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Daily VedantaOne lamp, one day
The scriptures

The whole shelf, standing where you can see it.

Fifty-four texts, on eight shelves in the order they were composed — and then the same fifty-four rearranged by the question they answer. Take one down and its own page opens: what it is, how it came to exist, who stands behind it, what it says, and what it is for in an ordinary present-day life.

ŚrutiThe three points of departureŚaṅkara and the Advaita manualsThe later Advaita traditionThe other VedāntasKindred and modern voices
Free to download from this shelf

The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda

3,442 pages, 23 MB. Swami Vivekananda died in 1902; the nine volumes are long out of copyright, so the whole set can simply be given away. Advaita Ashrama, the publishing house of the Ramakrishna Order, still keeps the authoritative printed edition in print.

The Complete Works, all nine volumes — PDF What it is, and where to begin in it
c. 1500–800 BCE

The Vedic hymns

Four collections, heard and kept by voice long before they were written.

4 texts
Ṛg Vedac. 1500–1200 BCEYajur Vedac. 1200–800 BCESāma Vedac. 1200–800 BCEAtharva Vedac. 1000–800 BCE
c. 400 BCE–400 CE

The Gītā and the Sūtras

The two texts that every school must comment on if it wants to be heard, and the manual of practice beside them.

3 texts
Bhagavad Gītāc. 200 BCEBrahma SūtrasBādarāyaṇa / VyāsaYoga SūtrasPatañjali
date not fixed by the tradition

Manuals the tradition hands down

Short teaching texts used in class for centuries. The tradition attributes them; it does not date them.

7 texts
Tattva Bodhaattributed to ŚaṅkaraĀtma Bodhaattributed to ŚaṅkaraVivekacūḍāmaṇiattributed to ŚaṅkaraAparokṣānubhūtiattributed to ŚaṅkaraRibhu GītātraditionalTripura RahasyatraditionalAṣṭāvakra Gītāc. 5th century or later
15th–17th centuries

Late classical

The textbooks, the theory of knowledge, and the devotional schools reading the same sūtras.

5 texts
Vedānta SāraSadānandaAdvaita SiddhiMadhusūdana SarasvatīAṇubhāṣyaVallabhācāryaṢaṭ SandarbhaJīva GosvāmīVedānta ParibhāṣāDharmarāja Adhvarin
All fifty-four

Every text, with what it is for

Each card opens a full study of that text. Where a study is not written yet, the card's own summary is complete.

Śruti — the revealed foundation

The Vedic corpus itself: hymn, ritual, forest-teaching and the Upaniṣads that close each Veda. Vedānta means, literally, the end of the Vedas — and the end here is the knowledge section rather than the last page.

c. 1500–1200 BCE Ṛg Veda The oldest layer of the Vedic corpus: over a thousand hymns to the powers of nature and consciousness. The seed of everything later, including the question of what the one thing behind the m… Read the study → c. 1200–800 BCE Yajur Veda The Veda of ritual formulae, and the home of several of the most-quoted Upaniṣadic lines. Read the study → c. 1200–800 BCE Sāma Veda The Veda of chant and melody — the same words as the Ṛg Veda, set to be sung. Read the study → c. 1000–800 BCE Atharva Veda Everyday life, healing, protection and speculation — the least liturgical and most human of the four. Read the study → c. 400–200 BCE Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad Where devotion and enquiry meet: a personal God and a non-dual absolute held in the same text. Read the study →

The three points of departure

Every Vedāntic school, whatever it concludes, must comment on these three: the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā, and the Brahma Sūtras. Disagreement between schools is disagreement about how to read them.

