Common features

Despite their differences, all schools of Vedanta share some common features:


  • Brahman exists as the unchanging material cause and instrumental cause of the world.
  • The Upanishads are a reliable source of knowledge (Sruti Śabda in Pramana); Vedanta is the pursuit of knowledge into the Brahman and the Ātman.
  • Belief in rebirth and the desirability of release from the cycle of rebirths, (mokşa).
  • The self (Ātman / Jivātman) is the agent of its own acts (karma) and the recipient of the consequences of these actions.
  • Rejection of Buddhism and Jainism.
  • Metaphysics

Vedanta philosophies discuss three fundamental metaphysical categories and the relations between the three.

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that explores the fundamental questions, including the nature of concepts like being, existence, and reality. It has two branches – cosmology and ontology. Traditional metaphysics seeks to answer, in a "suitably abstract and fully general manner", the questions:

  1. What is there?
  2. And what is it like?


  • Brahman or Ishvara: the ultimate reality
  • Ātman or Jivātman: the individual soul, self
  • Prakriti/Jagat: the empirical world, ever–changing physical universe, body and matter


Brahman / Ishvara - Conceptions of the Supreme Reality

  • Shankara, in formulating Advaita, talks of two conceptions of Brahman: the higher Brahman as undifferentiated Being, and a lower Brahman endowed with qualities as the creator of the universe.

Parā or Higher Brahman: the undifferentiated, absolute, infinite, transcendental, supra-relational Brahman beyond all thought and speech is defined as parā Brahman, nirviśeṣa Brahman or nirguṇa Brahman and is the Absolute of metaphysics.

Aparā or Lower Brahman: the Brahman with qualities defined as aparā Brahman or saguṇa Brahman. The saguṇa Brahman is endowed with attributes and represents the personal God of religion.

  • Ramanuja, in formulating Vishishtadvaita Vedanta, rejects nirguṇa—that the undifferentiated Absolute is inconceivable—and adopts a theistic interpretation of the Upanishads, accepts Brahman as Ishvara, the personal God who is the seat of all auspicious attributes, as the One reality. The God of Vishishtadvaita is accessible to the devotee, yet remains the Absolute, with differentiated attributes.
  • Madhva, in expounding Dvaita philosophy, maintains that Vishnu is the supreme God, thus identifying the Brahman, or absolute reality, of the Upanishads with a personal god, as Ramanuja had done before him.
  • Nimbarka, in his dvaitadvata philosophy, accepted the Brahman both as nirguṇa and as saguṇa. Vallabha, in his shuddhadvaita philosophy, not only accepts the triple ontological essence of the Brahman, but also His manifestation as personal God (Ishvara), as matter and as individual souls.