ABSTRACT
The Upanisads are written in the language of the seer or visionary: inspired, poetic, symbolic and of inexhaustible resonance. To this day, their words leap from the page, informed and shaped by the pressure of intense spiritual experience. What these profound texts are not is orderly or systematic, and over time the need was felt to draw together their insights into a philosophical system. The goal of Badarayana in composing the masterpiece for which he is remembered, the Brahma Sutra,1 was to construct precisely such a system. Together with the Vedas and the Upanisads this work forms the basis of the Indian orthodox philosophical tradition, and sets out to be a coherent statement of the philosophy implicit in the second of these works. The Brahma Sutra in turn has been commented on by almost every major figure in the Indian tradition and many of lesser importance also: it would be possible to trace much of the history of Indian philosophy by examining the commentaries on this work alone. Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva, for example, all commented at length on it, finding in it confirmation of their own philosophical beliefs. The extensiveness of the body of subsequent commentary on this work is not grounded solely in its authority, however, but is also partially a
result of its style. Each of the 552 propositions (each referred to as a sutra) in the work is terse and usually grammatically incomplete, generally such as to be not fully intelligible without accompanying exegesis. Since the Brahma Sutra deals with the ultimate questions of philosophy, it is not surprising that it has generated an uninterrupted stream of interpretation.
