Badarayana

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He is named six times inside his own book, and never once outside it with any certainty. In the third and fourth chapters of the work ascribed to him, where the aphorisms settle the hardest questions about the soul, a voice steps forward and is labeled: iti Bādarāyanah — “so says Badarayana.” It is the formula by which the sutras record their authorities, the same formula that flags Jaimini, Audulomi, Asmarathya, Kasakritsna. To name oneself among the disputants, in the third person, as one ruling opinion among several, is a strange way to claim a book. It suggests the author was also a compiler — that he gathered a long argument, gave the rival positions their say, and entered his own under his own name, letting the form decide which voice would carry. The man behind that name has no biography. What survives is the procedure, and the procedure made an entire tradition.

A name attached to a method

The work has three names, and each makes a different claim about what it is. The Brahma Sutras are the aphorisms on brahman, the unconditioned reality the Upanishads name. The Vedanta Sutras are the aphorisms of the vedanta, the “end of the Veda” — the speculative close of the revealed corpus. And the Uttara Mimamsa, the “later inquiry,” is set against the Purva Mimamsa, the “prior inquiry” into sacrificial action ascribed to Jaimini. The pairing is exact. Where Jaimini’s sutras dissect the obligations of ritual, Badarayana’s dissect the knowledge that lies beyond it; the two are the matched wings of a single critical literature, twin bodies of mimamsa — disciplined exegesis of scripture. The relation between the two sages is built into the texts. Badarayana cites Jaimini and Jaimini cites Badarayana, each weighing the other’s view, the one weighting knowledge and the other ritual, as if the founders of the two disciplines had once argued across a single room.

About the man himself the field can establish almost nothing. The dating of the work is genuinely open, and with it the dating of its author: the most cautious estimates spread the window from roughly the second century BCE — the placement preferred by Dasgupta and Radhakrishnan — to a final redaction often set around 400 to 450 CE. Earlier strata of doctrine plainly underlie the surviving text, since the sutras quote teachers who had already disagreed before the compilation was made: Atreya, Audulomi, Karshnajini, Kasakritsna, Badari, Asmarathya, alongside Jaimini and Badarayana himself. The text is a settlement of debates that were old when it was written down, and “Badarayana” may name the redactor who closed them as readily as a single original author. Of his life, his place, his century, the documentary record holds nothing fixed.

The sage Vyasa in the forest of Naimisharanya. Tradition identifies Badarayana with Vyasa, the legendary arranger of the Vedas — a claim the academy keeps separate from history. — Tantrik71, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From inside the tradition’s own frame, the question of the author is already answered, and answered grandly. Badarayana is Vyasa — the Vedavyasa, the “arranger of the Veda,” who divided the single primordial revelation into its four collections, and to whom is also assigned the Mahabharata and the Puranas. On this telling, the same hand that ordered the whole revealed corpus also wrote the treatise that systematizes its highest teaching, and the Brahma Sutras inherit the authority of the figure who stands behind all of scripture. The academy keeps the two apart, and on plain grounds: vyasa means “arranger” or “compiler,” and reads more as a title or office than the name of one datable man — wherever a body of inherited material was edited into shape, a “Vyasa” could be said to have done it. The identification is best read as a register of ascription, not a finding of history: a way the tradition expresses how central it holds the work to be, by tracing it to the arranger of everything. Whether the historical Badarayana, if the name belonged to one person, had anything to do with the Vyasa of the epics, the record cannot say.

The inquiry into brahman

What can be said with confidence is what the sutras do. They open not with a doctrine but with a turn of the will. Athato brahma-jijnasa — “Now, therefore, the inquiry into brahman.” Two words carry the weight. Atha, “now,” marks a threshold: something prior has been completed, and a new undertaking begins. Atah, “therefore,” supplies the reason. The first aphorism does not describe brahman; it commands the search for it, and stakes the whole literature on the premise that such a search is the proper close of a human life. The second sutra gives the object sought: brahman is “that from which the origin and so on” of the world proceed — its source, its sustenance, its reabsorption into the ground from which it came.

