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What Is Vedanta?
Exoterically, the word “Vedanta” refers to the knowledge contained in the texts that are at the end of each Veda. These texts are called Upanishads. The fundamental idea of the Upanishads is that reality is non-dual (advaita) awareness and that the ultimate goal of human life is the realization of the non-dual self. The realization of the self is called moksa, or liberation.
Vedanta is a Sanskrit compound word. Veda means “knowledge,” and anta means “end.” Esoterically, Vedanta is “the knowledge that ends the quest for knowledge.” What is it, the Upanishad says, that “knowing which, everything is known”? The realization that the “I” is whole and complete, actionless awareness ends the quest for the meaning of life because it destroys the belief that the self is limited, inadequate, incomplete and separate, a notion that is commonly called duality. Duality is a problem because it causes people to seek lasting happiness though the enjoyment of impermanent objects, a quest that always ends in disappointment and disillusionment.
A long teaching tradition has developed over the last three thousand years based on Upanishadic ideas. This teaching tradition is also known as Vedanta. But to convey the precise meaning of Vedanta the word “pramana” needs to be added. A pramana is “a means of knowledge.” All knowledge takes place with the aid of some means. Sense objects require sense organs to be known. The knowledge of ideas depends on an intellect. But since the self is not an object, the senses and the mind cannot know it. But Vedanta can reveal it by using ideas and logic to remove one’s ignorance about it, delivering direct self-knowledge.
As Vedanta evolved over time it became a very attractive means of knowledge as great sages added their commentaries and contributions to the literature. At some point in its long history enough apparent doctrinal differences concerning the nature of reality appeared that Vedanta seemed to be disintegrating into several “schools of thought.” These apparently conflicting views do not compromise Vedanta as long as it is taken as a means of knowledge, because the purpose of any teaching is to remove self-ignorance. And because different minds formulate self-ignorance differently, an idea that may reveal the self to one person may not reveal it to another. But many people who are not interested in liberation and are not qualified for it are nonetheless attracted to Vedanta for intellectual reasons because it is a very beautiful and profound body of literature. In India these people are known as pundits. The pundit class by and large takes Vedanta as a philosophy and views the emphasis on different doctrines as “schools of thought” or sects. But in its original sense advaita is not an adjective used to modify a particular school of Vedanta but an adjective indicating the nature of awareness, the self.
Vedanta is not a philosophy or a school of thought, because it is not the contention of an individual or a group of individuals. Philosophies are subject to negation and correction because they are invariably speculations, imaginations, beliefs and opinions of an individual or a small group of individuals – which means they are always subject to error or irrelevancy because they do not serve a fundamental human need, in this case the need to be free of limitation. Where is existentialism today? Vedanta has thrived for several thousand years precisely because it is not a personal philosophy.
Vedanta is called “shruti.” Shruti literally means “heard.” Its teachings are meant to be “heard” from someone who has been freed by them and who can skillfully wield them to help the qualified aspirant remove his or her ignorance. But shruti has a more general meaning too. It means revealed unauthored truth that has passed the test of time. In other words, the essence of Vedanta, the teachings that remove self-ignorance, do not change, because they effectively do what they are intended to do. Nobody is pressing for a new, improved eye since the eyes do all they need to do. So in this sense Vedanta, like the Sanskrit its mantras are formulated in, is a perfected body of knowledge. Nothing needs to be added to it, no timely modifications are necessary to help it adapt to recent times. But this has not stopped people from making of it what they want.
In approximately the last one hundred years Vedanta has suffered an apparent change, largely as a result of the teachings of Vivekananda around the turn of the twentieth century. Its basic function as a means of self-knowledge became confused with the doctrines of Yoga because Vivekananda, who had a profound influence on the West’s understanding of Vedanta (probably unintentionally), reduced it to “jnana” (knowledge) yoga, one of the many branches of Yoga. In fact, Yoga has traditionally been considered a subset of Vedanta, its purpose being to aid in the preparation of the mind to receive the teachings of non-duality. Before Yoga sullied the pure teachings of Vedanta enlightenment was considered to be the removal of ignorance about the nature of the self. But with the ascendancy of the Yoga teachings enlightenment came to be considered a “permanent experience of the self” in contrast to the mundane experiences of everyday life, which it obviously can’t be if this is a non-dual reality as the Upanishads claim. It can’t be a permanent experience, first because there is no such thing as a permanent experience, and second because it can’t be an experience in a non-dual reality, because the subject-object distinction necessary for experience is missing in a non-dual reality. If this is true then the quest for a permanent enlightenment experience is pointless and what is needed, as traditional Vedanta says, is the knowledge of reality since the craving for experience, including the experience of the self, is maya, the consequence of seeing oneself as a doer who is separate from reality. Or to put it another way, trying to get out of maya experientially is not ever going to happen, because maya is unreal. How can one be “in maya” in the first place if maya is only an apparent reality? The only way out of maya is to see that maya, the belief in duality, is only in the mind and to destroy it with the knowledge of reality. In any case, the experiential notion of enlightenment has been the dominant view for the last one hundred years, although it goes back to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. This Vedantic evolution has been labeled “Modern” Vedanta, an oxymoron if ever there was one.
By and large the wave of “export gurus” that inundated the West in the sixties peddled Modern Vedanta with considerable success. Then in the eighties the Western spiritual world became reacquainted with Ramana Maharshi, a sage in the Vedic tradition who had achieved international recognition around the middle of the twentieth century but who had been all but forgotten since his death in the fifties. Ramana was not a traditional Vedantic sage but he realized the non-dual nature of the self and taught both Vedanta and Yoga. Self-inquiry, which many Neo-Adviatins believe to be his invention, is as old as the Vedas itself. The rediscovery of Ramana roughly coincided with the rise of “Neo-Advaita.” Neo-Advaita is basically a “satsang”-based “movement” that has very little in common with either traditional Vedanta or Modern Vedanta or even its inspiration Ramana – except for the doctrine of non-duality.
I have recently been informed that in spite of the fact that no new Vedantas are required, we have entered the “post-Neo-Advaita” period. Presumably, Westerners have seen enough of Neo-Advaita and are now waiting for the next permutation of the Upanishadic teachings that by their nature never change.