Unit 15 · Interpreters Across the Centuries

In Sanskrit learning, the great teachers rarely wrote brand-new books from nothing. Instead they wrote a bhashya, a commentary on an older text held to be authoritative. A bhashya quotes a line of the root text, explains its words and grammar, and then draws out its meaning. It often argues against rival readings by stating their case first and then answering it.

This method is called purvapaksha and siddhanta. The purvapaksha is the opponent’s view, stated fairly and often strongly. The siddhanta is the author’s settled conclusion. Good commentators took their opponents seriously, since a weak summary would make their own answer look weak. Students today can learn from this habit of fair statement.

Commentaries then gathered their own commentaries. A student of Shankara’s school might read a sub-commentary on his commentary on the Upanishads. The result is a long conversation across centuries. Each school’s teachers built on the founder’s work, and each school’s texts answered the others by name.

Vedanta teachers speak of the prasthana traya, the "triple foundation" or three starting points. They are the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras. A teacher who wished to found a school of Vedanta was expected to comment on all three, showing that his reading made sense of each one.

The Upanishads were regarded as shruti, revealed texts. The Gita, part of the Mahabharata, belongs to smriti, "what is remembered," but it was treasured as a summary of Upanishadic teaching. The Brahma Sutras, credited by tradition to Badarayana, are about 550 short aphorisms that organize the Upanishads’ teaching into a system.

The Brahma Sutras are so brief that they cannot be understood without a commentary. Scholars date them roughly to the early centuries CE, though estimates vary widely. Because they are so compressed, each school reads them to support its own view. That is why the same three texts could found several different philosophies.

Shankara, or Adi Shankaracharya, is dated by most scholars to about the 8th century CE. Traditional accounts say he was born in Kerala, traveled all over India, debated other schools and died young. Some lineages give earlier dates. He is the most famous teacher of Advaita Vedanta, the school of "non-dualism."

Advaita teaches that Brahman, pure being, awareness and bliss, is the one reality. The self, atman, is not other than Brahman. Our ordinary sense that we are separate persons in a world of many things is due to avidya, ignorance. Shankara compares it to seeing a rope in dim light and mistaking it for a snake. When a lamp is brought, the snake was never there.

Shankara does not say the world is nothing. At the level of everyday life it is real enough, and duties and worship matter. But from the highest standpoint, he teaches, only Brahman is ultimately real. Later Advaitins used the word maya for the power by which the one appears as many. Advaita followers hold that liberation, moksha, comes through knowledge that removes ignorance.

For Shankara, tat tvam asi is a mahavakya, a great saying that teaches identity. "That" refers to Brahman, the cause of the universe. "Thou" refers to the individual self. On the surface they seem different: Brahman is all-knowing and infinite, the self limited and struggling.

Shankara’s school explains the phrase with an example. When someone says, "This is that Devadatta I met years ago," we set aside the differences of time and place and recognize the same person. So too, set aside the limits of "that" and "thou," and what remains is one pure awareness. Shankara holds this is what the Upanishad intends.

Advaita followers see this reading as the plain sense of the Upanishads. Critics from other schools argue that it makes the personal God, worship and the world less than ultimately real. Advaitins reply that worship is valuable and prepares the mind for knowledge. The debate between these positions has continued for more than a thousand years.

Tradition says Shankara founded four mathas, or monastic centers, at the four corners of India: Sringeri in the south, Dwaraka in the west, Puri in the east and Jyotirmath in the north. Scholars debate how many of these he founded himself. The heads of these mathas carry the title Shankaracharya today.

Shankara is also credited with many hymns, including devotional poems to Shiva, Vishnu and the Goddess. Scholars debate which of these he actually wrote. The tradition’s picture of Shankara joins a stern philosopher of knowledge with a devout poet, and many Smarta Hindus honor him as a great teacher.

In the modern period, Advaita became very influential outside India. Swami Vivekananda presented a form of it at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Many Western readers came to think of Advaita as "the" Hindu view. Scholars caution that this is misleading, since other Vedanta schools have far larger followings among devout Hindus.