The work as it survives carries on the order of 555 sutras — the exact count varies a little by recension and by which commentator does the counting — distributed across four adhyayas, or chapters, each subdivided into four padas, “quarters,” and resolving into something over two hundred adhikaranas, the “topics” that are the true units of argument. The four chapters are named for what they accomplish, and the names map the architecture of the whole. The first is samanvaya, “harmony”: it argues the scattered, contradictory Upanishadic passages into a single coherent referent, showing that the golden person in the sun, the being made of bliss, the two who entered the cave, the ruler within, all point to one reality and not to some lesser element, deity, or soul. The second is avirodha, “non-contradiction”: it defends that thesis against rival systems and against its own apparent internal tensions. The third is sadhana, “the means”: it follows the soul’s transmigration and sets out the discipline of knowledge by which release is approached. The fourth is phala, “the fruit”: the state attained in liberation, moksha, and the path of the self after death.

The unit of the operation is the adhikarana, and its shape is fixed and forensic. A topic opens with a doubtful scriptural passage; states the purvapaksha, the opponent’s prima facie view, given in its strongest form; raises the doubt; then delivers the siddhanta, the settled conclusion, with reasons. Across more than two hundred such topics the work proceeds less like a treatise than like a body of case law — each ruling narrow, each binding on what follows. This is why the text reads as a constitution rather than a creed. It does not announce brahman so much as adjudicate, passage by passage, what the revealed corpus must be taken to mean.

The second chapter is where the polemical edge shows, and where Badarayana’s positioning against the rival schools is sharpest. The non-intelligent pradhana — primal matter — that the Samkhya philosophers make the cause of the world is refuted: the world’s cause must be intelligent, for an unconscious principle cannot account for order and purpose. The atomism of the Vaisheshikas is dismissed. So is the Buddhist analysis of reality into momentary, self-extinguishing events — a position whose great exponent, Nagarjuna, the sutras meet by insisting that a flux of instants can ground neither memory nor the world’s persistence. And the Jain doctrine that a thing may be many incompatible ways at once is set aside as incoherent. The chapter reads as the defense of one proposition against every school that would deny it: that the world rests on a single conscious ground, neither a blind mechanism nor a stream of fleeting moments.

One stretch of the fourth chapter preserves the disagreement in miniature, and it is worth pausing on, because it shows the sutras doing the thing they were built to do. On the question of how the released soul stands to its ground, three named teachers are quoted in sequence. Asmarathya holds that the soul relates to brahman as sparks relate to a fire — neither simply the same nor simply other. Audulomi answers that the soul is wholly distinct until, at release, it dissolves into the absolute. Kasakritsna cuts both off: the soul is not different from brahman at all, full stop. The sutras set the three positions side by side, in a handful of syllables apiece, and let the sequence imply a verdict without fully closing it. A thousand years later these are precisely the alignments — sparks-and-fire, distinct-until-merger, never-distinct — into which the great commentators would sort themselves. The founder had not only fixed the terms of the argument; he had laid out, in advance, the very options his successors would fight over.

There is a peculiarity built into the achievement, and it governs everything that came after. The sutras are aphorisms in the strictest sense — strings of two, three, four words, designed to be memorized, sacrificing every grammatical limb a teacher’s voice could supply. George Thibaut, who carried the whole text into English and knew it as few Europeans have — his translation of Shankara’s commentary remains a standard point of access — drew the contrast precisely: ordinary sutras can be largely understood on their own, but the mimamsa sutras are different in kind, with “scarcely one single sutra” intelligible by itself. A sutra may consist of a single quoted Upanishadic word and a particle; what that word is doing — which view it endorses, which it attacks — is simply not in the text. The work was never meant to be read alone. It was a lattice on which a living teacher would hang a system. And the moment more than one teacher took it up, the lattice would bear more than one building.

The same lines, the opposite worlds

Together with the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, the Brahma Sutras form the prasthana-traya, the “three points of departure” — the threefold canon every master of Vedanta must expound. The three are not equal in kind. The Upanishads are shruti, revelation “heard,” the highest authority but scattered across many texts and openly inconsistent on the surface. The Gita is smriti, “remembered” — a single sustained poem, lucid where the Upanishads are cryptic, but secondary in standing. The sutras are neither revelation nor poem but instrument: the apparatus that takes the authoritative disorder of the Upanishads and forces it toward one doctrine. To found a school of Vedanta is, in practice, to write a commentary on these three, and above all on the sutras — for the sutras alone claim to systematize, and to control them is to control how the whole canon may be heard.

So the brevity that made the sutras unreadable alone made them inexhaustible together. Every party to Vedanta accepts their authority; what divides the parties is meaning, and because the lines are so terse the meaning is, to a remarkable degree, up for seizing. The history of Vedanta is, in large measure, the history of incompatible bhashyas — commentaries — on one unyielding text, each claiming to recover what Badarayana actually meant.

