Vedanta

Vedānta — "the end of the Veda" — is the most influential of the six darshanas, both within India and abroad. Its name has two senses: chronologically, Vedānta refers to the Upaniṣads, which appear at the end of each Vedic śākhā; philosophically, it refers to the systematic inquiry into the meaning of those Upaniṣads, codified in Bādarāyaṇa's Brahma Sūtras (also called Vedānta Sūtras) around the 1st century BCE to 2nd century CE.

Where Pūrva Mīmāṃsā studies the Veda's ritual injunctions, Vedānta studies its metaphysical revelations — the Upaniṣadic teachings on Brahman, Ātman, and their relation. The Brahma Sūtras, like Jaimini's Mīmāṃsā Sūtras, are terse aphorisms that demand commentary. The great schools of Vedānta — Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, Śuddhādvaita, Acintya-bhedābheda — are all rival commentarial traditions that read the same Sūtras (and the same Upaniṣads, and the same Bhagavad Gītā — together called the prasthāna-trayī, the "triple foundation") to remarkably different conclusions.

What unites all Vedāntins is the conviction that the Upaniṣads are the highest expression of Vedic revelation, that Brahman is the ultimate reality, that the self (jīva) is in some sense related to Brahman, and that liberation (mokṣa) consists in realizing that relation. What divides them is the precise nature of that relation: identity (Advaita), inseparable distinction (Viśiṣṭādvaita), eternal difference (Dvaita), pure manifestation (Śuddhādvaita), or inconceivable simultaneity of identity and difference (Acintya-bhedābheda).

Brahman is the sole ultimate reality — eternal, infinite, conscious, blissful — and the self's true nature is in some essential way one with, or inseparable from, Brahman. The world we ordinarily experience as a multiplicity of independent things is, on closer inspection, neither independent nor ultimately many: it is grounded in, and in some accounts identical with, the one Brahman. Liberation is the realization of this truth, ending the wandering of saṃsāra.

No school has shaped Hindu thought as thoroughly as Vedānta. Through Śaṅkara's Advaita, Rāmānuja's Śrī Vaiṣṇavism, and Madhva's Dvaita, Vedānta defined the theological landscape of medieval India. The bhakti movements — Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva, Śākta — drew their philosophical bones from Vedānta even when their hearts were elsewhere.

The colonial-era Hindu reformers — Rammohun Roy, Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Radhakrishnan — almost universally presented "Hinduism" through a Vedāntic frame, especially Advaita. This privileging of Vedānta has been criticized as itself partial — many living Hindu traditions are not primarily Vedāntic — but the school's intellectual depth and its capacity to absorb and accommodate other traditions explain its continuing dominance.

Vedānta — especially Advaita — is, alongside Yoga, the most globally exported strand of Hindu thought. Vivekananda's 1893 address at Chicago and subsequent Western mission, the Ramakrishna Order's translations, Nisargadatta and Ramana's modern classics, and the contemporary "neo-Advaita" movement have all carried Vedāntic ideas into global spiritual culture, often shorn of their traditional context.

For the seeker today, Vedānta offers a vocabulary and a framework for the most radical questions: who am I, what is real, what is the relation between consciousness and the world. Its various schools are best understood not as competitors but as different angles on a question deep enough to admit several true answers.