What is Vedanta?
That’s a question I get asked a lot.
The answer I give generally depends on who is asking the question. For the more general crowd, I often say that Vedanta is the philosophical basis of Hinduism. That’s an answer that most people can accept, even if it’s not strictly accurate.
First of all, Vedanta isn’t a philosophy. A philosophy is something cooked up by a person or group of people. It’s limited by nature; a worldview or set of ideas and concepts filtered through an individual’s personal assumptions and biases; and always at odds with competing philosophies.
Vedanta isn’t the product of any one person or group of people. It’s also much more than a philosophy. It’s what is known in Sanskrit as a pramana. A pramana is a means of knowledge. In this case, the knowledge in question is the king of all knowledge: Self-knowledge.
Why, you might wonder, would anyone need a means of self-knowledge? After all, most people assume they already know who they are. This guy is Mike, and that woman is Beverly. One is an accountant who drives a BMW and the other a school teacher who rides a motorcycle. One likes pizza and the other likes gin.
But consider something for a moment. What if everything you’ve ever thought or assumed to be true about yourself was actually nothing more than that — just a thought and assumption?
What if the person you’ve always considered yourself to be was nothing more than a concept in your head? And what if this concept was actually the source of all your suffering and unhappiness in life?
A Question of Identity
What sets human beings apart from other creatures is our ability to self-reflect.
While animals are intelligent, sentient, and have a rudimentary intellect, we humans are unique in that we have an enhanced sense of ego; a sense of who we think we are and who we think we should be. This has enabled us to become the dominant species on the planet; to build and maintain civilisations, and to discover, explore, and innovate.
It’s also, however, the root of our greatest bondage. According to Vedanta, the source of our suffering is misidentifying with a limited and erroneous sense of self. As the late, great Vedanta teacher Swami Dayananda said:
“It is the glory of man that he is conscious of himself. However, the self he is aware of is not a complete, adequate self. It is, unfortunately, a wanting, inadequate self.”
The problem with self-awareness is a simple one: the ‘self’ we are aware of may not be acceptable to us. In fact, it’s likely to be a highly unsatisfactory self. If we assume ourselves to be our body, mind, emotions or ego, we inevitably experience a sense of limitation, for all these components are by their very nature limited.
This pseudo-self, which, upon investigation, is simply a bundle of unquestioned assumptions, masks our true nature.
Vedanta tells us that we’re far more than we ever dared imagine — that we are already whole and complete — and that our sense of limitation comes from identifying with what we are not.
Perhaps the oldest form of psychology on the planet, Vedanta is a science of consciousness that uses impeccable logic to help us understand the nature of the self, consciousness, and reality itself. Universal in scope, it deals with the questions mankind has wrestled with since the very dawn of time:
Who am I?
What am I?
Where did the universe come from?
What is the purpose of life?
Again, Vedanta is not a philosophy. It’s not attributable to any one person or group of people. It’s a body of knowledge which has been revealed over time, carefully refined, and guarded for millennia.
It’s not a religion, either. Although it deals with theological topics, it works without any of the religious trappings. As such, it’s not necessary to have an affilitation with Hinduism or any other religion.
All that’s required is an open and questioning mind.
The End of Knowledge
The word Vedanta is derived from the words Veda and anta, which together mean ‘the end of knowledge’.
Vedanta is based upon the teaching of the ancient Indian Vedas, which form the basis of Sanatana Dharma (or what we call ‘Hinduism’). These texts, of which there are four, date back thousands of years and are said to be “revealed knowledge”. In other words, they are not the product of the human mind, but were heard by the ancient rishis (seers) in deep meditation and passed down through countless generations in the form of Sanskrit mantras, in a way that made the teaching impervious to change and distortion.
The Vedas can be divided into two portions.
The first and most voluminous section of each Veda is called the karma kanda. This deals with the fulfilment of one’s earthly goals and desires. It prescribes rituals and actions to aid in every aspect of worldly life. You might say that the karma kanda of the Veda deals with the lower rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; the basics of worldly living.
The second section, the jnana kanda, takes the form of the Upanishads. The word ‘Upanishad’ means ‘sitting at the foot of’; in this case, a teacher of Vedantic knowledge. This knowledge focuses not on worldly endeavour, but spiritual attainment in the form of Self-realisation and liberation.
Taking the form of dialogues and poetic stories, the Upanishads explore questions of existence, reality, and the nature of the self. There are over two hundred known Upanishads, of which ten are considered principal Upanishads.
Vedanta is a systematic unfoldment of the teachings of the Upanishads. It deals with the question of self-identity and liberation from worldly suffering.
Because it distils the teachings of the Upanishads, the end section of each Veda, it is called Vedanta (the end of the Vedas). Another understanding of the term Vedanta (“the end of knowledge”), is that it ends all further search for knowledge, because the subject matter of Vedanta is Self Knowledge, raja vidya (‘the king of knowledge’); knowing which nothing remains to be known or attained.
The Triple Canon
To refine and clarify the teachings of the Upanishads, other literature was created to elaborate upon the teachings and resolve any seeming contradictions.
In Vedanta, the most important of these are the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. Along with the Upanishads, they form what is called ‘the triple canon of Vedanta’.
