Sri Vimuktātman

The man

Of all the teachers on this site, Sri Vimuktātman is the one about whom the least can be said and the one whose single surviving book has been read the most widely outside his own school. The scholar who first printed that book, after searching out five manuscripts across the south of India, summed up everything known of its author in four sentences and ended: “This is all that can be ascertained about him.” No birthplace, no dates, no debate, no seat, no disciple named with certainty, no story. What remains is a book — the Iṣṭa-siddhi, “The Establishment of the Desired” — and the long shadow it cast.

That shadow is the reason he is here. Within a century or two of its writing the Iṣṭa-siddhi was being quoted by the teachers of a rival school in order to refute it; Sri Rāmānuja, in the greatest of all critiques of Advaita, drew on it for his statement of the doctrine he meant to overturn; a Kashmiri poet listed a commentator on it among the men of letters of his day; and every later Advaitin who discussed how the world can be neither real nor unreal, or how Ignorance can end, was building on ground he had cleared. Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, closing his Advaita-siddhi six or seven centuries later, named it as one of the three “Siddhis” to which he was adding a fourth. It is, in the words of its editor, “a very important one as indicated by references to it, direct or indirect, throughout the literature of the Vedānta—not only of the advaitic but also of other schools”.

He was a renunciate; the tradition calls him Muni and Ācārya, and his book is signed with the name of his teacher. He was, by every account, a dialectician of the first rank, terse to the point of difficulty, “a rather profuse use of pronouns” and all. He believed, and argued at a length no one before him had attempted, that the world we see is an error of the same kind as silver seen in a shell — neither real, since it can be seen through, nor unreal, since it is seen — and that the one fact which no argument can dislodge is the awareness in which both the error and its correction appear. This page sets out what the sources say of him, what his book argues, how it was read by friends and critics, and where the accounts differ. It does not supply a biography the sources do not contain.

The sources for this page, and what each can bear

Five documents stand behind this page, and it is worth saying what each is, because they are of very unequal kinds and the reader should know which is speaking.

• The 1933 edition of the Iṣṭa-siddhi, edited by M. Hiriyanna and published by the Oriental Institute, Baroda, in the Gaekwad’s Oriental Series, with extracts from the commentary of Jñānottama. Its preface and forty-page English introduction are the foundation of everything since written about the author; the substance of the introduction had been read to the International Congress of Orientalists at Oxford in 1928. The complete volume is freely available and linked below.
• The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha’s chapter in Preceptors of Advaita (1968), the thirteenth in the series, by P. K. Sundaram, who afterwards wrote a full study of the book’s theory of knowledge (Advaita Epistemology, named here but not linked, as it is still in copyright). The chapter is a close summary of the book’s arguments with page references to Hiriyanna’s edition, and is linked below.
• Swami Satchidanandendra’s The Method of the Vedānta, whose eleventh chapter, headed “The Iṣṭa Siddhi,” gives a long, translated, and pointedly critical account of the book as the moment at which, in that author’s judgment, Advaita took a wrong turning. It is the dissenting voice on this page and is treated as such.
• Surendranath Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy, volume two (1932), written before the Baroda edition appeared, from a fragmentary manuscript; valuable for its independent dating and its careful summary of the opening argument.
• The Advaita Vedanta Anusandhana Kendra’s survey of post-Śaṅkara authors, which places him among the tenth-century writers and records what is known of his commentator.

Every quotation on the page is taken word for word from one of these, and a link to the source is given wherever the source is free to link. Where the scanned books have been misread by the machine that copied them, the printed words have been restored and the restorations recorded, as the closing note explains.

Where the life was lived: a geography of manuscripts

There is no place to mark for Sri Vimuktātman. His book names no town, no river and no king; his colophons give only his own name and his teacher’s; and no maṭha lists him among its heads. The map below is therefore left without a pin, and honestly so. What can be traced instead is the geography of the book — where its copies were kept and where its readers lived — which is the nearest thing to a map of his influence that the evidence allows.

The 1933 edition was built on five manuscripts. Its editor took as his chief witness “a palm-leaf MS. belonging to the Naduvil Matham at Trichur in the Cochin State”, which he found “otherwise excellent” apart from “a few brief gaps”; a second copy in Mysore that “is a copy of MS. No. R 3,453 in the Oriental Library at Madras”; a third, sent by Gopinath Kaviraj from the Sanskrit College at Benares; a fourth that “seems to have been transcribed from the MS. of the work found in the Tanjore Palace Library”, which was “very corrupt” yet “furnished some correct readings”; and a fifth, “A copy of a Travancore MS. procured through the kindness of Pandit K. Sambasiva Sastri, Curator of the Department for the Publication of Oriental MSS., Trivandrum”, which “has many lacunae”. Dasgupta, working a few years earlier, had only “the manuscript from the Adyar Library, which is a transcript copy of a manuscript of the Naduvil Matham, Cochin State”, and found it “very fragmentary in many parts; so much so, that it is often extremely difficult to follow properly the meaning of the discussions”.

Kerala, the Tamil country, Mysore and Benares, then, are where the book was kept. Its readers reach further. Its earliest commentator, Jñānottama, “lived in the region of Tanjavur in Tamil Nadu”; the two teachers who quoted it to refute it, Yāmuna and Sri Rāmānuja, taught in the Tamil country; and a twelfth-century Kashmiri poem, the Śrīkaṇṭha-carita of Maṅkhaka, in its last canto “which contains a description of contemporary men of letters”, names one Ramyadeva who “is represented there as a renowned Vedantic teacher who had commented upon the Iṣṭa-siddhi”. A book known in Kashmir and in the far south at the same moment had already travelled the length of India. Where its author sat when he wrote it, no one has said.

What his own book says about its author

The book is the only witness to the man, and it says three things.

First, his name and his teacher’s. “We know from the colophons at the end of each chapter that the author of the Iṣṭa Siddhi was one Vimuktatman Acarya, pupil of” Avyayātman — so the Method, and the 1933 edition agrees: “The author of the Iṣṭa-siddhi was Vimuktātman, a disciple of one Avyayātman”. The editor adds in a footnote that “Some MSS. substitute ‘Vimuktācārya’ for ‘Vimuktātman’” — so that even his name comes down in two forms. Dasgupta gives the teacher a fuller style: “a disciple of Avyayatman Bhagavat Pujyapada”, “the blessed one whose feet are to be honoured,” a formula of reverence rather than a second name.

Second, that he had written another book. “to judge from a statement in the present work (p. 37), he seems to have written another book named Pramāṇa-vṛtti-nirṇaya dealing, as its name signifies, with the nature and scope of pramāṇas” — a “Determination of the Working of the Means of Knowledge.” Dasgupta confirms it from his own manuscript: “Vimuktatman wrote also another work, called Pramana-vrtti-nirnaya, to which he refers in his Ista-siddhi (MS. p. 72).” No copy of it has been found.

Third, what he thought he was doing. He calls the book a prakaraṇa, a manual, and claims for it the whole of Vedānta: “This work is a compendium of the essence of the Vedantic teaching on all subjects” (I.S. p. 37, in the Method’s translation). But in the closing verses of the last chapter he tells the reader where his heart was. In the Method’s rendering:

“On the question whether Ignorance is real, unreal or indeterminable as either, and on the question whether it inheres in the not-self or the Self, I have established that it is indeterminable and inheres in the Self, for that is what sound logic shows” … “The four ends of life, too, merit, welfare, pleasure and liberation, along with all other desirable and undesirable results of action, belong to the realm of Ignorance. So do the contradictory systems of the great philosophers and the whole amazing variety of the universe.” “I have given special consideration to the supreme bliss on which the experts in the Veda ponder, and which is known from the Upanishads to be the Self, in the belief that this bliss is what all desire. The truth on this subject becomes clear if metaphysical Ignorance is seen to be indeterminable. Therefore I have treated of that Ignorance in depth, so that the desired end may be attained.”

That is as near to a self-portrait as he comes: a man who believed that one carefully established idea — that Ignorance is real enough to work and unreal enough to end — would unlock everything else, and who wrote a long book to establish it.

Was he a monk? The colophons do not say. The Anusandhana Kendra’s survey notes that there are “some early sannyāsin authors whose daśanāmī suffixes are not known”, and names him among them, adding: “In these cases, that they were sannyāsins is known by the terms muni, yati, yogi etc. used by later commentators.” The tradition’s title for him, Vimuktātma Muni, is one of those terms. His own name — “he whose self is fully released” — is a renunciate’s name, like his teacher’s, “he whose self does not decay.” Nothing more is known.

