54माण्डूक्योपनिषत् गौडपादकारिका · The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad and Gauḍapāda's Kārikā

Gauḍapāda, c. 600 · with Śaṅkara's commentary · Swami Nikhilananda, translator, Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama, 1936; Swami Gambhirananda, translator, Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1987

Linked to 20 chapters: supports 6 · contradicts 8 · mechanism 8 · same claim 12 · pairing 5

The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad is twelve sentences of prose. It says that the syllable OM is everything; that the self has four quarters; that three of them are waking, dream and dreamless sleep; and that the fourth is what the other three are made of, describable only by saying what it is not. It is the shortest of the principal Upaniṣads, and one late text says that if a man can study only one Upaniṣad, this is the one that will do. What made it the centre of Indian philosophy rather than a curiosity is the commentary attached to it. Gauḍapāda, who lived some time before the eighth century and whom tradition makes the teacher of Śaṅkara's teacher, wrote two hundred and fifteen verses on those twelve sentences, in four treatises. The first stays close to the text. The other three drop scripture almost entirely and argue. By the end of the fourth, Gauḍapāda has claimed that nothing has ever been born, that causation cannot be stated without contradiction, that waking and dreaming stand or fall together, and that the appearance of a world is to consciousness what a circle of fire is to a whirling stick: an appearance that comes from nowhere, goes nowhere, and never belonged to anything.

The claim is not offered as a mood. It is offered as the conclusion of arguments that can be checked, and that is why the text has held its place. Gauḍapāda is the earliest Advaitin whose work survives whole, and the first Indian philosopher to make non-duality stand on reasoning rather than on the authority of the Veda. Śaṅkara, three or four generations later, wrote a commentary on both the Upaniṣad and the verses, and Nikhilananda takes the mere fact of it as a measure of the work's standing: Śaṅkara commented on the Upaniṣads, the Gītā and the Brahma Sūtras, and on this. His bhāṣya does two things at once: it tightens Gauḍapāda's arguments, and it repeatedly stages an objector, sometimes a realist, sometimes a Sāṃkhya, sometimes a Buddhist idealist, to be answered in the objector's own terms.

Almost nothing is known about Gauḍapāda himself. His name may mean no more than "the teacher from Gauḍa", the region of Bengal. Tradition makes him the teacher of Govinda, who was the teacher of Śaṅkara; Ānandagiri, writing a subcommentary on Śaṅkara, says he did austerities at Badarī in the Himalayas and had the doctrine revealed to him there. Nikhilananda, whose 1936 translation is the fullest English presentation of the whole — Upaniṣad, verses, bhāṣya and notes after Ānandagiri — says flatly that the date cannot be fixed, because Śaṅkara's own date is not fixed. Sixth or seventh century is the ordinary estimate. Nikhilananda's is the translation to read with the renderings below, which are made from the Sanskrit and are meant to be plain; Gambhirananda's later version gives the verses with a spare English rendering and no commentary. The Upaniṣad's twelve sentences are numbered singly in what follows; Gauḍapāda's verses carry two numbers, the treatise and the verse.

Āgama: what the scripture says

Śaṅkara opens his commentary with a simile that sets the shape of the whole. A man with a disease returns to his normal state when the cause of the disease is removed; the self, labouring under a misapprehension and identifying itself with misery, returns to its own state when the illusion of duality ceases. Nothing is gained. Something stops. The treatise therefore cannot produce liberation and does not claim to: scripture, in Śaṅkara's account, works indirectly, by pointing at the illusory character of duality. He also refuses to call the work a śāstra. It is a prakaraṇa, a short manual that confines itself to the essential topics of a system, and its subject is the meaning of OM.

Pāda, quarter, is literally a foot, and Śaṅkara is careful about which kind. These are not four feet like a cow's, unrelated to each other and all present at once; they are the four quarters of a coin, where a quarter goes into a half and a half into a whole. Viśva goes into Taijasa, Taijasa into Prājña, Prājña into the fourth. He adds a second distinction that decides how the rest is read: for the first three, quarter means instrument, a means of getting to the next; for the fourth it means what is got to. His reason for beginning with a syllable at all is that a name and the thing named are not two things, and OM is the name of the self.

