Philosophy & Practice
The Upaniṣads, the Gītā, commentaries, and treatises on philosophy, yoga and tantra.
The UpaniṣadsAitareya, Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Chāndogya…
- AitareyaA short Upaniṣad — the ancient Vedic teachings on the Self — in three chapters: the Self alone was, and sent forth the worlds; how it entered the person by the crown of the head; and the close, "Brahman is consciousness."Ṛgveda
- BṛhadāraṇyakaThe longest of the Upaniṣads, in six chapters: from the horse of sacrifice to Yājñavalkya's debates at Janaka's court and his parting words to his wife Maitreyī — the Self is dearer than all, and cannot be known as an object.Śukla Yajurveda
- ChāndogyaEight chapters of teaching by song and story: Satyakāma taught by a bull and a bird, Sanatkumāra teaching Nārada, and Uddālaka telling his son Śvetaketu "you are That" through salt in water and a seed.Sāmaveda
- ĪśaEighteen verses beginning "all this is clothed in the Lord": a short Upaniṣad on renouncing and enjoying, on action and knowledge, and on the one Self that moves and does not move, is far and near, within all and outside all.Śukla Yajurveda
- KaṭhaThe boy Naciketas, given away to Death by his angry father, waits three nights at Death's door, and as his third boon asks what remains when a person dies. Yama's answer is the whole Upaniṣad: the Self, the chariot, the two paths.Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda
All 13 textsThe first 5 only
- KauṣītakiFour chapters of an Upaniṣad from the Ṛgveda: the path the dead travel, breath as Brahman, Indra teaching Pratardana "know me alone", and King Ajātaśatru teaching a proud brahmin where the sleeper goes.Ṛgveda
- KenaAn Upaniṣad that opens by asking "by whom?" — who sends the mind out, who moves the breath — and answers that Brahman is what the eye cannot see but by which the eye sees, told through the gods learning from Umā whose power won their war.Sāmaveda
- MaitrīKing Bṛhadratha has given his kingdom to his son and gone to the forest; he asks the sage Śākāyanya how to escape the round of birth. The answer is the teaching of Maitri on the Self, the breath, and Oṃ.Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda
- MāṇḍūkyaThe shortest Upaniṣad: twelve verses on Oṃ and the four states of the Self — waking, dream, deep sleep, and the fourth beyond them — with each sound of Oṃ matched to a state.Atharvaveda
- MuṇḍakaŚaunaka asks the sage Aṅgiras: what, once known, makes everything known? The answer is the two knowledges, lower and higher — rites and scriptures on one side, on the other the imperishable, to be hit like a target with the mind as arrow.Atharvaveda
- PraśnaSix seekers put six questions to the sage Pippalāda after a year of discipline: where beings come from, which powers hold the body, what sleeps and what dreams, what Oṃ leads to, and the Person of sixteen parts.Atharvaveda
- ŚvetāśvataraSix chapters asking what the cause of the world is — time, nature, chance, the Self? — and answering with the one Lord, Rudra, known through meditation and devotion. An Upaniṣad that speaks of a personal God and of grace.Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda
- TaittirīyaThree lessons: on right conduct and study, with the teacher's parting words to his students; on the five layers that cover the Self, from food to bliss; and Bhṛgu pressing his father Varuṇa to teach him Brahman.Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda
The Brahma SūtrasŚārīrakamīmāṃsāsūtrabhāṣyam, Sūtra Vāhini
- ŚārīrakamīmāṃsāsūtrabhāṣyamHis commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, the aphorisms that gather the Upaniṣads into one teaching. Four books, sūtra by sūtra: Brahman as the cause of the world, the answers to rival schools, the means, and the fruit.
- Sūtra VāhiniHis Telugu commentary on thirteen selected Brahma Sūtras: from the inquiry into Brahman itself, through the sūtras on scripture, the Self and Prāṇa, to the teaching found everywhere.
Ādi Śaṅkarācārya: treatises and Vedānta hymnsAdvaitānubhūtiḥ, Advaitapañcaratnam, Anātmaśrīvigarhaṇam…
- AdvaitānubhūtiḥEighty-four verses "from the experience of not-two": a flaw in the eye shows one moon as two, and māyā shows the one Self as many. Space in a pot is no smaller than space in the sky; the Self is one whatever seems to hold it.