The Brahma Sutras, attributed to Badarayana, are a series of aphorisms that expound and clarify the teachings of the Upanishads in an involved and rigorous fashion.
The Bhagavad Gita is a book that forms part of Vyasa’s great Mahabharata epic and is one of the best-known pieces of Indian literature. Set upon a battlefield on the eve of a great battle, it takes the form of a dialogue between the noble warrior Arjuna and his charioteer and teacher, Krishna, who is an avatar, or representation of the Divine.
Through Krishna’s teaching, the text explores the topics of action and duty, meditation, devotion, understanding the nature of the Self, and attaining liberation and enlightenment. The Gita is an important text that beautifully lays out the core tenets of Vedanta in a remarkably poetic yet practical fashion.
The Influence of Shankara
One of the most important contributors to Vedanta was the 8th century visionary Adi Shankara, or Shankaracharya (acharya means ‘great teacher’ in Sanskrit).
Shankara travelled across India, established schools, engaged in public debates and, through his extensive commentaries and a voluminous body of work, consolidated the teaching into what it is today.
In Shankara’s time, what we think of as Hinduism (the term ‘Hinduism’ was actually created by Western anthropologists referring to what is better known as ‘Sanatana Dharma’), was a disparate assortment of different traditions, with their basis in the Vedas. Corruption was notably rife in the Brahmin, or priest caste, and the message of the Vedas distorted.
In his short life, Shankara reformed and unified Sanatana Dharma, which was at the time rapidly being supplanted by Buddhism, itself an offshoot of the Vedas.
With his razor-sharp intellect, Shankara excelled at the public philosophical debates of the time. The losers of these debates had to accept the position of the winner or tuck their tails between their legs and leave town.
A vocal critic of elements of Buddhist doctrine, Shankara would shoot down Buddhist scholars left, right, and centre at these public debates. The subsequent decline of Buddhism in India is often attributed to Shankara, as well as the subsequent revival and renaissance in Sanatana Dharma.
Having said that, some suggest that elements of Buddhist philosophy helped shape Shankara’s reformation of what some call Advaita Vedanta. The word ‘advaita’ means ‘not-two’ and refers to the nondual nature of reality as revealed by the Upanishads.
Shankara’s commentaries on the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Brahma Sutras are considered landmark works and helped consolidate the teaching into a clear and fully realised vision.
In the centuries since Shankara’s time, some offshoots of Vedanta have sprung up, such as the Dvaitaand Vashishtadvaita schools, which present a more dualistic interpretation of the Upanishads. Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta remains the oldest, most influential, and for many the definitive presentation of Vedanta.
A Complete Teaching
Vedanta is a taught in a structured way. The teaching progresses through a specific sequence of logic, leading the student to not only understand but eventually integrate and fully realise the essence of the teaching.
The fruit of the teaching is a completely different understanding of yourself and life; one that forever changes your relationship to the world of objects.
Instead of relying on external objects, such as people, situations, and attainments to bring fleeting moments of happiness, you discover a limitless well of happiness and wholeness within your own self.
This is called moksha, or liberation. Some people call it enlightenment. I just call it freedom. In a sense, Vedanta is a roadmap to freedom.
Vedanta is traditionally only taught to those who are ready to hear the teaching. There’s little point dipping in and out, reading occasional books and attending the odd lecture.
One must first prepare the mind to be able to grasp and assimilate the teaching; a teaching that may at first seem radical and counterintuitive, but which, upon reflection, makes perfect sense.
Vedanta requires a clear and open mind. You must be willing to let go of everything you think you already know and carefully consider the teaching as unfolded by a skilled Vedanta teacher.
In that sense, Vedanta is not for everyone, for it does require a commitment of time and effort. Until quite recently, Vedanta was something of a closed system, only taught in India by qualified teachers and delivered in Sanskrit. Whereas yoga and Buddhism have easily exported to the West over the past century or so, Vedanta’s influence has been more subtle.
While few in the general public will have ever heard the term ‘Vedanta’, its influence is nonetheless pervasive. The core concepts of Vedanta have profoundly influenced and inspired a great many other teachings, including Buddhism, and in the West, the theosophical movement and its new age offshoots, the new thought movement, and many Western thinkers and authors.
In contemporary spirituality, the ‘non-duality’ scene (which includes teachers such as Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, and Mooji), is essentially a repackaging of the core concepts of Vedanta. These advaita (or neo advaita) teachers borrow the fundamental elements of Vedanta. Their teachings have some value, but it is limited, because they fail to present the full picture.
Vedanta is a system. It works by following the teaching sequentially from beginning to end. There’s no point jumping ahead until the logic of each stage has first been understood and accepted.
This approach doesn’t appeal to everyone. Many Western spiritual seekers prefer a more rebellious, ‘follow your own vibes’ approach. They believe that enlightenment isn’t something that can be taught; that words are insufficient, and the truth can only come from within. For them, sitting down and listening to someone teaching from centuries old texts doesn’t seem very punk-ass.
This is, nevertheless, the way the teaching works — and it does work!