Who was his teacher? Avyayātman, and a possible pupil

Of Avyayātman nothing whatever is recorded beyond the name in the colophons. No work of his survives, no maṭha claims him, and no later writer mentions him except as Sri Vimuktātman’s teacher. Dasgupta’s fuller form of the name, Avyayātman Bhagavat Pūjyapāda, is a pupil’s reverence and not a biography. The reader who has followed the pages for Sri Padmapāda, Sri Sureśvara or Sri Sarvajñātman will notice how differently this lineage behaves: no line to Sri Śaṅkara is claimed for him by anyone, ancient or modern, and his book does not name the master except by the honorific title “the author of the Vārttika” for Sri Sureśvara, whom it twice cites. The editor of 1933 observed that “Vimuktātman quotes sparingly from others”, and that “latest writer to whom he directly refers is Sureśvara or the Vārttika-kāra, as he is styled here”.

If his teacher is a name only, his pupil is a guess. Sri Ānandabodha, the early Advaitin whose definition of falsity became one of the five classic ones, quotes half a verse of the Iṣṭa-siddhi in his Pramāṇa-mālā and introduces it with a word of reverence. Hiriyanna: “We may deduce from this, though we cannot at all be sure about it, that Ānandabodha was a disciple of Vimuktātman.” He adds that “There is nothing improbable in this, for Ānandabodha was an early writer on the Advaita”, and that in his Nyāya-makaranda “he held views in regard to many a detail of advaitic doctrine which are identical with those maintained by Vimuktātman”. The Method reads the same evidence the same way: “As the Pramāṇa Mālā (p.4) by Anandabodha refers to him by the word ‘Guru’ in the honorific plural, it is possible that he was the Guru of Anandabodha.” Both are careful to say “possible.” Hiriyanna notes the oddity that “the colophon in none of the three works of Anandabodha included in the volume in question mentions his guru”. This page reports the possibility and no more.

When he lived: three reckonings

No date is given anywhere in the book, and the scholars have had to reason from who quotes whom. Three answers are on record, and they do not agree.

Hiriyanna, 1933: between 850 and 1050. The argument is a model of its kind and deserves to be followed. The lower limit comes from the book’s critics. Yāmuna, Sri Rāmānuja’s teacher’s teacher, “quotes the first stanza of the Iṣṭa-siddhi—the same which, according to Vedānta Deśika, Rāmānuja had in mind in setting forth his mahāpūrva-pakṣa—and attempts to refute the advaitic view as contained in it”. Hence “the Iṣṭa-siddhi was regarded as a standard work on the Advaita already by 1100 A.D.”, and, allowing fifty years for a book to become an authority worth a rival school’s attention, “We may therefore fix 1050 A.D. as the inferior limit of its date”. The Kashmiri poem’s Ramyadeva gives, he says, “striking support from a rather unexpected quarter”, and its currency in the north and south together “suggests by the way that it is in all probability much older than the date mentioned above”. The upper limit comes from whom the book cites. Its commentator takes two passages to refer to Sri Bhāskara, whose commentary on the sūtras “is full of adverse references to Śaṅkara” and is itself cited by Sri Vācaspati Miśra; so “Bhāskara should be taken to have flourished in the first half of the 9th century. From this, we may conclude that the Iṣṭa-siddhi cannot be earlier than 850 A.D. These limits, viz. 850 to 1050 A.D. are all that we can fix for the work with the data procurable at present.”

Dasgupta, 1932: not later than about 1200. Working from the fragmentary Adyar copy, and reasoning from the book’s commentator, Dasgupta wrote: “Vimuktatman, a disciple of Avyayatman Bhagavat Pujyapada, wrote his Ista-siddhi probably not later than the early years of the thirteenth century. He is quoted and referred to by Madhusudana in his Advaita-siddhi and by Ramadvaya in his Vedanta-kaumudi of the fourteenth century. It was commented upon by Jnanottama, the teacher of Citsukha”, who “could not have flourished later than the latter half of the thirteenth century”. His heading gives “a.d. 1200.” Hiriyanna, a year later and with Yāmuna’s quotation in hand, judged this “much too late”. The two verdicts do not so much conflict as measure different things: Dasgupta was fixing the latest possible date, and Hiriyanna had found evidence that pushed it back two centuries.

The tenth century. The Anusandhana Kendra’s survey treats Sri Sarvajñātman as “another notable 10th century author” and adds that he “was probably a younger contemporary of Vimuktātman, the author of Iṣṭasiddhi” — which puts Sri Vimuktātman in the tenth century too, or a little before. The Method, for its part, finds that Sri Sarvajñātman “follows the view of the Iṣṭa Siddhi (M.V.232,1 and 2)” on how Ignorance ends, which requires the Iṣṭa-siddhi to be the earlier book. Within Hiriyanna’s bracket, then, the weight of later opinion falls toward its earlier half. The card for this page gives his editor’s bracket, “c. 850–1050,” and names him, because it is the only dating that rests on stated evidence and admits its own limits.

The works: one book found, one book lost

Two works are known. The Iṣṭa-siddhi survives in full and was printed in 1933. The Pramāṇa-vṛtti-nirṇaya, on the means of knowledge, is known only from its author’s own reference to it and has never been found. Nothing else has ever been attributed to him.

The book that survives has an unusual shape, and its editor described it exactly: “It is divided into eight chapters of which the first is much the biggest, occupying over one-half of the work. The remaining chapters also are of unequal length. It is written throughout in anuṣṭubh stanzas; and they are commented upon by the author himself—a mode of exposition which seems to have been common at one time.” The verses came first and stand on their own: “The stanzas by themselves constitute a connected whole, and the name of ‘Iṣṭa-siddhi’ seems originally to have been applied only to this portion.” The prose, which the author himself called a Vivaraṇa, “is later, although the author should have had the writing of it in mind from the very beginning”; it “deals with several points in the advaitic doctrine which are not mentioned in the verse portion or are only briefly touched upon there”, and “this double treatment leads to some amount of repetition to which Vimuktātman himself finds it necessary to draw our attention”. The Method notes the parallel with the other early Siddhi: “Like the Brahma Siddhi, this work, too, consists in verses explained by the author in a prose commentary.”

The title needs a word. Iṣṭa means “the desired” or “what is wished for,” and siddhi “establishment” or “attainment”; the book’s closing verses, quoted above, play on both senses — the desired end is attained when the desired doctrine is established. Hiriyanna, reading the author’s own gloss at p. 347, concluded that “It is this doctrine that appears intended to be understood by the word iṣṭa occurring in the title of the work.” The doctrine is Māyā. Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, closing his own great book, remarked “that there were in his time three advaitic works bearing the title of Siddhi and that he added a fourth to them”. The Kanchi chapter draws the three into a single sentence: the Brahma-siddhi of Sri Maṇḍana concerns the definition and testimony of Brahman; the Naiṣkarmya-siddhi of Sri Sureśvara “is interested in showing the how of Brahman-knowledge, i.e., whether it is by knowledge alone or by action that release is secured. The Ishta-siddhi of Vimuktatman engages itself rather in the question of the why of Brahman-knowledge, enquiring into the nature and cause of error, that is, the world. In short, ontology, ethology and epistemology may be said to be the respective contents of these three Siddhis.”

The book: its plan, its manner and its single theme

The Method gives the plan chapter by chapter, and no one has bettered its summary:

“The work has eight chapters. in the first, almost all the topics with which the work is concerned are stated in brief form. It therefore occupies over half the bulk of the book. It contains a protracted account of how the whole world is the effect of indeterminable Ignorance, as illustrated by the example of shell-silver. The next four chapters set out how those who hold different theories of error will have to accept in the end that their theory implies that error is indeterminable. The sixth chapter refutes the theory that Ignorance has its seat in the individual soul. The seventh chapter shows that only he who accepts metaphysical Ignorance can establish a distinction between the Self and the not-self — no one else can. The eighth chapter answers objections on the topic of the cessation of Ignorance.”

And the same writer’s conclusion: “From this examination of the contents, one can see that the author would not have objected to the work also being called ‘The Demonstration of Indeterminable Ignorance’.” Hiriyanna, from the opposite side of the argument, reached the same description by another road. Though the book claims the whole of Vedānta, “it is specially concerned with what may be described as its pivotal point—the doctrine of Māyā”, and “The exposition of this doctrine is so complete that the work may well be described as anirvacanīya-sarvasva, a name given to the later Khaṇḍana-khaṇḍa-khādya of the poet-philosopher, Śrīharṣa.” “The whole treasury of the indeterminable”: a title later given to the most famous dialectical work in Advaita, and one Hiriyanna thought this earlier book had earned first.

