Internal lineage · sampradāya
Advaita Vedānta
अद्वैत वेदान्तAdvaita VedāntaFounder / origin — Ādi Śaṅkarācārya (8th c. CE)
Non-dualism — Brahman alone is real; the world is māyā; ātman is Brahman.
Advaita Vedānta, systematised by Ādi Śaṅkara, holds that reality is one undivided Brahman — pure consciousness — and that the plural world arises through māyā. Liberation is the recognition (jñāna) that the individual self and Brahman were never two. The tradition is anchored by the four maṭhas Śaṅkara founded at Śṛṅgeri, Purī, Dvārakā, and Jyotirmath.
Related essays
Essay · Vocabulary
What is Dharma — and what is a Hindu?
The words Dharma, Sanātana and Hindu — where they come from, what they actually mean, and how the four great sampradāyas (Vaiṣṇavism, Śaivism, Śāktism, Smārtism) scale the same spiritual mountain from different sides.
Essay · Bhagavad Gītā 2.47–2.51
Karma Yoga — the discipline of acting without craving the fruit
A reading of niṣkāma karma from the Gītā's most quoted verse outward: why the fruit is withdrawn but the act is not, how samatva (evenness) turns work into yoga, what 'skill in action' actually means, and how the three Vedānta schools read the agency that remains.
Essay · Greater India · Living practice
The living flame — Bali's Hinduism and the sacred dance
Why an island in the world's largest Muslim-majority nation remains over eighty per cent Hindu — the empty stone throne of Acintya, the daily canang sari, the instrument-free Kecak chant, and the hyperextended royal postures of Khon and Robam Preah Ream.
Essay · Gītā 4.13
Guṇa, not birth — the architecture of society in Gītā 4.13
The most fiercely argued verse in the Gītā. Does cāturvarṇya describe a hereditary caste order or a psychological typology of qualities and work? A reading of the Sanskrit, Śaṅkara's Advaitic gloss, later reformist readings of the verse, and the counter-verse in chapter nine.
Essay · Gītā 2 · Sāṅkhya Yoga
The seed chapter — Sāṅkhya Yoga as the whole Gītā in miniature
The ācāryas call chapter two the sūtra of the entire Gītā: if the rest were lost, the architecture of liberation would survive here. Arjuna's collapse, the refutation of Cārvāka materialism, the immortal Ātman, and the portrait of the sthitaprajña that the Buddhist and Jain traditions would recognise instantly.
Essay · Gītā 18 · Mokṣa Sannyāsa Yoga
Do as you wish — renunciation, the guṇas and free will in Gītā 18
The longest chapter closes the argument. Kṛṣṇa cuts between ritualists and world-fleeing ascetics by separating sannyāsa from tyāga, sorts action, knowledge and even food by the three guṇas, and then — having delivered the most secret knowledge — leaves the decision entirely to Arjuna.
