The Brahma Sutra

The first line

Badarayana opened the entire text with one small phrase, and it is still regarded as the most famous line in all of Vedanta.

Three words only, and each one carries its own weight.

“Atha,” meaning “now.” But which now? Shankaracharya pauses right here in his commentary and asks, and inside this “now” he reads a precondition, a fourfold readiness ripened in the one who asks: discernment between the lasting and the passing, dispassion toward the fruits of this world and the next, the six inner virtues, and the longing for liberation. Whoever has these may take up the inquiry into Brahman before any study of ritual duty or after it, since the inquiry does not wait on the ritual portion of the Veda. It is the now of a person who has gathered wealth and people and youth and then watched all of it prove fleeting, and who feels a deep call rising within: “What is the root of all this?” That is the “now.”

“Atah,” meaning “for this very reason.” A great deal sits inside that “for this very reason.” A person’s journey runs first through the three human aims, dharma, artha, and kama, and then a turn comes, toward the fourth aim, moksha. Badarayana’s text begins at the exact point of that turn.

“Brahma-jijnasa.” The word names the desire to know Brahman, a living act of seeking that ends only in knowing. It was chosen with great deliberation. Jijnasa means to ask, to search, to yoke the whole inner faculty to a single question. Brahman is not an object you learn once and set aside. The journey toward Brahman is an unbroken search, and it transforms the very one who undertakes it.

This is the single axis of the whole text. Who is the seer that watches everything? Badarayana’s five hundred and fifty-five sutras raise this one question from many different directions.

What this text is

The Brahma Sutra, also called the Vedanta Sutra, is the work of Badarayana Vyasa. It was compiled at some point between roughly five hundred BCE and two hundred CE. Four chapters, each chapter in four padas, sixteen padas in all, and five hundred and fifty-five sutras.

The very nature of sutra composition is that each statement is extremely terse, as though threaded onto a string. Take one example. Sutra 1.1.3 holds a single word, “shastra-yonitvat,” meaning “because scripture is its very source of proof.” Yet a whole doctrine is packed into that one word. This compression is why the Brahma Sutra is almost impossible to read without a commentary.

Three major teachers wrote commentaries on it: Adi Shankaracharya (eighth century, Advaita), Ramanujacharya (eleventh to twelfth century, Vishishtadvaita), and Madhvacharya (thirteenth century, Dvaita). All three read the same text and drew three different doctrines from it. This is a natural result of Badarayana’s sutra style, since each sutra is so dense that more than one meaning can rest upon it.

Our commentary follows Shankaracharya’s Shariraka Bhashya, which means the establishment of Advaita. Where Ramanuja’s or Madhva’s reading deserves special reflection, we will be sure to note it.

The three foundations

Vedanta philosophy stands on three foundational texts, known as the “Prasthana Trayi”:

• Shruti Prasthana: the Upanishads, which form the final portion of the Vedas. This is the “heard” word, the speech that the rishis saw directly.
• Smriti Prasthana: the Bhagavad Gita, the knowledge “held in memory,” the teaching that was spoken and remembered.
• Nyaya Prasthana: the Brahma Sutra, Badarayana’s well-ordered exposition, set on the touchstone of reason and argument.

All three point toward the same reality, in three different ways. The Upanishads mostly speak in verse and in story. The Gita speaks as dialogue. And the Brahma Sutra speaks on the touchstone of reason and argument.

Four chapters, four padas in each

What an “adhikarana” is

Reading the Brahma Sutra one isolated sutra at a time is fruitless. A whole argument cannot show itself in one or two words. For this reason the tradition took up the “adhikarana,” a group of anywhere from one to seventeen sutras on a single topic that together carry one complete thought.

Every adhikarana has five parts, according to the tradition:

1. Vishaya: the subject under consideration
2. Samshaya: the doubt that arises
3. Purva-paksha: the opponent’s view
4. Uttara-paksha: the settled position
5. Sangati: how this adhikarana connects to the one before it

We open each adhikarana in the order of these same five parts, without the burden of the labels, in an easy conversational style.

How to read this

One approach: take only the first sutra, “athato brahma-jijnasa,” now, therefore, the inquiry into Brahman, and sit with it for a week. Then the next adhikarana. This is the slowest pace, and the truest.

A second approach: read the four padas of chapter one, one at a time, a pada to a sitting. Each pada of chapter one runs twenty to thirty minutes. The whole of chapter one takes about two hours.

A third approach: take only the famous sutras, 1.1.1 (athato brahma-jijnasa, now, therefore, the inquiry into Brahman), 1.1.2 (janmady asya yatah, that from which the world’s birth and the rest proceed), 1.1.4 (tat tu samanvayat, but that, because the texts converge on it), and a few of the major sutras in between. This is a ten-minute bird’s-eye view.

Do not try to read it start to finish in a single sitting. This text was never composed for that.