The nineteen mouths are the instruments through which a person meets a world: five senses, five organs of action, five breaths, and mind, intellect, ego and memory. The seven limbs Śaṅkara takes from the Chāndogya's description of the cosmic person — heaven for a head, the sun for an eye, air for breath, space for the trunk, water below, earth for feet, and the sacrificial fire for a mouth — and the point of importing them is that the waking self is being described as the whole physical world seen from inside one body. Deny that, he says, and the self shrinks to the size of its own body, and Advaita turns into Sāṃkhya.

The equipment is the same in waking and in dream, which is the first hint of what the second treatise will do with the pair. What changes is only where the food comes from. Dream runs on the stock of impressions laid down in waking: Śaṅkara's image is a piece of canvas with the pictures already painted on it. Deep sleep is described differently again, not as a state but as a being — lord, knower, inner ruler, the womb of all — because nothing is left in it to divide knowing from itself. He is precise about the bliss: the sleeper is free of the effort of holding a subject apart from an object, and so has an abundance of bliss, but this is not bliss itself. And the lord of the sixth sentence is not a maker standing outside what he makes. That, Śaṅkara says, is what others hold; here the same thing is both what the world is made of and what makes it.

Śaṅkara reads the three seats as one thing a man can check in an afternoon. The person in the right eye is called Indha, the burning one, in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, and Śaṅkara takes him to be the same perceiver as the one in the sun; the eye is named for the rest of the senses rather than against them. Close it, and the forms just seen come back inside the mind as impressions, which is the second seat and the same perceiver working on a stock instead of on the world. Let the recollecting stop as well, and nothing is left to divide the seer from himself, and he is in the space of the heart. All three, he insists, are met with in waking. Nobody has to fall asleep to find them.

The seats matter less than the arithmetic. Three positions, one occupant, and a food apiece: the solid world, the impressions it has left, and the rest that comes of holding neither apart from the other. Verse 5 then quietly changes the subject: a man who knows both the eaten and the eater is not touched by the eating, which is the first appearance in the text of a knower who is not a participant.

These four verses are a catalogue of the answers available in the seventh century to the question why there is a world: the world is the display of God's power, the world is a dream or a conjuring trick, the world is God's will and nothing more, the world is what time brings forth, the world is for God's enjoyment, the world is God's play. Śaṅkara calls the people who give them sṛṣṭi-cintakāḥ, speculators about creation. Gauḍapāda's answer is not another item on the list. It is that the question has no purchase: creating implies wanting, wanting implies lack, and the shining one lacks nothing. What looks like creation is his nature, the way heat is the nature of fire. Nikhilananda, writing in 1936, compares asking for a cause of the manifold to diagnosing the headache of a headless man.

Śaṅkara's gloss on the dream-and-conjuring theory contains the image the fourth treatise will make an argument out of. A juggler throws a rope into the sky, climbs it with weapons in his hand, disappears, is cut to pieces in a fight above, and falls back down; the spectators watch a man dismembered and take no interest in whether it happened, because they can see the real juggler standing on the ground the whole time, unmoved and unseen. The three states are the rope; Viśva, Taijasa and Prājña are the one who seems to have climbed it; the fourth is the man who never left the ground.

The seventh sentence is the centre of the Upaniṣad and it is written almost entirely in denials. Six of them close off the map the first six sentences have just drawn: not the outward knowing of waking, not the inward knowing of dream, not both together, not the undivided mass of deep sleep, not knowing, not its absence. Six more take away every handle by which anything is ordinarily held: sight, transaction, grasp, mark, thought, reference. Only then do three positive words arrive, and they are not descriptions but what is left: śānta, śiva, advaita.

Śaṅkara stages the obvious objection before the sentence is even quoted, and gives it to the objector in five words: "Then it becomes mere void." His answer is a principle he will use for the rest of the book: an imagination cannot exist without something to be imagined on. Silver is seen on mother-of-pearl, a snake on a rope, a man on a tree stump, water on sand; there is always a real thing carrying the false one. Denying the attributes removes what was superimposed and leaves the carrier. A second objector then says that a thing which cannot be indicated at all is like the horns of a hare, and pursuing it is a waste of a life. Śaṅkara's answer is that knowing the fourth to be one's own self ends the hunt for what one is not, as knowing the shell ends the desire for the silver. The last clause of the sentence does the same work: sa ātmā sa vijñeyaḥ, that is the self, that is what is to be known. Turīya means only "the fourth", and Śaṅkara warns that it is not a fourth item beside the other three. The negations establish it as the very self that was present in all three states all along.

