ABSTRACT
Among the most highly revered of the sages of India, Sankara ranks second only to Gautama Buddha. 1 He represents the flowering of the Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, the last of the six schools which developed from extremely ancient foundations. 2 Sankara's system of thought is known as Advaita, a term that classifies it as nondualistic. Its central theme is an examination of the relation between Brahman, the divine power of the cosmos, and atman, the individual human121self. Sankara held that reality is ultimately one and that the apparent plurality of the individual selves and entities of empirical existence is illusory: what seems to be an individual self, or atman, is in fact not essentially different from the one Self (Atman), just as the space contained in an individual jug or pitcher is not different from space as a whole. The one Self, he maintains, is identical with Brahman and the aim of the individual human being must be to obtain release from the illusory conceptions of the differentiated self by achieving a full realization of the identity of Self with Brahman. The western understanding of Hinduism is largely derived from Sankara's Vedantic thought.