Its manner has struck every reader. “The work is essentially polemical, and furnishes abundant evidence of the author’s mastery over the art of dialectics. For instance, he often develops his arguments in such a dexterous way as to force the opponent, on his own premises, to reach the advaitic conclusion.” Its style is “characterised by extreme terseness and a rather profuse use of pronouns”, and “may be said to vie in its succinctness with the style of mathematical works and renders the task of following the discussions couched in it not a little exacting”. Yet “where the topic is not controversial, Vimuktātman writes in quite an easy and attractive manner as, for example, when he is interpreting his own verse on pp. 35-7”. And its interest is theoretical: “Broadly speaking, the work exhibits far more interest in the theory than in the practical teaching of the Vedānta.” Hiriyanna added that since the doctrine of Māyā offers a solution to “the problem of knowledge, the theme of the work is essentially one of logic. In it lies the chief interest of the work to the modern student.”

Two things follow for the reader of this page. The book is not a devotional or a practical work, and it should not be expected to yield the kind of counsel found on the pages for Sri Ramakrishna or Swami Vivekananda; its gift is a way of thinking. And it was written to be argued with. Its author expected opponents, addressed them by school, and took their positions seriously enough to state them at length before answering. The sections that follow try to give the argument in order, plainly, with the sources speaking wherever they can.

The opening verse: a wall, a canvas and a fresco

Everything in the book grows from its first stanza, which the Method translates thus:

“I bow to that principle of Immediate Experience, which is unborn, immeasurable, infinite and of the nature of the bliss of the Self, and which serves as the wall on which is painted the fresco of this illusory appearance of a world, beginning with the Cosmic Intellect (mahat)”

Dasgupta’s paraphrase of the same verse gives the image in another figure: the author “offers his adoration to that birthless, incognizable, infinite intuitive consciousness of the nature of self-joy which is the canvas on which the illusory world-appearance has been painted”. Wall or canvas, the point is the same. The world is a picture; a picture needs a surface; the surface is not part of the picture and does not change when the picture does; and the surface here is awareness itself — anubhūti, immediate experience — which the verse calls unborn, unmeasurable, endless and blissful.

The prose explanation of this single verse, Hiriyanna notes, runs to nearly thirty-eight pages of Sanskrit, and it is here that the book is at its most attractive. The Method gives the gist: “Immediate experience is self-established and self-revealed. For if immediate experience had to be illumined it would be an object like a pot, and so not immediate experience”. Being self-established it is “free from birth and the other changing states of empirical existence”; since “Nothing knowable as an object can be an attribute of Consciousness”, it is “thus unlimited in space and time or by an object”; and “Being infinite, immediate experience can be none other than the supreme Self”. It is bliss because “there is no difference between Consciousness and Bliss. It is true that they are referred to by different words. But inference is powerless to establish that there is any difference in their nature.” And then a scriptural argument from the Taittirīya Upaniṣad, whose second chapter opens with Brahman as truth, knowledge, infinity, goes on to say that space was born from the Self, and ends by knowing that Brahman is bliss and that “Verily, from Bliss are these creatures born” — so that “the Absolute (brahman), the Self (atman) and Bliss (ananda) are all one” and are the world’s material cause. Dasgupta adds the argument from indivisibility: “Nothing can be beginningless and eternal, except pure consciousness.” Atoms are said to be so, “but, since they have colours and other sense-properties, they are like other objects of nature, and they have parts also”; “Only that can be indivisible which is partless and beginningless, and it is only the intuitive consciousness that can be said to be so.”

Hiriyanna, who had watched Sri Rāmānuja borrow from this passage, summarised what it established as “the unity, permanence, self-dependence, etc. of anubhūti or Brahman”. That is the book’s fixed point. Everything afterwards is an attempt to show that whatever is not this self-revealed awareness is a painting on it.

Seer and seen: can their difference be perceived?

The first objection the book meets is the plainest: surely the knower and the known are different, since one appears as “this” and the other does not, and everyone in the world treats them so. If that difference is real, awareness is bounded by what it is not, and the verse’s “infinite” falls. The Method quotes the opponent: “The distinction between consciousness and its object must therefore be accepted, as it is familiar to all” (I.S. p. 2), and remarks that the book’s answer — an examination of the relation of subject and object — runs to twenty-two pages.

The heart of the answer is that a difference between two things can only be perceived if both are perceived, and the seer is never seen. In the Method’s translation of the argument: “there cannot be vision of difference between subject and object, since the subject is not perceivable as an object. It is not possible to perceive the difference of the unperceived from the perceived or of the perceived from the unperceived, because perception of difference depends on perceiving both the different thing and the thing that it is different from.” Dasgupta gives the same reasoning from his manuscript: “There cannot logically be any difference between the perceiving principle (drk) and the perceived (drsya); for the former is unperceived (adrsyatvat). No difference can be realized between a perceived and an unperceived entity; for all difference relates two cognized entities.” If difference is said to be the very nature of the differing things, then seeing a thing should suffice to see its difference, without reference to anything else — which is not how difference is seen; if difference is a separate quality known by a separate cognition, then that quality differs from its bearer by a further difference, and so without end. And the seer, being “self-luminous perceiving power is always present”, can never be negated, “a condition without which neither difference nor negation could be possible”. Dasgupta’s conclusion: ““difference” or “mutual negation” cannot be established, either as the essence of the perceiving self or as its characteristics”.

What the argument does not claim is worth stressing, because critics have often missed it. Hiriyanna: the distinction between spirit and matter “That is the presupposition of nearly all the activities of life” and is therefore “well-recognised”; but it “is not finally intelligible” and “is therefore dismissed as untrue or as lacking rational justification. But this does not mean, we may add by the way, that matter and mind are one. For identity between them is not even prasiddha, and the question whether it is true does not therefore arise at all”. The book is not saying that the table is made of thought. It is saying that the line we draw between the awareness and the table cannot be found when we look for it, and that a line which cannot be found has no right to bound the infinite.

Behind this lies a principle Hiriyanna thought the book’s most important: a distinction “between belief or opinion and truth. The former is ordinary experience which is presumed to be true; the latter, what stands critical scrutiny within it”. Ordinary convictions are prasiddha, well-recognised; only what logic can confirm is pramāṇa-siddha, established. “Common experience does nothing more than furnish the data for logic. It consists of postulates which need to be confirmed, if they are to be reckoned as true.” Advaita, on this reading, is not a denial of common sense but a refusal to let common sense be the last word.

The five theories of error

Chapters two to five take up, one by one, the accounts of error current in the India of his day, and show — so the book claims — that each, followed to its end, arrives at the Advaitin’s. The theories were five, counting his own. The Kanchi chapter sorts them: “These five can be classified into two broad categories, viz., sat-khyati and asat-khyati. Atma-khyati of the Yogachara Buddhists, akhyati of the Prabhakara Mimamsakas and anyatha-khyati of the Bhattas and Naiyayikas fall under the first category, and the asat-khyati of the Madhyamika Buddhists falls into the opposite camp. The doctrine of anirvachaniya-khyati adopted by the Advaitins tries to show that the object of illusion is neither real nor unreal but indeterminable.” Hiriyanna observes that the sorting is by whether the content of error is, not by whether it is objective: the first three theories “resemble one another in holding that the non-existent is never thinkable and differ from the remaining one which believes that the content of knowledge not only can be the non-existent but is uniformly so”. Regrouped as realistic and idealistic, “they may be described as the theories of the orthodox and the heterodox—the first two representing Mīmāṁsaka views and the last two, Buddhistic ones”.

The stock example throughout is a piece of mother-of-pearl seen, in poor light, as silver, and then recognised: “this is not silver.” Each theory is an answer to the question: what was the silver?

