Sri Prakāśātman

The man

He is the teacher without a life. Of Sri Prakāśātman nothing is recorded that a biographer could use: no birthplace, no family, no year of birth or death, no monastery, no pilgrimage, no meeting with a king, no miracle. The tradition that tells a hundred stories about Sri Padmapāda, whose book he explained, tells none about him. What he left instead is a single very long book — a commentary on a commentary on a commentary — and the book was so thorough, so closely argued and so decisive in the way it settled questions that the school which read Sri Śaṅkara through it took his book’s title as its own name. The Vivaraṇa, the “Elucidation,” gave its name to the Vivaraṇa school, and its author came to be known simply as the Vivaraṇa-ācārya, the teacher of the Elucidation. A student who opens the standard textbook of Advaita epistemology today, the Vedānta-paribhāṣā, or the great fourteenth-century digest that Sri Vidyāraṇya wrote for the Sringeri tradition, is reading positions that Sri Prakāśātman fixed.

The book is a commentary on Sri Padmapāda’s Pañcapādikā, which is itself a commentary on the opening of Sri Śaṅkara’s Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya. That is three layers deep, and the reader should not be put off by it. What Sri Prakāśātman did with those layers was to make them into a system. Sri Śaṅkara had written that the whole human predicament rests on a mistake, the superimposition of the not-self on the Self; Sri Padmapāda had read that mistake as the work of a positive power of ignorance; Sri Prakāśātman asked what such a power must be, where it sits, what it conceals, how the individual soul is related to the one Self, what a sentence of the Upaniṣad does when it frees a hearer, and whether the objects of the world are anything more than ideas. He answered each question, argued each answer against every rival he knew — Buddhist, Naiyāyika, Mīmāṁsaka, and other Advaitins — and left the answers in a form that later writers could take up whole. The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭham’s volume on the teachers of the tradition says of the moment his book appears: “Coming to the Panchapadikavivarana of Prakasatman, we land ourselves in the epoch–making period of this school, and henceforward move towards a history of dialectical literature of Advaita philosophy, which bases itself solidly upon the conclusions, arrived at in clear terms by Prakasatman.”

He belongs on this site for a reason that is easy to state and hard to overstate. When the tradition speaks of “the two schools” of Advaita after Sri Śaṅkara, it means the Bhāmatī school, which follows Sri Vācaspati Miśra, and the Vivaraṇa school, which follows him. The difference between them is not a quarrel about the goal — both hold that the Self is Brahman and that knowing this is freedom — but about the account one gives of the way there: where ignorance lives, whether the soul is a reflection or a portion, whether hearing the text is itself the means or only the beginning, whether rituals help. Those are the questions a serious seeker meets, in one vocabulary or another, and Sri Prakāśātman’s answers to them have been the majority answers in the tradition for most of a thousand years. This page tries to say what they were, what they were arguing against, why a modern critic within the tradition has disputed them, and what a reader might take from them now.

And it tries to do so without pretending to know what nobody knows. There is no portrait of him, and this page shows none. There is no place to put a pin, and the map below is left empty, with an explanation. There are three different dates in the sources and two different names for his teacher, and this page gives all of them rather than choosing. He would not, one suspects, have minded. The website of a research centre devoted to his school introduces him in two sentences that contain everything a reader can be told about the man: “Sri Prakashatman is the most popular name of Prakashaatma-yati, who is also known as Svaprakashanubhava Bhagavata or just Svaprakashaanubhava. His period is not before the 10th century CE.”

The sources, and how this page uses them

Because there is no life to tell, the sources for this page are all sources for the book, and the reader should know their weight. The Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa itself was rendered into English only in 1997, by Professor P. S. Sastri, in a volume published by the Sadhana Grantha Mandali of Tenali with the assistance of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams; that translation is still in copyright and is not linked here. The Sanskrit text is on the Internet Archive in two editions, both linked at the foot of the page: the Vizianagram Sanskrit Series edition of 1892, printed at Benares with the commentaries of Sri Akhaṇḍānanda and Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama, which is the edition Dasgupta and the Kanchi chapter cite; and the Madras Government Oriental Series edition of 1958, which Swami Satchidānandendra cites. But this page does not pretend to have read the book in Sanskrit, and every statement here about what it says is taken from one of four kinds of witness that have.

The first witness is the tradition’s own digest of the book. In the fourteenth century Sri Vidyāraṇya, later head of the Sringeri monastery, wrote the Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṅgraha, a “Collection of the Topics of the Vivaraṇa,” which sets out the book’s positions in order so that a student need not work through the three layers of commentary himself. It was translated into English by S. S. Suryanarayana Sastri and Saileswar Sen and published at Andhra University in 1941; the translation is on the Internet Archive and is linked. Its second verse states its purpose, and in doing so names the three layers: “This compendium of the topics dealt with in the ‘Elucidation’ (the Vivarana of Prakasatman) of the ‘Gloss’ (tika i.e. the Pancapadika of Padmapada) on the ‘Commentary’ (i.e. the Sankarabhasya on the Vedanta Sutras) is written to the end of obviating the difficulty due to the relationship (of each earlier work to the succeeding one) as the explanation (only) of those (particular passages) which are to be explained” Where this page says “the Vivaraṇa school holds,” it is usually this digest that is meant.

The second witness is the modern history of Indian thought, in Surendranath Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy, volume two (Cambridge, 1932). Dasgupta read the Vivaraṇa in the Vizianagram Sanskrit Series edition of 1892 and cites it by page throughout his long chapter on the Śaṅkara school; more than that, he announced that he had taken “Padmapada’s method of treatment, as interpreted by Prakasatman” as his guide to the whole exposition of the Vedānta. His account of Sri Prakāśātman’s theory of ignorance, of his argument with the Buddhists and of his other writings is the fullest in English, and it is quoted here at length. His date for Sri Prakāśātman, which differs from the tradition’s, is given with the others in the section on dates.

The third witness is the tradition writing about itself in modern times. The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭham hosts the chapters on Sri Padmapāda, Sri Vācaspati Miśra and Sri Prakāśātman from Preceptors of Advaita, the volume of essays edited by T. M. P. Mahadevan in 1968 for the diamond jubilee of the late Kanchi Jagadguru; the chapter on Sri Prakāśātman is devoted to his argument with Mahāyāna Buddhism, and the other two set out the points on which his school and the Bhāmatī school differ. The Centre for Brahmavidya in Chennai, which has published the Vivaraṇa with two of its commentaries, carries a short page on him. And the Advaita Vedānta Anusandhana Kendra’s survey of post-Śaṅkara authors places him in the sequence of the tradition. All three are linked.

The fourth witness is a critic. Swami Satchidānandendra Saraswatī’s Method of the Vedanta, in A. J. Alston’s English translation (1989), has a chapter on the Vivaraṇa that summarises its main theories, page by page from the Madras edition, and disputes most of them from the standpoint of a man who held that the whole line from Sri Padmapāda onward had misread Sri Śaṅkara. Because he quotes and paraphrases the book so carefully before disagreeing with it, his chapter is also one of the best guides to what it says; this page uses it for both purposes, and gives his disagreement its own section, presented as one view.

Nothing on this page is invented. Every passage in quotation marks is copied from one of these sources and can be checked through the links at the foot of the page. The sources were read from scanned copies, and where the machine has misread a letter the printed word has been restored in the quotations and the correction recorded. No modern encyclopaedia has been used, and no picture is shown, for reasons given in the note near the end.

