this self is Brahman; consciousness is Brahman. Shankara insists these are statements of an existing fact, not commands to achieve a union. The self, atman, is not similar to Brahman, not a part of it and not merged into it; it is it, and always was.

What then accounts for the world of distinct things? Shankara's answer is avidya, ignorance, and maya, the power by which the one appears as many. The stock illustrations are a rope mistaken in dim light for a snake, and silver seen in mother-of-pearl. On seeing the rope, the snake does not go anywhere: it never existed, and the fear it caused was nonetheless real while the error lasted. Maya is accordingly not a claim that the world is a hallucination; it is a claim about its ontological status, real enough at its own level and not ultimately real.

Liberation, moksha, therefore consists in knowledge rather than in action, ritual or accumulation of merit. Nothing is gained, because nothing was ever lacking; what ends is a misidentification. Shankara held that ritual and devotion have their place in purifying the mind and are indispensable preparation, but that they cannot themselves produce liberation, because action produces results and liberation is not a result.

Advaita is one school of Vedanta and not the whole of it, though its prominence in Western accounts of Hinduism can obscure that. The other schools read the same texts and reach different conclusions.

Ramanuja, in the eleventh century, argued for vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism: there is one reality, but it is internally differentiated, and individual souls and the material world constitute the body of God, real and permanently distinct from him as a body is distinct from the self that animates it. His motive was devotional as much as logical, since a love relationship requires two parties, and he objected that Shankara's scheme makes worship a stage to be discarded.

Madhva, in the thirteenth century, argued for outright dualism, dvaita: God, souls and matter are eternally and really distinct, souls are eternally dependent, and the difference is never overcome.

The quarrel with Buddhism was fiercer than either. Advaita and Madhyamaka can look similar from outside, since both dissolve the world of ordinary distinctions, and Shankara's opponents accused him of being a crypto-Buddhist. He was at pains to deny it, and the denial identifies the real difference: Advaita affirms one absolutely real thing, being, consciousness and bliss, whereas Madhyamaka denies inherent existence to everything without exception and refuses to install any ground. Shankara therefore charged the Buddhists with nihilism; Buddhist logicians charged Advaita with reinstating the self that Buddhism was founded on rejecting. Neither charge is fair on the other's own terms, and both were meant.

Advaita reached the modern West largely through Vivekananda, who presented it at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions as the philosophical core of Hinduism, and through Ramana Maharshi and the neo-Vedanta teachers who followed. That presentation has shaped the widespread impression that Hinduism is monist by default, which the existence of Ramanuja, Madhva and the whole devotional mainstream contradicts.