• Akhyāti, “non-apprehension” — the Prābhākara Mīmāṁsā. There was no error, only two true cognitions — a perception of “this” and a memory of silver — and a failure to notice that they were two. “The logical attractiveness of this theory consists in its complete loyalty to the realism which the Mīmāṁsakas profess.” Sri Vimuktātman’s answers, in the Kanchi chapter’s summary: if knowledge is self-revealing, as the Prābhākaras hold, “the two separate knowledges (of the shell and silver in the illusion where the shell appears as silver, for example) must present themselves as separate in which case there is no question of their not being discriminated”; if truth is what leads to successful action, “there are instances where knowledge issues in no practical activity at all”; and a school that “do not accept negation as a category at all” cannot make non-discrimination, an absence, the cause of anything. Hiriyanna adds the plainest objection: “The defect of the theory is that it flatly contradicts experience” — the man reaches for the silver as one thing, not two.
• Anyathā-khyāti, “apprehension otherwise” — the Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṁsā and the Nyāya. The silver is real, but elsewhere; error shows the shell as silver, uniting what should be kept apart. Sri Vimuktātman asks whether the object changes, or the knowledge, or neither; rejects the first two; and then presses the third. “If error according to the Prābhākaras apprehends too little, it includes too much according to the Bhāṭṭas. It overflows the given, so to speak, and the overflowing element points to nothing”. Two of his arguments Hiriyanna singles out. The “not silver” that ends the error must deny either a remembered silver, which leaves the perceived one untouched, or the perceived one, which then “loses its whole claim for reality”: “It cannot admit of negation and also be real, which is what the Bhāṭṭas seek to establish.” And of the three parts of “this is silver” — subject, predicate, relation — “It is hard to see why one element alone of these three should be false, while the other two are not so”. The Kanchi chapter puts the second point sharply: since the “this” is reaffirmed and the silver denied, “silver is less real than the ‘this’, which, in the example, is the shell, or at any rate, not real in the same sense. But this conclusion will militate against the pluralistic realism of the Bhattas.”
• Ātma-khyāti, “apprehension of the self” — the Yogācāra Buddhists. There is no silver outside; the cognition itself takes the form of silver, as in a dream, and what is denied afterwards is only its seeming externality. Sri Vimuktātman grants the Yogācāra one point against the realist — a mental impression need not descend from a true perception, for “A person may imagine that he is seeing a ghost” — but presses two: “if the silver for instance be really only a form of knowledge, the fact of its being so should be known at once and there ought thus to be no error at all”; and the correction of error would require one cognition to know another, which self-luminous and momentary cognitions cannot do: “A cognition cannot both reveal itself and be revealed by another.” The Kanchi chapter adds his point about the constancy of knowledge against the shifting of its objects, and that “the very notion of externality will be impossible to explain when there is no external object at all”.
• Asat-khyāti, “apprehension of the non-existent” — the Madhyamaka Buddhists. What appears in error is nothing at all, and the fact that it is denied shows that nothing can appear. The world, on this view, is “an embroidery on the canvas of the void”. Sri Vimuktātman’s answer is the one the Kanchi chapter states: “How can the non-existent appear as existent, when it cannot even appear as non-existent?” If the non-existent is known and can be spoken of, “it should be other than knowledge and expression; and what is ‘other’ and therefore distinguishable must be something and not nothing”. Hiriyanna records a flash of humour: “If the Mādhyamika should still insist on the possibility of ‘empty thinking’, Vimuktātman facetiously adds (p. 118), we may satisfy him by admitting that this belief of his at any rate is empty and signifies nothing.”

Hiriyanna cautions that his summary cannot “exhibit in any adequate manner their dialectical subtlety”, and neither can this page. But the shape of the method is clear, and it is the book’s real contribution: rather than assert his own account, the author lets each rival account destroy itself, and shows that what survives the wreck is the same in every case — something that appeared, that was denied, and that was therefore neither simply there nor simply absent.

Neither real nor unreal: the Advaitin’s theory, and why its editor called it realism

“The Advaitin’s theory of error emerges directly from his criticism of the above theories”, writes Hiriyanna. The “object in the case of erroneous knowledge cannot be real for, if it were so, it would not be contradicted or sublated afterwards. Nor can it be unreal, for in that case it would never have been presented. His view is known as anirvacanīya-khyāti which means that error points to a thing which is precisely like what it appears (p. 105), but is yet not characterisable as either is or is not and is therefore styled anirvacanīya or durnirūpa.” Nor may one say it is both real and unreal, “for that would go against the law of contradiction”; nor deny the distinction between truth and error altogether, “for in the very act of doing so we shall be admitting it”. What is left is the only alternative not yet ruled out — a conclusion by elimination, which the Sanskrit calls pariśeṣa. The Kanchi chapter puts the same point in the book’s own Sanskrit and then in English: “When the theories of the sat and the asat as presented in error cancel out each other, what we are left with is the fact that the object in error is characterisable neither as real nor as unreal nor as both.”

Two features of this theory surprised its modern editor enough to name them. The first is that it is not idealism. “Unlike the Buddhist but like the Mīmāṁsaka, the Advaitin assumes an objective counterpart in explaining error.” “The distinction between knowledge and the known is primary; and error points to an object as surely as truth.” The silver is not in the mind: because Ignorance “has an objective reference”, it “shows the silver not as existent within the mind of the percipient but at the spot where the thing misapprehended, viz. the shell, is. The silver is consequently not subjective.” Yet it is private: “the Advaita, unlike realism, regards objects of error as private to each self; but at the same time it declines to regard them, like subjectivism, as purely mental. They must be objective and yet not fully real, because neither sat-khyāti nor asat-khyāti is tenable. They are logical existents and we may, for that reason, describe anirvacanīya-khyāti as epistemological realism.” The phrase is Hiriyanna’s, and it has stuck.

The second is that the theory posits kinds of reality. “we are forced to conclude that the reality with which knowledge acquaints us is not always of the same kind, and that the objects of error are of a type which is ontologically different from that of common objects”. The means of knowledge that reaches this conclusion is not perception or inference but arthāpatti, postulation from what would otherwise be inexplicable. And beneath the silver there is always a ground that is not denied: “erroneous knowledge implies a ground (idam) which is not contradicted afterwards. It is to this ground that a character is wrongly ascribed in error or on which, as it is ordinarily expressed, an anirvacanīya object is superimposed.” The relation between the ground and what sits on it is as indeterminable as the silver; “In the case of truth, on the other hand, where the subject and the predicate are equally real, the relation between them also is real.”

Here a difference of emphasis between the sources should be noticed. Hiriyanna consistently presents the book’s doctrine as a theory of knowledge, arrived at by logic and defensible before any modern philosopher; the Kanchi chapter, likewise, treats it as epistemology. The Method reads the same chapters as an exercise in “hypothetical reasoning without regard to experience” whose real purpose was to establish a positive Ignorance that Sri Śaṅkara never taught. Both readings are on this page; the second has its own section below.

What he taught: Ignorance as the stuff of error

If the silver is neither real nor unreal, what is it made of? Here the book makes the move that gave it its name and its critics. “The common belief is that the efficient cause like defective eyes or faintness of light is adequate to explain error. But there is need to seek for a ‘material’ cause also according to the Advaitin, since he regards error as involving the emergence of objects having their own specific being (p. 48). That cause is avidyā” — Ignorance, “or ignorance of the true nature of the object misapprehended. While defects like imperfect eye-sight condition error, avidyā is constitutive of it.” The material must be of the same order as the product: “Hence it cannot be real in the true sense of the term (p. 48) but anirvacanīya like the silver itself.”

Like knowledge, Ignorance has a bearer and an object. “In the present case, the person that mistakes the shell for silver is its āśraya and the shell is its viṣaya.” The Kanchi chapter draws the consequence that mattered most to later Advaita: “Though the shell in illusion has a beginning, its ignorance is beginningless. This is because this ignorance is not located in the shell but in the Intelligence–Self, even as the knowledge of the shell is. Nescience is established only by Self-Intelligence, and not by pramanas.” And it is many and one at once: “Nescience of specific objects are many, though the mula-ajnana or primordial nescience is one. In fact, there are as many nesciences of, say, a shell as there are shell-cognitions.” Every act of knowing removes the particular ignorance that hid its object: “Everytime an object is cognized, the nescience concealing that object is removed.”

Two things distinguish this Ignorance from a mere blank. It is positive, in a precise sense. The Kanchi chapter: “Nescience is not just absence of knowledge.” It is not the absence of a thing before it arises, nor its absence after it perishes, nor the mutual exclusion of two things; “Ajnana is like darkness which is not mere antecedent non-existence of light. It is positive. Otherwise, it will be difficult to explain how a lamp taken from one place to another dispels darkness there.” Hiriyanna is careful about what “positive” means here: the Advaitin’s word bhāva-rūpa “means not that avidyā is real but only that it is not negative. Being constructive in its nature, it should so far be regarded as positive”. It is a creative principle “which expresses itself as both knowledge and object”: the silver and the seeing of the silver both come out of it, “on the principle that the nature of knowledge is like unto the nature of its object”. And because it belongs to one person, what it makes is private — “It is constructed or, if we prefer to put it so, imagined by the individual and therefore remains an object for him alone.” Ignorance is known, not by any means of knowledge, but by the witness alone — kevala-sākṣi-bhāsya.