Where the life was lived

The map on every other teacher’s page on this site shows the places the sources name. For Sri Prakāśātman there are none. Neither his own book, nor the tradition’s digest of it, nor the modern histories, nor the monasteries’ websites names a village, a river, a region, a monastery or a court. The one thing known about his circumstances is that he was a sannyāsin — the name Prakāśātma-yati says so, a yati being a renouncer — and a renouncer, by the rule of his order, had no fixed home to record. The outline of India is shown below with nothing on it, because the honest map of his life is an empty one, and because a reader who has seen the crowded maps of Sri Śaṅkara’s disciples should see the difference.

It is not that his whereabouts were forgotten so much as that they were never thought worth recording. The Anusandhana Kendra’s survey makes the general point about the whole tradition: its writers, “True to the advaita spirit of not identifying with the body, our writers rarely give any clues to personal details in their texts. Consequently, all dates mentioned here rely upon the academic research that has been done within the last two centuries.” Sri Prakāśātman is the extreme case. It would be easy to guess at a southern origin, since the school he founded became the doctrine of the Sringeri monastery in Karnataka and the modern editions of his book were made in Madras and Vizianagram; but that is a fact about the book’s later readers, not about its author, and this page does not put a guess on the map.

What the book says about its author: names and a teacher

The only evidence about the man that does not come from later report is in the opening and closing verses of his own book, and even that is disputed. The Kanchi chapter states what the colophon gives: “From the colophon of his work we know that his real name is Svaprakasanubhava-bhagavat, or simply Svaprakasanubhava, and he was the disciple of Ananyanubhava”. And it adds: “But the more commonly known name of the author of the Panchapadikavivarana is Prakasatmayati or Prakasatman”. So there are three names. Svaprakāśānubhava, “self-luminous experience,” is the name the author gives himself; Prakāśātma-yati, “the renouncer whose self is light,” is the name by which his readers have called him; and Prakāśātman is the short form of the second that has become standard. All three mean nearly the same thing, and all three are the kind of name a sannyāsin is given at his initiation rather than the kind he is born with. His birth-name is not recorded anywhere this page has been able to check.

The teacher’s name is the one point at which the sources disagree about a matter of fact, and this page reports both sides. The Kanchi chapter, as just quoted, reads the colophon as naming Ananyānubhava; Dasgupta agrees, and knows of a book by the teacher: “But Ananyanubhava, the teacher of Prakasatman (a.d. 1200), seems to have written another commentary, called Sariraka-nyaya-manimala.” The Centre for Brahmavidya, on the other hand, states: “As may be gleaned from Pancapadika-vivarana, Sri Prakashatman is the disciple of Sri Govindananda.” The two statements cannot both be a plain reading of the same verse, and this page has not been able to consult the verse to see which reading it bears, or whether the book names two teachers, one who initiated and one who taught. A reader should hold the teacher’s name as uncertain. What is not uncertain is the shape of the names: teacher and pupil both bear names ending in -anubhava, “experience,” which may point to a lineage with its own naming convention, and Dasgupta noticed that a later writer of the same school also carried the form.

Dasgupta’s remark on the later name is in his discussion of the sixteenth-century teacher Sri Prakāśānanda, where he records that one commentator’s list of Vedānta teachers “mentions the names of Prakasanubhavananda, Nrsimha and Raghavendra Yati” and notes the suggestion that Prakāśānubhava and Prakāśātman may be the same person. Nothing on this page depends on that suggestion.

When he lived: three dates

The sources give three dates, and the difference between them is not small. The oldest modern opinion, and the one the tradition’s own scholars have generally favoured, places him in the tenth century. D. Venkataramiah, the translator of the Pañcapādikā, writing of the loss of most of Sri Padmapāda’s book, says that “even so early as the time of Prakasatman (950 A.D.) the author of the Vivarana, the work appears to have suffered this further mutilation”. The Anusandhana Kendra’s survey calls him “The next important author from the 10th century CE”. The Centre for Brahmavidya is more cautious and says only that his period “is not before the 10th century CE”.

Dasgupta, by contrast, dates him to about 1200, and does so every time he names him: “Prakasatman (a.d. 1200) in his Panca-padika-vivarana raises this point”, he writes at the start of his account of the argument with the Buddhists, and the same figure appears in his list of Vedānta commentators and in his note on Sri Prakāśānanda. The foreword to Venkataramiah’s translation, which follows Dasgupta rather than the translator’s own text, gives the same figure: “It was commented upon by Prakasatman (A.D. 1200) in his Pancapadika-vivarana, which was later further commented upon by Akhandananda (A.D. 1350) in his Tattvadipana.” So the same book carries both dates, two hundred and fifty years apart, one in its foreword and one in its introduction. The Kanchi chapter, quoting Dasgupta, also prints “A.D. 1200.”

This page does not try to settle the question, and it should say why it cannot. A date for an author who names no king and no event can be fixed only from two sides: by the latest writer he quotes, and by the earliest writer who quotes him. The sources this page has used state their dates without setting out that reasoning, and a page that cannot examine the reasoning should not pretend to judge it. What can be said is this: in the century and more since Dasgupta wrote, the tradition’s scholars have continued to say “tenth century,” and the phrase “not before the tenth century” is the safest form of the claim. The card for this teacher on this site says “10th century” and the timeline below marks the alternative.

One consequence of the uncertainty deserves to be noticed. If the tenth-century date is right, Sri Prakāśātman wrote within a century or so of Sri Vācaspati Miśra, whose Bhāmatī is dated by Dasgupta to the first half of the ninth century, and the two schools took shape almost together. If Dasgupta’s date is right, the Bhāmatī had the field to itself for three and a half centuries before the Vivaraṇa answered it. The Kanchi chapter on Sri Vācaspati says the Vivaraṇa position is Sri Padmapāda’s “as interpreted by Prakasatman in his Vivarana”, which is true on either date; but a reader who wants to picture the two schools as rivals face to face in the same generation should know that the picture depends on the earlier date.

The book: what it is, and what it did

Sri Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Brahma-sūtra opens with a preface on superimposition and then comments on the first four sūtras, and it is on this opening — the preface and the first four sūtras, the catuḥ-sūtrī — that Sri Padmapāda’s surviving Pañcapādikā was written. The Vivaraṇa is a commentary on that. It is therefore, in its subject matter, a book about the first few pages of Sri Śaṅkara; and it is very long, because the first few pages of Sri Śaṅkara contain, in compressed form, the whole of his position, and because Sri Prakāśātman treated every sentence of Sri Padmapāda as an occasion to state, defend and extend it.

The critic within the tradition, Swami Satchidānandendra, described its method better than its friends have: “The commentary on the Pancapadika we are now to consider, the Vivarana, would well deserve the title of Pancapadika Vartika, in that it went over the work on which it was commenting (the Pancapadika) in great detail, discussing what it had said, what it had left unsaid and what it had said incorrectly.” A vārttika, in the tradition’s own definition, is a commentary that considers what its text has said, what it has left unsaid and what it has said badly — the form Sri Sureśvara used on Sri Śaṅkara’s Upaniṣad commentaries — and the compliment is exact. He goes on: “It stood as a summary of the teaching of all the Advaita schools current at the time when it was written. And because the author effected all this and set out at length a number of original theories of his own in support of the doctrine of Indeterminable Ignorance, he came to be called the ‘Vivaranacarya’.” The Centre for Brahmavidya says the same from the other side: “It is a seminal work, which has given rise to the Vivarana-prasthana or the Vivarana sub-school of advaita and has received much attention from later authors.”

