Vedanta (loosely translated, what the Vedas are leading up to) is the basis for Indian philosophy. Most Hindus continue to perform rites and rituals in the manner prescribed by the Vedas. They visit temples to express their devotion or to seek blessings from the Gods. Vedanta says that these are not the right way to attainment of self-realization / moksha.

I had the occasion to attend a lecture on the first five verses of the 15th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita by Smt. Jaya Row. She is an excellent speaker and explains the verses in a contemporary way using examples from the news and personal experience. The lecture, which lasted an hour, was basic. But the audience reaction led me to think that this was all entirely new to most of them. It is interesting that almost no one today bothers to understand one’s own religion.

The history of Vedantic philosophy itself is telling: it was a radical departure from the way that the Vedas were understood before. Earlier the emphasis was on the rituals and the philosophic parts were taken as dicta. Vedantic philosophy turns it on its head – emphasizing the philosophic parts and relegating rituals to a secondary role. It is also important to note that Hinduism has encouraged the development of alternate philosophies: Vedanta compared to the former ritualistic religion; the three major schools within the Vedantic tradition; and the development of Vedantic philosophy itself in answer to Buddhist philosophy.

Vedanta emphasises the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutra and the Bhagavad Gita as sources of knowledge. One powerful way of looking at Vedic Sutras is that these are the product of the super-conscious and are thus from a source greater than the composers themselves. The western world understands conscious and sub-conscious. The sub-conscious takes care of the basic functions of the body, while the conscious deals with the mind and intellect. The super-conscious is a state above the intellect and is the aim of moksha.

As someone who has studied science and engineering, I have found Advaita to have the most appeal. It agrees so well with what science has discovered over the centuries. For an Advaitist, quantum states of matter are not difficult to understand. Sankara speaks of how the observer affects the observed. The energy-matter interchangeability comes as no insurmountable proposition to someone who has studied Maya. At B-school, a classmate once asked me: if all Selves are the same as Brahman, when the first Self attains Moksha, shouldn’t all selves attain Moksha at the same time. After all, the first Self now becomes one with all other Selves. My answer was: if in a cloud of electrons and positrons, one pair meet and “realize” that they are just a manifestation of energy, it does not mean that all other pairs also annihilate. It is the working of Maya if we believe that it has to be one or the other state. Both states are real and it is the knowledge that both states are real, but are manifestations of the same that is real knowledge.