SOURCE: "Epistemology" in The Pure Principle: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Shankara, Michigan State University Press, 1960, pp. 37-55.

Below, Menon and Allen discuss Sankara's theory of knowledge and how his epistemology "steered a middle course between the two main Hindu schools of thought."

How can we come to know the Self? The answer is that if we truly know anything at all, it is the Self; and everything else we seem to know is a product of avidya or ignorance, which splits up the pure or integral knowledge into subject and object. For if the Self is universal and is the only reality, then, as Sir S. Radhakrishnan has said, it is not the real that calls for explanation, but the false, the erroneous, and the unreal.

Why should avidya exist at all? Is it ingrained in the Self? If so, the non-dualist conception of the Self...