Two features of the book are worth fixing before its doctrines are set out. The first is that it is, throughout, a book of argument. Sri Padmapāda had already answered the Naiyāyikas, the two schools of Mīmāṁsā and the Buddhists in the course of explaining superimposition; Sri Prakāśātman took up each of those arguments and pressed it further, and added arguments against positions within Advaita that he thought mistaken. The Centre for Brahmavidya notes that “Though primarily an exposition of advaita philosophy itself, Pancapadika-vivarana can be considered to be styled as a rebuttal of the Mahayana school of Buddhism.” The Kanchi chapter on him is given over entirely to that rebuttal. The second feature is that it also leans on a book outside its own line. Swami Satchidānandendra observed that “Although the Vivarana was undertaken as a commentary on the Pancapadika, it often accepts the line of thought followed in the Ista Siddhi” — that is, Sri Vimuktātman’s Iṣṭa-siddhi, an independent treatise on ignorance and error — so that the Vivaraṇa is the point at which two earlier streams of post-Śaṅkara thought were brought together.

He wrote other books. The Centre for Brahmavidya lists them: “On the Brahma-sutra, Sri Prakashatman has also penned independent commentaries Saririka-mimamsa-nyaya-samgraha and Laukika-nyaya-muktavali. His Sabda-nirnaya upholds the testimonial authority of sabda.” Dasgupta describes the first of these as “a metrical summary of the main contents of Sankara’s Bhasya called Sariraka-mimamsa-nyaya-samgraha”, and the Anusandhana Kendra names the Śabda-nirṇaya and the Nyāya-muktāvalī. Swami Satchidānandendra knows him “also as the author of the Sariraka Nyaya Sangraha and of the Sabda Nirnaya and other works”. The Śabda-nirṇaya, a “Determination of the Word,” is a defence of scripture as an independent means of knowledge, and its existence tells a reader something about its author: the man who argued so hard about the nature of ignorance also thought it necessary to argue that the Upaniṣad could be trusted at all. None of these other books is used on this page, because none of them is available in a form this page could check.

The Sanskrit text of the Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa in the Madras Government Oriental Manuscripts Library edition (1958) is on the Internet Archive and is linked at the foot of the page; the Kanchi chapter on Sri Vācaspati cites it by page. Swami Satchidānandendra’s references, marked “V.” with a page number in the passages quoted here, are to the same edition.

What he taught: ignorance as the stuff of the world

Everything in the Vivaraṇa grows from one question, and the question is Sri Śaṅkara’s. His preface to the Brahma-sūtra commentary says that the whole of ordinary life rests on adhyāsa, superimposition: the mixing-up of the Self, which is pure consciousness, with the not-self — body, mind, the sense of “I am a man,” “I am happy,” “I do not know.” Sri Śaṅkara calls this mixing-up mithyā-jñāna, false knowledge, and says it is beginningless and endless and is what the Vedānta exists to remove. He does not say what it is made of. Sri Padmapāda took the compound apart into two words, “false” and “ignorance,” and said that the second word names a power — a non-conscious potency of ignorance that is the stuff the mistake is made of. Sri Prakāśātman’s first great contribution was to take that reading and make it rigorous.

Dasgupta’s summary of the result is the clearest in English, and it is worth following his sentences closely. “as Padmapada or Prakasatman explains, ajnana or nescience is some kind of indefinable stuff out of the transformations of which subjective psychological experiences and the world of objects have come into being. This ajnana is not the ajnana of the Buddhists, i.e. a wrong notion or misconception, and this adhyasa, or illusion,” — and after a page-reference he continues — “is not the viparyaya of Nagarjuna; for here it is a positive power or stuff. Thus Prakasatman argues that all effects have at their back some cause, which forms their stuff or material; the world-appearance, being also an effect, must have some stuff out of which it has evolved or was made up; and ajnana, lying in the transcendent self as a separate power, is such a material cause”. The argument has the shape of a proof. A pot needs clay. The world of appearance is an effect, since it comes and goes. Therefore it too needs a stuff, and since it is not real in the way Brahman is real, its stuff cannot be Brahman as such; the stuff is ignorance, understood not as an absence but as a something.

Two further steps belong to him. The first is to claim that this stuff is not a philosopher’s posit but a matter of experience: “This positive ajnana is directly perceived in such immediate perceptions as “I do not know myself or others,” and can also be inferred or comprehended by implication”. When a person says “I don’t know,” the Vivaraṇa school holds, he is not reporting a blank; he is perceiving something present, the way one perceives darkness. The second step is to say precisely in what sense ignorance is a “power.” “The fact that ajnana or avidya is spoken of as a power inherent in the transcendent self shows that it is dependent thereon ; avidya is not, however, a power, but a substance or entity which has certain powers by which it transforms itself into the cosmic appearances, subjective and objective; yet it is called a power, or sakti, because of its dependence (para-tantrata) on the transcendent self”. So the word śakti does not mean, for him, a mere capacity of Brahman. It means a dependent entity, a something that cannot stand on its own but does its own work.

The tradition’s own digest states the doctrine in a single sentence, and adds the test by which it is proved: “And of this superimposition the material cause is nescience which is beginningless, indeterminable, and of the nature of an existent; for when that exists, superimposition arises and when that is non-existent, it does not arise.” The test is the ordinary one for a cause: present with the effect, absent without it. And the three adjectives are the school’s signature. Ignorance is beginningless, because if it had begun there would have been a time when the free Self fell into it, which the Upaniṣads deny; it is indeterminable, neither real like Brahman nor nothing like a square circle, because if it were real it could never be removed and if it were nothing it could not produce a world; and it is of the nature of an existent, bhāva-rūpa, a positive something rather than a mere lack. That last adjective is the one Swami Satchidānandendra disputed most sharply, and the dispute is set out below.

Why does it matter? Because on this account the removal of ignorance is the removal of a thing, and the thing is removed by one means only, knowledge, as darkness is removed only by light. Ritual cannot touch it, devotion cannot touch it, good conduct cannot touch it, except in so far as they prepare the mind for the knowledge that does. Everything the Vivaraṇa school says about the path follows from what it says about the stuff of the mistake.

What he taught: where ignorance sits, and what it hides

If ignorance is a something, it must be somewhere, and it must hide something. These two questions — the āśraya, seat or locus, and the viṣaya, object or content — are the point at which the two schools of Advaita part, and Sri Prakāśātman’s answer is the Vivaraṇa school’s defining position. The Kanchi chapter on Sri Padmapāda states it exactly: “Avidya, like knowledge, requires a substratum as well as a content. On this issue Padmapada’s view as interpreted by Prakasatman in his Vivarana is that Brahman is both the locus and content of avidya as against the view of Vacaspati Misra that avidya has Brahman as its object and jiva as its support. This is one of the fundamental points of difference between the Vivarana line of interpretation and the interpretation of the Vacaspati line. In this Prakasatman agrees with the view of Suresvara and his (Suresvara’s) disciple Sarvajnatman.”

The plain sense of this is startling, and the school knew it was. Sri Vācaspati had said that ignorance belongs to the individual soul — it is the jīva who is ignorant — and that what it hides is Brahman. That is what common sense would say. Sri Prakāśātman said instead that ignorance sits in Brahman itself, the pure Self, and hides Brahman from itself. Swami Satchidānandendra, summarising the Vivaraṇa from its own pages, states the position and its reasons: “The teaching of the Vivarana is that Ignorance does not have its seat in the mind, nor in Consciousness as qualified by the mind, but in reality as such (svarupa-matra).” The objection is obvious — surely the experience “I am ignorant” shows that ignorance belongs to the “I,” the mind-qualified self? — and the Vivaraṇa answers it. The experience “I am ignorant” arises, it says, because both ignorance and the mind are related to the same Self, not because the mind is the seat of ignorance; and dreamless sleep, in which there is no mind at work and yet ignorance plainly persists, shows ignorance sitting in the Self directly. Then comes the decisive consideration, in the summary’s words: “it is better to accept as seat of Ignorance something of the existence of which one is certain, rather than to resort to a hypothesis which implies two seats for Ignorance (the qualified Self and the pure Self), both of which are logically indefensible. Also, (if the one in bondage is to be the same as the one who later enjoys liberation) the seat of Ignorance must be related to that aspect of the Self that relates to liberation”.

