Badarayana

Also known as Vyasa (traditional), Vedavyasa

Indian

Born c. 2nd century BCE

He gathered the teachings of the Upanishads into the threads that became Vedanta, India's most enduring philosophy.

Badarayana composed the Brahma Sutras, the terse aphorisms that systematize the Upanishads and found the school of Vedanta. The thread he draws is the relation of the self, atman, to the ultimate ground, Brahman, and whether they are one, distinct, or somehow both. The sutras are so compressed that they can barely be read without a commentary, and the great commentators who followed, arguing fiercely over what he meant, generated the central debates of later Indian philosophy. Few sentences in history have been weighed as carefully as his.

Badarayana weaves Brahma Sutras by the sacred Ganges, atman and Brahman as one thread through Upanishadic fire. — The self meets the absolute.

Places

Ideas

Being

Words

“Now, therefore, the inquiry into Brahman.”
— BadarayanaShare

Works

The Brahma Sutras

attributed

c. 100 BCE·Sanskrit

The terse aphorisms that systematize the Upanishads and found the school of Vedanta. So compressed they can scarcely be read without a commentary, they set the central question of later Indian thought: the relation of the self to the ultimate ground, Brahman.

Life & Moments

c. 2nd century BCE

Born by the Ganges

Tradition names him Vyasa, compiler of wisdom. He gathered the Upanishads into a single thread of questions about the self and the absolute.

c. 2nd century BCE

The Brahma Sutras

Wove the teachings of the Upanishads into the terse aphorisms that founded the school of Vedanta.

c. 195 BCE

Self and Absolute

Asked whether atman and Brahman are one, distinct, or somehow both. The sutras are so compressed that every later school fought over their meaning.

c. 190 BCE

The Vedanta Debates

Shankara, Ramanuja, and Madhva would build empires of commentary on his few lines. No sentences in India were weighed more carefully.

Influence

Influenced by

Jaiminithe two halves of Mimamsa
Jaimini's inquiry into ritual duty and Badarayana's inquiry into Brahman were treated as the earlier and later halves of one investigation, each citing the other, though they pull in different directions.

Influenced

Adi Shankaracommentary on the Brahma Sutras
Shankara's most influential work is a direct commentary on Badarayana's Brahma Sutras, systematizing and extending Badarayana's compressed aphorisms into the full architecture of Advaita Vedanta.
Ramanujaa rival commentary on the Brahma Sutras
Like Shankara before him, Ramanuja built his entire system as a commentary on Badarayana's Brahma Sutras, arguing that the compressed aphorisms actually support qualified non-dualism rather than Shankara's stricter reading.