Metaphysics

Ātma Bodha

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Adi Shankara

800

The Ātma Bodha — Self-Knowledge — is one of Shankara's most accessible and beloved works: a short poem of sixty-eight verses that distils the whole of Advaita Vedanta into the directest possible form. Composed for students who are already purified by spiritual practice and ready to receive the final teaching, the text proceeds with elegant economy through the key doctrines: the nature of the self as pure consciousness, the unreality of the body-mind complex, the mechanism of superimposition by which the self is mistakenly identified with what it is not, and the liberating recognition that dissolves this mistake. Each verse is a philosophical proposition and a meditative directive simultaneously. The Ātma Bodha does not argue for non-dualism so much as point directly at the self that is always already present — the witness-consciousness behind all experience that neither rises nor sets, neither changes nor ceases.