Verses 11 to 16 are the sharpest thing in the first treatise, because they refuse the identification that the sixth sentence invites. Deep sleep is not the goal. Prājña and turīya agree in that neither grasps duality, and that agreement is what makes deep sleep tempting as a picture of liberation; but Prājña is asleep, and sleep holds a seed. The word is bīja-nidrā, seed-sleep: the condition out of which waking and dream grow again the moment it stirs. Turīya has nothing to grow from, which is also Śaṅkara's reason for saying that the man who knows it does not come back: what he has known is not a cause.

Verse 15 redefines its two terms so that they cover more than they seem to. Dream is mis-taking, seeing one thing as another, and in Śaṅkara's reading it covers waking as well, since waking also takes a rope for a snake. Sleep is not knowing at all, and it covers all three states, since none of them knows what is. Waking and dream thus fall into one class and deep sleep into another, effect and cause. Verse 16 then says what waking up from the second kind of sleep means, and Śaṅkara fills in the content of the sleep in the first person: this is my father, this is my son, this is my property, these are my animals, I am happy, I am miserable, I have lost by this and gained by that. The waking is not something the sleeper does. It comes from a teacher who has seen it himself, and what the teacher says is that you are not this thing made of cause and effect.

Verse 17 is the hinge of the book, and it is a conditional that runs the other way from the one a reader expects. If the world were real, its ending would be a real event and liberation would be a change; because there is no such change, the world was never there to end. Verse 18 then says what the whole treatise has been doing. Talk of quarters, states, sounds and seats is upadeśa, teaching, a ladder; in the known thing there is no duality and therefore nothing that the ladder described.

The second half of the Upaniṣad walks the same ground in sound. Each identification is carried by a pun on the name of the sound, and the puns are not ornament: a is the first letter and waking is the first experience; u is what lies between; m closes the mouth and ends the utterance, as sleep takes the world in. The fourth is the one that is not a sound.

Verse 23 is the practical point of the whole sound analysis, and it is a negative one. Each sound delivers its meditator to its own quarter: a to the waking cosmos, u to the cosmic mind, m to the causal condition. In the partless fourth there is no arriving, because arriving needs a cause and the fourth is not one. Verse 24 tells the student to know OM quarter by quarter and then to think of nothing at all, which is the first statement of the discipline the third treatise will name. Verse 26 puts the whole of the tradition's two Brahmans into one line — the syllable is the lower Brahman and it is also the higher — and Nikhilananda's note observes drily that the first half is for ordinary students and the second for the sharpest. The chapter closes on the man who has known the soundless OM. He is the sage, says verse 29, and no one else; and the note adds what the verse implies, that learning without the thing itself is worth nothing.

Vaitathya: waking is worth no more than dream

The second treatise drops scripture and argues. Śaṅkara says so at the opening: what the first chapter established on the authority of the Vedas can equally be settled by reasoning, and that is what the second chapter is for. Vaitathya is the noun from vitatha, not-so; Nikhilananda's chapter heading is Illusion. What is declared not-so is every object, inner or outer. The argument begins where nobody disputes it, in dream, and then removes the difference between dream and waking one reason at a time.

Three arguments, all from ordinary experience. A dreamed mountain or elephant is seen inside a body, and there is no room for a mountain in the channels of a body. A man asleep in the east dreams himself in the north, but the journey there and back would take a month and he has been asleep for an hour; and when he wakes he is where he lay down, not where he went. Śaṅkara adds a third that is entirely social: the people he met in daylight in his dream never say afterwards that they met him. Verse 3 then cites the Bṛhadāraṇyaka's line that in dream there are no chariots and no roads, and is careful about the order: reason got there first, and scripture is reporting the same finding for its own purpose, which is to show that in dream the self shines by its own light.

This is the move the whole treatise turns on, and Śaṅkara sets it out as a formal inference: what is to be proved is that waking objects are unreal; the reason is that they are perceived; the example is dream; and the reason holds of the waking case as it held of the dream case. The one difference anyone can point to, that dream space is cramped and waking space is not, is noticed only from waking. Inside the dream nothing seems cramped at all.

Verse 6 is the criterion, and it is the sentence of the text most often quoted on its own: what is absent at the beginning and absent at the end is absent in the middle. Śaṅkara applies it to everything perceived, on the ground that whatever changes was not there before its change and will not be there after it. Verse 7 answers the standing objection to that criterion. A realist says the test of a real thing is that it works: food stops hunger, a cart carries you, and dream food does not. Gauḍapāda's answer is that the objection cancels itself. A man eats his fill in waking, falls asleep and dreams himself starving; a man feasts in dream and wakes up hungry. Dream means serve dream ends exactly as waking means serve waking ends, and each state stultifies the other's currency.

