Gauḍapāda

Gauḍapāda (c. 6th century CE) is the earliest known systematic philosopher of Advaita Vedānta. Tradition makes him the teacher of Govinda Bhagavatpāda, who was the teacher of Ādi Śaṅkara — hence Gauḍapāda is honoured as Śaṅkara’s paramaguru, “grand-teacher”. His only certain work is the Māṇḍūkya Kārikā (also called the Gauḍapāda Kārikā or Āgama Śāstra), 215 verses in four chapters that expound the short Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad and go far beyond it, developing the most radical form of non-dualism in Indian thought: the doctrine that nothing has ever really come into being (ajātivāda).

The Māṇḍūkya Kārikā

The four states

The first chapter follows the Upaniṣad’s analysis of the syllable Oṃ and the four states of the self. The self in the waking state (vaiśvānara) experiences gross objects; in the dream state (taijasa) subtle objects; in deep sleep (prājña) it is a mass of undifferentiated consciousness, without objects. The fourth (turīya) is not a state but the ground of all three: “not inwardly cognitive, not outwardly cognitive, not both… unseen, beyond relation, ungraspable, without marks, unthinkable, indescribable, whose essence is the experience of the one Self, the cessation of the world, peaceful, auspicious, non-dual”. The three letters A, U and M of Oṃ correspond to the three states; the silence after Oṃ is the fourth.

Waking is a dream

The second chapter, “Unreality” (Vaitathya), argues that the waking world is as unreal as the dream world: both are “seen”; both have a beginning and an end; what is non-existent at the beginning and the end is non-existent in the middle too. The objects of a dream seem useful while we dream, as the objects of waking seem useful while we wake. “As a dream and an illusion, or a city of the gandharvas in the sky, so is this universe seen by those wise in Vedānta” (2.31). And the climactic verse: “There is no dissolution, no origination, no one in bondage, no one striving, no seeker of liberation and no one liberated: this is the highest truth” (2.32).

Non-origination

The third chapter, “Non-duality” (Advaita), argues that the Self is like space: when a pot is made, the space in the pot seems separate from space at large, but it was never born and is never really divided. Nothing can come into being: what exists cannot come to be (it already is), what does not exist cannot come to be (it is nothing), and nothing can change its nature.

The firebrand

The fourth chapter, “The Quenching of the Firebrand” (Alātaśānti), is the most philosophically intense and the most Buddhist in vocabulary. It argues dialectically that origination is impossible on every account — neither from itself, nor from another, nor from both, nor from neither — in arguments resembling Nāgārjuna‘s. And it gives Gauḍapāda’s image of the world: “As a firebrand, when moved, appears straight or crooked, so consciousness, when vibrating, appears as perceiver and perceived” (4.47). When the firebrand is still, the illusory shapes vanish; when consciousness stops “vibrating”, the world of subject and object disappears into the unborn, non-dual Self.

Gauḍapāda and Buddhism

The resemblance of the fourth chapter to Buddhist Madhyamaka (emptiness, non-origination, the two truths) and Yogācāra (the world as the vibration of consciousness) is unmistakable; Gauḍapāda even uses Buddhist technical terms and praises “the best of bipeds”, a Buddhist epithet. Scholars debate whether he borrowed from Buddhism, whether the fourth chapter was originally Buddhist, or whether both drew on shared ideas. Theistic critics later called Advaita “Buddhism in disguise” partly because of Gauḍapāda. His decisive difference from the Buddhists is that what remains when the illusion ends is not emptiness but the Self, unborn, eternal consciousness.

Legacy

Ādi Śaṅkara (or someone in his school) wrote a commentary on the Kārikā, and later Advaitins regarded it as authoritative scripture. The modern sage Ramana Maharshi taught ajātivāda as the highest truth.