That last clause is the heart of the matter, and it is a religious argument as much as a logical one. Whoever is bound must be the one who is freed. If ignorance belonged to the individual soul, then when ignorance ended the individual soul would end, and it would be hard to say who was liberated. If ignorance sits in the Self, then it is the Self that was, so to speak, hidden from itself, and the Self that is unveiled; nothing is lost but the veil. The Bhāmatī school has its own answer to this, and it is given on Sri Vācaspati’s page. But the reader should see what Sri Prakāśātman was protecting: the identity of the one who seeks with the one who is found.

He was also, on this point, siding with the oldest layer of the tradition against a newer one. The Kanchi chapter notes his agreement with Sri Sureśvara, Sri Śaṅkara’s direct disciple, and with Sri Sarvajñātman; Sri Vācaspati had drawn instead on Sri Maṇḍana Miśra, whose Brahma-siddhi he had commented on. So the question of where ignorance sits is also, in the tradition’s own history, the question of which of Sri Śaṅkara’s contemporaries one follows — and the Vivaraṇa school has always claimed the direct disciple.

What he taught: how Brahman can be the cause of a world

The Brahma-sūtra says that Brahman is the cause of the world, and the Upaniṣads say that Brahman is changeless. How can a changeless thing be the material out of which a changing world is made? Sri Padmapāda had answered that Brahman is the cause in the sense that it is that on which the world-appearance is displayed. Sri Prakāśātman refined the answer into three alternatives, and the Kanchi chapter on Sri Padmapāda sets them out: “On this point three alternative views are offered by Prakasatman; and they are: (i) Just as two strands conjoined together make a rope, Brahman and maya are the material cause of the world, in a relation of equal primacy. The elements of reality and manifestation are caused by Brahman; and the elements of inertness and change are produced by maya. (ii) The potency of maya alone may be characterised as the material cause. But, since potency always depends on the potent, it would have to be said presumptively that even Brahman that possesses the potency is the material cause. (iii) Since Brahman is the substrate of maya, though material causality may belong directly to maya alone, for Brahman too material causality cannot be avoided.” And the conclusion: “Of these three views, the first maintains that material causality in the principal sense belongs to Brahman qualified by maya; and the other two hold that it belong to maya alone. But on all the three views, Brahman is only figuratively the material cause”.

A reader meeting this for the first time may wonder why a teacher would offer three answers to one question. The reason is that Sri Prakāśātman is not trying to describe a mechanism; he is trying to protect two texts at once. The Upaniṣads must be right that Brahman is the source of everything, and they must be right that Brahman does not change. The three alternatives are three ways of holding both, and what they share is the last sentence: whichever way one puts it, Brahman is the cause only figuratively. The clay-and-pot language of the sūtras is true as far as it goes, and it does not go as far as Brahman’s own nature. What actually changes, on any of the three accounts, is māyā; and māyā, for this school, is the same positive, indeterminable, dependent stuff that the previous section called ignorance, seen now from the side of the world rather than the side of the soul. The two-strand rope of the first alternative — one strand consciousness, one strand inert power, twisted so that the rope seems one thing — is the image the school has favoured, and it is the image a reader will most easily carry away.

Dasgupta gives the doctrine its most compressed form. Because ignorance depends entirely on the Self, “it is in consideration of the entire dependence of avidya and its transformations on the self that the self is regarded as the material cause of all effects — the cosmic appearances of the world and the mind”. And then the sentence that shows how far the school was willing to go: “The self thus not only holds the ajnana within it as a dependent function, but in spite of its self-luminosity it can be reacted upon by the ajnana with its manifold powers in such a way that it can be veiled by this ajnana and made the underlying basis of all world-appearances of ajnana-transformations”. The light can be veiled by what depends on the light. That is the paradox the Vivaraṇa school accepted with open eyes, and its critics have never let it forget.

What he taught: the soul as a reflection

If ignorance sits in Brahman, what is the individual soul — the jīva, the one who reads this page? The Advaita tradition has three answers, and the Kanchi chapter on Sri Padmapāda lists them: “As regards the nature of the individual soul and the Supreme Lord, three theories are set forth by the Advaitic writers; and they are: pratibimba-vada, avaccheda-vada and abhasa-vada. According to the pratibimba-vada, the consciousness that transcends avidya and serves as the original is Isvara; and, the consciousness that is reflected in the intellect in its gross and subtle states is Jiva. Or, the consciousness reflected in avidya is Isvara, and in intellect is Jiva”. The Vivaraṇa school holds the first. Sri Padmapāda had introduced the image of the face in the mirror in his Pañcapādikā; Sri Prakāśātman made it the school’s theory of the soul. Swami Satchidānandendra, summarising the Vivaraṇa from its own page, reports the question and the answer: “The Vivarana raises the question, ‘Well, what is this thing called the soul?’, and replies: ‘We say that it is nothing but the Absolute, reflected in Ignorance’ (V. p.760).”

The picture is this. There is one consciousness. Ignorance, the positive stuff described above, stands to it as a mirror stands to a face, or as water to the moon. The consciousness reflected in ignorance as a whole is Īśvara, the Lord; the consciousness reflected in each individual mind — each small pool — is a jīva. There are as many souls as there are minds, as there are as many moons as there are pools; but there is one moon. The image does three things at once for the school. It explains plurality without dividing Brahman, since a reflection does not cut the original. It explains bondage, since the reflection takes on the tremor and the colour of the water. And it explains liberation, since what a reflection is, when the reflecting medium is removed, is simply the original — there is nothing for the soul to become, only something for it to stop being mistaken for.

The rival theory within Advaita, avaccheda-vāda, says instead that the soul is consciousness delimited by the mind, as the space in a pot is space delimited by clay. Sri Prakāśātman argued against it, and Swami Satchidānandendra’s summary gives the argument in the book’s own voice. “The author of the Vivarana is not merely a champion of the reflection theory of the soul: he is also an active opponent of the delimitation theory.” Then the objection and the answer: “But why could not the soul simply be the Absolute delimited by conditioning adjuncts (without being a reflection of the Absolute)? No, this is wrong. For the Absolute present within the cosmos as enclosed within the various conditioning adjuncts, universal and particular, would be totally conditioned as soul; and that same Absolute in its true nature as unlimited by adjuncts would fall outside the cosmos. But from this it would follow that the Absolute could not be omniscient and omnipotent.” The point is a subtle one and deserves to be put plainly. If the soul were simply Brahman fenced in by a mind, then inside the fence there would be only the fenced-in Brahman, and the whole, free Brahman would be somewhere else — outside. But the Upaniṣad says the Lord dwells within the soul as its inner ruler, whole and free. A reflection can carry the whole of its original into a small place without the original being cut; a fenced-off portion cannot. That, in the Vivaraṇa’s reading, is why the soul must be a reflection and not a piece.

