B
Brahman
Aleksandar Uskokov
Department of South Asian Languages and
Civilizations, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL,
USA
Definition
The first principle; the cause of creation, mainte-
nance, and destruction of beings.
Introduction
Brahman is one of the most common ideas in
Hinduism, persistent throughout its history, and
it may generally be defined as the first cause in the
creation of the world. Its canonical definition is
given in the Brahma-Sūtra 1.1.2 (derived from the
Taittirī ya Upaniṣad 3.1.1 and repeated in the
Bhāgavata 1.1.1) as that from which proceed the
creation, sustenance, and destruction of beings. It
is, thus, the most general ontological principle,
and in theistic Vedānta it is also identified with
personal divinity such as Viṣṇu or Kṛṣṇa.
The earliest uses of Brahman, however, are not
as straightforward as our initial paragraph sug-
gests. In the early Vedic corpus, Bráhman (with
the acute accent on the first syllable) was solely
associated with a hymn that an inspired poet
would fashion, or a charm or a sacrificial formula
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2018
P. Jain et al. (eds.), Hinduism and Tribal Religions, Encyclopedia of Indian Religions,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1036-5_341-1
that a priest would use in a ritual, through which
the gods would be strengthened, or otherwise help
would be derived for achieving a purpose, such as
getting rid of one’s enemies, of evil spirits, or of
danger in general. Bráhman was, further, com-
monly and explicitly identified with speech
(vāc), and the poet or priest that utters such speech
was called brahmán (with the acute accent on the
last syllable) through association ([1], pp. 1–10).
Brahman was, thus, a complex of related ideas of
inspired speech that had creative power and was
associated with men who utter it.
The early scholarship on Brahman has recog-
nized this complex and has focused on what
Bráhman meant in the various early Vedic texts
and how it developed to stand for the great ground
of Being and origin of everything: the investiga-
tion of Brahman the origin commonly proceeded
through searching after the origin of Brahman and
through negotiating the space between Bráhman
the holy speech and Brahman the universal prin-
ciple. In many cases, the arena of such polemics
was comparative Indo-European linguistics.
Without going into the details, we may point out
two views that were at the extreme not only con-
ceptually but methodologically as well. Paul
Thieme claimed that the original import of
Bráhman was a “formulation” that was created
specifically for ritual use. In other words,
Bráhman was a poetic creation. By implication,
brahmán was a “formulator” in the sense of Brah-
man that creates [2]. Jan Gonda, on the other hand,
was much more willing to side with the native
2 Brahman
tradition that always interpreted Brahman as the
power that makes things grow: “To my mind,
brahman is a more or less definite power . . .
which often, and especially in the more ancient
texts, manifests itself as word, as ritual . . . sacred
or magical word” ([3], p. 70).
As hinted above, the native tradition had con-
sistently related Brahman to a principle which is
itself great and makes other things grow, and its
etymology was associated with the root √bṛṁh,
meaning “to grow” or “to make things grow” ([3],
p. 20). This etymology is found, for instance, in
the Viṣṇu Purāṇa 3.3.31: “It is called Brahman
because it is great and because it makes things
grow” ([3], p. 19). Śaṅkara likewise says in his
commentary on the Taittirī ya Upaniṣad (2.1.1)
[12]: “It is Brahman because it is the greatest.”
The association of Brahman with speech as a
creative principle, however, was not lost on the
native tradition, and Brahman is occasionally
identified with the Veda, with the performance of
ritual, and through that with growth. In such con-
texts, it is explicitly called śabda-brahman or the
verbal Brahman. One such case is in the third
chapter of the Bhagavad-Gī tā [10], which delin-
eates a primordial social contract between the
gods and the humans, forged by the highest
Vedic divinity Prajāpati, in which men are obliged
to offer sacrifices for the gods and the gods to
reward men by pouring rain. Verses 14–15 say
that beings grow from grain, grain grows from
rain, rain is produced through sacrifice, sacrifice
is rooted in action, and action is rooted in “Brah-
man.” Brahman on its part is rooted in the “imper-
ishable.” Śaṅkara and most other commentators
identify “Brahman” with the Veda and the “imper-
ishable” with Brahman itself. The speech that is
Brahman, thus, makes things grow through laying
out ritual performances that cause rain, and
through that food, but is itself an effect of Brah-
man the first principle.
