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Title: Sankara's fatal mistake.

Authors: Betty, L. Stafford
Source: Asian Philosophy. Mar1994, Vol. 4 Issue 1, p3. 5p.
Document Type: Article
Subjects: SANKARA, Thomas
Examines the philosophy of Thomas Sankara. Sankara's non-dualistic view of sinning and
Abstract:
suffering of human beings; Recommendations for the teaching of Sankara's philosophy.
Full Text Word
2877
Count:
ISSN: 09552367
Accession Number: 9512181225

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ABSTRACT Sankara's philosophy fails definitively at the point where he leaves the human experience--'sinning and
suffering'--unaccounted for. What in each of us, he asks, sins and suffers? Is it the antahkarana, the 'mental organ'
giving rise to the series of mental states (buddis)) that file by illumined by the atman? Impossible, he says, for the
antahkarana by itself is material (jiva) and therefore unconscious (acit). Then is it the atman, upon which the
antahkarana is superimposed? Inconceivable, he says, for the atman is identical with Brahman, and Brahman is by
definition pure bliss-consciousness, as far removed from sin and suffering as can be imagined. Then is the atman in
conjunction with the antahkarana-a partnership that Sankara calls the jiva for soul)-the sinner and sufferer? Yes, he
says, as long as you remember that the sin and suffering are ultimately illusory, as illusory as the antahkarana itself. I
show why Sankara's answer fails and what the failure implies, then suggest a fruitful way to approach Sankara and
teach his philsophy to our students.

I. Introduction

In the middle of reading Thibaut's translation of Sankara's Commentary on the Vedanta Sutras more than two
decades ago, I began to feel that something strange and not quite right was taking place; it was as if I were watching
a master magician at work and everyone around me was seduced by his Sankara's sleight-of-hand except me. I

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eventually wrote my dissertation on the dualist Vedantin Vadiraja, [ 1] who, like every good Dvaitin (literally 'Twiost'),
insists that the spiritual core (atman) of persons is not identical to Brahman, as Sankara would have us believe:
Brahman and atman, for dualists, are two irreducibly different kinds of reality. As I explored and translated the logically
impressive dualist rebuttals of Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism) and of Sankara and several later Advaitins (literally
'Non-Twoists') in particular, I became all the more convinced that my first impression of Sankara was correct.

At the same time, it seemed to me that Sankara was closer in a certain way to reality, to ultimate reality, than almost
any other philosopher I had met, including those Dvaitins who reduced his philosophy to absurdity at a critical point. It
still seems that way to me.

I will point out here what I consider the fatal logical error in Sankara and non-dualism, then conclude by saying why he
nevertheless may be worthy of the high honour that India, and now the world, gives him.

II. The Fatal Flaw

Much of the following argument is found in Vadiraja and other dualist thinkers, but the climax of the rebuttal owes
more to modern Western analysis. [ 2]

The question we are putting to Sankara can be expressed in the following ways: what in each of us actually
experiences the lives that we call 'ours'? What experiences happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain? What
does the knowing? And what is it that actually wills the good or the evil things that we do? To put it in the language of
the various Vedanta schools, what 'sins and suffers'?

Let us now examine Sankara's and more broadly non-dualism's, answer to the questions we have posed. Let us follow
his analysis closely and see where the weakness lies.

What sins and suffers? Sankara wonders for the sake of argument if it is the antahkarana. But this can't be. For the
antahkarana or 'inner mental organ' (roughly the mind), is material and unconscious (jada) by everybody's admission;
and its vrtti, or 'modification' (or action), is equally unconscious. And of course, nothing that is made of unconscious
matter, however subtle or ethereal it may be (almost all India's traditional philosophers, Sankara included, regarded
the antahbarana as made of ethereal matter), is capable of knowing or willing. It is not the seat of experience.
Furthermore, even if per impossibile it were, the law of karma would become unintelligible. For the antahkarana is but
a series of thought-moments, or buddhis, each lasting only as long as the thought (or vrtti itself, and it would violate
the law of karma if one thought-moment were made to pay for the sin of an altogether different one.

Then Sankara next asks, what about the atman (self), also called the saksin (inner witness)? Is it the seat of knowing
and willing? The saksin is identical to Brahman, however, and if the saksin were the seat of our fragmentary knowing
and willing, our sinning and suffering, then Brahman would be too. And that is of course impossible. If the
antahbarana cannot be the seat of ordinary consciousness because it is unworthy, the atman cannot be, Sankara
says in so many words, because it is too worthy.