Second, it is removable by knowledge, and this became his definition of the indeterminable. The familiar account says that the indeterminable is what is neither real nor unreal; “That is the familiar explanation of the term and our author also accepts it. But he prefers to explain it by jñāna-nivartyatva (p. 63).” Hiriyanna judges the new account “more exact”: “what is real cannot be dismissed by mere thought and there is no need or occasion for negating the absolutely unreal”. The Kanchi chapter states the point crisply: “The non-apprehensibility by pramanas is, however, not the reason why nescience is indeterminable, but its destructibility by knowledge. (jnana-matra-apanodyatvat). For, non-apprehensibility is found even in determinable categories like knowledge, pleasure, etc.” Hiriyanna adds that “In advaitic tradition, this new characterisation of anirvacanīyatva is associated with the author of the Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa” — that is, with Sri Prakāśātman, whose page on this site tells how the Vivaraṇa school made it its own.

How error ends: knowledge cannot cancel knowledge

A theory of error is also a theory of its correction, and here the book says something that sounds strange and turns out to be exact. The correction “this is not silver” does not cancel the earlier cognition. “according to the Advaita, it is absurd to speak of one jñāna cancelling another. The sole purpose of all jñāna is to reveal objects, and what is a bodhaka, as it is put, cannot be a bādhaka” — what informs cannot annul. “Jñāna can remove only ajñāna, which is its logical contrary (p. 127); and as the latter is the source of error, the bādhaka-jñāna may also be said to remove error but it does so only indirectly.” Knowledge removes Ignorance; Ignorance was the material of the silver; the silver goes with its material. In the book’s earlier argument against the Bhāṭṭas the same principle had been put in four words: an act of knowing “may inform but cannot annul”.

From this follows a theory of truth. “The invalidity of knowledge depends upon bādha or contradiction (p. 33) and not upon vyabhicāra or lack of correspondence.” Hiriyanna explains why this is not a rejection of the outer world: correspondence is not denied but is useless as a test, since “all knowledge equally satisfies the condition of correspondence”, and an appeal to the facts “resolves itself into experience finally, and that jñāna cannot be tested by what is other than jñāna”. So “The advaitic view, on the other hand, settles the validity of any specimen of knowledge not on the basis of the presence or absence of its object but by its coherence or harmony with other knowledge. It is the lack of this harmony that is termed bādha.” A judgment is true or false only within a system of judgments; “The conception of truth thereby becomes relative. What is true from one standpoint may be false from another”. That relativity is not scepticism; it is the ground on which the next step stands.

“As is silver, so is everything in this world”

The Kanchi chapter’s summary of the first chapter ends in five words: “As is silver, so is everything in this world.” The whole of the world we share is to be understood on the pattern of the silver in the shell. Hiriyanna sets out with unusual care what this does and does not mean.

It does not mean that the world is going to vanish tomorrow, or that it is nothing. “Both are presented in knowledge, and so far preclude the explanation that they are asat or unreal. But while the latter are sublated sooner or later, the former is not—as far at least as ordinary experience goes.” What the world shares with the silver is not that it is contradicted but that “when subjected to logical scrutiny exhibits, like the objects of illusion, a self-contradictory character”: “we cannot say for certain whether it has a beginning in time or not; and, if it has, whether it is derived from a plurality of simple reals as some hold or from a single complex entity as some others do”. One may rest in the contradiction and call it the truth; the Advaitin will not. “That is why he regards it as sadasadvilakṣaṇa and not as sadasat.”

Nor does “indeterminable” mean “inexplicable” in the sense of a shrug. Hiriyanna is emphatic: “If that were true, the Advaita would cease to be a philosophic doctrine.” Rather, “The illusory silver is anirvacanīya, and we turn to the shell to discover the truth about it. Similarly, in the case of the world also, we have to look elsewhere—in something behind and beyond it—if we should comprehend its nature rightly. Thus the universe is inexplicable only in the sense that it is not self-explanatory.” “it means that the world is an appearance and therefore necessarily points to something of which it is the appearance”.

The world’s cause is then named by the same analogy: cosmic Ignorance, or Māyā, “and explained as anirvacanīya”. But the two levels are kept apart. “While for instance objects like shell-silver caused by the former are given only in individual experience, objects like tables and chairs emerging from the latter are vouched for by the experience of all.” There are thus two grades of the real short of the Real: the prātibhāsika, “private to each individual”, and the vyāvahārika, “public and may be described” “as the result of inter-subjective construction. It is otherwise represented as created or projected out of himself by Īśvara.” Dream-worlds are many; “the vyāvahārika is but one”. This is the doctrine of the three levels of reality that every later Advaita primer teaches; it is stated here, by Hiriyanna’s account, as a consequence of the theory of error rather than as a dogma.

And what is the surface on which all this is painted? “If the world and its source be alike appearances, what is the reality which explains them?” It cannot be nothing, “for the positive richness and variety of the universe cannot be traced to the void”; nor both-and-neither; “So it must be sat.” And since Ignorance’s work is to conceal, and only what shines by itself can be hidden, it must also be consciousness: “Hence the reality on which Avidyā and the universe are dependent is both sat and cit.” That is “eternal consciousness or experience (anubhūti) which is self-dependent as set forth in the first stanza of the work. That is the Ultimate of Advaita or Brahman, the stay and foundation of both the prātibhāsika and the vyāvahārika types of reality.” It is neither of them, and so the categories that fit them do not fit it: “the final fact of the universe cannot be known logically or expressed verbally (p. 32). It is for that reason also termed nirguṇa or ‘indeterminate’”. Yet it is not out of reach. The means of knowledge apply to it, but “only they have in its case a negative value (pp. 62, 72). They remove the veil of Avidyā which hides it, and it at once shows itself in its full splendour.” And “though not knowable in the ordinary sense, it is realisable (p. 246) from within as our self at its deepest is the same as Brahman (i. 76). ‘To know Brahman’ as the Upaniṣad says, ‘is to be Brahman’.” The final test of truth is that direct experience, “which knows no annulment”; “It is solely on the strength of this direct experience or mystic intuition (vidvadanubhava) that the anirvacanīyatva of the world is established.” Reason and revelation “only lead to it, and naturally become superfluous when once that truth is realised”.

Whose Ignorance? The sixth and seventh chapters

The three closing chapters, Hiriyanna says, “are concerned, though only indirectly, with the establishment of the doctrine of Māyā”. The sixth and seventh take up the two questions that divided Advaitins for centuries after: “whether Brahman or the jīva is the seat of Avidyā and whether there is only one jīva or many”. He passes over them in a sentence as “quite familiar to the student of the Advaita”; the Method, more interested in exactly these points, tells us where the book stood.

On the seat: “The sixth chapter refutes the theory that Ignorance has its seat in the individual soul.” The book’s own closing verses, quoted in an earlier section, say that Ignorance “inheres in the Self”, and the Method’s summary is that for him Ignorance “is identified with Maya and has its seat in the Absolute”. This is the position Sri Vācaspati Miśra’s Bhāmatī school rejected and the Vivaraṇa school made its own; the reader will find the two sides on their pages and on this site’s page about the schools. The Method counts among the developments that “emerge clearly in the Iṣṭa Siddhi for the first time” “the refutation of the view that Ignorance could have its seat in the non-conscious”.

On the number of souls: the seventh chapter, in the Method’s report, “shows that only he who accepts metaphysical Ignorance can establish a distinction between the Self and the not-self — no one else can”, and it ends by drawing the strict conclusion from the Advaitin’s own premises. The translated passage runs: “the difficulty about liberation that faces those who accept as ultimately real the existence of a plurality of different souls is not of our making. The logical answer, therefore, is to accept that everything constitutes one Self.” (I.S. VII.10–12). The reader who has met the doctrine of one soul on the page for Sri Sarvajñātman will recognise its root here; the two men, the sources agree, were near contemporaries, and the Method notes that the younger followed the elder on more than one point.