In the philosophy of the grammarians and of
the Vedāntin Maṇḍana Miśra, however, Brahman
the first principle itself was speech in nature.
Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadī ya famously opens with
the statement that Brahman which has no origin
and end and which itself is the origin of the world
is essentially verbal (śabda-tattvam), whereas the
external things are its apparent transformations.
This is another śabda-brahman that is, further,
commonly identified with the Vedic praṇava, the
holy sound Om.
Brahman in the Upanisads and the
Brahma-Sūtra ˙
It was in the Upaniṣads, however, that the notion
of Brahman became the central object of reflec-
tion. In the Upaniṣadic corpus, as the Brahma-
Sūtra (BS) had systematized it, Brahman in the
most general sense is the first principle from
which individual beings are born. The locus
classicus of this canonical determination of Brah-
man was Taittirī ya Upaniṣad (TU) 3.1.1: “That
from which these beings are born, on which, being
born, they live, and into which they return at
death, try to know that distinctly: it is Brahman.”
This passage provided the definition of Brahman
in the tradition of Vedānta because it was the
topical text for the Brahma-Sūtra statement that
Brahman is that from which proceed creation,
maintenance, and destruction of beings
(BS 1.1.2).
Creation passages with different degrees of
elaboration and a significant variety of detail are,
otherwise, found throughout the Upaniṣads, and
this principle from which creation proceeds is
variously called “the great being” (mahān bhūta,
Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad [BĀU] 2.4.10;
4.5.11), “the imperishable” (akṣara, Muṇḍaka
Upaniṣad [MU] 1.1.7), “Being” (sat, satyam,
Chāndogya Upaniṣad [ChU] 6, TU 2.6), and
“the Self” (ātman, TU 2.1.1) and is implicitly or
explicitly identified with Brahman. The beings
that are created from Brahman include further
creation principles that are associated with colors,
the combination of which produces all the details
of the world (ChU 6: heat, water, and food,
corresponding to red, white, and black), the five
elements (TU 2.1.1: space, air, fire, water, and
earth), the four Vedas and other items of scriptural
and ritual significance (BĀU 2.4.10; 4.5.11), the
social classes and Vedic deities (BĀU 1.4.9–15),
or simply “the whole” or “everything” (sarvam,
BĀU 1.4.10).
Brahman
The Taittirī ya definition of Brahman as the
cause was itself found in a wider context, how-
ever, and it was commonly taken by Vedāntins as
not informative enough. It was the positing of the
category – Brahman is the great cause of things –
but not a distinguishing definition or a determinate
description, such that it would be sufficiently clear
just how that great cause was different from other
possible causes. Four characteristics are further
predicated of Brahman in the TU that define Brah-
man in its peculiar character. TU 2.1.1 contains
the famous statement satyaṁ jñānam anantam
brahma, which says that Brahman is Being, con-
sciousness, and limitless. Further, the whole third
chapter of the Upaniṣad is an identification of
Brahman the cause of beings with ānanda, bliss.
These four characteristics provided the positive
definition of Brahman for Vedānta in general:
Brahman the cause was conscious, blissful, and
a unique, single cause. While Vedāntins have dif-
fered widely on what precise relation obtains
between Brahman and the four characteristics
and on what kind of a thing this Brahman is, as
we shall see later, the definition itself was com-
mon to all Vedāntins since it provided the para-
digmatic positive determination of Brahman.
From this derived the popular characterization of
Brahman as sac-cid-ānanda, Being, conscious-
ness, and bliss.