Dasgupta thought both theories were older than the men whose names they carry, and said so in his chapter on Sri Padmapāda: the doctrines of delimitation and reflection “are also at least as old as Padmapada’s Panca-padika, and both Padmapada and Prakasatman seem to support the reflection theory (pratibimba-vada), the theory that the jiva is but a reflected image of Brahman”. What Sri Prakāśātman did was not to invent the reflection theory but to choose it, defend it against the alternative, and tie it to the rest of the system — to the seat of ignorance in particular, since if ignorance is the mirror and the mirror is in the Self, the soul’s whole existence as a separate thing is a fact about the mirror and not about the Self.

What he taught: hearing as the means, and the place of ritual

The Vivaraṇa school’s account of the path follows from its account of the mistake. If bondage is a positive ignorance sitting in the Self and hiding it, then what removes bondage is knowledge of the Self, and knowledge of the Self comes from the one source that can give it, the words of the Upaniṣad heard from a teacher. The tradition’s digest sets this out in its opening pages. The Upaniṣad, it says, declares that seeing the Self is the means to immortality; but seeing cannot be commanded, so the text commands the means to seeing, and enjoins hearing, “as the principal (means), along with its subsidiaries, reflection and meditation, which are auxiliaries in achieving the fruit.” Then it quotes the tradition’s own gloss on the three: “‘hearing’ consists only in the ascertainment of the express sense and purport through marks like the initial passage etc., in the case of all Vedanta passages, from the beloved mouth of the preceptor. ‘Reflection’ is pondering over arguments which are in support of the (Vedanta) passages. Meditation is one-pointed attention in respect of ‘hearing’ and ‘reflection.’”

The word to notice is principal. For the Vivaraṇa school, hearing — śravaṇa, the ascertainment of what the text means, in the teacher’s presence — is the main thing, and reflection and meditation are its helpers, which clear away doubt and the habit of thinking otherwise. Knowledge arises from the sentence. The Bhāmatī school gives the greater weight to what comes after the sentence. The modern translators of the Bhāmatī summarise its account of the path thus: “When the desire to know has been awakened, one hears the highest truths from the Vedanta, reflects on them, reasons about them, refutes all objections to them, and, being finally satisfied about them, begins to contemplate the supreme Brahman that they teach. By uninterrupted meditation practised with devotion for a long time, the seeker of Brahman attains Brahman” — and in a footnote to the same page they mark the other school’s difference: “The Vivaranakara holds that rituals are contributory to knowledge itself and not merely to the desire to know.” This is the second of the great differences between the two schools, and it is a difference with consequences for how a seeker spends his days: whether the decisive work is done in the hearing, or in the long meditation that follows it.

The third difference concerns ritual, and here the Kanchi chapter on Sri Vācaspati is the witness. It explains that Sri Vācaspati held “that performance of rituals and other duties relating to one’s stage and order of life generate in the mind of the aspirant the desire to know Brahman”, the “desire to know” being vividiṣā, and then states the other view: “Prakasatman, on the other hand, maintains that the performances of rituals, etc., are responsible for giving rise to the knowledge of Brahman. In his Vivarana as well as in his work Sarirakanyayasangraha he affirms this view. According to both the views, the performance of rituals and other duties belonging to one’s class of life must be given up after the rise of the desire to know Brahman. But, while according to Vachaspatimisra the utility of karma ceases with merely giving rise to the desire to know Brahman, according to Prakasatman the results of the performed deeds are operative till the rise of the knowledge of Brahman. The former view is known as vividishapaksha; and the latter one, as vedanapaksha.”

This needs a word of explanation, because on a careless reading it seems to make Sri Prakāśātman the more ritualist of the two, and that is not quite right. Both teachers agree that a person who has come to desire knowledge should give up ritual and take to hearing. The disagreement is about what the ritual he did before that point goes on doing. Sri Vācaspati says its work is finished once it has produced the desire; Sri Prakāśātman says the merit it produced keeps working, silently, until knowledge itself arises — that it helps to bring about not only the wish but the fulfilment. The Kanchi author cites the Vivaraṇa and the Śārīraka-nyāya-saṅgraha by page for this. It is a technical point, but it has a human side. On Sri Prakāśātman’s view, nothing a seeker has done in good faith is wasted; the years of duty before the years of inquiry are still at work in the inquiry.

The argument with the Buddhists

The Kanchi chapter on Sri Prakāśātman is given over to a single theme, and its author explains why in his first sentence: “It is as a humble homage to the memory of an Advaita Acharya Prakasatman, that I contribute this paper on an Advaita theory which has stood the onslaughts of a very challenging school, the Mahayana Buddhism.” The theory is the theory of perception, and the challenge came from the Yogācāra or Vijñānavāda school of Buddhist thought, which held that the objects of experience are not distinct from the moments of awareness in which they appear — that “blue” and “the awareness of blue” are one thing. To a reader outside both traditions this may look like the closest possible neighbour to Advaita, which also says that everything is, in the end, consciousness. Sri Prakāśātman thought it the most important thing to get right, and his reason shows what Advaita is and is not.

Dasgupta states the disagreement in his words: “Prakasatman (a.d. 1200) in his Panca-padika-vivarana raises this point and says that the great difference between the Mahayanists and the Vedantins consists in the fact that the former hold that the objects (visaya) have neither any separate existence nor any independent purpose or action to fulfil as distinguished from the momentary ideas, while the latter hold that, though the objects are in essence identical with the one pure consciousness, yet they can fulfil independent purposes or functions and have separate, abiding and uncontradicted existences”. The distinction is fine and it is everything. Advaita does not say that the pot is an idea in my mind. It says that the pot, and my mind, and the idea, are all appearances of one consciousness — and that within the appearance the pot is really out there, holds water, lasts overnight, and is the same pot in the morning. The world is not real in the way Brahman is real; but it is not a private dream either, and the difference between those two denials is the difference between Advaita and Vijñānavāda.

The argument he and Sri Padmapāda used is the one Dasgupta calls the argument from constancy and variation: “Both Padmapada and Prakasatman argue that, since the awareness remains the same while there is a constant variation of its objects, and therefore that which remains constant (anuvrtta) and that which changes (vyavrtta) cannot be considered identical, the object cannot be regarded as being only a modification of the idea”. The Kanchi author puts the same point: “In the Advaitist School however, as Padmapada, and following him, Prakasatman very clearly bring out, that there is no necessity of the distinctness in the direct awareness of this or that object. Even in the awareness of a distinctness regarding this object or that object the awareness remains the same in regard to the directness. It does not change from object to object, as required to be known in every case of the knowledge of a given object.” I see blue, then yellow, then a face. The seeing does not turn blue and then yellow. If seeing and seen were one thing, it would have to. Since the seeing stays and the seen changes, they are two — and the one that stays is the one that is finally real.

The second half of the argument concerns the Buddhist claim that to exist is to be momentary. Dasgupta reports Sri Padmapāda’s reply and then Sri Prakāśātman’s: “Existence is a nature of things; and even when a thing remains silent after an operation it does not on that account cease to exist” — a pot that has done its work and stands idle is still a pot — and then: “that the supposed three notions of “I,” “awareness” and the object are really not three distinct notions appearing as one on account of their similarity, but all the three are joined together in one identical subject-object-awareness which does not involve the three successive stages which the Buddhists suppose. This identity is proved by the fact that they are recognized (pratyabhijna) to be so.” Recognition — “this is the same pot I saw yesterday,” “I am the one who saw it” — is for him the decisive fact that a philosophy of moments cannot explain. Dasgupta then records the Buddhist rejoinder, that a changeless consciousness could not do the recognising either, and the Vedāntin’s reply that “though the pure consciousness cannot behave as an individual, yet the same consciousness associated with mind (antahkarana-visista) may behave as an individual who can recognize his own identity as well as that of others”. That reply is the reflection theory of the soul at work: it is the reflection in the mind, not the pure light, that remembers.