The end of Ignorance: “the fifth kind”

The eighth chapter answers the question the book’s critics thought unanswerable. If Ignorance is neither real nor unreal, what is its ending? Hiriyanna sets out the dilemma the opponents pressed. “There are only four possible ways of explaining its character and all the four, the opponents contend, are excluded.” If the ending is real, “there will be left in mokṣa an entity other than Brahman which would go against the monism of the doctrine”. If it is a negation, it must belong to something; it cannot belong to Brahman, which is beyond relation; and if it simply is Brahman, then, Brahman being eternal, Ignorance never was, and “There would then be no saṁsāra and consequently no need for any effort to attain release.” “Both” is self-contradictory. And “neither” is refused on the ground that “the negation of Avidyā which is anirvacanīya must be other than anirvacanīya”.

His first answer is the one that has carried his name ever since. “It is in meeting such objections that our author enunciates the view (pp. 83-93) that Avidyā-nivṛtti is ‘of the fifth kind’ (pañcama-prakāra)—a notion which may be compared to that of what mathematicians term an ‘imaginary number’.” Hiriyanna’s comparison is exact and kind. A mathematician who admits the square root of a negative number does not claim to have found it on the number line; he admits it because his system, followed consistently, requires it. “It means that the explanation in question is one to which we are driven by the considered conclusions of the Advaita doctrine. If we admit Avidyā and the possibility of escape from it, we must necessarily accept Avidyā-nivṛtti also and give it such explanation as is compatible with those admissions.” The book adds a Sanskrit proverb that Hiriyanna quotes: the offering must suit the spirit it is made to.

But that is not the book’s only answer, and Hiriyanna thought it not even the author’s preferred one. “There is another which coincides with one of the alternatives rejected above and represents Avidyā-nivṛtti as anirvacanīya (viii. 2).” The reasoning is that the four alternatives the opponent offers “are all applicable to objects that are regarded as fully real; and that, as Avidyā is not so but anirvacanīya, its negation may, without any inconsistency, be described as anirvacanīya”. “This explanation seems more acceptable to our author as he puts it forward in the last chapter where the topic is specifically discussed.” And then a historian’s wry note: “But, strangely enough, the” “former has come to be associated with his name in advaitic tradition”. Hiriyanna cites, as the place where the tradition did this, the commentary on Sri Sarvajñātman’s Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka IV.14 — the very verse where, the Method says, the younger writer follows the elder. The Kanchi chapter records the same two views and adds a third strand, from the commentator Jñānottama: “He also says that Atman alone is ajnana-nivritti. Jnanottama writes that Vimuktatman agrees to the suggestion of some among the Advaitins that Atman alone is the removal of ajnana in so far as it does not conflict with non-dualism.” But, the chapter continues, “the difficulty that if Atman is the remover of ajnana how there was any bondage at all is felt by Vimuktatman. He suggests the alternative view that avidyanivritti is the absence of any other than Atman. And Advaita is not opposed to the non-existence of anything other than Atman.”

The reader should know that the sources are not quite of one mind here. Hiriyanna says the “fifth kind” came to be attached to his name “strangely enough”, since the book itself seems to prefer the other answer; the Kanchi chapter reports the fifth kind first and the “indeterminable” answer as what he “seems to take” in the last chapter, with a difference: “while ajnana is removable by knowledge, ajnana-nivritti is not”. Both agree that the book holds more than one view and that the tradition remembered one. This page reports both.

Liberation in life, and the body that remains

A book so devoted to theory says less about the path than the other Siddhis, but it does not omit the goal. Hiriyanna: “The Advaita differs from some other doctrines in admitting the possibility of this realisation not in a world to come but here in this life or in recognising jīvanmukti (pp. 74-8).” Knowledge comes from the texts: the Method’s summary is that for him “Liberation comes from knowledge derived from the Vedic texts of the true nature of one’s Self as the Absolute”, and that in accepting this he “rejects the doctrine of Maṇḍana and others that the practice of affirmation is required first” — a point on which he stood with Sri Sureśvara against Sri Maṇḍana Miśra, whose page gives the other side.

Yet the liberated man still walks about, and Sri Vimuktātman would not explain this away. The Kanchi chapter sets out his position in detail. He “does not accept the theory that the continuance of the body after realization in the case of a jivan-mukta is due, not to ajnana itself, but to its latent impressions (samskaras). Latent impressions are nothing apart from nescience.” The usual analogy — that a man who knows the rope is a rope may still tremble — he examines and rejects: “Fear, trepidation, etc., do not constitute the body of nescience. Only the snake-illusion does. And when that is over, nescience at that place is removed.” His own account is franker: “It is, then, reasonable to suppose that in the jivan-mukta there is a residuum of ajnana in the form of the prarabdha-karmas which is responsible for the continuance of the body.” The Method records the same teaching from the other side of the argument: “he holds that even in the case of a person liberated in life a modicum of Ignorance persists; and he also holds that total freedom from Ignorance comes only with the death of the body (videha-mukti)”.

Why should the body remain at all? His answer is one of the few warm passages in a cold book, and the Kanchi chapter preserves it: “The body should be there for the released soul so that he can transmit the knowledge to others. If wisdom and death were simultaneous, there will be no one to pass the wisdom on to others and with the first wise man, his wisdom would be buried. The actions which lead to knowledge, says Vimuktatman, preserve the body for sometime for this purpose. Indeed, without the teacher and his instruction, mere activities, however correct according to scriptures, will never lead to permanent good.” There is no conflict between the ripened karma that keeps the body and the knowledge that frees the man, “Actions of great merit like the Horse-sacrifice wait for their operation for the exhaustion of the prarabdha-karmas.” and so “though inhabiting a body, a mukta is not a baddha” — the freed is not bound. The chapter ends with the book’s own words, in Sanskrit, on the necessity of hearing, pondering and meditation for the one who would see the Self directly — the same triple discipline every teacher on this site has taught.

A dissenting reading

This site’s pages give the tradition’s view of each teacher and also the strongest serious objection to it. For Sri Vimuktātman that objection was written in the twentieth century by Swami Satchidanandendra Sarasvatī, whose Method of the Vedānta devotes a whole chapter to the Iṣṭa-siddhi and treats it as a turning point — the book in which post-Śaṅkara Advaita finally committed itself to a doctrine of Ignorance as a positive thing with a seat, rather than as a mistake to be seen through.

The chapter opens with a scene-setting that is itself an argument. The followers of Sri Padmapāda’s Pañcapādikā had been pressing the doctrine of root Ignorance; even those who had held Ignorance to be simply superimposition “were eventually forced to accept a ‘Power of Ignorance’ (avidyā-śakti) as well”; Sri Vācaspati had conceded the point. “And then came Ācārya Vimuktātman, who thought” — and here the Method puts a thought into his head — “Why be so pretentious as to offer a new system under another name?” On this reading he “was not satisfied with showing that the system of Difference in Identity was a prey to indefensible errors. He sought to show that these were to be found in the systems accepted by Maṇḍana and Vācaspati as well. And he wrote his Siddhi to establish this and also to support the doctrine of Root-Ignorance.”

The second charge is against the method. The opening verse bows to what is self-established and self-revealed, “And yet the Iṣṭa Siddhi paradoxically starts off on a course of negative dialectic, demonstrating the untenable consequences for those who do not admit this principle.” “The author never pauses to ask here ‘Why is there doubt over something that is self-established and self-revealed?’, nor does he ask in what way the implanting of a new doubt through negative dialectic could lead a doubter to a knowledge of truth.” The Method quotes Sri Sureśvara against him — “The logicians bemuse each other with a web of wherefores and therefores, heavily afflicted with the fever of debate. But it is to this experience that they make their final appeal.” (Naiṣkarmya-siddhi II.59) — and Sri Śaṅkara’s warning against “allowing empty hypothetical reasoning to gain entry”. Its summary presses the same point: “The delight in dialectic manifested in this work goes so far that reasons are frequently adduced to prove the blatantly obvious”, and “A feature of this system is the frequent resort to hypothetical reasoning without regard to experience, both in refuting the doctrines of the adversary and in establishing the author’s own positions.”

The third charge is against the result. Because the book holds that some Ignorance survives in the liberated man until death, the Method concludes: “From this we deduce that for him the notion that the result of metaphysical knowledge was realization of the Self was only an idea received through Vedic revelation (and not a matter of direct experience).” And its last words on him are the sharpest in the chapter: “in this work the method of explanation by cause and effect, introduced in the guise of a support for the doctrine of indeterminability, triumphs over the method of interpretation of the texts as false attribution followed by later retraction, and reigns supreme. Advaitins from now on have to accept this doctrine forced down their throats whether they want it or not. Wondrous indeed are the powers of Māyā!”