- AdvaitapañcaratnamFive verses in the first person: I am not the body, senses, mind or breath; wife, children and money do not reach me; I am the unchanging witness — "I am Śiva." Also called the Five Verses on the Self.
- AnātmaśrīvigarhaṇamEighteen verses that "tear down the glory of what you are not": learning that kings honour — and then what? Wealth, beauty, silk, a magnificent meal — and then what? None of it brought anyone face to face with the Self.
- AparokṣānubhūtiḥOn direct realisation — knowing the Self not from books but as immediately as one knows oneself. Its 144 verses set out fifteen steps of inquiry, from stilling the senses to steady abiding, as a practice rather than a doctrine.
- Ātmabodhaḥ"Self-knowledge" in sixty-eight verses, written for those already calm and detached: knowledge alone frees, as only fire cooks. Taught through a chain of plain images — the rope and the snake, the pot and the space inside it.
All 45 textsThe first 5 only
- BrahmajñānāvalīmālāTwenty-one verses that state the knowledge of Brahman, the one reality, as plainly as it can be put: "Brahman is real, the world an appearance, the self is Brahman itself." Meant to be heard once and remembered.
- BrahmānucintanaṃTwenty-nine verses of sustained contemplation on "I am the supreme Brahman": be certain of it and you are free; otherwise you stay bound. What follows for the one who holds that thought and does not let go.
- DakṣiṇāmūrtistotramNineteen verses to Dakṣiṇāmūrti, Śiva as the young guru seated under a banyan tree, teaching aged sages by silence alone. One gesture of his hand scatters their darkness: you are That.
- DakṣiṇāmūrtivarṇamālāstotramTwenty-five verses to Dakṣiṇāmūrti, Śiva as the silent guru, whose opening syllables spell out his mantra letter by letter from "oṃ" to "svāhā", so that to recite the hymn is to recite the mantra.
- DaśaślokīTen verses of negation — not earth, water, fire, air or space; not caste, creed or stage of life; not teacher or taught — each ending "I am Śiva alone", the one that remains when everything is denied.
- DhanyāṣṭakamEight verses on who is truly blessed: not the rich or the honoured but those who have mastered the senses, let go the fondness for home, and inquire into the Self day and night in forest clearings with quiet companions.
- EkaślokīA single verse, a dialogue on what one sees by: the sun, or a lamp — then the eye that sees them — then the mind that knows the eye — then the "I" that knows the mind. "Then you are the light itself." "That I am, my Lord."
- GadyabandhaḥThe prose half of the Upadeśasāhasrī, "a thousand teachings": a teacher takes a pupil through his doubts step by step — the body, action, who is really the knower — until he can say "I am Brahman" and mean it.
- Śrī gurvaṣṭakam (guru aṣṭakam)Eight verses on the guru: a beautiful body, a gracious wife, fame, wealth as vast as Meru, learning, virtue — if the mind does not rest at the guru's feet, then what? Then what? Then what? Then what?
- HastāmalakīyabhāṣyamHis commentary on twelve verses by Hastāmalaka, his own disciple, a boy thought mute until asked who he was and answering in verse: I am the unchanging awareness behind body and mind, as the sun is behind all seeing.
- JīvanmuktānandalaharīSeventeen verses on one who is free while still alive: he walks through cities, markets and forests, sees men and women shining in their finery as figures in a painting, and knows himself only as the witness of it all.
- KāśīpañcakamFive verses that turn the holy city inward: the body is Kāśī, flowing knowledge its Gaṅgā, the still mind its holiest ghat, and the witness within is Viśveśvara, its Lord. Then what pilgrimage is left to make?
- LaghuvākyavṛttiḥA short explanation of the sentence "I am Brahman" in eighteen verses: what the gross and the subtle bodies are, why neither is you, and how the awareness that lights them is the whole of what is.
- ManīṣāpañcakamFive verses, each ending "this is my firm conviction": the one awareness shining through waking, dream and sleep runs through every body from Brahmā to the ant. Whoever knows it, outcaste or brahmin, is the guru.
- MāyāpañcakamFive verses on Māyā, the power of appearance, "astonishingly skilled at making what never happened happen": in the one undivided Self it sets God, world and soul apart and makes the impossible look ordinary.
