Reading room

Commentary on the Brahmasūtras

Adi Shankara

Śaṅkara's major work and one of the great texts of Sanskrit philosophy. It comments on Bādarāyaṇa's aphorisms, which summarise the teaching of the Upaniṣads, and reads them as affirming the identity of ātman and brahman. It opens with the famous "preamble on superimposition" (adhyāsabhāṣya), which defines ignorance as the confusion of subject and object, and argues at length against Sāṃkhya, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, the Buddhist and Jaina schools and the ritualism of Mīmāṃsā. It became the base text of the Bhāmatī and Vivaraṇa schools.