Brahman

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, maintenance, 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 suggests. 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 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, commonly 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 recognized 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 investigation 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 principle. 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 conceptually 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 Brahman that creates [2]. Jan Gonda, on the other hand, was much more willing to side with the native # 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 2 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 consistently 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 contexts, 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 delineates 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 “Brahman.” Brahman on its part is rooted in the “imperishable.” Śaṅkara and most other commentators identify “Brahman” with the Veda and the “imperishable” 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 Brahman 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 Brahman 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 reflection. In the Upaniṣadic corpus, as the BrahmaSūtra (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 Brahman 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, however, 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 Brahman in its peculiar character. TU 2.1.1 contains the famous statement satyaṁ jñānam anantam brahma, which says that Brahman is Being, consciousness, 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 differed 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 common to all Vedāntins since it provided the paradigmatic positive determination of Brahman. From this derived the popular characterization of Brahman as sac-cid-ānanda, Being, consciousness, 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 outside 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 imperishable all things here spring” ([4], p. 437). The Bhagavad-Gī tā likewise identified the imperishable with the highest Brahman (8.3: akṣaraṁ brahma paramam). The intention of describing Brahman in such negative terms was to communicate 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 positive 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 Brahman 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 sacrifice of Janaka provided two more related mainstays 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 cognitive 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 Brahman as the principle that accommodates seeing, hearing, thinking, and knowing in general but that cannot itself become an object of these cognitive processes. 4 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 controller 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 individual Selves ultimately distinct from Brahman, or whether Brahman was the inner Self and controller of the individual Selves that kept their separate existence. While Vedāntins have generally 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 Brahman 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 unanimous in this regard. While Yājñavalkya’s teachings in the BĀU easily lend themselves to monistic interpretations, there are Upaniṣadic passages 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 goldencolored Person, the creator, the Lord, and Brahman 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 Brahman 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 similarly 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 oneself 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 important to note that Brahman itself is presented as personified. Brahman sits on a couch called amitaujas, “of limitless might,” which is identified with life breath and is made of various Vedic chants. The liberated Self approaches this Brahman, 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, Brahman concludes, “You have truly attained my world, it is yours.” Despite the explicit identification of the individual with Brahman, this is clearly a case of qualitative identity, “the highest similarity,” 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 principle, 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 kāryabrahman, 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 passages 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 important 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 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 definition. Such determination of Brahman, however, was not informative enough in Śaṅkara’s eyes to distinguish Brahman the first cause from competing 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 defining 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 characteristics 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 Brahman as nirviśeṣa, having no distinguishing characteristics (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 consciousness was not any content of awareness that can be predicated of a subject, but it was the “light Brahman 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 experiential bliss, and to Śaṅkara’s mind this bliss was but synonymous with freedom from transmigration (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 different from its creation on the other. These negative 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 hermeneutic 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 descriptions 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 comprehend (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 characteristics of Brahman applied to the feature of consciousness were meant to prevent cognitive agency from obtaining as an essential characteristic 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, however, had some internal uneasiness. As Being, Brahman was essentially causal, that great plentitude 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 absolutely 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 creation as the Self, etc. was just a way of facilitating the subject’s understanding that the Being, consciousness 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 person. The most common way for Rāmānuja to describe Brahman was through the so-called ubhaya-liṅgatva or the fact that Brahman possesses 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 characteristics 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 Brahman from the BS, and it seems to be equivalent to the freedom from imperfections in the first classification ([5], pp. 88–113). Purity and infinity distinguish Brahman from the individual selves and the world, and thus Brahman essentially or substantively is Being that is unlimited and unconditional 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 consciousness of the individual selves is liable to contraction occasioned by embodiment. The two are, also, entities essentially dependent on Brahman, unlike Brahman that is essentially independent. The group of “natural” (svabhāva) characteristics 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 postRāmānuja 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” characteristics 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 interpret this knowledge as omniscience to distinguish 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 notwithstanding, 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, constituting “the body” of Brahman. By a “body,” Rāmānuja meant any dependent reality that a conscious 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 relationship 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 illustrate 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 support (ādheya-ādhāra), ruled and ruler (niyamyaniyantṛ), 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 Brahman as the material cause of the world, but Brahman 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 specifically 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). Brahman Madhva (1238–1317) was another famed Vedāntin, an uncompromising pluralist and a realist. 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 insentient 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 individual 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 individual 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 principles, 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 determination insofar as Brahman would be characterized as different from everything else. “Having no distinguishing features” was a distinguishing feature, and such being the case, there is no reason why Brahman would not have other kinds of characteristics that are positive in a more straightforward 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 efficient 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 Brahman 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 possesses 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, consciousness, 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 Brahman and standing in some sort of a relationship to it. Rather, Brahman was a single substance that is for practical purposes described through the attribution of diverse characteristics. These characteristics 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 References 1. Griswold HDW (1900) Brahman: a study in the history of indian philosophy. The Macmillan Company, New York 2. Brereton J (2004) Bráhman, Brahmán, and Sacrificer. In: Griffiths A, Houben JEM (eds) The vedas: text, language & ritual. Egbert Forsten, Groningen, pp 325–344 3. Gonda J (1950) Notes on Brahman. J.L. Beyers, Utrecht 4. 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