The One and Brahman

Of all the comparisons that the study of unitive knowledge invites, few are made as often as this one. Plotinus, the founder of what modern scholars call Neoplatonism, and Śaṅkara, the most influential teacher of Advaita Vedānta, both describe a single first principle from which everything proceeds and to which the self returns. Both hold that this principle cannot be adequately described. Both teach that the self’s return to it is the purpose of philosophy. The resemblance has struck readers since the nineteenth century, and it has been studied closely since.

The purpose of this study is to test that resemblance against the texts, and to ask what kind of convergence it is. Our answer, argued below, is that the two thinkers converge in method and in the shape of the spiritual life, but diverge at the point that matters most to each of them: what the ultimate is.¹1 The comparison has a scholarly literature of its own. See especially J. F. Staal, Advaita and Neoplatonism: A Critical Study in Comparative Philosophy (University of Madras, 1961), and R. Baine Harris (ed.), Neoplatonism and Indian Thought (State University of New York Press, 1982).

Two lives§

Plotinus was born in Egypt early in the third century and studied philosophy in Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas. According to his biographer and editor Porphyry, he joined the emperor Gordian III’s campaign against Persia in order to learn the philosophy practised among the Persians and the Indians; the campaign ended with the emperor’s death, and Plotinus escaped to Antioch (Plotinus 1917, Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 3). He settled in Rome, where he taught for twenty-five years, and began to write only late. Porphyry arranged his fifty-four treatises into six groups of nine, the Enneads.

Śaṅkara’s dates are uncertain; the traditional date of 788–820 CE is now often placed earlier, in the first half of the eighth century. Hagiographies written centuries after his death describe a life of extraordinary brevity and range: renunciation as a boy, study under the teacher Govinda, travels across India in debate, and the founding of monasteries. What is secure is the work. His commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, the aphorisms that systematize the teaching of the Upaniṣads, became the foundational text of Advaita (Śaṅkara 1890), and his commentaries on the principal Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad Gītā made its reading of them classical.

The two thinkers wrote in different genres. Plotinus wrote treatises that argue from first principles, often in response to questions raised in his seminars; his authorities are Plato and, less often, Aristotle. Śaṅkara wrote commentaries: his authority is revealed scripture, the Veda, and his task is to show what the Upaniṣads teach when they are read consistently. That difference of genre is itself significant. For Plotinus reason, purified, can climb to the edge of the ultimate. For Śaṅkara reason serves scripture, which alone can make known what no perception or inference reaches.

Beyond being, or being itself§

Plotinus’s first principle is the One, which he also calls the Good. Everything that exists is a unity of some kind, and so depends on unity; the source of all unity cannot itself be one thing among others. It is therefore, in a phrase Plotinus takes from Plato, “beyond being” (epekeina tēs ousias) (Plato 1871, Republic 509b). It is not a being, not even the highest being, and it does not think, since thinking requires a duality of thinker and thought. From it proceed, in order, Intellect (nous), in which being and thinking are one, and Soul, which animates the world.

The procession of Intellect from the One is not a choice or a making. Plotinus compares it to the light that radiates from the sun, or the heat from fire: the source gives without losing anything and without going out of itself (Plotinus 1917, V.1.6). What proceeds is lesser, but not other in the way one thing is other than another. The whole of reality is the One’s overflowing, and every level of it bears the trace of the source.

Śaṅkara’s Brahman, by contrast, is not beyond being. It is being itself. Commenting on the Taittirīya Upaniṣad’s definition of Brahman as satyaṃ jñānam anantam, “reality, knowledge, infinity”, Śaṅkara explains the three terms as mutually qualifying pointers rather than properties: Brahman is what is real without dependence, what is knowledge without an object, and what is limited by nothing.²2 Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.1.1. The translation of the three terms is ours. Later Advaita summarizes Brahman as saccidānanda, “being, consciousness, bliss”, a formula more common in the tradition after Śaṅkara than in his own works. Brahman is not a thinker, since there is nothing outside it to think about; but it is consciousness, the light by which anything is known.

Here the resemblance needs to be looked at carefully. Both thinkers deny that the ultimate is an object among objects. Both deny that it can be captured in a concept. But they deny these things for different reasons. Plotinus places the One above being and intellect because being and intellect are already a kind of multiplicity, a two-in-one, and the source of multiplicity must be simple. Śaṅkara denies that Brahman is an object because it is the subject, the witness that can never become what it witnesses. For Plotinus, intellect is the first thing below the One. For Śaṅkara, consciousness is what Brahman is.