What then is the seat of knowing and willing if it is neither the antahkarana nor the saksin? Could it be the jiva, the
empirical self, the 'soul', the atman or saksin in conjunction with the various material adjuncts such as the
antahkarana? Could it be the jiva--"Brahman in empirical dress", [ 3] as one modern non-dualist described it--that is
the sinner and sufferer? Yes, says Sankara, precisely. And if an opponent (purvapaksin) were to answer that the jiva
is ultimately nothing other than the atman, and that therefore the atman, and therefore Brahman too, would
necessarily be implicated in the sinning and suffering, that opponent would merely be showing his ignorance. For the
jiva's knowing and willing, his sinning and suffering, is not ultimately real. As [Java] puts it, "The pain of the individual
soul [jiva] ... is not real, but imaginary, caused by the error consisting in the non-discrimination of (the Self from) the
body, senses, and other limiting adjuncts which are due to name and form, the effects of Nescience." [ 4] In another
place he says that "the soul does not really suffer", although as far as the "phenomenal world" goes "we may admit
the relation of sufferer and suffering just as it is observed, and need neither object to it nor refute it". [ 5]

Sankara is saying here that the jiva's suffering is merely apparent, not real. The beginningless transmigratory careers
of the infinite numbers of jivas throughout the universe are the stuff of mere seeming. The pleasure and pain, the
rewards and punishments caused by karma, are merely apparent, not real. More precisely, they have an empirical
reality only, not an ultimately true one. They are vyavaharika, not paramarthika.

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It should be clear why Sankara takes this tack. He appreciates the difficulties outlined above as well as any of us. He
has to do two things simultaneously: first, account for ordinary human experience; second, distance the atman from
any involvement in it. He tries to achieve his ends not by saying that the jiva doesn't experience it but by saying that
the experience isn't real. Sankra is like an attorney who tries to prove a man innocent of a crime not by showing that
the man didn't commit the crime but by showing that there has been some great mistake and the alleged crime was
merely imagined and didn't take place in the real world.

This is, to say the least, a strange. Does it work?

I will try to show now that it does not. Let us begin with a plain fact: we sometimes experience pain. What is this 'we'
that suffers? Sankara calls it the jiva, the soul, the conscious seat of personality. So far so good. But then Sankara
reminds us that the pain is imaginary. But I would answer that whether you call the pain real or imaginary is irrelevant,
for an imagined snake causes as great a fright as a real snake, and the terror in a nightmare is just as real as the
terror of wide-awake experience. What does it mean to say that the jiva does not really suffer, but suffers only "as far
as the phenomenal world goes"? I examine what it means for me to suffer, and I know of no distinction between
seeming suffering and outright suffering. Who has ever seemed to suffer who did not really suffer? The
hypochondriac's sickness may be imaginary, but is he not suffering anyway? There may not be a real monster
chasing the dreamer, but is he not terrified anyway? All suffering is subjective; if someone feels that he is suffering, he
is suffering, and there the matter ends. It is invalid, therefore, for Sankara to claim that the jiva does not really suffer
but merely seems to. And since according to him the sole principle of consciousness in the jiva is none other than the
atman, it follows necessarily that the atman really suffers. But the atman, according to Sankara is in turn none other
than Brahman. It therefore follows necessarily that Brahman is the sinner and sufferer.

I see no legitimate way out for Sankara and non-dualism. 'Imaginary suffering' turns out to be either nonsensical, the
proverbial hare's horn, or it turns out to be real suffering. And this suffering, though facilitated by the antahkarana, is
not the antahkarana's. Obviously then it is the javi's which is to say it is ultimately the atman's, which is to say it is
Brahman's. So Brahman, whose nature, according to Sankara is pure, undifferentiated bliss-consciousness, has
turned into a sufferer. The reductio ad absurdum is complete. Sankara has been slain with his own sword.

III. How to Appreciate Sankara

If my analysis is correct--as I believe it is--where do we go from here? I think, first, that we should admit outright that
Sankara epistemology is untenable. Non-dualism fails; it could not possibly correspond to the ways things really are.
Second, we should treat Sankara's non-dualism as a philosophical myth and discover what truth might be expressed
by it.

Das Gupta wrote in the Preface to the fourth volume of his monumental History of Indian Philosophy the following
words: "There is a general belief amongst many that monism of Sankara presents the final phase of Indian thought ...
But the readers of the present volume ... will recognise the strength and uncompromising impressiveness of the
dualistic position." [ 6] I agree with Das Gupta. As much as we may dislike admitting it, there must be some principle in
us that differentiates us--really differentiates us--from the Supreme Being, whatever name we call Him, Her, or It (we
are assuming here that such a Being exists)--unless we are willing to admit that this Being suffers along with us. If we
are not so willing--and Sankara is emphatically not--then the words 'I am Brahman', if they are to be saved, if they are
to mean anything intelligible, must be interpreted along the lines of, for example, Ramanuja's or Madhva's Vedanta,
which postulates, each in its own way, a difference between the Supreme Being and the human soul. I am aware that
it may appear that I am siding with a bhaktic over a jnanic approach to supreme realisation, and that I may be biased
towards the one over the other. That is not the case. I do not equate difference with bhakti. I equate it with sound
thinking, with a science of the possible.

I see no point, then, in trying to defend Sankara as a metaphysician, for the epistemology that underpins his
metaphysics is unsound. A genius he was, but geniuses make mistakes, even great mistakes. What interests me
about Sankara is the experience that gave rise to the mistake. Once the experience is understood, metaphysics is
transcended by something nobler, and the mistake ceases to be a mistake. Or rather it remains a mistake only at the
pedestrian level of metaphysics, while at the level of timeless myth it becomes one of the greatest, truest stories ever
told, a story about eternal salvation.

