The Brahma Sutras -- The Short Book Every School of Vedanta Had to Explain

The Upanishads say a great deal about Brahman, the ultimate reality, but they say it in many voices, across many texts and centuries, in dialogues, images and riddles. Do they teach one consistent doctrine? The Brahma Sutras were composed to show that they do. In some five hundred and fifty sutras -- the count varies slightly between traditions -- they gather the Upanishadic teaching into a system, answer the objections of rival schools, and set out the path and the goal.

The work is attributed to Badarayana, whom tradition identifies with Vyasa. Scholars disagree about its date, placing its final form anywhere from the last centuries BCE to the early centuries CE. Its other names describe its purpose: the Vedanta Sutras, the sutras of the end of the Veda, and the Uttara Mimamsa, the "later inquiry" into the Veda, as distinct from the Purva Mimamsa, the inquiry into ritual.

The first sutra is only three words, and it is one of the most commented-on sentences in Indian philosophy. "Now" -- after what? The commentators say: after the student has gained the qualifications for the inquiry, such as discrimination, detachment and the desire for freedom. "Therefore" -- why? Because the results of ritual and worldly effort are temporary, and only the knowledge of Brahman brings what is lasting. "The inquiry into Brahman" -- not belief, but a sustained desire to know.

The second sutra then gives the definition that frames everything after it: Brahman is that from which the birth and so on -- the origin, sustenance and dissolution -- of this world proceed. The third adds that Brahman is known through scripture; the fourth, that the scriptures, rightly read, all agree in pointing to it.

The sutras are so compressed -- often two or three words -- that they cannot be understood without a commentary, and this is what made them so important. Along with the principal Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, they form the prasthana-traya, the "three starting points" of Vedanta. To found a school of Vedanta, a teacher had to show that his reading fitted all three, and above all to write a commentary on the Brahma Sutras.

So the same sutras became the battleground of Indian philosophy. Adi Shankaracharya's commentary reads them as teaching non-dualism (Advaita): Brahman alone is real, and the individual self is not other than it. Ramanuja's Shri Bhashya reads them as qualified non-dualism (Vishishtadvaita): souls and the world are real, but they are the body of Brahman. Madhva reads them as dualism (Dvaita): God, souls and matter are eternally distinct. Nimbarka, Vallabha and, later, the Gaudiya teacher Baladeva wrote commentaries of their own. Reading the sutras with even two of these commentaries side by side is one of the best ways into Indian philosophy.