Advaita Vedanta

Advaita reads the self and brahman as non-different.

Adi Shankara is the standard-scholarship systematizer and effective founder of Advaita Vedanta as an organized school.

One of the four great statements, one drawn from each Veda, which Advaita treats as the compressed content of the whole.

The northern of the four cardinal monasteries the tradition attributes to Shankara stands here, and its head is one of the recognised authorities of the school.

Ascribed to Shankara, and directed against learning pursued for its own sake, which is a strange thing for the tradition of the great commentaries to sing and is exactly why it does.

The western of the four cardinal monasteries stands here, on the coast where Krishna is held to have founded his city.

The Advaita guru transmits by removing ignorance rather than by conferring anything, and the lineage from teacher to pupil is the tradition itself.

The eastern of the four cardinal monasteries stands beside the temple, and the tradition's custody of it is institutional rather than devotional.

Advaita teaching counts desire among the enemies the seeker restrains through the disciplines of inner and outer control before knowledge can take hold.

Advaita teaching counts anger among the enemies to be restrained by the preparatory disciplines that precede inquiry.

The Mandukya Upanishad's division of the syllable into three sounds and a fourth silence is the text on which Advaita builds its account of the self.

The swami has taken formal renunciation and left caste, family and property, and the Dashanami orders trace their organisation to Shankara.

Spoken nine times by Uddalaka to his son, and read by Advaita as instruction rather than as description.

Advaita subordinates the disciplines of the subtle body to knowledge, holding that they may steady the mind but cannot themselves remove the ignorance that binds, so they are preparatory at best.

Advaita argues against the dualist reading: an eternally real difference between God, soul and world cannot be reconciled with the Upanishadic identity statements, which Advaita takes in their plain sense.

Advaita argues against the qualified non-dualist reading: to make souls and matter real eternal attributes of Brahman is, on the Advaita account, to leave difference standing in the ultimate and so to fall short of the non-duality the texts declare.

Image worship is allowed as a preparation for the seeker who still takes the world as real, and set aside in the knowledge that admits no second thing. It is a stage rather than a practice of the school.

Advaita Vedanta holds Atman, the self, to be identical with Brahman, its single defining thesis.

Avidya, ignorance of the self's identity with Brahman, is Advaita Vedanta's account of why liberation is not already realized.

Shankara's Brahma Sutra Bhashya, the foundational commentary establishing Advaita Vedanta's non-dual reading of this shared Vedanta text.

Brahman alone is ultimately real in Advaita Vedanta, the school's defining, non-dual reading of the Upanishads.

The ten renunciate lineages ascribed to Shankara.

Maya, the world's appearance of separateness from Brahman, is Advaita Vedanta's central doctrine explaining the world without granting it final reality.

Neti neti, not this, not this, is Advaita Vedanta's apophatic method for approaching a Brahman beyond every positive description.

Nirvikalpa samadhi, formless absorption without distinction of subject and object, is Advaita Vedanta's account of direct liberating realization.

The order carries Vivekananda's reworking of Advaita into a mission with social service at its centre.

Sakshi, the witness consciousness underlying all experience, is Advaita Vedanta's account of the self that Atman-Brahman identity discloses.

Sat-chit-ananda, being, consciousness and bliss, is Advaita Vedanta's positive description of Brahman and Atman alike.

Clergy or specialist role within Advaita Vedanta.

The Four Mahavakyas are Advaita Vedanta's proof texts for the identity of Atman and Brahman.

Turiya, the fourth state beyond waking, dream and dreamless sleep, is Advaita Vedanta's account of the self's true, ever-present condition.

Advaita Vedanta is the non-dual reading of Vedanta established by Shankara, one of the tradition's three great classical schools.

Non-injury is held in Advaita among the ethical qualifications for enquiry.

Devotion is valued in Advaita and is not the means of liberation. It purifies the mind and fits it for enquiry, and knowledge alone removes the ignorance that binds. This is the precise point on which Advaita and the theistic Vedantas divide over the same texts.

Giving is held in Advaita, among the acts that purify the mind and fit it for enquiry.

Dharma is held in Advaita, with ritual and duty belonging to the level of practice that prepares the mind for knowledge rather than producing liberation themselves.

The teaching lineage is held in Advaita and is institutionally embodied: the monastic seats traced to Shankara transmit the teaching through a succession of heads.

A chosen deity is held in Advaita as a real and effective focus of devotion at the level at which the worshipper is real, which is the ground on which the school accommodates the whole range of Hindu worship.

The path of knowledge is the Advaita path. Liberation comes by knowledge alone, and every other discipline is preparatory to it.

Karma is held in Advaita as governing the empirical world, and the school's account of the liberated person still living is worked out in terms of which karma is exhausted and which continues to run.

Moksha as the recognition that the self was never other than Brahman, so liberation is realised rather than attained.

Merit and demerit are held in Advaita at the empirical level, and knowledge is held to end the whole account rather than to settle it favourably.

Advaita holds the supreme self, and reads it as Brahman with qualities, real at the level at which the worshipper and the world are real, and non-different from the unqualified Brahman that knowledge discloses.

Periodic dissolution is held in Advaita, and the school treats the return of the world after it as further evidence that appearance depends on something that does not itself appear and disappear.

Collected absorption is held in Advaita, and the school's two grades of it, with and without distinction, are already in its own vocabulary.

Transmigration is held in Advaita as real at the empirical level and as belonging to the ignorance that liberation dispels, not to the self.

Latent impressions are held in Advaita as what carries the individual across lives, and their exhaustion is part of the school's account of what remains after knowledge has arisen.

Absorption in which the distinction of knower and known remains is held in Advaita as a stage, and the school is explicit that it is not yet liberation.

The three strands are taken into Advaita from Samkhya as a description of the manifest world, without the Samkhya conclusion that the world is a real transformation of an independent nature.

The three worlds are held in Advaita as part of the cosmology of the empirical level.

Both belong to the six orthodox schools; Samkhya's two principles are the position Advaita Vedanta argues against.