Adi Shankara Quotes on Truth
Ādi Śaṅkara (c. 788–820), the founder of the Advaita (non-dual) Vedānta school whose commentaries on the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā, and the Brahma Sūtras gave classical Indian philosophy its most systematic non-dualist exposition, defended the case that ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya) is the non-dual Brahman alone, while the apparent manifold of the empirical world possesses only the conventional reality (vyavahārika-satya) available to ordinary cognitive practice. The framework treats the manifold as the superimposition (adhyāsa) of differentiating categories upon the underlying Brahman by the operation of māyā, and liberation as the discriminative recognition (jñāna) by which the superimposition is dissolved.
Quotes
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Attributed to Adi Shankara:
“Brahman alone is real; the world is illusory; the individual self is non-different from Brahman.”
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Attributed to Adi Shankara:
“Pleasure and pain are mere ideas, transient and unreal; renounce them.”
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Attributed to Adi Shankara:
“He who sees all beings in the Self and the Self in all beings has no fear.”
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“Brahman (the existential substratum) is the only truth, the world is illusion, and there is ultimately no difference between Brahman and individual self.”
Brahma satyam jagat mithyam, jivo brahmaiva naparah -
“When the force of desire for the Truth blossoms, selfish desires wither away, just like darkness vanishes before the radiance of the light of dawn.”
P4