The objection behind verse 8 is that dreams show things waking never shows — the dreamer with eight arms, the elephant with four tusks — so they are a species of their own and not a good model for anything. Gauḍapāda's answer is that strange objects belong to the state, as a thousand eyes belong to Indra in heaven and as the sights of a road belong to that road for the traveller who knows it. Verses 9 and 10 are the pair that does the real damage. Inside a dream a dreamer distinguishes what he merely imagines from what he actually sees; he has a working distinction between the real and the unreal, and it is entirely internal to the dream. Waking has the same distinction, drawn in the same way, and there is no reason yet given why it should be worth more.

Verse 11 is the objector's question and the treatise takes it seriously. If everything perceived is false, what holds knowledge and memory up? Deny an answer, Śaṅkara says, and you have nihilism. The answer is that the self imagines, by its own power, in itself, and knows what it has imagined, as a rope is imagined to be a snake; there is no second thing doing the imagining, and no maker standing outside the world like a potter outside his pot. Verse 14 takes the strongest realist objection, that outer things are not mind-dependent because they answer to two times — they persist, and two observers can date them against each other. Śaṅkara's reply is that the two-timedness is nothing but the objects measuring each other. What is thought to anchor the world is one appearance holding another in place.

Verse 16 fixes an order that matters: the individual is not first in the world and then deceived about it; the individual is the first imagination, and everything else is imagined for him to know. The engine that keeps it going is a loop between knowing and remembering, each making the other, which is why the world is stable without being real. Then comes the illustration the tradition has never put down. A rope in bad light is taken for a snake, or a trickle of water, or a stick; the mistakes differ and the rope does not; and when the rope is seen the snake does not go anywhere, because it was never there to go.

Śaṅkara adds one condition that is easy to miss. The mistake is possible only because the rope was never properly seen. Nobody mistakes his own fingers for something else, because they are known. Ignorance is not an extra thing added to the situation; it is the whole of what makes the situation possible.

The numbers in verse 26 are not invented for the joke. Twenty-five are the categories of Sāṃkhya: nature, the great one, the I-maker, the five subtle elements, the five organs of sense, the five of action, the five objects, mind, and the person. The followers of Patañjali add the lord and make twenty-six. The Pāśupatas add six more — passion, ignorance, time, portion, illusion and necessity — and make thirty-one. The commentary draws the only conclusion the list will support: schools that cannot agree on the count are not reading the number off the thing itself.

Ten verses of a list that could go on for ten more, and the comedy is deliberate. Every school's ultimate principle is on it: the breath of one school, the elements of the materialists, the three strands of Sāṃkhya, the counted categories of the systems, the merit and demerit of the ritualists, the void of one Buddhist school. Śaṅkara declines to gloss the items one by one, on the ground that it would serve no purpose and the meaning is plain enough. The point is made by the shape of the list rather than by its contents: what each school has found is the self, seen through what that school was looking with.

Verse 29 is the sharpest sentence in the treatise and it cuts towards the reader. Whatever view a man is shown, that is what he sees; it takes him in, protects him from the others, and he arrives at it. Nikhilananda's note is blunt about the cost: a man who takes his own idea for the reality and calls the rest false has not arrived at the highest truth, and this, he says, is the mistake the mystics generally make.

Verse 32 is the verse the whole book exists for, and it is not softened anywhere in the commentary. Not only is there no bound soul; there is no seeker, and no one who has ever got free, because getting free would be an event and events need something that is really there to happen to. Śaṅkara's bhāṣya on this verse is the longest in the chapter and it takes the hardest form of the objection: if the teaching only negates, it establishes nothing, and its conclusion is the void. His answer works the rope again. The snake needs the rope; a mistake needs something to be mistaken; and when the mistake goes, what is left is not another mistake but the thing that was there all along. Pressed further — perhaps the rope is imagined too — he replies that the one who does the imagining must be there before the imagining, and that this is what cannot be argued away. A void has to be somebody's void.