Another Upaniṣadic text of central importance
for the Brahma-Sūtra notion of Brahman was
Yājñavalkya’s dialogue with Gārgī Vācaknavī in
BĀU 3.8. There, Gārgī challenges Yājñavalkya to
tell her about that on which all things above the
sky, below the earth, and in between are woven
warp and woof. Yājñavalkya says that it is the
imperishable, akṣara, and proceeds to describe it
in thoroughly negative terms: “That, Gārgī, is the
imperishable, and Brahmins refer to it like this – it
is neither coarse nor fine; it is neither short nor
long; it has neither blood nor fat; it is without
shadow or darkness; it is without air or space; it
is without contact; it has no taste or smell; it is
without sight or hearing; it is without speech or
mind; it is without energy, breath, or mouth; it is
beyond measure; it has nothing within it or out-
side of it; it does not eat anything; and no one eats
it” ([4], p. 91). The MU (1.1.7) explicitly
3
described this akṣara as the origin from which
beings are born and through that identified the
imperishable with Brahman: “As a spider spins
out threads, then draws them into itself; As plants
sprout out from the earth; As head and body hair
grows from a living man; So from the imperish-
able all things here spring” ([4], p. 437). The
Bhagavad-Gī tā likewise identified the imperish-
able with the highest Brahman (8.3: akṣaraṁ
brahma paramam). The intention of describing
Brahman in such negative terms was to commu-
nicate that Brahman was essentially different from
the beings that it creates.
These two textual loci were the most important
for the Brahma-Sūtra notion, which intended to
define Brahman essentially through the means of
analogy with its creation, by combining such pos-
itive and negative characteristics. Two sūtras in
the BS were key to this: 3.3.11 and 3.3.33 [9].
Without going into the technical details, these two
sūtras say that whenever Brahman is mentioned in
the various Upaniṣadic texts that serve as props
for meditation, the proper characteristics of Brah-
man are to be “read in” these texts because they
form the general or essential notion of Brahman.
Sūtra 3.3.11 states the positive characteristics,
“bliss and the rest,” whereas sūtra 3.3.33 refers
to the “imperishable.” They, thus, point to the
Taittirī ya and the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka positive and
negative characterizations of Brahman as equally
determinative of the notion.
Yājñavalkya’s theological contest at the sacri-
fice of Janaka provided two more related main-
stays which were influential in different ways in
the schools of Vedānta but concerned specifically
Brahman’s relation to the individual Selves. One
was the identification of Brahman with the cogni-
tive agent within each individual, the inner Self or
antarātman, most explicitly stated in BĀU 3.4.
There, on the insistence of Uṣasta Cākrāyaṇa to
tell him about that Brahman which is known
immediately (sākṣād aparokṣāt brahma) as the
Self within all, Yājñavalkya describes this Brah-
man as the principle that accommodates seeing,
hearing, thinking, and knowing in general but that
cannot itself become an object of these cognitive
processes.
4 Brahman
The second is in BĀU 3.7, where Yājñavalkya
responds to the question of Uddālaka Āruṇi about
the string (sūtra) that keeps the world and all
beings together, as well as the inner controller
(antaryāmin) that guides them from within.
Yājñavalkya identifies the inner controller with
the Self within Uddālaka, which is also present
in the elements of creation, in the heavenly bodies
such as the sun, the moon, and the stars, in natural
phenomena such as light and darkness, in the
functions of life such as respiration, and in the
cognitive faculties: it is this Self that controls all of
them from within, unbeknownst to them. Then
Yājñavalkya proceeds to describe this inner con-
troller as the inner Self that is the principle that
accommodates cognition but is itself not known:
“He sees, but he can’t be seen; he hears, but he
can’t be heard; he thinks, but he can’t be thought
of; he perceives, but he can’t be perceived.
Besides him, there is no one who sees, no one
who hears, no one who thinks, and no one who
perceives. It is this self of yours who is the inner
controller, the immortal” ([4], p. 89). The notions
of antarātman and antaryāmin are clearly
identified.
This theme of the inner Self and the inner
controller became one of the key problems in the
schools of Vedānta, which were divided into
monistic and pluralistic theologies. The question
about Brahman being the inner Self was whether
Brahman was the only Self, there being no indi-
vidual Selves ultimately distinct from Brahman,
or whether Brahman was the inner Self and con-
troller of the individual Selves that kept their
separate existence. While Vedāntins have gener-
ally recognized that the Upaniṣads affirmed the
identity between Brahman and the Self, several
schools of Vedānta understood this identity as
qualitative rather than quantitative, and they
interpreted the identity statements as promoting
assimilative identification through meditation. An
all-important sūtra in this regard is BS 4.1.3,
which points to Upaniṣadic texts that understand
and teach Brahman or the Supreme Self
(paramātman, parama-puruṣa) as one’s own
Self. The theistic commentators such as
Nimbārka, Rāmānuja, and Śrīnivāsa have
interpreted this sūtra as a statement of meditation
that promotes some form of unity between the
individual Self and Brahman that does not abolish
the separate existence of the first, such as that of
an attribute to a substratum.
