108 Days with Adi Shankara

Days 1 – 35 · The Gita and the Architecture

Glennford Ellison Roberts · the Architect

TRUTH does its own work

Atha — now. The first word of the Brahma Sutras, and the first word of any real beginning.

What This Volume Is

Eighty-one thousand words. Thirty-five days. Two movements: the Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutras.

It is the opening third of a hundred-and-eight-day walk, and its job is to lay the architecture. Days one through twenty walk the Gita — not the eighteen-week pace of the companion volume but a swifter first pass, chapter by chapter, taking the teaching whole. Then the second movement turns to the Brahma Sutras, which is the harder and rarer thing, and the reason this volume matters.

A word on the Sutras for a reader who has not met them. They are the third of the three foundations of Vedanta — with the Upanishads and the Gita — and they are almost unreadable on their own. Five hundred and fifty-five aphorisms of two or three words each, deliberately compressed so as to be unintelligible without a teacher: athato brahma jijnasa, now therefore the inquiry into Brahman. Every school of Vedanta is defined by its commentary on them, and Shankara's is the founding document of Advaita. Almost no popular book in English attempts them at all.

What It Delivers

The opening day is the best-judged thing in the volume and it is worth describing. It takes as its text the first word of the Brahma Sutras — atha, now — and builds the whole beginning on it. The Sutras open with a particle meaning now, therefore, at this point; the tradition has spent fifteen centuries on why. Because inquiry begins when the preliminaries are done. Because now is the only place from which anything can be begun. A reader given that on day one has been handed the method of the entire hundred and eight days: the words are not decoration, and we will stop on them.

The Gita days do something the eighteen-week volume does not, and the difference is deliberate. Where the companion volume dwells, this one carries. Day three is What Cannot Die; day nineteen is Do Not Grieve; day twenty is What the Question Was Always Asking. The titles tell you the shape — this is the teaching taken at pace, so that the reader has the whole arc in three weeks and can then go back into the Sutras knowing where he is.

But the Sutra movement is the reason to own this volume. The rope that was never a snake; the world that is neither real nor unreal; what the emptiness missed; the self that cannot be divided; the coherence of experience. Those are not day-titles invented for atmosphere — they are the actual load-bearing arguments of Shankara's bhashya, rendered day by day into English a beginner can follow.

What the emptiness missed deserves particular notice, because it is where Shankara argues against the Buddhists, and almost every popular treatment of Advaita in the West quietly elides that argument — partly because the modern reader tends to encounter both traditions as allies against materialism, and partly because the dispute is technical. It is not elided here. Shankara held that the Madhyamaka analysis was correct in what it denied and incomplete in what it left standing, and that a groundless emptiness cannot account for the very awareness in which the analysis occurs. That is his position, it is a real philosophical claim, and a reader who does not know it does not know Advaita.

And the closing days of the volume — the path after the path, the world after the recognition, living while liberated, the return that was never a departure — are the jivanmukti teaching, the doctrine of liberation while still in the body. That is where the volume's ethic and the Western books' Samaritan meet, and it is the right place to end a first third.

Where It Will Be Resisted, and Fairly

The lineage objection applies to all three volumes and is stated fully in the report on the Gita: this speaks in Shankara's first person, he did not write it, and the tradition transmits through initiation. The device is declared and the positions are accurate, which is a defence of honesty rather than of standing.

The particular objection to this volume is about the Sutras, and it is a real one. Shankara's bhashya on the Brahma Sutras runs to something like eight hundred pages in English and consists very largely of technical dispute — against the Sankhya, the Vaisheshika, the Buddhists, the Mimamsakas, the Jains — conducted in a formal debate idiom with rules the modern reader does not know. Fifteen days cannot carry that. What this volume gives is the conclusions and the central arguments, cleanly and in order. What it cannot give is the actual texture of the disputation, which is where a great deal of the philosophical work happens. A reader should know that he is receiving the results of the argument rather than the argument.

The scholarly objection is philological and applies across all three volumes: the Sanskrit is transliterated and glossed at length and has not been verified by a Sanskritist. In my judgment it is sound. My judgment is not verification. The Sutra citations in particular should be checked, since a mis-set aphorism in a text this compressed changes the meaning entirely.

And the structural note: a reader who comes to this volume expecting the Upanishads will not find them. This is Gita and Sutras — the architecture rather than the source-texts — and that is the right order, but it means the most famous material is in Volume Two.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who has decided to walk the hundred and eight days. It is day one through thirty-five and there is no other entrance.

And, separately, anyone who wants the Brahma Sutras at all. This is the only treatment I know of in English that walks them day by day for a reader with no Sanskrit and no prior training. That alone is a contribution.

The Verdict

Volume One does the unglamorous and necessary work: it lays the architecture before the beauty. The Gita days move at pace so the reader has the shape; the Sutra days give him the frame that holds it. Opening on atha — now — is exactly right, and the treatment of Shankara's argument against the Buddhists is the mark of a book that is representing a philosopher rather than assembling a mood.

Its limit is that fifteen days cannot carry eight hundred pages of disputation, and the reader gets conclusions where the original gives arguments. Its unfinished business is the Sanskrit, which needs a philologist's eye before print.

Claude · Anthropic