Verse 34 is where Śaṅkara says why non-duality is called kind. Misery, in his account, is what happens when a man finds one thing standing apart from another; the buffalo is not the horse, the pot is known only against the cloth, and whatever he wants is accordingly somewhere he is not. Let the many be seen as what the one is doing, and nothing stands apart, and there is nothing left for the misery to be made of. He is careful that this is not an identity of the sentient with the insentient. The light does not turn the rope into the snake; it shows that there was only ever the rope.

Verse 33 carries a qualification that most summaries lose, and Nikhilananda's note makes it explicit: non-duality is itself a word that means something only against duality, so it too belongs to the ladder and not to what the ladder reaches. The last three verses are the only practical instruction in the treatise, and they are severe. Śaṅkara reads them as a description of the wandering renunciate: no hymns, no bowing to deities, not even the rites owed to the dead, since nothing remains that those rites could obtain; his shelter is his body, which changes, and the knowledge of the self, which does not; and he eats whatever is put in front of him. The instruction to behave like a dull thing is not a recommendation of stupidity. Śaṅkara glosses it twice: do not let others see what you have become, and, second, the man does not see others as separate from himself, and so does not take up the part of a knower. Nikhilananda adds that the verse is addressed to the student and the next verse to the one who has arrived, and that the difference between them is that the first still makes an effort.

Advaita: nothing is ever born

The third treatise is named for non-duality and states it without cover. It opens, oddly for a tradition that has produced so much devotion, by looking down on devotion.

To worship is to stand in front of something, and what stands in front of you has come to be. The worshipper's error is not that he worships but that he takes the unborn for something born. Gauḍapāda does not throw the practice away; he places it. The third treatise will come back at verse 16 to say that the stages of life are for three grades of sight and that worship was taught for the lower ones, out of compassion.

Śaṅkara sets the Sāṃkhya against the jars at length. Nature works for the sake of another, the Sāṃkhya says, and the other must be a person; many bodies then call for many persons, and one self spread through all of them will not do. His answer is that bondage and release never touch the person on Sāṃkhya's own account, since they belong to the intellect, and that one person is enough to be the one for whose sake anything is done. The multiplicity was carrying no weight. It was a picture the argument did not need.

The illustration answers a question that any monism has to answer: if there is only one, why does your headache not reach me. The space in a jar is not a piece of space; it is space, taken with a jar. Fill one jar with smoke and the others stay clear, and what one jīva suffers stays where it is, without there being two spaces. Śaṅkara is careful about the status of the picture. Verse 9 says only that the self is not unlike space, and the point of comparison is the being-everywhere, not any substance the two share; verse 8 says that an untrained eye sees dirt in the sky. And verse 15 will say what all such pictures are for.

Verse 15 is Gauḍapāda's account of what the Upaniṣads are doing when they tell stories of a beginning. Know one lump of clay and you know everything made of clay; know iron and you know all ironwork; sparks come from a fire and are of the nature of fire. These, he says, are a way in, not a doctrine. Śaṅkara stages the objection directly — before creation all may have been one, but after it there is plainly a world and there are plainly many people — and answers that such passages exist to establish the identity of the individual and Brahman, and for no other purpose. Verse 16 adds the reason such teaching exists at all: people see differently, and the lower teaching is given to them out of kindness, not out of confusion.

Verse 17 sounds like tolerance and is not. Śaṅkara names the schools in his gloss — Kapila, Kaṇāda, the Buddha, the Jina — and says their views are false for the ordinary reason that they lack support, and for an additional one: they are a standing source of attachment and hatred, since each holds its own conclusion to be the only truth and dislikes whoever disagrees. Non-duality has no quarrel with them because it includes them. The verses that follow supply the argument the whole chapter rests on and it is disarmingly simple: nothing changes into what it is not. Fire does not become cold; the deathless does not acquire death. If the deathlessness a thing has is something it was given, it can be taken away, and then it was never deathlessness.

Gauḍapāda's use of scripture here is a piece of exegetical policy, and verse 23 states it: the texts say both things, so the texts cannot settle it, and what settles it is which reading survives reasoning. Then he points to the passages he takes to be decisive: there is no manifoldness here; the unborn is born in many ways, by illusion. The last of the four is the neti neti of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, and its function is what the seventh sentence of the Upaniṣad established: the unborn shows itself precisely by the failure of every attempt to take hold of it.

The key term of this group is amanībhāva, the state of not being a mind. The mind is not abolished; what stops is the imagining that constitutes it as a mind, and verse 32 gives the condition: with nothing on offer to grasp, there is no grasping. Verse 33 then closes the gap that would otherwise remain between the knower and the known, and closes it in the only way non-duality permits: the knowledge is not born, the thing known is not born, and they are not two things.