The oldest surviving commentary, and the most consequential, is the bhashya of Shankara, placed by most of the field in the eighth century. He reads the sutras to teach Advaita, strict non-duality: brahman alone is the sole reality, the world of plurality is maya, a beginningless misperception, and the individual self, the atman, is not finally distinct from the absolute at all — the Upanishadic tat tvam asi, “that thou art,” states a flat identity. Where the sutras themselves seem to insist on a real difference between the soul and the highest Self — and in several topics they do, plainly — Shankara must add that the difference holds only from the standpoint of ignorance, the work of false “limiting adjuncts” laid over an undivided ground. Thibaut, comparing the commentary line by line against the bare aphorisms, judged that on some points Shankara’s non-dualism answers the sutras only by force, and that the plain sense of certain topics leans the other way.

Ramanuja, the eleventh- and twelfth-century master of Vishishtadvaita, whose Sri-bhasya read the Brahma Sutras as teaching a qualified non-dualism. — Pakideadithya, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

For that other lean had its champions. Ramanuja, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, wrote the Sri-bhashya and read the same lines as Vishishtadvaita, “qualified non-dualism.” Brahman is one, but it is a personal Lord whose body is the world of conscious souls and unconscious matter; the individual self has its own reality, distinct, and eternally dependent, never dissolved. Plurality is not illusion but the differentiated body of God. Ramanuja claimed he was not innovating but restoring an older reading, following a lost vritti of one Bodhayana — a claim the academy cannot verify, since the work he invoked does not survive. The dispute over who held the original sense was thus already, in the eleventh century, a dispute conducted over a missing text.

A shrine image of Madhva at Pajaka, near Udupi. His thirteenth-century commentary read the Brahma Sutras as Dvaita — a permanent distinction between the soul and the Lord. — AR767, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

And then the far pole. Madhva, in the thirteenth century, read the sutras as Dvaita, frank dualism: an eternal, unbridgeable distinction between the soul and God, between one soul and another, between matter and spirit. Liberation is not merger but the soul’s arrival, forever itself, in the presence of a Lord it can never become. Between Shankara’s identity and Madhva’s permanent difference lies the whole spectrum of Vedanta — and intermediate schools filled the space between, the bhedabheda “difference-and-non-difference” lineages and the qualified positions of teachers like Nimbarka, each anchored, like the rest, in a commentary on Badarayana’s lines.

The economy of the form is what made all this possible, and it was almost certainly deliberate. A sutra literature is built for a world of oral transmission, where the master holds the meaning and the pupil holds the thread; the aphorism is a mnemonic peg, complete only when a living voice supplies the missing words. What looks to a modern reader like an unfinished sentence was, in its original setting, a finished instrument — a cue precise enough to recall an entire ruling once the teaching behind it was known. The cost of that economy is that the teaching behind it could be lost, or replaced, and the cue would still seem to fit. When the oral chain that carried Badarayana’s own intent thinned or broke, the pegs remained, bare and authoritative, ready to hold whatever a later master hung on them. The commentaries are, in part, the record of teachers reconstructing a meaning the sutras presuppose but do not state.

What is striking is that all three of the great commentators, holding mutually exclusive doctrines, agreed that Badarayana was on their side. None treated the sutras as a neutral frame to be filled; each read them as the authoritative statement of his own conclusion, and built his polemic on the charge that the others had misread the founder. The compression that left the sutras grammatically open left them doctrinally contested in perpetuity. A reader cannot recover, from the bare text, which master read Badarayana rightly — and that irrecoverability is not a flaw the tradition suffered but the condition under which it became productive. The terser the founder, the longer the conversation.

That conversation never closed. When Vedanta was carried into European and American attention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — through Thibaut’s translation of Shankara’s commentary in the Sacred Books of the East, and through reformers and teachers in the line that runs to Swami Vivekananda and the Neo-Vedanta movement — it was almost always Shankara’s Advaita that traveled first, and Badarayana who arrived already wearing a single commentator’s reading. The sutras went out into the world interpreted, as they had always been received: never bare, never alone, always voiced through the teacher who had taken them up. The sage who named himself in the third person, as one opinion among the disputants, had arranged for exactly that. He left a structure precise enough to hold any number of systems and empty enough to belong to none, and signed it with a name the tradition would spend two thousand years learning to fill.

→ In the library: The Vedânta-Sûtras with Śankara's Commentary (Thibaut, SBE 34 & 38)

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