c. 500–400 BCE Īśa Upaniṣad Eighteen verses. Enjoy the world, own none of it; act fully, renounce the grip. Read the study → c. 500 BCE Kena Upaniṣad Begins by asking what moves the mind, the eye, the ear — and refuses to let the answer be anything you can objectify. Read the study → c. 500–300 BCE Kaṭha Upaniṣad A boy meets Death and asks the only question worth asking. Death, unusually, answers honestly. Read the study → c. 500–300 BCE Praśna Upaniṣad Six students bring six questions to a teacher who makes them wait a year before he answers. Read the study → c. 500–300 BCE Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad Two kinds of knowing — information and the knowledge that ends seeking — and the two birds on one tree. Read the study → c. 500–200 BCE Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad Twelve verses. Waking, dream, deep sleep, and the fourth — that which is aware of all three. Read the study → c. 600–500 BCE Taittirīya Upaniṣad The five sheaths — food, breath, mind, intellect, joy — peeled one at a time, and a graduation address that still holds up. Read the study → c. 600 BCE Aitareya Upaniṣad Creation, the entry of consciousness into form, and the declaration that awareness is what reality consists of. Read the study → c. 700–600 BCE Chāndogya Upaniṣad Long, narrative, and full of teaching by experiment: salt dissolved in water, a blindfolded man led home, a father wearing his son down over nine attempts. Read the study → c. 700 BCE Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad The largest Upaniṣad. Yājñavalkya argues in public, refuses to flatter kings, and tells his wife the one thing worth knowing before he leaves. Read the study → c. 200 BCE Bhagavad Gītā Eighteen chapters spoken on a battlefield to a man who wants to walk away from his duty. Knowledge, action and devotion are reconciled without any of them being demoted. Read the study → c. 400–200 BCE Brahma Sūtras 555 compressed aphorisms that systematise the Upaniṣads and answer the objections of every rival school. Read the study →

Śaṅkara and the Advaita manuals

Ādi Śaṅkara's commentaries, and the short teaching manuals — prakaraṇa granthas — written to take a beginner from vocabulary to enquiry without requiring the commentaries first.

c. 6th century Māṇḍūkya Kārikā The first systematic Advaita text: dream, waking and the argument that the world's status is no better than a dream's. Read the study → c. 8th century Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya Śaṅkara's monumental commentary on the Sūtras, and the foundation document of Advaita as a school. Read the study → c. 8th century Upadeśa Sāhasrī The only non-commentarial work certainly by Śaṅkara: a teaching manual, including how to actually conduct a dialogue with a student. Read the study → traditional Tattva Bodha The vocabulary text. Definitions, in order, of every term the tradition uses, in question-and-answer form. Read the study → traditional Ātma Bodha Sixty-eight verses on the nature of the self, dense with images: the rope and the snake, the lamp in the pot, the reflection in water. Read the study → traditional Vivekacūḍāmaṇi 580 verses: the whole path from the first stirring of discrimination to liberation, including the hardest questions about what remains afterwards. Read the study → traditional Aparokṣānubhūti Direct experience, treated procedurally: enquiry, the fifteen steps, and what mistakes look like. Read the study → c. 14th century Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka The discrimination between the seer and the seen, worked through until nothing seen is left to be you. Read the study → c. 8th century Bhaja Govindam A blunt, rhythmic poem about how life is spent: on accumulation, appearance and comparison, while time runs. Read the study → c. 8th century Sādhana Pañcakam Forty instructions in five verses — reportedly Śaṅkara's last teaching, and effectively a complete curriculum in one page. Read the study → c. 8th century Dakṣiṇāmūrti Stotram A hymn to the teacher who teaches in silence, containing the mirror and dream arguments in compressed poetic form. Read the study →

The later Advaita tradition

Eight centuries of sharpening after Śaṅkara: epistemology, definitions, objections answered, and the great compendia that most traditional teaching still runs on.