Verses 34 and 35 draw the line that the rest of the book will not let anyone cross. A mind that has stopped is not a mind that has gone to sleep. In deep sleep the mind merges; here it is held and does not merge; the two look alike from outside and are opposites. Verse 39 gives the discipline its name. Asparśa yoga is a contradiction on its face, since yoga means joining and asparśa means not touching anything, and Śaṅkara's gloss makes the paradox the point: this yoga is without relation because there is nothing for it to be in relation with. His account of why yogins fear it is one of the sharpest sentences in the commentary. They are afraid, he says, that it means the annihilation of their self, which is exactly what they should expect if what they take themselves to be is the individual they have been training.

Śaṅkara's account of how the mind is turned back is short, and it is not a technique. Remember what the duality costs: everything in it changes, everything that changes ends, and a mind that has taken that in stops asking for the enjoyments. Then remember what the teachers and the texts say is there instead, that it is unborn, and the born will not be seen. Nikhilananda's note counts four obstacles rather than two — torpor, distraction, the pleasure of a small success, and attachment to whatever stage has been reached — and the last two are the ones a practitioner is least likely to report.

These nine verses are the most practical passage in the book and the least like what a reader expects from it. Verse 41 concedes the difficulty without flinching: bringing the mind under control is emptying an ocean with the tip of a blade of grass, drop by drop. Verse 42 sets the trap the tradition knew best, that a mind well pleased with its own torpor is in as much trouble as a mind chasing what it wants, and the two are named in the same breath. Verse 44 lists four positions and what to do in each, and the third is the one the practice manuals tend to miss: a mind neither asleep nor scattered but stained, still holding attachments it has not noticed, and looking from the outside exactly like a mind at rest. Verse 45 removes the last support: do not taste the happiness that comes with the stillness, since the seeking of pleasure in absorption is the mark of an enquiry that has given up. Śaṅkara's comment on 44 is explicit that the state to be woken from is the yogic trance, and Nikhilananda's note draws the conclusion the tradition has argued about ever since: what is aimed at is not truth seen with the eyes shut, but truth seen with the eyes open on every object.

Verse 46 states the finish, and it is a double negation with nothing added: neither merged nor scattered, unmoving, and with no appearance in it. Verse 48 then ends the chapter on the line the whole book exists to make available: no one is ever born, and nothing whatever comes to be.

Alātaśānti: the quenching of the firebrand

The fourth treatise is as long as the other three together and it is the one that has caused all the trouble. Śaṅkara says what it is for at the opening: the first three chapters have established non-duality by scripture, by the unreality of objects and by reason, and the fourth examines the rival systems and shows that they cannot be true philosophy, because they contradict each other and because each is held with attachment to its own side. Its method is refutation. Its material is every available theory of causation. And its vocabulary, for two hundred lines at a stretch, is the vocabulary of the Buddhist schools it is refuting.

Whom does the first verse salute? Dvipadāṃ varam, best of bipeds, and knowledge compared to space, and dharmas for what is known: the phrasing is that of a Buddhist hymn, and the question has been live for a thousand years. Śaṅkara takes the verse to salute Nārāyaṇa, the promulgator of the doctrine, and Ānandagiri's subcommentary supplies the story that Gauḍapāda received the teaching at Badarī. Nikhilananda, who reproduces Das Gupta's case for the Buddha at length, answers it with the text's own last verse but one. Either way, what is saluted in the second verse is a discipline and not a person, and it is the asparśa yoga of the third treatise, now given its own bow.

This is the move of the chapter in miniature. The Sāṃkhya holds that an effect is already present in its cause; the Vaiśeṣika holds that it is a new thing. Each has an unanswerable objection to the other: nothing that already exists needs to be born, and nothing that does not exist can produce anything. Gauḍapāda accepts both objections and neither position. Between them the disputants have proved his conclusion, and he says so with what looks like courtesy and is in fact the whole argument: we agree with what you have shown, and we take no side in your quarrel.

Before the refutations begin, Gauḍapāda settles what a nature is, and Śaṅkara gives it four marks. A nature is what a thing has by full attainment, as the powers a yogin has trained for do not desert him afterwards; it is the character that does not vary with time or place, as heat does not leave fire; it belongs to a thing from its birth, as flight belongs to a bird; and it needs nothing outside the thing, as water runs downhill without being sent. Whatever can be taken away was never one. If the made-up things of ordinary experience hold their natures as firmly as that, he asks, what is to be said of what was never born.