A reader should notice what this argument is not. It is not a dismissal of the Buddhist teachers as fools or unbelievers. Sri Prakāśātman took their position seriously enough to spend a great part of his book on it, and the Kanchi author, writing in 1968, still thought the dispute worth a whole essay. Both sides agreed that the ordinary world is not what it seems and that the cure is a knowledge that changes the knower. They disagreed about whether there is a changeless knower at all, and whether the world one wakes up from is a shared world or a private one. Those are real questions, and Advaita’s answers to them were sharpened, in this book, by having to meet the best rival account then available. The tradition owes the Buddhist teachers that much, and Sri Prakāśātman’s pages are the record of the debt.

Bhāmatī and Vivaraṇa: what the two lines disagree about

The points on which the two schools differ have been touched on in passing above; it may help to gather them. This page has been able to check four of them in its sources, and it lists only those four. On each, the first position is Sri Vācaspati’s and the second Sri Prakāśātman’s.

• Where ignorance sits. The Bhāmatī: in the individual soul, with Brahman as what it hides. The Vivaraṇa: in Brahman itself, which is both its seat and what it hides. The Kanchi chapter on Sri Padmapāda calls this “one of the fundamental points of difference between the Vivarana line of interpretation and the interpretation of the Vacaspati line”.
• What the soul is. The Vivaraṇa holds the reflection theory, that the soul is Brahman reflected in ignorance and in each mind; it argues against the delimitation theory, that the soul is Brahman bounded by a mind. The section above gives its argument. Sri Vācaspati’s page discusses his own account.
• What ritual does. The Bhāmatī: ritual produces the desire to know, and its work ends there (vividiṣā-pakṣa). The Vivaraṇa: the merit of ritual goes on working until knowledge itself arises (vedana-pakṣa). The Kanchi chapter on Sri Vācaspati and the translators of the Bhāmatī both record this.
• How knowledge comes. The Vivaraṇa: hearing the text from a teacher is the principal means, and reflection and meditation are its auxiliaries; the tradition’s digest opens with this. The Bhāmatī, in its translators’ summary: one hears, reflects, is satisfied, and then “By uninterrupted meditation practised with devotion for a long time, the seeker of Brahman attains Brahman”.

Later teachers of the tradition have been at pains to say that these are differences of method and emphasis and not of goal, and the two witnesses this page has for that judgement are worth hearing. The Anusandhana Kendra’s survey reports the view of Sri Appayya Dīkṣita, the sixteenth-century polymath who wrote for the Bhāmatī side yet “points out that the differences between the vivaraNa and bhAmatI schools are not because of philosophical disagreement on fundamental principles, but a result of differing technique and the emphasis on different issues, such as epistemology in one and ontology in the other”. The survey uses a transliteration in which capital letters mark long vowels and special consonants, and the quotation is left as it stands. And the Kanchi author of the chapter on Sri Vācaspati closes with an image that has become the tradition’s way of holding the two schools together: “Various theories have been set forth in order to understand the truth. Although the theories are not ultimately true, yet they are helpful in realizing the ultimate truth. Just as alphabets are useful in understanding the sounds, though they are less true than sounds being mere lines, the theories that are set forth by Vachaspatimisra, Prakasatman and others are helpful in leading the aspirant to liberation, though they are less true than the latter. These theories, though different, lead one to the same goal, that is, liberation.”

That is the tradition’s own verdict, and this page adopts it. A reader who finds the Vivaraṇa account of ignorance more convincing, or less, has not thereby found Sri Vācaspati or Sri Prakāśātman to be a worse teacher. He has found which alphabet he reads more easily.

A dissenting reading

Not everyone within the tradition has accepted that verdict, and the most searching modern dissent is set out here as one view. Swami Satchidānandendra Saraswatī (1880–1975), the founder of the Adhyātma Prakāśa Kāryālaya at Holenarsipur, argued in The Method of the Vedanta and elsewhere that both post-Śaṅkara schools had departed from Sri Śaṅkara at the root — and that the departure began with the two-word reading of “false knowledge” that Sri Padmapāda proposed and Sri Prakāśātman fixed. His chapter on the Vivaraṇa begins there. Having reported how the Pañcapādikā split the compound into “false” and “ignorance” and how the Vivaraṇa explained the two words as excluding two errors, he writes: “Both explanations contradict the way Sri Sankara himself understood the term ‘false knowledge’ (mithya-jnana) in the relevant part of his Commentary and in the argumentation by objection and answer that followed. For he simply took the term to mean superimposition. Both explanations undeniably commit two faults. They introduce points not relevant to the Commentary they are explaining; and they introduce a mode of explanation totally foreign to the previous Vedic tradition”.

The charge, in plain terms, is this. Sri Śaṅkara said that the human problem is a mistake — taking oneself to be what one is not — and that the mistake is removed by seeing through it, as one sees through a mirage. He did not say that the mistake is made of a stuff, or that the stuff sits in the Self, or that the soul is a reflection in it. Those, Swami Satchidānandendra held, are theories added by later teachers to answer questions Sri Śaṅkara did not think needed answering, and once added they generated further questions — where does the stuff sit, what does it hide, how many seats has it — that the schools have argued about ever since. On the reflection theory in particular he thought the Vivaraṇa had failed to answer the obvious objection: “The right answer would have been to have said ’It is precisely because the soul is seen to be conscious that it cannot be a reflection. For no reflection anywhere is found to be conscious”. On the seat of ignorance he granted the Vivaraṇa’s honesty — it admitted that placing ignorance in the Self was a contradiction, and argued only that it was a smaller one than the alternative — but thought a method that ends in choosing the smaller contradiction had gone wrong earlier.

Two things should be said in fairness to both sides. The first is that Swami Satchidānandendra’s chapter is also one of the most careful summaries of the Vivaraṇa in English, quoting it by page and stating its arguments in full before answering them; a reader who wants to know what Sri Prakāśātman said can learn it from his critic. The second is that the Vivaraṇa school has answers to him. It would point to Sri Śaṅkara’s own way of speaking of the unmanifest as a seed-power and of māyā as the Lord’s power, would say that the sleep in which no mistake is being made and yet ignorance persists shows ignorance to be more than a mistake, and that a teaching which must explain how one Self appears as many cannot avoid saying something about the medium of the appearance. This page does not judge between them. It records that the largest single body of Advaita writing for a thousand years has followed Sri Prakāśātman, that a serious modern teacher within the tradition thought this a wrong turning, and that both are still read. The reader who goes on to Swami Satchidānandendra’s own page on this site will find his case made at length there.

The other schools, seen from this book

The Vivaraṇa is a work of controversy, and a reader should know whom it was arguing with and how this site regards them. Sri Padmapāda had listed the rivals whose accounts of the “I” and of error he refuted — the Naiyāyikas, the two Mīmāṁsā schools of the Bhāṭṭas and the Prābhākaras, and the Vijñānavāda and Madhyamaka schools of Buddhism — and Sri Prakāśātman inherited the whole list and added to it the positions within Advaita, the delimitation theory chief among them, that he thought mistaken. Each of these rivals is a serious tradition with its own great teachers, and this site does not belittle any of them. What follows says only where the Vivaraṇa stood in relation to each.