Rudolf Otto understands Sankara well when he states that Sankara concern was "not metaphysics but a doctrine of
salvation". [ 7] Otto is saying that Sankara is best understood by a mystic mystically, not by a philosopher

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philosophically. When Sankara claims that we are Brahman, he is telling us more about his experience during
samadhi than the nature of the universe. When I was a boy of 17, long before I ever heard of Sankara I made a
religious retreat with my senior class. It went very well, and I will never forget the drive home: the solid bright world
which seemed so real on the way over seemed like a strange shimmering dream on the way back. Even that
adolescent mini-samadhi had the effect of making the world seem like a mirage. It is not difficult, therefore, for me to
imagine why Sankara called the world an illusion after his samadhi: that is the way the world feels. Nor is it difficult to
imagine why he claimed he was one with Brahman. That is the way samadhi feels. One does not feel that he knows
Brahman, he does not feel that he is participating in an I-Thou relation. He feels that he is Brahman, or rather that
there is nothing else real but Brahman.

Sankara was a mystic in philosophical guise. His Commentary on the Vedanta Sutras is a philosophical myth, just as
is Nagarjuna's Madhyamikakarika. [ 8] Neither of these works can be depended on to tell us in a literal way about the
ultimate nature of things, for each contradicts itself at a critical point. Rather they tell us about a particular kind of
mystical experience. Sankara in samadhi knows nothing but the Eternal; he knows it so intimately that he seems to
merge with it; he loses all sense of individuality, of limitation and fragmentariness. He forgets what is most obvious
and fundamental to the dualist, and to the philosopher in me: that there would have been no individuality-forgetting
experience in the first place without the individual doing the forgetting. Was it not he who, for a few minutes or hours,
forgot his own identity and knew only Brahman? In denying this first fact, in denying any ultimacy to himself, to the
mystical knower, to the self-forgetter, Sankara makes his great mistake. Yet, correctly understood, it is not a mistake.
When he relegates the world, including himself, to vyavaharika status, this is his way of telling us how inconceivably
great and momentous, how ineffably beatific and blissful is the reality he knew. And this is as true a claim as ever has
been made.

Sankara writings are the ebullitions of one of the world's great mystics. They give his followers hope that they too,
someday, in some life, will experience what he experienced. What does it matter ultimately that he is untrustworthy as
a metaphysician? As a phenomenologist of a certain kind of mystical experience he is unexcelled. Non-dualism is an
experience, not a coherent metaphysical system. Didn't Sankara himself imply as much when he labelled his own
writings part of the vyavaharika world? In the final analysis Sankara was uninterested in system-building; it was the
mystical experience that he ultimately valued, and that alone. No story, however exaggerated or fanciful, whether
crafted in the form of a Platonic myth or in the way Sankara crafted his, could ever do justice to that.

The final irony is that we tend to honour and love Sankara not in spite of his metaphysical mistake but because of it. If
he had not made so exaggerated and bizarre a metaphysical claim--that there is no difference whatever between our
deepest selves and Brahman--we would not admire him as a mystic today as much as we do. The wild claim is a
warrant, a verification of the legitimacy of his experience. The more modest dualist insists that the self(jiva) is not
identical to Brahman and that therefore the self alone, not Brahman, is the sinner and sufferer. The dualist makes
more sense metaphysically than Sankara but at the same time he gives the impression of not having met the truth as
directly as Sankara with his untenable metaphysics. That is because at heart we are more moved by the non-literal, by
fancy and exaggeration, by myth, than logical, commonsensical argument.

In the final analysis Sankara is a great storyteller. But his is a strange genre, a peculiar literature, and his audience is
narrow and a bit eccentric. He tells a story, the story, for mystics, but not, alas, for philosophers.

NOTES

[1] BETTY, L. STAFFORD (1978) Vadiraja's Refutation of Sankara's Non-Dualism: Clearing the Way for Theism
(Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass).

[2] This section is a better elaborated, clearer presentation of an argument I made in (1976) A death-blow to Sankara's
non-dualism? A dualist refutation, Religious Studies, 12, pp. 281-290.

[3] IYER, M. K. V. (1964) Advaita Vedanta According to Sankara (Bombay, Asia Publishing House) p. 117.

[4] Sankara (1962) The Vedanta Sutras of Badarayana with the Commentary of Sankara, trans. George Thibaut, Vol.
II (New York, Dover Publications) p. 64.

[5] Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 379, 381.

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[6] DAS GUPTA, SURENDRANATH (1932) A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol IV (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press) p. viii.

[7] OTTO, RUDOLF (1932) Mysticism East and West (New York, Macmillan) p. 33.

[8] BETTY, L. STAFFORD (1983) Nagarjuna's masterpiece logical, mystical, both, or neither?, Philosophy East and
West, 33(2), pp. 123-138.

~~~~~~~~

By L. STAFFORD BETTY

L. Stafford Betty, Dept of Philosophy and Religious Studies, California State University, 9001 Stockdale Highway,
Bakersfield, California 93311-1099, USA.

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