The problem with following your own way and only going with what ‘resonates’ with you, is that mortal enemy of the discriminating mind — confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is one of the greatest obstacles to Self-knowledge. Owing to this hard-wired tendency of the mind, we only seek out or pay attention to what we already believe and agree with. So rather than learning, we spend our lives simply reinforcing our ignorance. And this ignorance, Vedanta points out, is at the very core of our suffering.
This doesn’t, however, mean that Vedanta is about mindlessly adopting a new worldview, doctrine, or set of beliefs.
As a student, you’re not expected to blindly accept what you’re being taught. At each stage, you carefully reflect and consider the teaching to prove its validity for yourself. You’re meant to question it, to work through doubts, and consider it from all angles.
Experience and Knowledge
Eventually, most self-honest spiritual seekers hit a dead-end. They get to a point where they realise that, even after decades of meditation, yoga, and perhaps occasional samadhis and epiphanies, they still haven’t changed one little bit. Their spiritual experiences come and go, but their experience of themselves and life — and their existential suffering — hasn’t changed much at all.
It take a mature seeker to admit that spiritual experiences, however blissful and wondrous they might be, come and go and rarely create lasting change. They don’t end the seeking. If anything, they reinforce the seeking, and thereby the ego, because the moment you have a taste of bliss and it dries up, you immediately crave more.
As long as you’re psychologically dependent on any external factor for your happiness, you remain trapped in the wheel of samsara — a self-perpetuating cycle of seeking, craving, and dissatisfaction.
Experience, which is the result of action, can’t create lasting change. It can’t do this because, like anything perceptible, it is time-bound. That’s why Vedanta says that trying to manipulate objects and experiences (and this includes manipulating the mind) can’t lead to lasting freedom.
What does lead to lasting freedom, however, is knowledge.
Vedanta contends that our suffering — the sense of being a lacking, limited, person who must continually chase after objects and experiences in order to be happy and whole — is based on ignorance of our nature.
The only cure for ignorance is knowledge. Knowledge destroys ignorance as rapidly as a light destroys darkness.
Vedanta is known as jnana yoga, the yoga of Self-knowledge.
It requires a mature mind. It doesn’t negate meditation and yoga. In fact, meditation and yoga are seen as necessary practices (sadhanas) to prepare the mind to receive the teaching. These practices are viewed not as ends in themselves, but as necessary means for cultivating a pure and qualified mind.
There’s a reason that of the many hundreds of thousands of seekers in the world, only a few every ‘get’ enlightened. This is not down to the capricious hand of fate. It’s because only those few have done the necessary groundwork to cultivate an appropriately calm, discriminating, dispassionate, and clear mind. That’s the primary qualification for Vedanta.
If you aren’t yet ‘qualified’, however, you needn’t worry. Vedanta offers karma yoga, upasana yoga and meditation as means of managing the mind and neutralising our entrenched desires and aversions, which over a lifetime have conspired to create worlds of suffering for us.
A Nondual Reality
We live in a world of apparent duality; of subject and object; of me, you, and the world.
Nevertheless, the essential teaching of Vedanta is that, in spite of appearance, reality is actually non-dual. All the seemingly separate beings and constituent parts of this duality are, in fact, expressions of — and appearances in — the same universal consciousness (Brahman; the Self).
Furthermore, we are not separate from this consciousness. In fact, it is the essence of what we are. Consider dreaming and the dreamworld. When you’re asleep, an entire universe of form, places, objects, and people appears before you, and you identify with one particular portion of this. Everything in the dream, however, is but an expression of — and an appearance in — the dreaming consciousness. It has no existence or reality outside of consciousness.
Everything you experience — the world of objects, forms and experiences — appears within consciousness.
It’s actually impossible to experience anything outside of consciousness. Take a moment to consider this. In any given moment, your senses are relaying all kinds of data. Objects are perceived outside of you: walls, furniture, houses, trees, people, mountains, and clouds.
But WHERE are you actually experiencing these objects? It might seem that you are experiencing them outside of yourself. But actually, the senses are merely relaying signals, enabling you to experience representations of these objects in your mind; in your own consciousness.
You can’t experience anything outside of consciousness. Consciousness is the very ground of your existence; and the basis of your reality. The content of your consciousness is ever-changing, but consciousness itself remains changeless and unlimited.
Consciousness, pure awareness, is the eternal factor that can never be negated; the one thing that can never be taken from you.
It takes time to fully grasp and integrate this radically different understanding of reality. Yet the teachings of Vedanta prove, in numerous ways and with impeccable logic, that all you ever experience — and all you ultimately ever are — is actually consciousness.
This, in time, dissolves your identification with the limited mind-body-ego entity you assumed yourself to be; which is but a superimposition in consciousness and literally the source of all your troubles.
You discover a far more expansive identity as awareness, and the result is freedom from the suffering of samsara. The Vedas proclaim this freedom, moksha, to be the highest goal of human life.
In actuality, there’s nothing particularly mystical or magical about enlightenment. It’s simply a sense of freedom from limitation, freedom from suffering, brought about by knowledge of your self and reality as it actually is.
In a world where knowledge is power, the ultimate knowledge — Self Knowledge — is nothing less than liberation.
