Adi Shankara · Theology
How can Shankara teach both a personal creator-God who answers prayers and an impersonal Absolute beyond all qualities? With his doctrine of two standpoints - empirical and absolute - and two aspects of Brahman: saguna (with qualities) and nirguna (without).
A reader of Shankara meets an apparent contradiction that has puzzled students for centuries. In some passages he writes as a fervent theist: there is Ishvara, the Lord, an omniscient and omnipotent personal God who creates, sustains, and governs the universe, who dispenses the fruits of action with perfect justice, and to whom devotion and worship are wholly appropriate. Shankara composed hymns of exquisite devotion to such a God. Yet in other passages he insists that the highest reality is utterly impersonal - Brahman without a single quality, without form, name, will, or activity, beyond even the distinction between knower and known, of which nothing positive can truly be said. How can the same philosopher teach both a loving personal Lord and a featureless Absolute?
The resolution is one of Shankara’s most important and most subtle doctrines: the distinction between two standpoints and, correspondingly, two aspects of Brahman. He is not contradicting himself; he is speaking from two different levels of truth, each valid at its own level, but ranked one above the other. Get this distinction clear and the whole apparent inconsistency dissolves - and with it, a great deal of confusion about whether Advaita is a religion of devotion or a philosophy of stark impersonal monism. The answer, characteristically, is: both, at different altitudes.
Corresponding to the two standpoints are two ways of conceiving Brahman, and they are the key to the whole puzzle. Saguna Brahman is Brahman ‘with qualities’ (guna): Brahman as conceived in relation to the world - as its creator, sustainer, and ruler; as omniscient, omnipotent, all-good; as the personal Lord, Ishvara, who can be loved, worshipped, and prayed to. This is the highest God, the supreme being of religion. Nirguna Brahman is Brahman ‘without qualities’: Brahman as it is in itself, apart from any relation to a world - partless, formless, actionless, beyond all attributes and even beyond the personal, of which the truest speech is silence or negation. This is the Absolute of the highest philosophy.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Shankara’s two-standpoint framework: from the empirical standpoint (vyavaharika) there is a personal God (Ishvara, saguna Brahman) who creates and governs; from the absolute standpoint (paramarthika) there is only the attributeless nirguna Brahman, with which the self is identical. Reconstruct how the two…
Leads to Immanuel Kant.
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