Vedânta-Sûtras

Book Summary

The Brahma-Sūtras (or Vedānta-Sūtras) are traditionally ascribed to Bādarāyaṇa and stand, alongside the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gītā, as one of the three foundational texts of Vedānta philosophy. Because the 555 aphorisms are so compressed that they are barely intelligible without a commentary, the history of Vedānta is largely a history of rival commentaries arguing over what Bādarāyaṇa actually meant. This volume presents the second of the two commentaries George Thibaut translated for the Sacred Books of the East series: that of Rāmānuja, the great eleventh–twelfth-century Vaiṣṇava theologian, whose reading is commonly called Viśiṣṭādvaita, or qualified non-dualism.

Where Śṅkara reads the sūtras as teaching that Brahman is a single undifferentiated reality and that the individual self's apparent separateness is ultimately an illusion (māyā) to be dissolved through knowledge, Rāmānuja reads the same aphorisms as describing a personal Supreme Being — the ground of a real universe of souls and matter that form his ‘body’ — whom the liberated soul comes to resemble and enjoy forever without losing its own distinct identity. The translator's preface situates this disagreement in the broader history of Indian theology and explains Thibaut's own view, argued at length in his companion volume on Śṅkara, that Rāmānuja's interpretation in fact tracks the plain sense of many sūtras more closely than Śṅkara's.

The four Adhyāyas (Books) that follow work through the sūtras in traditional order. The First Adhyāya (especially its long First Pāda) establishes that the sūtras' scriptural evidence points to a personal, all-qualified Brahman rather than an attributeless one, weighing this conclusion against rival Sāṅkhya and other readings sutra by sutra. The Second Adhyāya defends the system against objections and in turn criticises rival schools, including the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika atomists and the Buddhists. The Third Adhyāya turns to the soul's path toward liberation — the disciplines and forms of meditation (vidyās) that lead to release — and the Fourth Adhyāya describes the fruits of that meditation and the soul's journey after death along the 'path of the gods' to eternal, blissful communion with Brahman.

Read alongside Thibaut's earlier translation of Śṅkara's commentary, this volume lets a reader see, argument by argument, how two of classical India's greatest theologians could derive opposite metaphysical systems from the identical set of 555 aphorisms — a debate over the nature of the self and the divine that continues to shape Hindu philosophy and devotional practice to this day.