THE GROUND BENEATH APPEARANCE: SHANKARA AND REALITY OF WORLD

Brahman is real; the world is an error; the self is nothing other than Brahman. The verse that has summarized Advaita Vedanta for the better part of a thousand years is anonymous. Shankara never wrote it. And it may have cost him more sympathetic readers than any of his opponents ever managed to drive away. This book takes the eighth-century philosopher seriously enough to disagree with him, and it does so using objections that his own tradition raised first. Shankara built something no European mystic ever managed to build. His ground is not a thing hiding behind the world. It is the substrate without which the world could not so much as appear to be there. Everything he says about the way we mistake one thing for another depends on that insight, and the insight holds. One further step does not hold. To say that appearances rest on a ground is not yet to say that appearances are false, and the moment Shankara takes that further step his system acquires a difficulty it never resolved. The ignorance that is supposed to produce the world has nowhere to live. Ramanuja counted seven distinct ways in which the doctrine fails. Advaita itself divided into two schools that gave incompatible answers to the same question and never reconciled them. The argument has been running ever since, inside India, in Sanskrit, for twelve hundred years, and it is a far better argument than anything the comparative study of mysticism has produced about it since. >Keywords: Shankara, philosophy, consciousness, Vedanta, metaphysics, nonduality, India, reality