- Mohamudgaraḥ"Worship Govinda, you fool — your grammar will not save you when the hour comes." Thirty-one verses on the passing of youth, wealth and kin, a hammer against delusion, best known as Bhaja Govindam.
- NirguṇamānasapūjāA disciple asks how what has no attributes can be worshipped — invite the all-pervading to come where? seat the support of everything on what? In thirty-three verses the guru answers rite by rite, in the language of non-duality.
- NirvāṇamañjarīTwelve verses in which the Self says what it is not — not god or mortal, demon or spirit, not male or female, not any stage of life — and what it is: the supreme light of awareness. "I am Śiva."
- NirvāṇaṣaṭkamSix verses denying everything one could take oneself for — mind, senses, elements, breath, birth, caste, teacher, even freedom — each ending "I am awareness and bliss; I am Śiva, I am Śiva."
- PañcīkaraṇamA short prose account of how the five elements combine to make the world and the body, and of the syllable Oṃ as a map of the Self's states, ending in how a renunciant rests in samādhi.
- Prabodhasudhākaraḥ"The moon of awakening", 257 verses in nineteen chapters: the body, the senses and the mind censured, then dispassion, the Self, Māyā and awakening, closing in devotion to Kṛṣṇa so that knowledge and love arrive together.
- PrapañcasāraḥA manual of mantra and ritual in thirty-three chapters: the letters of the alphabet as the body of the Goddess, the seed-syllables, initiation, and the worship of the deities each mantra invokes.
- PraśnottararatnamālikāA garland of questions and one-line answers in sixty-seven verses: who is a guru? what must be done at once? what is the seed of freedom? what is poison? A whole teaching in the form of riddles and replies.
- Prātaḥsmaraṇa stotraṃThree verses to be said at dawn, remembering not a god but the Self: the awareness that lights waking, dream and sleep and is never absent — "that is what I am, not this heap of elements." With a verse on their fruit.
- PrauḍhānubhūtiḥSeventeen verses of "mature realisation": all that has appeared in me is a mirage on desert sand; I am not the body, breath or mind; I am the one awareness by which all this is lit — no one doubts the sun who sees by its light.
- SadācārānusandhānamFifty-five verses that read a brahmin's day — the dawn prayer, the bath, the rubbing away of sin — as inner acts of one who knows the Self: the bath is knowledge, and purity is knowing "I am unattached."
- Sādhana pañcakaṃFive verses holding forty instructions, a whole path on one page: study the Veda daily, give up action done for reward, keep the company of the good, serve one who knows, hear the great sayings, and rest in Brahman.
- SanatsujātīyamHis commentary on the Sanatsujātīya from the Mahābhārata: the blind king Dhṛtarāṣṭra, sleepless before the war, asks whether there is death, and the sage Sanatsujāta answers through the night that for the knower of Brahman there is none.
- SarvavedāntasiddhāntasārasaṅgrahaḥA summary of the whole settled teaching of Vedānta in a thousand and six verses, in order: who is fit to seek, the fourfold discipline, the sheaths and the states, the great sayings, and liberation.
- ŚataślokīA hundred verses in the long sragdharā metre on the whole of Vedānta: opening with the guru, who outdoes the touchstone that turns iron to gold by making his disciple his equal, and closing by felling the tree of worldly life.
- ŚrīdakṣiṇāmūrtyaṣṭakamEight verses to Dakṣiṇāmūrti, Śiva as the silent teacher: the world is a city seen in a mirror, within you and seeming outside, as a dream seems real until waking. Two further verses on practising this and its fruit.
- SvarūpānusandhānāṣṭakamEight verses of inquiry into one's own nature, also called "the boat of knowledge": wait on a settled teacher, discriminate, dwell on what the knower reaches — each closing "that supreme, eternal Brahman I am."
- SvātmanirūpaṇamA hundred and fifty-five verses in which a guru sets out the disciple's own Self, starting from the one thing nobody can doubt — "I exist" — and showing that this existence is Brahman.
- SvātmaprakāśikāSixty-eight verses on the Self's own light. A disciple confesses that the world looks real to him every hour though he knows it is not; the teacher answers plainly: there is no ignorance, no world, no separate witness.
- TattvopadeśaḥEighty-seven verses in which a teacher takes the great sentence "you are That" apart word by word for a student, beginning with what "you" can possibly mean once body, senses and mind are ruled out.