The world: overflow and appearance§

The second difference follows from the first. For Plotinus the world is real, though with a diminished reality. It is the lowest stage of the One’s outflowing, beautiful because it is an image of Intellect, and imperfect because it is only an image. Matter is at the limit of the procession, almost non-being. But nothing in the Plotinian cosmos is simply illusory. The procession is real, and the return retraces a real path.

Śaṅkara begins his commentary on the Brahma Sūtras with an analysis of adhyāsa, superimposition: the error by which we take the self for the body and the mind, and the body and the mind for the self, as one takes a rope in poor light for a snake (Śaṅkara 1890, Introduction (adhyāsa)). The world of many things is real as long as one is within that error; it is the domain of perception, action and ritual, and Śaṅkara does not dismiss it. But from the standpoint of knowledge it is an appearance, neither simply real nor simply unreal, on the one reality that does not change. The snake never existed. The rope was always there.

The contrast is often put too simply, as if Plotinus affirmed the world and Śaṅkara denied it. Both regard the world as less than ultimate, and both regard it as grounded entirely in the ultimate. The difference is in the relation. For Plotinus the world is an effect: lesser, dependent, but really produced. For Śaṅkara the world is, in the last analysis, not produced at all, because nothing other than Brahman ever came into being; causality itself belongs to the standpoint of ignorance.

The way back§

On the path of return the two thinkers come closest. For both, the self must turn away from external things, purify itself of what it is not, and discover in its own depth the presence of the ultimate. Plotinus’s instruction to the soul is compressed into two words at the end of a treatise: aphele panta, “take away everything” (Plotinus 1917, V.3.17). The Upaniṣadic formula that Śaṅkara makes central to his teaching is equally austere: neti neti, “not this, not this”.³3 Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.3.6 and elsewhere. The translations of aphele panta and neti neti are ours.

Both also insist that the final knowledge is not the knowledge of an object. Plotinus says the One is known not by reasoning but by a presence higher than knowledge (Plotinus 1917, VI.9.4), and he describes the culmination of the return as a vision in which the seer no longer sees an object but has become one with what is seen. Śaṅkara says that liberation is not produced by anything, not by ritual, not by meditation, not even by knowledge considered as an act; knowledge only removes the ignorance that concealed what was always the case (Śaṅkara 1890, I.1.4). For both, the goal is not reached by going somewhere. It is found where one already is.

Yet the destination is described differently. The last sentence of the Enneads as Porphyry arranged them calls the life of the gods and of godlike human beings phygē monou pros monon, which MacKenna renders “the passing of solitary to solitary” (Plotinus 1917, VI.9.11). Even at the summit there is a movement toward, and a soul that moves. Plotinus can speak of the soul becoming one with the One, and of the distinction vanishing in the vision; he can also speak of the soul coming down again, and he never says that the soul simply was the One all along. For Śaṅkara that is exactly what must be said. There is no passing and no second solitary. The self does not become Brahman. It never was anything else.

What kind of convergence?§

It is tempting to settle the comparison with a formula: Plotinus and Śaṅkara describe the same ultimate reality in different languages. The texts do not support that formula without strain. The One is beyond being and beyond consciousness; Brahman is being and consciousness. The Plotinian world is the real overflow of a real source; the world of Advaita is, from the highest standpoint, an appearance without origin. The Plotinian soul returns to its source; the Advaitin self discovers that it never left. A reader who ignores these differences has not found what the two thinkers share. They have found a third thing, their own.

But the opposite formula is equally unsatisfying. To say that the two thinkers simply disagree would miss the depth of what they share: the conviction that the ultimate is present in the depth of the self, that it is reached by subtraction rather than addition, that it cannot be an object of thought, and that the purpose of philosophy is not information but transformation. Those are not superficial resemblances. They concern the method and the goal of the whole enterprise.

That conclusion is itself open to testing. Later issues of Metanoia will return to the question with other pairs, and with thinkers who stand between these two positions: Christian Neoplatonists for whom God is both beyond being and being itself, and schools of Vedānta that reject Śaṅkara’s reading of the Upaniṣads. The question of what is ultimately real is not settled by one comparison. It is sharpened by it.