c. 9th century Naiṣkarmya Siddhi Śaṅkara's direct disciple on why action alone can never liberate, and how knowledge and action actually relate. Read the study → c. 14th century Pañcadaśī Fifteen chapters covering discrimination, bliss and method — the most complete single manual in later Advaita. Read the study → c. 14th century Jīvanmukti Viveka What liberation looks like while still alive, in a body, with obligations. Read the study → c. 15th century Vedānta Sāra A compact primer that organises the whole system — qualifications, superimposition, method, result. Read the study → c. 17th century Vedānta Paribhāṣā The epistemology: how perception, inference and testimony work, and why scripture counts as a means of knowledge at all. Read the study → c. 16th century Advaita Siddhi A point-by-point reply to the Dvaita school's demolition attempt, and the high-water mark of Advaita dialectics. Read the study →

The other Vedāntas

Advaita is one reading of the same three texts. These schools accept the authority and reject the non-dual conclusion, and their objections are the reason Advaita had to become precise.

c. 12th century Śrī Bhāṣya One reality, but with real distinctions inside it: God, souls and matter inseparably related, not identical. Read the study → c. 13th century Sarvamūla Granthas Five eternal differences, an utterly independent God, and a sustained attack on the idea that the soul is identical with Brahman. Read the study → c. 13th century Vedānta Pārijāta Saurabha Soul and God are both different and non-different, like a coil and the snake it is made of. Read the study → c. 16th century Aṇubhāṣya The world is real and is God's own play; no illusion is needed to explain it. Read the study → c. 16th century Ṣaṭ Sandarbha The Bengali Vaiṣṇava resolution: difference and identity both hold, and the relation is beyond conception. Read the study → c. 9th–10th century Bhedābheda An older position that Śaṅkara argues against directly: the self is both one with Brahman and genuinely distinct. Read the study →

Kindred and modern voices

Texts outside the formal commentarial tradition, and the teachers of the last two centuries whose language most readers meet first.

c. 10th century Yoga Vāsiṣṭha Enormous, dreamlike, story inside story: a prince is talked out of despair by a teacher who uses narrative as an argument about the status of the world. Read the study → c. 5th century or later Aṣṭāvakra Gītā A dialogue with no concessions: no practice, no stages, nothing to attain, told to a king who is ready to hear it. Read the study → c. 9th–10th century Avadhūta Gītā The song of one who has dropped everything, including the vocabulary of dropping things. Read the study → traditional Ribhu Gītā Relentless repetition of one statement of identity, used as a practice rather than a proof. Read the study → traditional Tripura Rahasya Non-duality taught through a Śākta frame, with a memorable insistence that liberation is compatible with ordinary activity. Read the study → c. 200 BCE–400 CE Yoga Sūtras The mechanics of attention, stated as a technical manual, from restlessness to absorption. Read the study → 1902 Who Am I? (Nāṉ Yār) Ramaṇa's answers to a seeker's questions, written when he was still barely speaking. Fourteen pages that replace a library. Read the study → 1928 Ulladu Nāṟpadu — Forty Verses on Reality Ramaṇa's own philosophical statement in verse: the ego's nature, its source, and what remains when it is traced home. Read the study → 1927 Upadeśa Sāram Thirty verses ranking every practice — ritual, chant, breath, meditation, enquiry — and explaining why they are ordered as they are. Read the study → 1935–1939 Talks with Sri Ramaṇa Maharṣi Four years of recorded conversations with visitors of every kind, from scholars to the newly bereaved. Read the study → 1882–1886 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna Verbatim diaries of Ramakrishna's conversations: parables, songs, laughter, and states of absorption described as they happened. Read the study → 1893–1902 The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda Lectures on the four yogas, letters, poems and the Chicago addresses — non-duality restated as strength, service and self-reliance. Read the study → 1950s–1990s Self-Unfoldment and the Chinmaya commentaries A graded course in Vedānta for householders, plus commentaries on the Gītā and the major Upaniṣads in plain, forceful English. Read the study → 1973 I Am That Dialogues from a small room in Mumbai, in the flattest possible language and with no interest in comfort. Read the study →

A text is not a possession; it is a means of knowledge, and a means of knowledge has to be usable. If one of these pages sends you to the original rather than back here, it has worked.

The teachers who commented on them