The Upaniṣads themselves were far from unan-
imous in this regard. While Yājñavalkya’s teach-
ings in the BĀU easily lend themselves to
monistic interpretations, there are Upaniṣadic pas-
sages that explicitly promote a form of dualism.
Some of them crucially concern Brahman and the
Self in the state of liberation from embodiment.
An often-quoted passage from the MU (3.1.1-3,
the first two verses also in Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad
[ŚU] 4.6-7 and the very first taken from the
Ṛgveda 1.164.20) says that two friendly birds
reside on the same tree, and the one eats its
sweet fig fruits, while the other just observes.
The analogy is clearly between the individual
Self and Brahman, who is called here a golden-
colored Person, the creator, the Lord, and Brah-
man the source; the tree represents the body and
the sweet figs – karma. The Upaniṣad proceeds to
say that the bird that represents the individual Self
suffers, being ignorant of the Lord, but when it
sees him, its suffering disappears, it becomes
freed from the good and bad karma and attains
paramaṁ sāmyam, the highest sameness or
similarity.
A triangulation of passages from some of the
oldest Upaniṣads indicates that the qualitative
rather than the quantitative identity between Brah-
man and the individual Self was the norm. TU
2.1.1 that provided the definition of Brahman as
Being, knowledge, and limitless proceeds to
claiming how he who knows these characteristics
as present both in the cavity of one’s own heart
and in the highest heaven “enjoys all desires with
the wise Brahman.” This text was the topical
passage for the Brahma-Sūtra understanding of
liberation as a state where one had become equal
to Brahman in all respect, primarily in the power
of enjoyment, but excluding the ability to interfere
in the functioning of the world (BS 4.4.21). The
idea of liberation as a state of enjoying all desires
was most thoroughly elaborated in the last chapter
of the ChU. There, the claim is that he who had
discovered the Self “that is free from evil, free
from old age and death, free from sorrow, free
Brahman
from hunger and thirst; the Self whose desires and
intentions are real” (ChU 8.7.1) – taken by
Vedāntins to refer to Brahman – becomes simi-
larly one “whose desires and intentions are real,”
satya-kāma and satya-saṅkalpa, that is, wins the
ability to fulfill one’s desires and intentions by the
mere thought. This was further specified as the
ability to have one’s ancestors appear before one-
self at one’s will, the ability to enjoy things such as
perfumes and garlands, food and drink, music,
and women through sheer intention, as well as
unimpeded motion through the Vedic heavens
(ChU 8.2.1-10, 8.3.4, 8.12.2). More specifically,
liberation was a state of non-return to the human
world of performing sacrifices for the gods, on the
account of attaining the world of Brahman,
brahma-loka, where one remains in some form
of an unembodied state but not quite shapeless,
like “the wind is without a body, and so are the
rain-cloud, lightning and thunder” (ChU 8.12.2).
This world of Brahman is graphically
described in the first chapter of the Kauṣītaki
Upaniṣad (KU), and for our purposes it is impor-
tant to note that Brahman itself is presented as
personified. Brahman sits on a couch called
amitaujas, “of limitless might,” which is identi-
fied with life breath and is made of various Vedic
chants. The liberated Self approaches this Brah-
man, sits on its couch, and on Brahman’s question
“Who are you?” concludes its reply with “You
yourself are the Self of every being, and I am
who you are.” After some more discussion, Brah-
man concludes, “You have truly attained my
world, it is yours.” Despite the explicit identifica-
tion of the individual with Brahman, this is clearly
a case of qualitative identity, “the highest similar-
ity,” which is further confirmed by the description
of the attained state: “When one comes to know
this, he wins the same victory and success that
Brahman has” (KU 1.7).
In the Brahma-Sūtra, already, Bādari had
rejected such personal Brahman as the first prin-
ciple, for several reasons, the main being that it
makes no sense for the omnipresent Brahman to
be localized in brahma-loka. The Brahman in
brahma-loka was, rather, the so-called kārya-
brahman, Brahman as the effect or the universal
soul called Hiraṇyagarbha that animates the
5
whole world as life breath, prāṇa (BS 4.3.6-10).
Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta had endorsed this
interpretation, but Bādarāyaṇa himself had
rejected it (BS 4.3.14), and in the theistic schools
of Vedānta Brahman was in any case identified
with a personal divinity, such as Viṣṇu, and
brahma-loka with a sphere beyond the created
world.
In the later Upaniṣads, there are several pas-
sages based on which two other characteristics are
commonly predicated to Brahman in Vedānta:
omnipotence (sarvaśakti) and omniscience
(sarvajña). The first is in the ŚU 6.8, which says
that the Supreme has various innate capacities (ś
akti) and proceeds to list three: knowledge, power,
and action (jñāna, bala, kriyā). The Upaniṣad
directly presents such capacities as the means
through which the divinity creates the world in
its various details: “Who alone, himself without
color, wielding his power [śakti] creates variously
countless colors, and in whom the universe comes
together at the beginning and dissolves in the
end – may he furnish us with lucid intelligence”
(ŚU 4.1, [4], p. 423). That Brahman possesses ś
aktis of various kinds through which it vicariously
transforms itself into the world became an impor-
tant determination of Brahman in several schools
of Vedānta, and even Śaṅkara commonly
describes Brahman as omnipotent.
The ŚU also describes the divinity which
through its greatness creates the world, explicitly
called the wheel of Brahman, as omniscient,
sarvavid (6.1-2). The commonplace reference for
Brahman’s omniscience in later Vedānta texts,
however, came from verse 1.1.9 of the MU. That
verse is also situated in a creation passage, and it
describes the imperishable Brahman (akṣara)
from which the creation proceeds as sarvajña
and sarvavid, omniscient.
Brahman in Vedānta
In systematic thought, Brahman was the specific
domain of the schools of Vedānta that developed
through the medium of commentaries on the
Upaniṣads and the Brahma-Sūtra. Although all
the schools of Vedānta drew on the same
6 Brahman
Upaniṣadic data, and addressed the same question
about Brahman in its relation to the individual
Selves on the one hand and the world on the
other, their ideas about Brahman differed widely.
Here we will look briefly at the founders of the
three most prominent schools of Vedānta: the
Advaitin Śaṅkara, the Viśiṣṭādvaitin Rāmānuja,
and the Dvaitin Madhva.
Śaṅkara’s (ca. 700–750) theology identified
Brahman with the cause from which all beings are
created, according to the standard Taittirī ya defi-
nition. Such determination of Brahman, however,
was not informative enough in Śaṅkara’s eyes to
distinguish Brahman the first cause from compet-
ing candidates, such as the atoms of Vaiśeṣika or
the prakṛti of Sāṅkhya (TUBh 2.1.1). In fact, in
later Advaita Vedānta, causality is commonly
described as a taṭastha-lakṣaṇa or an accidental
characteristic of Brahman. Śaṅkara, therefore,
claimed that Brahman in its specific nature was
defined in three sets of characteristics stated in
Upaniṣadic texts (BSBh 4.1.2) [13]. The first
were characteristics that present Brahman as “the
light of consciousness,” and these are the positive
qualities from the Brahma-Sūtra systematization:
Being, consciousness, bliss, and limitless.
Brahman, however, did not belong to the genus
of causes, and Śaṅkara’s theology did not take
these qualities as characteristics the collocation
of which would make a determinate description
of Brahman, a particular of a genus, but as defin-
ing features whose purpose was to jointly delimit
Brahman as a thing sui generis. For that to be the
case, Brahman’s qualities could not be character-
istics such as common things have, for instance,
color, but features that are identical with Brahman
as constitutive of its nature. This was the idea
behind Śaṅkara’s habitual descriptions of Brah-
man as nirviśeṣa, having no distinguishing char-
acteristics (TUBh 2.1.1).
Brahman’s Being, for instance, was not like the
being of any object, such as a clay pot, an object to
which being was predicated as a characteristic so
long as the object was existent: Brahman was
Being that is predicated to everything, the Being
that never ceases to be. Likewise, Brahman’s con-
sciousness was not any content of awareness that
can be predicated of a subject, but it was the “light
of consciousness” that makes cognition possible
yet does not admit of the subject-object distinction
on which cognitive content depended. Finally,
Brahman’s being bliss did not involve any expe-
riential bliss, and to Śaṅkara’s mind this bliss was
but synonymous with freedom from transmigra-
tion (BĀUBh 3.9.28.7) [11].