- UpadeśasāhasrīThe verse half of the Upadeśasāhasrī, "a thousand teachings": nineteen chapters on the Self as the one consciousness in every heart, why it is never the doer, and how the sentence "I am Brahman" is to be understood.
- VākyavṛttiḥFifty-three verses: a disciple asks the way across the sea of birth, and the teacher explains the sentence "you are That" — what "you" means, what "That" means, and how the two are one.
- Vivekacūḍāmaṇiḥ"The crest-jewel of discrimination": 581 verses cast as a teacher answering a student who asks how to be free. The rarity of a human birth, the sheaths that hide the Self, the rope taken for a snake, and the knower's freedom.
- YatipañcakamFive verses on the wandering renunciant who owns a loincloth and nothing else: a tree-root for shelter, cupped hands for a bowl, the words of Vedānta for company. Each ends "the loincloth-wearer is the fortunate one indeed."
- Yogatārāvalī"A string of stars on yoga", twenty-nine verses: listening to the inner sound, the three locks that hold the breath, the breath that stops of itself, and the samādhi beyond even these, in which the mind is no more.
Treatises of VedāntaDṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka, Jīvanmuktiviveka, Pañcadaśī…
- Dṛg-Dṛśya-VivekaForty-six verses that separate the seer from the seen: form is seen by the eye, the eye by the mind, the mind by a witness that is never seen. The seer is followed inward to that witness, and the verses end in samādhi.
- JīvanmuktivivekaFive chapters on liberation while still alive: that it is possible, how latent tendencies are worn out, how the mind is dissolved, what such freedom is for, and the renunciation of the one who knows.
- PañcadaśīFifteen chapters in three sets of five: discriminating the real from the passing, consciousness as the light in which everything is seen, and the bliss that is the Self's own nature. A full course in Vedānta.
- Tattva BodhaA primer in questions and answers: who is fit to inquire, what the Self is, the three bodies and five sheaths, what the world is made of, and what freedom is. The vocabulary of Vedānta, defined one term at a time.
- VedāntasāraA prose manual of Vedānta in 227 passages: who may study, the sheaths, how the Self is mistaken for what it is not and how the mistake is undone, the great sayings, and the state of one liberated while alive.
Sri Sathya Sai Baba: the VāhinīsDharma Vāhini, Dhyāna Vāhini, Gītā Vāhini…
- Dharma VāhiniHis Telugu discourse on dharma in thirteen chapters: its ground in the Self, the excellence of women's dharmas, temples and Gāyatrī-mantra japa as its supports, explained for the householder's own life.
- Dhyāna VāhiniHis Telugu text on dhyāna in fourteen chapters: the kinds of sādhana, the steadying of the mind, the Name and meditation as the means that loosen every bond, and the purity and humility that meditation asks for.
- Gītā VāhiniHis Telugu exposition of the Bhagavad Gītā in twenty-seven chapters: beginning from Arjuna's grief on the battlefield, then the paths of selfless action, devotion and knowledge, explained for everyday practice.
- Līlā Kaivalya VāhiniHis Telugu Q&A on the Veda in eight chapters: mental peace as the ideal life, the Veda's own names and its division into Saṃhitās, the Ṛṣis and Svādhyāya, and the forms of Parameśvara and Prakṛti.
- Sathya Sāī VāhiniHis Telugu discourse on the nature of God and the Self in twenty-five chapters: from the highest truth, through bondage and the four paths of yoga, to the Avatar as guru, self-enquiry and the divine form.
All 8 textsThe first 5 only
- Sūtra VāhiniHis Telugu commentary on thirteen selected Brahma Sūtras: from the inquiry into Brahman itself, through the sūtras on scripture, the Self and Prāṇa, to the teaching found everywhere.
- Upaniṣad VāhiniHis Telugu exposition of the Upaniṣads in twelve chapters: Kaivalya through Jñāna alone, then the Īśāvāsya, Kaṭha, Muṇḍaka, Māṇḍūkya, Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Praśna, Kena, Chāndogya, Aitareya and Taittirīya in turn, closing on their essence.
- Vidyā VāhiniHis Telugu discourse on Vidyā in nineteen chapters: learning as purity of citta and mastery of the senses, Ātmavidyā as the highest learning, and the character and marks of the ideal student.