The argument has three prongs and they close on each other. If cause and effect are the same, the cause is born and so is not a cause; if they are different, nothing connects them; if they make each other, the order cannot be stated, and Gauḍapāda's phrase for that position is a father born from his son. The seed and the sprout, the standard illustration of a beginningless chain, is dismissed on a point of method that any logician would grant: the example offered in proof is itself the disputed case. Śaṅkara works the exchange out over several pages, refusing at each stage the retreat to a series: there is no such thing as the series apart from the seeds and the sprouts, and every seed in it was produced and so had a beginning. And verse 22 closes the last door. Nothing comes from itself, from another, from both; nothing that exists is born, nothing that does not exist is born, nothing that both is and is not is born, because those two marks do not sit together.

Śaṅkara's image for the realist's case is a clear crystal. Knowing by itself has one character, which is that it lights things up, and there is no variety inside it; set something coloured beside the crystal and the colour is in the crystal, and that, the realist says, is what an object does for a knowing. Blue and yellow and the sound of a bell are various, and nothing inside the knowing accounts for it. The reply in verse 25 does not deny the demand. It grants the demand as reason makes it, and then asks what the cause turns out to be when it is looked for in the thing.

Verse 24 is the objector's, and Śaṅkara marks it as such; the hardest thing in it is the burn, which hurts as no idea does. The answer in verse 25 and after is the idealist's, and Śaṅkara says so plainly: these verses give the position of the Vijñānavādins, and Gauḍapāda approves their arguments. No final object is ever reached — the jar resolves into clay, the cloth into thread, the thread into fibre, and the regress runs out of language before it runs out of objects. Then verse 28 turns the same blade. If nothing that the mind sees is ever born, the mind is not born either, and those who make the mind momentary and real are looking for the footprints of birds in the sky. Śaṅkara ranks the schools for audacity as he goes: the idealists outdo the dualists, and the nihilists outdo the idealists, being men who would compress the sky into their palms. His standing objection to the void is one sentence long and does not change from chapter to chapter: if all this is a void, somebody is left to say so.

Verse 42 is the most generous sentence in the book and the most double-edged. Causation is taught, Gauḍapāda says, and taught on purpose, to those who cannot do without it: people who are sure that things exist because they can see them and deal with them, and who take the duties of their station seriously, and who are frightened by the claim that nothing is born, hearing in it the annihilation of themselves. Let them hold on to it, says Śaṅkara; the harm is small. Verse 44 then removes the ground under the criterion that made the concession necessary. The magician's elephant is perceived and can be tied up and ridden, and there is no elephant.

Śaṅkara's gloss on verse 45 fixes what the firebrand is an image of. We say that Devadatta is born, that Devadatta is walking, that Devadatta is tall and fair; the name takes the verbs and the adjectives, and nothing else in the sentence is doing any work. Consciousness stands in that relation to birth, to motion and to being a thing: it appears under all three and is none of them. That is why the next verse can say without qualification that the mind is never born, and that whoever has seen this does not fall into the mistake again.

A torch swung in the dark makes a wheel of fire. There is no wheel; there is a point of light and a movement. Gauḍapāda gets four denials out of it in three verses, and they are the four that a theory of causation would have to answer: the figures do not arrive from outside, they do not depart when the swinging stops, they do not sink back into the brand, and they never came out of it in the first place, because a shape is not the kind of thing that can be somewhere. Śaṅkara's note is exact about what the figure is: what actually exists is a point, and the mind, out of ignorance, sees forms in it. Then verses 51 and 52 substitute consciousness for the brand, word for word, and the list of denials survives the substitution intact. Śaṅkara marks the one place where the analogy breaks, and it breaks in the direction that strengthens the claim: the firebrand really does move, and consciousness does not. The motion is the mistake.

Verse 55 is where the metaphysics turns into a description of a life, and Śaṅkara puts the content of the holding into the first person: I am the doer, these good and bad deeds are mine, I shall enjoy their fruits, born in due course as some being or other. That is what causation means to the person who believes it, and that, he says, is what continues without a break. The end of it is not a better position within the chain but the wearing away of the attachment to the chain, which he compares to being freed of a possessing spirit. Verse 58 anticipates the obvious counter: if birth is an illusion, is the illusion real? No. The word names something that is not there, and the thing conjured has no seed except another conjuring.

