Advaita Vedānta
Śaṅkara (Ādi Śaṅkarācārya) · 8th century · The four maṭhas: Śṛṅgerī, Dvārakā, Purī, Jyotirmaṭh · Daśanāmī monastic order
Advaita sees one reality and no second. Brahman, pure being and pure consciousness, alone is; the world of many things is its appearance, and the seeker is not a soul climbing toward a distant God but the Self that has mistaken itself for something small. The whole spiritual problem is a case of mistaken identity: the deathless Self taken to be a body that ages and a mind that grieves. So the school asks not for acquisition but for discrimination. Hear the teaching, reason it through, abide in it, and let the sentence that you are That do its quiet work, until what remains is what was always here.
Advaita as a Gītā tradition begins with Śaṅkara, whom the hagiographies remember as a Kerala brahmin who renounced young, walked the length of India, and died at thirty-two, sometime in the eighth century. He wrote commentaries on the principal Upaniṣads, the Brahmasūtras, and the Bhagavadgītā, the triple canon, along with the independent Upadeśasāhasrī. The question of his age was whether Vedic action, alone or combined with knowledge, brings the highest goal. Against the Mīmāṃsā ritualists he answered no: action presupposes a doer, and the doer is precisely what knowledge of Brahman dissolves. He argued just as strenuously with the Buddhist schools, insisting that beneath the flux of experience stands an unchanging witness.
The school he left behind became a river. His early disciples and successors elaborated the system; later sub-schools, Bhāmatī and Vivaraṇa, disputed fine points such as where ignorance resides, in the jīva or in Brahman. The renunciate community organized itself as the Daśanāmī order, with maṭhas at Śṛṅgerī, Dvārakā, Purī, and Jyotirmaṭh tracing their descent to Śaṅkara himself. On the Gītā the commentarial line stayed unusually alive: Ānandagiri glossed the bhāṣya, Śrīdhara Svāmī gave it a devotional warmth that Vaiṣṇavas also embraced, Madhusūdana Sarasvatī braided dialectics with bhakti in the Gūḍhārthadīpikā, and Nīlakaṇṭha and Dhanapati Sūri carried the conversation into the early modern era.
In the twentieth century the lineage stepped out of the monastery and into the household. Swami Sivananda founded the Divine Life Society at Rishikesh in 1936; his disciple's disciple Swami Chinmayananda began teaching Vedānta in public halls, and the Chinmaya Mission grew around him from 1953; and Gita Press, begun at Gorakhpur in 1923 by Jayadayal Goyandka and his colleagues, printed the Gītā by the tens of millions with sādhanā-centered commentary in plain language. Through these channels an Advaita-shaped reading of the Gītā became, for many families, simply the way the book is read.
Śaṅkara's dates are unsettled: the tradition remembers 788 to 820 CE, while modern scholars argue for roughly 700 to 750, or the late seventh century.
Whether Śaṅkara himself founded the four maṭhas and the Daśanāmī order is historically uncertain, though the living institutions trace their descent to him.
Of the hundreds of works bearing his name, scholars accept a core as securely his, the three bhāṣyas and the Upadeśasāhasrī; much else was likely composed by later teachers holding the Śaṅkarācārya title.
Brahman is the sole reality: pure being, pure consciousness, pure bliss, without a second. In itself it bears no qualities at all; through its own inscrutable power it appears as Īśvara, the Lord with qualities whom the world rightly worships and by whom the world is governed. Nothing exists apart from Brahman; whatever seems other is appearance only.
The jīva is not a part or product of Brahman; it is Brahman itself, seeming limited the way space inside a jar seems separate from space. Body, mind, and agency are superimposed on the Self through beginningless ignorance. Remove the superimposition and no individual remains to be liberated; only the Self remains, which was never bound.
The world is neither simply real nor simply unreal. For all practical transaction it stands firm: actions bear fruit, scripture binds, dharma matters. Yet it is vivarta, an appearance resting on Brahman that leaves Brahman unchanged, as a rope is never altered by the snake seen in it. Knowledge does not destroy the world; it sublates the claim that the world is final.
Mokṣa is not produced, attained, refined, or reached, for anything produced would also perish. It is the very nature of the Self, hidden only by ignorance. Knowledge alone removes that ignorance, the way light removes dark; action cannot, because action presupposes the very doer that knowledge dissolves. One so awakened may continue living, free while embodied: jīvanmukti.
The Gītā opens with a man collapsing under grief for those he must kill, and the teaching answers grief at its root: no one here slays, and no one is slain. We hear the second chapter's discrimination between the real and the unreal as the whole book in seed. Karma yoga is honored fully, but as purification: acting without claim on the fruit scours the mind until it can receive the knowledge that the Self never acts at all. And when the final chapter asks the seeker to abandon every dharma and take refuge, we hear the call to set down even the last identity of the doer, and rest as the Self.
“In all three times we are eternal in our nature as the Self. The plural is used following the difference of bodies, not with the intent of a difference of Selves.”