in the sutras (as does Sankara) the distinction between the higher and lower Brahman, or the doctrine of the unreality of the world (Maya) or the absolute identity of the individual soul with Brahman.  We are told that the state of the released soul is non-separation (avibhaga) from Brahman, but this is variously explained by the commentators according to their views.  Though the sutras are the acknowledged text-book of Vedantism, their utterances are in practice less important than subsequent explanations of them.  As often happens in India, the comment has overgrown and superseded the text.

The most important of these commentators is Sankaracarya.[774] Had he been a European philosopher anxious that his ideas should bear his name, or a reformer like the Buddha with little respect for antiquity, he would doubtless have taken his place in history as one of the most original teachers of Asia.  But since his whole object was to revive the traditions of the past and suppress his originality by attempting to prove that his ideas are those of Badarayana and the Upanishads, the magnitude of his contribution to Indian thought is often under-rated.  We need not suppose that he was the inventor of all the ideas in his works of which we find no previous expression.  He doubtless (like the Buddha) summarized and stereotyped an existing mode of thought but his summary bears the unmistakeable mark of his own personality.

Sankara’s teaching is known as Advaita or absolute monism.  Nothing exists except the one existence called Brahman or Paramatman, the Highest Self.  Brahman is pure being and thought (the two being regarded as identical), without qualities.  Brahman is not intelligent but is intelligence itself.  The human soul (jiva) is identical with the Highest Self, not merely as a part of it, but as being itself the whole universal indivisible Brahman.  This must not be misunderstood as a blasphemous assertion that man is equal to God.  The soul is identical with Brahman only in so far as it forgets its separate human existence, and all that we call self and individuality.  A man who has any pride in himself is ipso facto differentiated from Brahman as much as is possible.  Yet in the world in which we move we see not only differentiation and multiplicity but also a plurality of individual souls apparently distinct from one another and from Brahman.  This appearance is due to the principle of Maya which is associated with Brahman and is the cause of the phenomenal world.  If Maya is translated by illusion it must be remembered that its meaning is not so much that the world and individual existences are illusory in the strict sense of the word, as phenomenal.  The only true reality is self-conscious thought without an object.  When the mind attains to that, it ceases to be human and individual:  it is Brahman.  But whenever it thinks of particular objects neither the thoughts nor the objects of the thoughts are real in the same