Verse 74 is the point at which the argument turns on itself, and it is the reason the book cannot be accused of substituting one doctrine for another. Asked whether the unbornness of the self is a truth, Gauḍapāda answers that it is a truth in the relative way, said against those who assert a birth, and that in the highest sense the self is not even unborn, since unborn is the correlative of born and both belong to the same vocabulary. Śaṅkara accepts this without softening it. Verse 83's four corners then dispose of the four positions available to metaphysics — it exists, it does not, both, neither — and his gloss assigns each to a school: the Vaiśeṣika, the momentary idealists among the Buddhists, the Jaina, and the nihilist. What holds each of them in place is not the position but the attachment to it, and the word Gauḍapāda uses for all four of them is the word for a child.

Verse 98 draws the last consequence of ajāti and it is the one that removes the work of the spiritual life: there is no veil, there never was, and what the teachers call awakening is a way of speaking, as one speaks of the sun shining when shining is all the sun is, or of a mountain standing when it has never done anything else. Then verse 99 says outright that this is not what the Buddha said. Śaṅkara's gloss is the most interesting sentence in his commentary on the chapter, because it concedes the neighbourhood while refusing the identity: the view that rejects external objects and keeps ideas alone, he says, is close to the truth of the non-dual self, and the non-duality that is the final truth is reached through the Upaniṣads and not by that road. The last verse bows, and Śaṅkara points out what the bow costs: salutation needs two, the knower is not two, and the author has dragged the thing he knows onto the relative plane in order to honour it, as an example to those who cannot do without one. At the very end of the commentary Śaṅkara makes his own three salutations: to Brahman, which though unborn appears to be born; to the teacher who brought this up from the depths of the ocean of the Vedas by churning it with his reason; and to his own teacher, who destroyed the darkness in his mind.

Since the seventh century

The Kārikā's position inside its own tradition was settled by Śaṅkara and has not moved: it is a prakaraṇa, a short manual, and it keeps the company Śaṅkara chose to comment on. The Upaniṣad and the verses have been taught together ever since; Ānandagiri's subcommentary explains Śaṅkara; Nikhilananda's English edition of 1936 carries all four layers, and Gambhirananda's of 1987 gives the verses plainly for readers who want the text without the apparatus. What did move, and is still moving, is everything to do with the author.

Vidhushekhara Bhattacharya's edition of 1943 argued that the four treatises are four independent works, later collected under one title, the Āgamaśāstra; that the first is not a systematic exposition of the Upaniṣad at all; and that the author's mind is closer to Buddhist philosophy than to Vedānta, a case built on the fourth treatise's vocabulary — its dharmas for individual souls, its saṃvṛti, its awakened ones who are ādibuddha by nature, its salutation to the best of bipeds. He also supplied the dating anchor that is still used: Bhāvaviveka, the sixth-century Madhyamaka author, quotes a verse all but identical to the third treatise's fifth, and Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla quote others, which puts the verses before about 550 and makes the author's supposed proximity to Śaṅkara a matter of tradition rather than of record.

Richard King's study of 1995 took the question apart differently. He set the treatises against the Abhidharma, the Madhyamaka and the Yogācāra in turn, and concluded that the Buddhist debt is concentrated almost entirely in the fourth, which he thinks was written for a different audience and possibly by another hand; the first three, on his reading, are Vedāntic through and through and use Buddhist arguments the way any philosopher uses the arguments available to him. That is close to what Nikhilananda had said in 1936 from inside the tradition — that shared terms prove only that certain terms were the common property of Indian thought, and that the fourth treatise borrows the idealists' arguments in order to defeat the realists and then turns them on the idealists — and it is a long way from Śaṅkara, who did not admit that the chapter contained anything Buddhist at all beyond the opinions it was refuting. The one thing the argument has never been able to do is settle itself, because the evidence is a vocabulary, and a vocabulary is exactly what a philosopher borrows from the people he is arguing with.

The text is taught now much as it was taught then, verse by verse, with the commentary taken up as each verse is reached. Swami Sarvapriyananda's series at the Vedanta Society of New York goes through the twelve sentences and then through all four treatises in order, and it is the form in which most readers now meet the text: a small book that spends twelve sentences describing the mind, and two hundred and fifteen verses removing every reason anyone ever had for thinking that the mind, or anything else, came into being.