The second and the third set were the negative
characteristics of Brahman, such as “unborn,
deathless, beyond hunger and thirst” etc., whose
purpose were to deny any change in Brahman on
the one hand and to present it as thoroughly dif-
ferent from its creation on the other. These nega-
tive characteristics of Brahman were related to the
positive as their determinants – the Being and
consciousness that is Brahman is not liable to
change – and through that had a massive herme-
neutic significance in Śaṅkara’s system. Since
Brahman was a permanently changeless thing,
the Upaniṣadic descriptions of creation where
Brahman was that from which real things proceed
could not be read as statements that have full truth
value, since Brahman’s transformation into such
things would be contradictory to Brahman’s being
permanently changeless. The Upaniṣadic descrip-
tions of creation, then, had to be read not as
accounts of real creation but as illustrations of
causality that should intimate not that Brahman
transforms into everything but that everything just
was Brahman. It was such kind of cause that
Brahman was, and the talk of transformation into
beings in the Upaniṣads was just the closest
approximation of causality that one could com-
prehend (BSBh 2.1.14).
The negative characteristics were similarly
related to Brahman’s feature of consciousness,
specifically through the Self of every individual
being. The Upaniṣadic accounts of creation say
that Brahman, having created the world, entered
into it as the cognitive agent, that is, as the Self of
every individual being. The negative characteris-
tics of Brahman applied to the feature of con-
sciousness were meant to prevent cognitive
agency from obtaining as an essential characteris-
tic of the cognitive agent. To put it differently,
Brahman in its feature of consciousness was
each and every individual Self, not, however, as
individual nor as the Self that cognizes content of
Brahman
awareness but as the pure awareness that makes
cognition possible (TUBh 2.1.1).
The two essential features of Brahman, how-
ever, had some internal uneasiness. As Being,
Brahman was essentially causal, that great plenti-
tude that is coordinated with everything as the
only real thing, and through that it was external.
As consciousness, Brahman was inner, to which
the great external Brahman seemed like a second
entity. This external Brahman is commonly
described by Śaṅkara as Īśvara, with omnipotence
and omniscience as the important characteristics.
It was, therefore, in the identity statements of the
Upaniṣads, such as the tat tvam asi, “You are
that,” in ChU 6.8.7ff, and ahaṁ brahmāsmi, “I
am Brahman,” in BĀU 1.4.10, that Brahman was
most directly defined. Brahman’s being the inner
Self of the cognitive agent prevented Brahman
from being causal and external, and Brahman’s
being great prevented there being a second entity
to the inner Self. This was, then, the only abso-
lutely true statement about Brahman, “I myself am
Brahman,” the light of consciousness, eternal,
pure, and bliss in the sense of being ever free.
Brahman’s being the cause, its entering the crea-
tion as the Self, etc. was just a way of facilitating
the subject’s understanding that the Being, con-
sciousness and bliss that is Brahman is nothing
but myself (BSBh 2.1.22). (Here we will not go
into the details of Śaṅkara’s cosmology where the
question of Brahman’s relation to ignorance or
avidyā becomes important, and the reader should
look at the entry on Śaṅkara.)
Rāmānuja’s (ca. 1077–1157) theology of
Brahman was radically different from that of
Śaṅkara. For Rāmānuja, Brahman was a personal
divinity, identical with Viṣṇu: he refers to him
predominantly as Puruṣottama, the supreme per-
son. The most common way for Rāmānuja to
describe Brahman was through the so-called
ubhaya-liṅgatva or the fact that Brahman pos-
sesses two kinds of characteristics: “superlative
auspicious qualities” (niratiśaya-kalyāṇa-guṇa)
and “freedom from imperfections” or “opposition
to everything defiling” (nikhila-heya-pratyanī ka)
([5], pp. 65–76). Another classification that
Rāmānuja occasionally makes divides the charac-
teristics of Brahman into essential and natural.
