An Indian sage used dreams to argue that waking life is illusion too
A dreamer never actually travels to the places he dreams of, observed Gaudapada, and everything in the dream vanishes on waking. Push that logic further, he argued, and waking objects are no more real. His verse commentary is the oldest surviving systematic treatise on Advaita Vedanta, the philosophy Adi Shankara made famous.
Almost nothing is known of the man himself. Shankara called him the highest teacher, or the teacher's teacher, which puts him perhaps a generation or two before Shankara and so in the seventh century. Buddhist writers such as Bhavaviveka quote his verses, however, which pushes some estimates back to around 500. He must postdate the fourth century, since he responds to the Buddhist thinkers Nagarjuna and Asanga.
His text, the Mandukya Karika, explains the Mandukya Upanishad, just 12 sentences long, in 215 verses spread over four chapters. The first maps three states of the self onto waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep, then names a fourth, Turiya, which is unchanging, sorrowless and beyond duality. He links the first three to the sounds A, U and M, with the fourth transcending the whole syllable Om. The second chapter makes the dream argument: anything absent at the start and the end is absent in the middle too, so the apparent world is Maya, like a rope mistaken for a snake in the dark.
The third chapter offers an analogy that became classic. The one Self is like space, and individual souls are like the space inside jars; break the jar and its space merges with the rest, untouched throughout. He also describes a practice of non-contact in which the mind stops generating things to grasp and comes to rest as Brahman. The fourth chapter, The Peace of the Firebrand, borrows Buddhist vocabulary, though its doctrine stays Vedantic.
Not everyone believes one author wrote all four chapters; the scholar Hajime Nakamura dates them to different periods between roughly 300 and 600. Yet even rival schools prized the work. Ramanuja and Madhvacharya, leaders of the qualified and dualist traditions, treated its first chapter as revealed scripture, a higher status than Advaita scholars themselves granted it.
Source: Gaudapada