With the Nyāya logicians he shared a great deal of method and a conviction that argument matters; he differed in holding that the Self is not a substance with knowledge as one of its qualities but is consciousness itself, self-luminous, needing no second light. With the Mīmāṁsā teachers of ritual he shared the conviction that the Veda is authority and that ritual has real effects — his own view that the merit of ritual works on until knowledge arises is closer to them than Sri Vācaspati’s; he differed in holding that the Veda’s final purpose is not to command action but to reveal what is, and his Śabda-nirṇaya, by the Centre for Brahmavidya’s account, “upholds the testimonial authority of sabda” in that sense. With the Buddhist idealists he shared more than either side liked to say: that the world is not what it seems, that consciousness is the fundamental fact, that liberation is a change in knowledge; he differed, as the section above explains, on whether there is a changeless knower and whether the world is shared. And with the other Advaitins — Sri Vācaspati above all — he shared the whole goal and differed on the account of the way.

Two things about his manner of arguing deserve notice. He argued with the best version of each position he could find, which is why his critics’ views can still be reconstructed from his book. And nothing in the accounts used here shows him arguing against devotion; the Vivaraṇa, as its digest and its critics describe it, is not a polemic against the worship of God. On the contrary, its account of Īśvara as the consciousness reflected in the whole of māyā, omniscient and omnipotent, gives the school a Lord, and a way of saying why worship of that Lord is not the same thing as the ignorance the school wants removed. A reader who has been told that Advaita is cold should know that the school’s most systematic book made room, at its centre, for the Lord.

The school that grew from the book

What happened to the Vivaraṇa after it was written is the best measure of what it was. It gathered commentaries of its own. Dasgupta lists them: “Prakasatman’s commentary on it, called Pancapadika-vivarana, was commented upon by Akhandananda Muni in his Tattva-dipana, by Ramananda Sarasvati in his Vivaranopanyasa, and by Nrsimhasrama in his Panca-padika-vivarana-bhava-prakasika.” The Centre for Brahmavidya gives the same names and adds the fourth and most influential: “Thus, Akhandananda Muni’s Tattva-deepana, Ramananda Sarasvati’s Vivaranopanyasa, Nrisimhasrama’s Pancapadika-vivarana-bhava-prakashika” and the Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṅgraha of Sri Vidyāraṇya and Sri Bhāratī Tīrtha “have stemmed from it”. A book that is commented on for five hundred years is a book a tradition has decided to live by.

The decisive step was the Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṅgraha. When Sri Vidyāraṇya — the fourteenth-century teacher whom tradition makes the counsellor of the founders of Vijayanagara and who became head of the Sringeri monastery — wanted to give students the doctrine of Advaita in an ordered form, it was the Vivaraṇa he chose to digest, and in doing so he made Sri Prakāśātman’s positions the teaching of the most important monastery in the south. The Kanchi chapter on Sri Padmapāda records it: “Vidyaranya wrote a separate monograph called Vivarana-prameya-sangraha in which the Vedanta doctrines are clearly set forth on the lines of the Panchapadika-vivarana.” The same author’s Pañcadaśī, one of the most widely read manuals of Advaita, carries the same doctrines to readers who have never heard the word Vivaraṇa. The Anusandhana Kendra’s survey notes that the book “lends its name to the other important sub-tradition in advaita vedAnta, namely the vivaraNa school”.

The line ran on. Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama in the sixteenth century, whom the survey calls “an extremely influential teacher in the 16th century”, wrote a commentary on the Vivaraṇa; his disciple Sri Dharmarāja Adhvarīndra wrote the Vedānta-paribhāṣā, of which the survey says that it “is immensely popular” and that “All these authors of the vivaraNa school pay a lot of attention to epistemological issues”. The Vedānta-paribhāṣā is the book from which most students of Advaita in the last three centuries have learned how the school thinks about perception, inference and the word; every one of its definitions descends from the Vivaraṇa. Sri Dharmarāja has a page of his own on this site, as do Sri Vidyāraṇya and Sri Vimuktātman.

And in the twentieth century the school found its most unexpected reader. When Surendranath Dasgupta set out to write the first full history of Indian philosophy in English, he had to choose a form of Advaita to expound as the standard, and he chose this one: “Padmapada’s method of treatment, as interpreted by Prakasatman, has been taken in the first and the second volumes of the present work as the guide to the exposition of the Vedanta.” So the Advaita that a century of English-speaking readers have met in the standard history is, without most of them knowing it, Sri Prakāśātman’s.

Legacy

It is possible to measure a teacher’s legacy by the stories told about him, and by that measure Sri Prakāśātman has none. It is also possible to measure it by how much of what a tradition says a thousand years later was first said by him, and by that measure few teachers in Advaita stand higher. The vocabulary in which the school has discussed its central problem — ignorance as bhāva-rūpa, positive; as anirvācya, indeterminable; as having Brahman for both āśraya and viṣaya; the soul as pratibimba, reflection; the Lord as bimba, original; hearing as the aṅgī, principal, and reflection and meditation as its aṅgas, limbs — is his vocabulary, or was fixed by him from Sri Padmapāda’s. When a student in a monastery today is taught “the Vivaraṇa view” of a question, the teacher is reporting a decision this man made.

The legacy has three parts. The first is the school itself, described above: the chain from Sri Akhaṇḍānanda through Sri Vidyāraṇya to Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama and Sri Dharmarāja, and the two textbooks — the Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṅgraha and the Vedānta-paribhāṣā — through which his positions reached everyone who studied Advaita formally in the south. The second is the shape of the debate. Because he stated the Vivaraṇa positions so clearly, the Bhāmatī positions became clear by contrast, and the tradition acquired the habit of teaching itself as a dialogue between two well-defined lines. That habit is his legacy as much as either line is. The third is the standard of argument. The Vivaraṇa set the expectation that an Advaita teacher would meet the Buddhist, the logician and the ritualist on their own ground and answer them point by point; Śrīharṣa, Sri Citsukha and Sri Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, the great dialecticians of the later school, are his heirs in method whatever they thought of his conclusions.

Outside the tradition, his legacy is quieter and stranger. Because Dasgupta chose his line as the guide to the standard English history, the Advaita that Western philosophy has argued with for a century is largely his; the objections raised against “Śaṅkara’s doctrine of māyā” in a hundred university lectures are, often, objections to the Vivaraṇa’s account of it. And because Swami Satchidānandendra’s critique has been translated and widely read, a modern seeker is now likely to meet Sri Prakāśātman first as the man who is said to have got Sri Śaṅkara wrong. Both are odd fates for a teacher who left no name but a title, and both are proof that the book is still alive. Nobody spends a chapter refuting a dead book.

For the seeker

What can a person who is not a scholar take from a teacher whose only surviving voice is a commentary on a commentary? More than might be expected, because the questions the Vivaraṇa answers are questions a seeker actually asks, in his own words, sooner or later. Four of them are worth stating plainly.

Is my ignorance real? The seeker who has been told that his bondage is “only ignorance” often hears it as “only imaginary,” and then wonders why it does not go away when he stops imagining. Sri Prakāśātman’s answer is that ignorance is not nothing. It is a positive something, beginningless and stubborn, that one can perceive directly — every “I don’t know” is a sighting of it — and that is removed by one thing only, the knowledge it hides. This is a harder teaching than “it is all in your mind,” and a more useful one. It explains why effort is needed and what kind.

Who is bound, and who is freed? The Vivaraṇa answer — that ignorance sits in the Self, not in the small self — sounds like a paradox and is meant as a consolation. It means that the one who seeks is not a separate creature who must earn his way to Brahman, but Brahman itself, veiled, in the act of removing a veil. The seeker is what he is looking for. The school’s critics have thought this a contradiction; the school has replied that it is a smaller contradiction than any alternative, and that it is what the Upaniṣad means by “That thou art.”