7
The first, svarūpa-nirūpaṇa-dharma, is five in
number and is the canonical characteristics from
the BS: Being, consciousness, limitless, bliss, and
purity. The last of these, purity or amalatva, may
be understood as a collective noun that includes
the full set of the negative characteristics of Brah-
man from the BS, and it seems to be equivalent to
the freedom from imperfections in the first classi-
fication ([5], pp. 88–113). Purity and infinity dis-
tinguish Brahman from the individual selves and
the world, and thus Brahman essentially or sub-
stantively is Being that is unlimited and uncondi-
tional consciousness and bliss in nature.
Consciousness and bliss are also constitutive of
the essential nature of the individual selves, and
matter is Being – Rāmānuja is a realist, unlike
Śaṅkara – but they are not essential in the same
way as in Brahman’s case. Brahman’s Being is
changeless, unlike that of matter, and the con-
sciousness of the individual selves is liable to
contraction occasioned by embodiment. The two
are, also, entities essentially dependent on Brah-
man, unlike Brahman that is essentially
independent.
The group of “natural” (svabhāva) characteris-
tics seems to include relational characteristics
which Brahman has “naturally” but which he
can exhibit only in relation to other beings. We
may illustrate these with the characteristic of
saulabhya or accessibility, which became one
the most important divine attributes in post-
Rāmānuja Śrīvaiṣṇava theology: Brahman is
accessible naturally, but the manifestation of his
accessibility is contingent on there being other
living beings that intend to approach him ([5],
pp. 96–97). This rubric, the “natural” characteris-
tics of Brahman, is equivalent to what Rāmānuja
calls the “superlative auspicious qualities” and
includes two sets of characteristics that the later
tradition has subsumed under the notions of
supremacy (paratva) or lordship (ī śitṛtva) and
accessibility (saulabhya) ([5], pp. 77–87). The
first consists of six characteristics that made their
entrance into Vedānta from the Pañcarātra system
as the defining features of the category of
Bhagavān or God: knowledge (jñāna), power
(bala), majesty (aiśvarya), capacity (śakti), valor
(vī rya), and splendor (tejas). Commentators
8 Brahman
interpret this knowledge as omniscience to distin-
guish it from the essential jñāna or consciousness.
The second set consists of characteristics such as
compassion and generosity. The classification that
involves a limited number of characteristics not-
withstanding, however, Rāmānuja was in the
habit of describing the auspicious qualities as
“infinite.”
Rāmānuja was, like Śaṅkara, a monist but of a
very different kind. The world and the individual
Selves in this ontology were real entities, consti-
tuting “the body” of Brahman. By a “body,”
Rāmānuja meant any dependent reality that a con-
scious being can use for its own purpose, as its
extension of a sort. The body and the embodied
formed a unit of entities that kept their separate
being yet constituted an organic whole. Thus,
central to Rāmānuja’s theology of Brahman’s rela-
tionship to the world and the individual Selves
was Yājñavalkya’s teaching about the inner
dweller, the antaryāmin, that controls everything
from within. Brahman was the universal Self to
which everything else was a body. Rāmānuja
referred to other similar kinds of relations to illus-
trate this notion of organic whole, such as modes
and mode-possessor (prakāra-prakārin), parts
and part-possessor (aṁśa-aṁśin), subordinate
and principal (guṇa-guṇin), supported and sup-
port (ādheya-ādhāra), ruled and ruler (niyamya-
niyantṛ), etc. His system is commonly called
viśiṣṭādvaita or “non-duality of the qualified,”
through one of these relations, namely, the
substantive-adjective or viśeṣya-viśeṣaṇa-bhāva.
Rāmānuja also accepted the BS doctrine of Brah-
man as the material cause of the world, but Brah-
man was such a cause through having matter as its
mode, in virtue of which the shortcomings of the
world did not affect Brahman’s essential nature
([5], pp. 114–157).
Finally, Brahman for Rāmānuja was most spe-
cifically Nārāyaṇa, the personal divinity that has
his own body in the direct sense, a body that is a
permanent divine form characterized by beauty,
grace, and similar superlative features and dwells
in a celestial abode with consorts, retinue, etc., the
“supreme place,” paramam padam, of Viṣṇu ([5],
pp. 167–175).