Ramanuja is traditionally dated 1017 to 1137, though many scholars give a shorter life in the 11th and 12th centuries. He lived in Tamil Nadu and led the Sri Vaishnava community at the great temple of Srirangam. He wrote the Sri Bhashya on the Brahma Sutras and a commentary on the Gita.

His school is called Vishishtadvaita, "qualified non-dualism" or "non-dualism of the qualified." Brahman is one, but Brahman is qualified by, or includes, real souls and a real world. Ramanuja’s key image is soul and body. As a soul lives in and controls a body, God lives in and controls all souls and the world, which make up his body.

For Ramanuja, Brahman is not an impersonal reality but a personal God, Narayana or Vishnu, full of good qualities: knowledge, power, beauty and compassion. The world is not an illusion. Souls are real, eternal and distinct, yet they cannot exist apart from God. This allowed Ramanuja to join Upanishadic philosophy with the bhakti of the Tamil poet-saints.

For Ramanuja, both "that" and "thou" in tat tvam asi refer to Brahman. "That" is Brahman as cause of the world. "Thou" is Brahman as the inner controller dwelling in Shvetaketu’s self. Words that name a body can also name the soul within it, and words that name a soul can name God within it. So the phrase teaches that God lives in the self, not that the self simply is God.

Ramanuja reads the Gita as a book of devotion. He takes bhakti to be a loving, constant remembrance of God that grows from knowledge and action. On Gita 18.66, "giving up all dharmas, come to me alone for refuge," his tradition sees a call to prapatti, complete surrender. Later Sri Vaishnava teachers called 18.66 the charama shloka, the final verse.

Ramanuja’s followers see his reading as faithful to both the Upanishads and the devotional heart of the Gita. Advaitins answer that his reading adds distinctions the texts do not need. Both sides cite the same verses and argue from grammar, context and the whole sweep of scripture. That is how Vedanta debate works.

Madhva, also called Madhvacharya or Anandatirtha, lived in the 13th century; scholars often give 1238 to 1317, while his tradition gives earlier dates. He was born near Udupi in present-day Karnataka, where he established the worship of Krishna in a temple still famous today. He wrote commentaries on the Brahma Sutras, the Gita and the Upanishads.

His school is called Dvaita, dualism. Madhva taught five eternal differences, the pancha-bheda: between God and souls, God and matter, souls and souls, souls and matter, and matter and matter. God, Vishnu, is fully independent. Everything else is dependent on him. The world is real, and the differences in it are real.

Madhva also taught that souls differ in nature, and his tradition holds that God’s grace, won through devotion, is necessary for liberation. In moksha the soul does not merge with God; it lives in joyful service and nearness to him. Madhva’s followers today, including many in Karnataka and among Kannada-speaking families abroad, honor him as a great teacher of devotion.

Sanskrit words often join together in writing, which can hide where one word ends and the next begins. In the Chandogya phrase sa atma tat tvam asi, Madhva’s tradition finds a possible division: sa atma atat tvam asi, "that self, thou art not that." On this reading, the Upanishad teaches the self’s difference from God.

Madhva also offers a second line of argument that does not rely on the split. Even if the words are read "that art thou," he argues, the phrase can mean "you are like that" or "you belong to that," in the way one might say a devoted servant is "one" with his master’s purpose. He points to the Upanishad’s many images that show difference, such as the bird and the tree.

Advaitins reject the split reading as forced. Madhva’s followers answer that his reading fits the grammar and the whole of scripture better, and that the Upanishads’ own images keep God and soul apart. As with the other schools, the argument rests on careful claims about language, context and the rest of scripture.

Setting the schools side by side helps. On the self: Shankara says it is not other than Brahman; Ramanuja says it is real and distinct but part of God’s body; Madhva says it is eternally different from God. On the world: for Shankara it is real at the everyday level but not ultimately; for Ramanuja and Madhva it is fully real.

