In its very first word the text sets down a grave mystery. Shankaracharya bows to that Govinda who is the subject of every conclusion of the Vedanta, and who stays forever beyond the reach of the senses. What the whole text will speak of is no object of the eye or the ear. And notice this: he names “Govinda” and “the true guru” in a single breath. His own guru bore the name Govindapada. So this salutation goes at once to God and to the guru, because in Advaita, in the end, the two are not separate.

Now Shankaracharya builds a staircase, each step rarer than the one below it. Among all living beings a human birth is rare; rarer still is real capability, then the fitness for knowledge, then treading the Vedic path of dharma, then true learning; and above all of these, three more steps: the discrimination of self from non-self, the direct experience of one’s own being, and coming to rest as Brahman. And liberation? That is never won without the merit of a hundred crore lifetimes. This staircase is shown so that a person may recognize where he stands. Whoever holds a human birth, the capacity to understand, and the wish to turn toward these words has already climbed many of its steps. Only the top three remain. To come this far and then halt, this is Shankaracharya’s worry.

That long staircase Shankaracharya now gathers into three. These three things are rare and come only by the grace of God: being human, the ache for liberation, and the shelter of a great soul. Of these, the middle one, the ache for liberation, is the subtlest. A human birth comes to countless beings, and a guru too can be found, yet a true ache for liberation is rare. Most minds want a better livelihood, better relationships, a little more pleasure; the wish to be free of this whole round of coming and going seldom wakes. Shankaracharya says that in whoever this ache has arisen, it has not come by chance. It is grace.

Now comes the sharpest shloka of the text, and Shankaracharya deliberately chooses a hard word: atma-ha, the slayer of the self. Having somehow won a rare human birth, and within it capability and the sight of the shastras, the one who still will not strive for his own liberation, that dull-witted man destroys his own self. This killing is done by no weapon. It is done by clinging to the unreal, holding on to the counterfeit and letting the genuine go. To pour a whole life into what does not last is a slow suicide. The words are hard, and they are spoken out of compassion, like a physician who names the disease plainly so the patient will wake up.

Then comes a direct question. Who could be a greater fool than the one who, having won a rare human body and capability within it, grows careless about his own true good? The key to this shloka is the word “svartha.” In today’s language it sounds like greed. Its real sense here is sva-artha, one’s own true good, one’s own real purpose. Shankaracharya’s blow lands here: a person shows great cleverness in a thousand small matters, in money, in livelihood, in accounts and reckonings; yet about what is genuinely his own he stays careless. The greatest cleverness and the greatest carelessness dwell side by side in the same person.

Now Shankaracharya counts off every familiar act of religious life. Let people go on reciting the shastras, offering yajna to the gods, performing rites, worshipping the deities; without the realization of the oneness of the self there is no liberation, not even across a hundred lifetimes of Brahma. The reason is that all of these are “doing,” and liberation is “knowing.” Liberation gains no new thing. It is the erasing of an old illusion, the illusion that “I am separate from Brahman.” And an illusion is not undone by action, however great; it dissolves only in clear seeing. That is why no measure of time and no measure of action is enough.

On this very point Shankaracharya now calls the shruti itself as witness. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the famous line from the dialogue with Maitreyi runs: there is no hope of immortality through wealth. From this it is clear that action is not the cause of liberation. Shankaracharya takes one logical step further. What is wealth? The fruit of action. Yajna, worship, good deeds, the fruit of all of these is a kind of wealth, earthly or heavenly. And if wealth cannot buy immortality, then action cannot buy liberation, because action only breeds more wealth. Liberation belongs to an altogether different order.

For seven shlokas we have heard what does not bring liberation: action, wealth, learning by itself. Now for the first time Shankaracharya says what to do, and it has two limbs. Let the learned one strive for liberation, giving up the craving for outer pleasures, going to some true and great guru, and gathering his mind on the meaning that guru teaches. The first limb is the renunciation of the craving for outer pleasures; this comes first. The second is the shelter of a guru, never the road walked alone. This is one of the hearts of Advaita: this path is not crossed by books alone; it asks for a living guru, one who has known it in himself. The whole Vivekachudamani ahead sets exactly this scene, a guru, a student, and a dialogue flowing between them.

Yet alongside the shelter of a guru Shankaracharya sets a balance. Lift up your own self, sunk in the ocean of the world, by your own effort, holding firm in right vision, settled in the seat of yoga. The same note sounds in the Gita, and here both things are said together. A guru is necessary, and even so a guru cannot lift the drowning man in the student’s place. The guru shows the way; the walking belongs to the seeker. The “I” that is drowning and the “I” that lifts are one and the same self.

To break free of the world’s bondage, renouncing all action, let the learned and steady ones strive by taking up the practice of the self. The phrase “renouncing all action” can sound hard, and Shankaracharya is no enemy of action; the next shloka will give action a necessary role. The hint here is to stop clinging to action, to drop the hope that action by itself will hand over liberation. The word “dhira,” steady, is a beautiful one. The steady one does not waver; in him there is stillness. The practice of the self asks for stillness. This is no work for hurry.

And now the shloka that gives action its exact place. Action serves the purification of the mind. It does not reach the truth; the truth is realized through inquiry, and not by a hair’s breadth through millions of actions. Action’s work is to wipe a soiled mirror, and this work is necessary, since without a clean mirror nothing will show at all. But wiping and seeing are two different acts. However much you wipe a mirror, nothing “enters” it by the wiping; the wiping only removes the grime that had covered an image already there. In the same way action purifies the mind, and does not manufacture the truth. The truth is realized by direct examination, by going down with an honest mind into the question “what am I, really.” Even millions of actions cannot do the work that one honest inquiry does.

This “inquiry” Shankaracharya now pours into Advaita’s most beloved illustration: the rope and the snake. Right inquiry alone settles the truth of the rope, and that same certainty destroys the fear and grief of the great snake that had risen out of illusion. A rope lies in the dark, and it appears to be a snake. The fear seems real, the heart pounds, sweat breaks out. What will erase that fear? Not worship of the rope, not a battle with the snake, since the snake is not there at all. Only one thing erases it: light, and in that light the clear seeing that “this is only a rope.” That is all. Shankaracharya says our every worldly fear is just like this rope and snake, and its cure is the same, nothing to be done, only clear seeing.

And now the close of the first part, which repeats the point of shloka 11 with full force, this time by naming examples. The certainty of a thing’s truth comes through inquiry, and through the word of a well-wisher, not through bathing at holy fords, not through charity, not through a hundred rounds of breath control. Bathing at the fords, charity, breath control, these are all fine and holy acts, and they cannot give certainty, because they are all doing and certainty is understanding. A problem in mathematics is not solved by any amount of bathing or giving; it has to be understood. In the same way the certainty of “who am I” comes from only two things, one’s own true inquiry, and the sound word of a well-wishing guru. It is with these two that the text moves forward.