The reader should weigh three things against this. First, the Method is a partisan of a particular reading of Sri Śaṅkara, set out on its author’s own page on this site, and it judges every later Advaitin by that reading; the Vivaraṇa tradition, the Kanchi chapter and Hiriyanna do not share its premise that a positive Ignorance is foreign to the master. Second, even the Method concedes a great deal: that the book “expounds the position of Advaita”, that its author “accepts the general position that the world is the effect of Ignorance, which latter is identified with Māyā and has its seat in the Absolute”, that liberation for him comes from the texts, and that “many special developments based on the use of reason as a panacea to solve all difficulties emerge clearly in the Iṣṭa Siddhi for the first time”. Third, Hiriyanna, reading the same pages without that quarrel, saw not a departure from experience but a refusal to let unexamined experience be the judge — the distinction between what is well-recognised and what is established. The two readings cannot both be right about what Sri Śaṅkara meant. They can both be right about what Sri Vimuktātman did.

The book’s travels: readers in every school

No Advaita book before the fourteenth century can show a wider circle of readers than the Iṣṭa-siddhi, and the circle is the nearest thing to a biography its author has.

• Yāmuna, the teacher’s teacher of Sri Rāmānuja, in his Ātma-siddhi “quotes the first stanza of the Iṣṭa-siddhi” and “attempts to refute the advaitic view as contained in it”; his discussion, Hiriyanna notes, “contains more than one sentence taken from the beginning of the Iṣṭa-siddhi”.
• Sri Rāmānuja, in the Śrī-bhāṣya, “is known to have drawn his information chiefly from it in one essential portion of his examination of the Advaita which is designated the mahāpūrva-pakṣa and in which are found summarised some of the characteristic features of the doctrine such as the unity, permanence, self-dependence, etc. of anubhūti or Brahman”. “We have for it the authority of no less a person than Vedānta Deśika”, and it is “fully corroborated by the arguments as given in this portion” and “even by some of the phrases and turns of expression which Rāmānuja takes from the Iṣṭa-siddhi”. Hiriyanna draws the moral: the book “is valuable not only for tracing the development of the Advaita doctrine but also for a proper appreciation of the speculative position adopted by Rāmānuja in the Śrī-bhāṣya”. That the greatest critic of Advaita chose this book to state the doctrine he opposed is the highest compliment a hostile reader can pay.
• Ramyadeva of Kashmir, a commentator on it named in Maṅkhaka’s Śrīkaṇṭha-carita in the first half of the twelfth century, as recounted above.
• Sri Ānandabodha, who quotes it with reverence in his Pramāṇa-mālā and may have been its author’s pupil.
• Jñānottama, its first surviving commentator, whose Vivaraṇa Hiriyanna printed in extracts. The Anusandhana Kendra: “One author named Jñānottama, who lived in the 12th century CE, wrote the Candrikā on Sureśvara’s Naiṣkarmyasiddhi, and a Vivaraṇa to the Vimuktātman’s Iṣṭasiddhi. This Jñānottama lived in the region of Tanjavur in Tamil Nadu. His full name in the manuscripts is Jñānottama Miśra Mahopādhyāya, which indicates that unlike the Jñānottama mentioned earlier, he was a householder scholar. There is some evidence from the last verse of the Candrikā that this author later became a sannyāsin by name Sarvajñāśrama.” Dasgupta calls him “the teacher of Citsukha”. The Kanchi maṭha’s own page on its origins quotes Hiriyanna’s preface to the Naiṣkarmya-siddhi on this Jñānottama’s title, “the glory of the Sarvajnasrama”, and takes it as a reference to its own seat.
• Ānandānubhava, a second commentator, whose work “is far less systematic than G which it seems to presuppose” and about whom “Nothing is known” except two other titles.
• Sri Sarvajñātman, who in the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka, the Method says, “follows the view of the Iṣṭa Siddhi” on the cessation of Ignorance.
• The later Advaitins: Sri Citsukha’s Tattva-pradīpikā, Sri Amalānanda’s Kalpataru on the Bhāmatī, Sri Vidyāraṇya’s Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṁgraha, Rāmādvaya’s Vedānta-kaumudī and Madhusūdana’s Advaita-siddhi all cite him, according to Hiriyanna’s and Dasgupta’s notes; and the Siddhānta-leśa-saṁgraha preserves views under his name.
• The other schools: Vedānta Deśika’s Sarvārtha-siddhi refers to him directly, and so, Hiriyanna records, does the Madhva-vijaya, the biography of Sri Madhva.

The other schools, seen from this life

This section is written from the Advaita side, as the whole site is, and is meant to diminish no one. Sri Vimuktātman’s book is an argument with almost every school of his day, and the striking thing about it, on Hiriyanna’s reading, is how much credit it gives its opponents before answering them.

• The Prābhākara Mīmāṁsā. Its theory that there is no error, only two truths mistaken for one, is granted “logical attractiveness” and “complete loyalty to the realism which the Mīmāṁsakas profess”. The book answers it, but it also learns from it: the Advaitin, “like many other Indian logicians, holds that the value of knowledge as such is cognitive”, and shares the Prābhākara conviction that a cognition is self-revealing.
• The Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṁsā of Kumārila. Hiriyanna sets out its view of the world — that “every object is a one-many or an identity-in-difference” — with care, and notes that the book’s summary of the theory of error “is ascribed to Umbeka and not to Kumārila directly”. The disagreement is over whether a realist may admit a subjective element in error; the Advaitin himself, Hiriyanna observes, “like the Bhāṭṭas, maintains that neither of the objects that appear to be related in error can be unreal”. The two are cousins.
• The Nyāya. Its account of error stands with the Bhāṭṭas’ in the Kanchi chapter’s sorting, and it makes the kind of assumption the book declines to make: Hiriyanna notes that “the Naiyāyika takes for granted that the nirvikalpaka form of perception is so. He maintains that we are then in direct contact with reality and that what is immediately experienced must be real.” The book puts critical scrutiny in the place of that assumption. Hiriyanna notes in passing the Naiyāyika’s own ingenious solution to the silver problem.
• The Yogācāra and Madhyamaka Buddhists. The Yogācāra is granted its point against the realist about mental impressions; the Madhyamaka is answered with a joke and an argument. Hiriyanna is scrupulous about the resemblance and the difference: “Though the Advaita here resembles the Mādhyamika form of Buddhism, it differs essentially in the positive conclusion at which it arrives, viz. its admission of infinite and impersonal Experience as the final explanation of all.” He even suggests that the “fifth kind” “looks as if the explanation was borrowed from the Mādhyamika school of Buddhism which conceives of its Ultimate as discarding the four predicables” — a debt, if it is one, honestly recorded.
• Sri Bhāskara and the Bhedābheda Vedānta. The book refers to him, on its commentator’s reading, and Hiriyanna cites one passage where the Bhāṭṭa, pressed to the end, would “reduce their doctrine to monism of the type advocated by thinkers like Bhāskara (p. 96) according to whom all things mingle in one another’s being and nothing stands by itself”. This site’s page on Sri Bhāskara gives his own teaching in his own terms.
• Sāṁkhya. Hiriyanna notes, without claiming any historical link, “the analogical case of Prakṛti changing into buddhi as well as objects in the Sāṁkhya”, and remarks that the Advaitin “can also thereby find a place in his world-scheme for the concepts of other doctrines like Prakṛti and Asat, for they are all alike the result of avidyā” — a generosity of system, if not of judgment.
• Viśiṣṭādvaita. Sri Rāmānuja and his line read this book more closely than any other Advaita text and built their critique on it. That is a disagreement conducted at the highest level on both sides, and this site’s page on the other schools gives Sri Rāmānuja’s position with the respect it commands.
• Within Advaita. His placing of Ignorance in Brahman sets him against the Bhāmatī; his rejection of Sri Maṇḍana’s requirement of repeated affirmation sets him with Sri Sureśvara; and the Method’s whole chapter is an Advaitin’s dissent from an Advaitin. These are family quarrels about how the one truth is best stated, and none of the parties doubted the truth.

Legacy

The Method’s summary, hostile as it is, is the best inventory of what the book gave the tradition: “Amongst these we could number the refutation of the view that Ignorance could have its seat in the non-conscious, the proof of indeterminable Ignorance through the example of shell-silver, the establishing that distinctions of any kind occur through Māyā only, the explanation of the interplay between empirical cognition and its objects through the example of dream”. To this Hiriyanna adds the definition of the indeterminable as what knowledge removes, the account of truth as coherence, the two-level theory of reality, and the “fifth kind” — and the honour of being the book from which Advaita’s most formidable critic learned what Advaita was. The Vivaraṇa, the Method says, “restated in briefer form some of the arguments accepted in the Iṣṭa Siddhi”; through that school his positions became the school’s.