On God: for Shankara, the highest Brahman is beyond all qualities, though worship of a personal God is valuable. For Ramanuja and Madhva, the highest is the personal God Vishnu, full of good qualities. On liberation: for Shankara, knowledge removes ignorance; for Ramanuja, devotion and surrender bring God’s grace; for Madhva, devotion and God’s grace bring the soul near to him.

None of these schools is a relic. Each has monasteries, temples, teachers and families who follow it today, in India and in the United States. When studying them, the goal is not to pick a winner. It is to understand each teacher’s reasoning well enough to explain it in terms its followers would recognize.

Ram Mohan Roy (1772 to 1833) was a Bengali scholar who knew Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and English. In the 1810s he translated several Upanishads, including the Isha and the Kena, into Bengali and English. He argued that the Upanishads taught worship of one formless God, and he urged Hindus to return to these texts.

Roy is best known for his campaign against sati, the practice, in some communities, of a widow dying on her husband’s funeral pyre. Roy argued from the scriptures themselves. He cited texts that praised a widow’s life of discipline and learning, and argued that the highest teaching, knowledge of Brahman, did not require such a death. The British government banned sati in Bengal in 1829.

In 1828 Roy helped found the Brahmo Samaj, a reform society for worship of one God based on the Upanishads. Many Hindus admired his work; others opposed his reforms as too influenced by Christianity and the British. Historians call him a founder of the Bengal Renaissance, a burst of reform and learning in the 1800s.

Swami Vivekananda (1863 to 1902) was a disciple of the Bengali saint Ramakrishna. On September 11, 1893, he spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, opening with "Sisters and Brothers of America." He quoted a hymn saying that as rivers from different sources all reach the sea, so different paths lead to God.

Vivekananda taught a Vedanta shaped largely by Advaita. He stressed that the divine is in every person. From this he drew a practical ethic: serve human beings as God. He called this practical Vedanta. In 1897 he founded the Ramakrishna Mission, which runs schools, hospitals and relief work to this day.

Vivekananda read the Gita as a call to strength, fearlessness and work for others. He is honored in India as a national figure, and his birthday is observed as National Youth Day. Some scholars note that his presentation of Hinduism as one unified Vedanta shaped how many Westerners and many Hindus came to see the tradition, sometimes leaving out its variety.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856 to 1920) was a scholar and a leader of the Indian independence movement. The British jailed him in Mandalay, Burma, from 1908 to 1914 for writings they judged seditious. In prison he wrote Gita Rahasya, "the secret of the Gita," in Marathi. It was published in 1915.

Tilak argued that earlier commentators, especially in Shankara’s school, had read the Gita as mainly about renunciation and knowledge. He argued instead that the Gita’s central teaching is karma yoga: selfless, energetic action in the world, even after one has gained wisdom. Arjuna, after all, is told to fight, not to retire.

For Tilak, this meant that a person of wisdom should work for the good of society, including the struggle for freedom. He did not reject nonviolent methods, but he did not treat nonviolence as an absolute rule. Many in the freedom movement found strength in his reading; others, including Gandhi, disagreed with parts of it.

Gandhi first read the Gita in Edwin Arnold’s English verse as a law student in London in 1889. It became the book he read most. He translated it into Gujarati as Anasaktiyoga (1929 to 1930), and from Yerwada Jail in 1930 he wrote weekly letters on it to his ashram, later published as a small book.

How could a war poem teach nonviolence? Gandhi gave several answers. He read the battle as an allegory of the fight between good and evil in the heart. He argued that a person who truly acts without attachment to results, as Gita 2.47 teaches, cannot harm others for gain. And he said the Mahabharata itself shows the futility of war, since almost everyone dies.

Gandhi’s reading has been admired worldwide and has shaped nonviolent movements, including the American civil rights movement through Martin Luther King Jr. Critics, including some Hindu scholars and Tilak’s supporters, have argued that his allegory sets aside the plain setting of the poem. Gandhi answered that he read the Gita through his own experience of trying to live it.