Madhva (1238–1317) was another famed
Vedāntin, an uncompromising pluralist and a real-
ist. He was the only founder of a school of
Vedānta who claimed that Brahman could not
possibly be the material cause of the world:
Brahman’s essential nature was consciousness
and bliss, and it was unthinkable that the insen-
tient world that is the locus of suffering could be a
transformation of a cause so different from it. For
Madhva, then, Brahman was just the efficient
cause of the world, and there obtained absolute
difference between Brahman and the two other
principles of reality, the insentient matter and the
sentient individual Selves. Madhva’s doctrine is
known as prapañca-bheda, a fivefold absolute
difference between Brahman and the individual
Self, Brahman and insentient matter, the various
individual Selves, insentient matter and the indi-
vidual Selves, and the various material entities
([6], p. 73).
What distinguishes Brahman as one among the
several coeval reals is its independence. Brahman
is an independent principle, svatantra, omniscient
and omnipotent, whereas the insentient matter and
the individual sentient Selves are dependent on
Brahman ([7], pp. 36–41). Although insentient
matter is the stuff of creation and is coeval with
Brahman, unlike the Sāṅkhyan prakṛti, it is not in
itself able to evolve the world, and it requires the
guidance and control of Brahman. Likewise,
although the individual Selves are essentially
knowledge in nature and possess agency, these
are obscured by ignorance, a feature of matter
that is an “inscrutable power of Brahman,” such
that without the intervention of Brahman the indi-
vidual Self remains in bondage. Since matter is
itself insentient, though, even this feature of
obscuring the knowledge of the individual Selves
depends on the will of Brahman. Thus, both the
individual Selves and matter are dependent prin-
ciples, asvatantra, incapable of independent
action without the sanction of Brahman ([8],
p. 100). Brahman is, therefore, immanent in the
world in a sense that is much more direct than in
any other brand of Vedānta.
Madhva further argued that Brahman is an
entity that essentially possesses diverse positive
characteristics. Even if one were to assume that
Brahman
Brahman is without positive characteristics,
nirviśeṣa, that would still be a positive determina-
tion insofar as Brahman would be characterized as
different from everything else. “Having no
distinguishing features” was a distinguishing fea-
ture, and such being the case, there is no reason
why Brahman would not have other kinds of
characteristics that are positive in a more straight-
forward manner ([8], pp. 115–121).
Madhva’s realist ontology, in fact, required
that Brahman be a qualified entity, saviśeṣa, and
have characteristics of various kinds. As the effi-
cient cause, Brahman must be both omniscient
and omnipotent, as well as possessed of a will to
create. The negative descriptions of Brahman
throughout the Upaniṣads were denials that Brah-
man has characteristics that are products of the
material cause of the world, prakṛti. For instance,
the statements that Brahman is formless are
denials that Brahman possesses a form composed
of the five elements of creation, but not a denial
that Brahman may have his own form that pos-
sesses hands, feet, a face, etc., made of Brahman’s
own trans-material nature. This trans-material
nature was constituted, in fact, by the classical
positive characteristic of Brahman: Being, con-
sciousness, and bliss. “Viṣṇu’s eternal and innate
body is faultless consciousness and bliss,” said
Madhva ([6], pp. 94–95). Like Rāmānuja,
Madhva was also a Vaiṣṇava and Brahman for
him was simply Viṣṇu.
In an important sense, however, Madhva was a
non-dualist. He argued that the characteristics of
Brahman were not qualities different from Brah-
man and standing in some sort of a relationship to
it. Rather, Brahman was a single substance that is
for practical purposes described through the attri-
bution of diverse characteristics. These character-
istics are explicative, but not constitutive of
Brahman, much after the fashion of attribution of
omnipresence to space. Central in this regard was
the notion of viśeṣa or specific difference, which
for Madhva was an intrinsic capacity of a thing to
be a homogenous whole yet be described as a
substance that has various attributes ([6],
pp. 95–97).
9
Cross-References
▶ Advaita Vedānta
▶ Aum
▶ Bhagavad Gītā
▶ Bhāgavata Purāṇa
▶ Bhāskara
▶ Bhedābheda
▶ Brahmā
▶ Brahma Sūtras (Vedānta Sūtras)
▶ Dvaita Vedānta
▶ God, Overview
▶ Madhva
▶ Nimbārka
▶ Rāmānuja
▶ Śaṅkara (Śaṁkara)
▶ Upaniṣads
▶ Vāc
▶ Vedānta, Overview
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