Two summaries from the sources may stand as verdicts. Hiriyanna’s: the book “is a very important one as indicated by references to it, direct or indirect, throughout the literature of the Vedānta”. The Kanchi chapter’s: of the three ancient Siddhis, this is the one that asks “the why of Brahman-knowledge, enquiring into the nature and cause of error, that is, the world”. And it should be said that for six centuries the book was known by reputation and manuscript only. “Like the Brahma Siddhi, the Iṣṭa Siddhi remained for some time unlocated, until it was eventually published about thirty years ago (1933 A.D.) by the Government Oriental Institute at Baroda” — so the Method, written in 1964. That edition, “which at one stage appeared to be a venture” in its editor’s words, is the reason the book can be read at all today, and it is linked below.

For the seeker

A reader who is not a philosopher may still take three things from this life, and they are not small.

The first is the image in the opening verse. Whatever the world is — and the book spends four hundred pages saying what it is not — it is painted on something, and that something is the awareness in which you are reading this sentence. The awareness is not part of the picture; it does not change when the picture does; it was never born and is not measured. A seeker who feels lost in the picture has been told where the wall is.

The second is the difference between what is well-recognised and what is true. Sri Vimuktātman did not deny common sense; he denied it the last word. That the knower and the known are two is “the presupposition of nearly all the activities of life” — and still it may be a presupposition, not a fact. The practice of examining what one has always assumed, without fear of where the examination leads, is a spiritual discipline as well as a logical one, and this book is one long example of it.

The third is his honesty about the end. He would not pretend that a freed man is instantly weightless. Some remnant of the old ignorance keeps the body walking, and it walks, he said, so that the teacher can teach: “If wisdom and death were simultaneous, there will be no one to pass the wisdom on to others and with the first wise man, his wisdom would be buried.” Every teacher on this site who lived on after realisation and taught is an instance of what he meant. And the removal of Ignorance, he said, is of a kind for which our four categories have no name — which is another way of saying that liberation is not a thing among things, and that the seeker who expects to find it as an object will not.

A note on pictures, names and dates

There is no portrait of Sri Vimuktātman from any period and none could be authentic; this site shows only pictures whose age and origin are known and credited, and the lamp stands in the picture’s place.

His name is Vimuktātman, “he whose self is released”; the tradition adds Muni and Ācārya, and some manuscripts, Hiriyanna reports, read Vimuktācārya. The scanned copy of the 1933 edition garbles the name in several ways — “Vimuktitman,” “Vimuktétman,” “Vimuktaétman” — and the printed form has been restored wherever it occurs in a quotation on this page, as have the diacritics of other Sanskrit words that the machine dropped or misread (avidyā, anirvacanīya, jñāna, Iṣṭa-siddhi and the like); stray marks and broken words introduced by the scan have been removed, and a handful of capital letters that the scan of the Method inserted mid-sentence have been lowered. Each such change was recorded as the page was built. Nothing has been added to any quotation, and nothing has been quoted that is not in the sources named.

His teacher is Avyayātman, called by Dasgupta Avyayātman Bhagavat Pūjyapāda. Of the teacher nothing else is known. The dates on his card, “c. 850–1050 CE,” are Hiriyanna’s bracket, given with his own caution that they “are all that we can fix for the work with the data procurable at present”; Dasgupta’s “a.d. 1200” is an upper limit reached before the decisive evidence was known, and the tenth-century placing is the Anusandhana Kendra’s. No place of birth, residence or death is recorded, and the map has no pin.

Timeline

• Late 8th to early 9th century — Sri Śaṅkara, Sri Sureśvara and Sri Padmapāda on the conventional dating; the Naiṣkarmya-siddhi is the latest work the Iṣṭa-siddhi names, calling its author “the Vārttika-kāra.”
• First half of the 9th century — Sri Bhāskara, to whom the book’s commentator takes two passages to refer; hence, Hiriyanna reasons, the book “cannot be earlier than 850”.
• c. 850–1050 — the Iṣṭa-siddhi is written, with its author’s own prose commentary; the Pramāṇa-vṛtti-nirṇaya, now lost, is written before it, since the Iṣṭa-siddhi refers to it.
• 10th century — Sri Sarvajñātman, “probably a younger contemporary of Vimuktātman” by the Anusandhana Kendra’s reckoning, follows the Iṣṭa-siddhi on the cessation of Ignorance in his Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka.
• 11th century — Sri Ānandabodha quotes the book with reverence and may have been its author’s pupil; Yāmuna quotes its first verse in order to refute it.
• Early 12th century — Sri Rāmānuja builds the great prior view of his Śrī-bhāṣya on it; Maṅkhaka’s Śrīkaṇṭha-carita in Kashmir names Ramyadeva as a commentator on it.
• 12th century — Jñānottama Miśra Mahopādhyāya of the Tanjavur region writes the Iṣṭa-siddhi-vivaraṇa; he is, by Dasgupta’s account, the teacher of Sri Citsukha.
• 13th–14th century — Sri Citsukha, Sri Amalānanda, Rāmādvaya and Sri Vidyāraṇya cite him; Vedānta Deśika and the Madhva-vijaya refer to him from the other schools.
• c. 1500 and after — Madhusūdana Sarasvatī names the three Siddhis and adds his Advaita-siddhi as a fourth.
• 1928 — Hiriyanna presents his findings on the book to the International Congress of Orientalists at Oxford; 1932 — Dasgupta’s account from the fragmentary Adyar manuscript.
• May 1933 — the first edition, from five manuscripts, with extracts from Jñānottama’s commentary, Gaekwad’s Oriental Series LXV, Baroda (linked below).
• 1964 — Swami Satchidanandendra’s critical chapter in the work translated as The Method of the Vedānta.
• 1968 — P. K. Sundaram’s chapter in the Kanchi maṭha’s Preceptors of Advaita (linked below), followed by his full-length study of the book’s epistemology.

Questions a reader may ask

Is anything at all known about his life? His name, his teacher’s name, that he wrote one other book, and — from later commentators’ titles for him — that he was a renunciate. His editor said plainly that “This is all that can be ascertained about him.” This page has not pretended otherwise.

Then why does he matter? Because his one surviving book was read by everyone. It gave Advaita its fullest early theory of error and illusion, its definition of the “indeterminable,” its account of how Ignorance ends, and its first extended argument that Ignorance rests in Brahman and that the soul is one; and it gave Advaita’s greatest critic the version of the doctrine he set out to refute.

Was he a disciple of Sri Śaṅkara’s line? No source, old or new, claims it. He cites Sri Sureśvara with honour and upholds Sri Śaṅkara’s doctrine, and his teacher Avyayātman is otherwise unknown.

When did he live? Between 850 and 1050, on the only dated argument; probably in the tenth century, if the later scholars are right that Sri Sarvajñātman was his younger contemporary; not later than about 1200 on any account. See “When he lived.”

What does “Iṣṭa-siddhi” mean? “The establishment of the desired”: the desired doctrine being, on Hiriyanna’s reading of the author’s own words, the doctrine of Māyā; and the desired end being, in the book’s closing verses, the liberation that follows when Ignorance is understood.

Did he say the world is unreal? No. He said it is neither real, since it does not survive scrutiny, nor unreal, since it is experienced; that it is an appearance and therefore points to something it is the appearance of; and that this something is the awareness in which it appears. Hiriyanna called the position “epistemological realism” precisely because it insists that error has an object.

What is “the fifth kind”? His name for the ending of Ignorance, which he held cannot be described as real, unreal, both or indeterminable, and must be admitted as a fifth thing because the system requires it — as mathematicians admit imaginary numbers. He also gave a second answer, that the ending is indeterminable like Ignorance itself, and seems to have preferred it. The tradition remembered the first.

Why is the Method so hard on him? Because its author held that Sri Śaṅkara taught Ignorance as a mistake to be seen through, not a thing with a seat, and saw in the Iṣṭa-siddhi the moment when the second view won. The section “A dissenting reading” gives the case and its limits.

Where can I read him? The 1933 Baroda edition is freely available and is linked below; it is in Sanskrit, with an English preface and introduction. The Kanchi chapter linked below is the best short English summary of the book’s argument. A full English translation does not, so far as this page’s sources record, exist.

Why does this page keep saying “the sources say”? Because the promise of this site is not to state as fact what is not known, and of this teacher very little is. What is known is here, in the words of those who found it out, and what is not known is said to be unknown.