Atma Anatma Viveka Of Shankara: The Essential Advaita Vedanta

Shankara wrote many basic and introductory texts on Advaita Vedanta to help the seekers. This book is one of them. He defines various terms of his philosophy from scratch. At the same time, he outlines a systematic framework of reasoning to analyze our spiritual journey.



Shankara starts the discussion with the root cause analysis of the problems of an embodied soul. He shows why our temporary methods are not working in the case of self-knowledge. Afterward, he suggests a permanent solution to end our miseries. He describes two equivalent ways to show the bondage of a soul. One can conceptualize the layers over the soul as three bodies, viz. physical, subtle, and causal. Alternatively, he can think of five layers of wrappers over the soul based on their different functions. He also outlines the intrinsic characteristics of a soul and how it appears to be bound.