Aurobindo Ghose (1872 to 1950) was educated in England and returned to India as a scholar and a radical nationalist. In 1908 he was arrested in the Alipore bomb case and held in jail for a year before being acquitted. He later wrote that in jail he read the Gita and the Upanishads daily and had a deep spiritual experience.

In 1910 he left politics and settled in Pondicherry, then a French territory, where he devoted himself to spiritual life. His Essays on the Gita (published in the journal Arya, 1916 to 1920) read the Gita as teaching an integral yoga, joining knowledge, action and devotion into one path that transforms the whole person.

Aurobindo saw the Gita’s battlefield as both real and symbolic: a picture of the world’s struggles in which a person must act. His followers, centered at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, continue his teaching. Scholars see him as one of several modern thinkers who reread old texts to speak to a changing India.

The first English translation of the Gita, by Charles Wilkins, appeared in 1785. By the 1840s, American writers in New England were reading it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leading Transcendentalist, owned a copy and shared it with friends. He wrote in his journal of his debt to it.

In 1857 Emerson published a poem called "Brahma" in the new Atlantic Monthly. Its first stanza echoes Katha Upanishad 1.2.19 and Gita 2.19: if a slayer thinks he slays, or the slain thinks he is slain, neither understands, since the self neither kills nor is killed. Many readers in 1857 found the poem baffling, and it was widely parodied.

Emerson’s poem shows how the texts traveled. An American poet borrowed an idea, set it in English rhyme and gave it a Sanskrit title. Scholars discuss how well he understood the sources. Some Hindu readers welcomed his interest; others see Western borrowing of this kind as taking ideas out of their living context.

Henry David Thoreau lived in a small cabin at Walden Pond, Massachusetts, from 1845 to 1847. His book Walden (1854) describes that life. In it he writes that each morning he bathed his intellect in the vast philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, beside which, he said, modern thought seemed small.

Thoreau imagined the water of Walden mixing with the sacred water of the Ganges. For him, the Gita’s teaching of action without clinging to results fit his own experiment in simple living. He also admired its calm and its large view of time. Some Hindu readers today welcome his praise; others note that he read the text alone, apart from the practice around it.

Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience (1849) later influenced Gandhi, who read it in South Africa. Gandhi’s nonviolence, in turn, influenced Martin Luther King Jr. Scholars trace this chain of readers across continents. It shows how texts can travel from India to New England and back, changing as each reader takes them up.

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891 to 1956) was born into the Mahar community, which was treated as untouchable. He earned doctorates from Columbia University in New York and the London School of Economics. He became a leading lawyer and led the committee that drafted India’s Constitution.

Ambedkar read the sacred texts closely and critically. In Annihilation of Caste (1936) he argued that caste rested on scriptural authority, and that reform required rejecting that authority. In unfinished writings he criticized the Gita for defending the four varnas, citing verses such as 4.13 and 18.41 to 18.44. He saw the texts as having been used to keep his community down.

In 1956, shortly before his death, Ambedkar and hundreds of thousands of followers converted to Buddhism in Nagpur. Many Dalits, people from formerly untouchable communities, honor him as a liberator. Many Hindus today also honor him as a reformer, even when they read the texts differently. His critique remains central in debates about caste and scripture.

Look back over the readers in this chapter. Roy found in the Upanishads a case for one God and against sati. Vivekananda found a call to serve people as God. Tilak found a call to act. Gandhi found nonviolence. Aurobindo found an integral yoga. Emerson and Thoreau found a vast philosophy. Ambedkar found a defense of caste to be rejected.

Each reader lived in a particular setting: colonial Bengal, a Chicago stage, a Burmese prison, a New England pond, a courtroom. Each brought questions from that setting to the text. This is what scholars mean by hermeneutics, the study of how interpretation works. A reader’s situation shapes what a text seems to say.

In this course we do not rank these readers or pick the correct one. We describe each reading accurately, show the verses it rests on, and note who accepted or challenged it. A strong essay does the same. It can argue a position of its own, as long as it attributes every belief and treats each reader fairly.