What am I, as this one person? A reflection, the school says: the one light, caught in the small mirror of this mind, taking the mirror’s shape and tremor without being changed in itself. The image is worth living with. It tells the seeker that his individuality is real enough to be worked on and unreal enough to be seen through; that his faults belong to the mirror and his consciousness to the light; and that when the mirror is finally set aside nothing is lost that was ever his.

What should I do? Hear. The Vivaraṇa school’s most practical teaching is that the decisive event is the understanding of the text in a teacher’s presence, and that reflection and meditation exist to remove the doubts and habits that stand between that understanding and its full effect. This does not make meditation unnecessary — the school enjoins it — but it puts the weight where the school thinks the Upaniṣad puts it, on knowing what the sentence means. A seeker drawn to this school will spend his effort on study with a teacher; one drawn to the Bhāmatī will spend more of it in contemplation. The Kanchi author’s alphabets are the right image: they are two ways of spelling the same word.

And there is a fifth thing, which is not a doctrine. Sri Prakāśātman is the teacher who disappeared into his work. He left no story, no place, no face, and a name that means only “light.” The tradition he served regards that as the proper condition of a teacher of the Self, and a reader who is troubled by how little this page could tell him about the man may take the trouble itself as the lesson.

A note on pictures, names and dates

No portrait of Sri Prakāśātman exists, and none has ever been claimed. This site shows a lamp in place of a picture wherever no authentic likeness of a teacher can be found, and it does so here without hesitation. The lamp is the right emblem for a man whose every name means light.

His names are given on this page as the sources give them. Prakāśātman is the standard short form and is used throughout; Prakāśātma-yati is the fuller form of the same name; Svaprakāśānubhava, with or without the honorific bhagavat, is the name the Kanchi chapter and the Centre for Brahmavidya report from his own colophon. The honorific “Sri” is this site’s mark of respect and is not part of any of the names. His teacher is named Ananyānubhava by the Kanchi chapter and by Dasgupta and Govindānanda by the Centre for Brahmavidya, and the page reports both without choosing.

The dates are three, and the reasons for each are set out in the section on dates above: 950 (Venkataramiah), “tenth century” or “not before the tenth century” (the Anusandhana Kendra and the Centre for Brahmavidya), and about 1200 (Dasgupta, followed by the foreword to Venkataramiah’s book and by the Kanchi chapter when it quotes him). The card for this teacher on this site says “10th century” because that is the tradition’s usual figure and the more cautious of the two; the reader should treat the date as open.

The sources were read from scanned copies and web pages. Where the machine had misread a printed word — a broken hyphen, a stray page-header, “Vivaraija” for Vivaraṇa, “father” for “rather” — the printed word has been restored in the quotations on this page, and a spacing habit of one website, which puts a space before its commas, has been quietly normalised. No word has been altered for any other reason, and no quotation has been composed. A reader who wishes to check any passage can do so through the links at the foot of the page.

Timeline

Every date below is a modern scholar’s estimate; the sources record no event of his life. The dates for other teachers are those given in the sources used on this page, and are stated so that the reader can see where the Vivaraṇa falls among them.

• 8th century CE (the traditional and scholarly estimates differ) — Sri Śaṅkara writes the Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya; his disciple Sri Padmapāda writes the Pañcapādikā on its opening. The dates of both are discussed on their own pages.
• First half of the 9th century — Sri Vācaspati Miśra writes the Bhāmatī, by Dasgupta’s dating; Sri Sureśvara, Sri Maṇḍana Miśra and Sri Sarvajñātman belong to the same broad period.
• 950 / 10th century — Sri Prakāśātman writes the Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa, the Śārīraka-mīmāṁsā-nyāya-saṅgraha, the Laukika-nyāya-muktāvalī and the Śabda-nirṇaya, on the dating of Venkataramiah, the Anusandhana Kendra and (as a lower limit) the Centre for Brahmavidya.
• About 1200 — the alternative date for the same books, on Dasgupta’s reckoning.
• 13th–14th century — Sri Akhaṇḍānanda Muni writes the Tattva-dīpana on the Vivaraṇa (Venkataramiah’s foreword gives 1350); Sri Vidyāraṇya writes the Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṅgraha, making the book’s positions the teaching of Sringeri.
• 16th century — Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama writes the Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa-bhāva-prakāśikā; Sri Rāmānanda Sarasvatī the Vivaraṇopanyāsa; Sri Appayya Dīkṣita, writing for the other school, says the two differ in technique and not in principle.
• 17th century — Sri Dharmarāja Adhvarīndra writes the Vedānta-paribhāṣā, the Vivaraṇa school’s textbook of knowledge.
• 1892 — the Vivaraṇa is printed in the Vizianagram Sanskrit Series, the edition Dasgupta used.
• 1932 — Dasgupta’s second volume takes “Padmapada’s method of treatment, as interpreted by Prakasatman” as its guide to Vedānta.
• 1941 — the Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṅgraha is translated into English at Andhra University.
• 1958 — the Madras Government Oriental Series edition of the Pañcapādikā and Vivaraṇa with two commentaries, the text Swami Satchidānandendra cites.
• 1968 — Preceptors of Advaita devotes a chapter to him, on his argument with Mahāyāna Buddhism.
• 1989 — The Method of the Vedanta appears in English, with its critical chapter on the Vivaraṇa.
• 1997 — the whole Vivaraṇa is rendered into English by Professor P. S. Sastri (Sadhana Grantha Mandali, Tenali), with the assistance of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams.

Questions a reader may ask

Is anything at all known about his life? No. His names, the name of his teacher (on which two sources differ) and the titles of his books are the whole of it, and all of it comes from his own colophon and from later writers. This page says so plainly rather than filling the gap with what other teachers’ lives contain.

Why is the school named after his book and not after him or Sri Padmapāda? Because the school’s positions were fixed in his book rather than in Sri Padmapāda’s, which survives only in part and leaves several questions open, and because the tradition’s way of naming a line is by its defining text: the other school is likewise named after the Bhāmatī and not after Sri Vācaspati.

Did he and Sri Vācaspati argue with each other? Not in person, on any dating; and whether he was answering the Bhāmatī or writing before it was widely known depends on which of the three dates is right. The Kanchi chapters and Dasgupta present the two positions side by side without saying that either book names the other, and this page follows them.

Is the Vivaraṇa school “the” Advaita? It is the larger of the two classical lines and the one whose textbooks have been most used; it is not the whole tradition. The Bhāmatī line has its own great commentators; Sri Sureśvara’s line has its own emphasis; and modern teachers have drawn on all of them. This site presents the Vivaraṇa view as one strong view within Advaita and Swami Satchidānandendra’s objection to it as another.

Does his view of ignorance mean the world is real? Not in the sense Brahman is real. It means the world is not nothing, that it has a stuff, and that the stuff is a positive, dependent, indeterminable power that the Vedānta calls ignorance or māyā. His argument with the Buddhists was precisely that the world is not a private idea; his argument with everyone else was that it is not finally real either.

Where can I read him? The one English rendering of the whole Vivaraṇa, Professor P. S. Sastri’s of 1997, is still in copyright and is not linked here; a library may have it. The tradition’s own digest of his book, Sri Vidyāraṇya’s Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṅgraha, is in English on the Internet Archive and is the best way in; Dasgupta’s second volume and Swami Satchidānandendra’s chapter, both linked below, give his arguments from friendly and critical sides. The Sanskrit text is linked, in two editions, for those who read it.

Why is there no picture? Because there is none. See the note above.