One of the most disorienting experiences for a close reader of Śaṅkara is not the doctrine of non-duality itself, but the way it is taught. A passage insists that the individual self is a real agent and enjoyer; a few pages later, agency and individuality are denied as projections on pure consciousness. Elsewhere, God is described as the creator and lord of the universe; in another place, creation is likened to a dream and the creator to a snake projected on a rope. The tension is not accidental. It is a deliberate teaching strategy with its own name: adhyāropa–apavāda, “superimposition and (subsequent) negation.”

This phrase, made explicit in post-Śaṅkara manuals but operative throughout his commentaries, names a discipline of carefully constructed not-knowing. Provisional explanations are introduced, argued for, and inhabited; then, at the right moment, they are dismantled. The goal is not to leave the student with a more polished conceptual system, but to refine the intellect into something like a self-cancelling instrument, capable of recognizing its own limits without collapsing into laziness or vagueness.

Superimposition: Building with Intent to Demolish

In later Advaita treatises such as Vedānta Sāra and Pañcadaśī, adhyāropa–apavāda is openly described as a method: one first “superimposes” features on Brahman to make it a workable object of thought, and then one “withdraws” those features to reveal what was never an object at all. Śaṅkara himself rarely uses the compound, but the movement is traceable in his commentaries.

Consider his opening to the Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya. The very first sūtra, “athāto brahmajijñāsā” (“Then therefore, inquiry into Brahman”), seems to invite metaphysical speculation about an ultimate principle. Śaṅkara does not immediately say, “There is only non-dual consciousness.” Instead, he spends considerable time defending the need for a special source of knowledge (śruti) to know Brahman, distinguishing it from objects of perception and inference, and entertaining an opponent who identifies Brahman with the world’s material cause in a straightforward way.

In this early phase, Brahman is elaborated as the efficient and material cause of the universe, all-knowing, all-powerful, dispenser of results, and so on. The student is granted, almost encouraged, a robust theistic and causal picture. This is classical adhyāropa: an attribution of properties to Brahman that are not, for Śaṅkara, ultimately compatible with its being non-dual consciousness, free of all relational predicates. Yet the teacher does not rush to negate. He allows the student’s inherited intuitions—about personal agency, cosmic order, and divine authorship—to find a refined, scripturally grounded place.

Only later, when commenting on upaniṣadic passages such as “not this, not this” (neti neti, Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.3.6) and the identity statements like “That thou art” (tat tvam asi, Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.8.7), does Śaṅkara explicitly loosen and finally withdraw many of the earlier, more concrete depictions. The same Brahman that was described as the omniscient creator is now presented as untouched by any action, relation, or change. The creator-God is revealed as a didactic concession—a provisional mask worn for the sake of the student’s entry into inquiry.

The pattern is similar with the individual self (jīva). In his Bhagavad Gītā Bhāṣya, Śaṅkara often addresses Arjuna as a responsible moral agent who must choose right action and fight unrighteousness. The Gītā is replete with injunctions and prohibitions presupposing a doer who can comply or fail. Śaṅkara does not erase this picture at the outset. He comments extensively on duty, sin, merit, and the psychology of attachment. Yet the same commentary, when explicating verses like “the Self neither kills nor is killed” (2.19), insists that in truth the Self is actionless consciousness, while all doing belongs to the body-mind complex under the sway of prakṛti.

The result is not a simple contradiction, but a conscious two-step. First, superimpose the ordinary sense of “I am the doer”; purify and elevate it through devotion, discipline, and the study of scripture. Second, once the mind is subtle and steady enough, withdraw the notion of the doer from the Self and relocate it in the complex of body, senses, and intellect operating under causal laws. What remains is not a nihilistic void, but a self-evident witnessing consciousness that was never an agent in the first place.

Two Levels of Truth as a Teaching Scaffold

The vocabulary that stabilizes this strategy is the distinction between different orders of reality: vyavahārika (transactional or empirical), pāramārthika (ultimate), and, in some texts, prātibhāsika (merely illusory, like a mirage). Post-Śaṅkara Advaitins lean on this triad to explain why a teacher might insist on propositions that are later undercut.

Pañcadaśī, attributed to Vidyāraṇya, offers a classic sequence when discussing causality. At the empirical level, the world is said to be an effect of Brahman, just as cloth is the effect of threads. This “world as effect” model supports ritual, ethics, and devotion; it makes sense of karma and divine justice. The text deliberately affirms it as functional truth. Yet when the question is pressed—“What change can occur in non-dual consciousness for it to become a world?”—the very same treatise shifts register. It introduces analogies: the snake seen in a rope, the silver seen in nacre. Here the world’s dependence on Brahman is no longer causal in the usual sense; it is dependence as appearance on its ground. From the ultimate standpoint, the causal story is surrendered. Brahman cannot “become” what it never was not.

Vedānta Sāra by Sadānanda makes the method almost schematic. It states that Brahman is first described as qualified (saviśeṣa)—possessing attributes of omniscience, lordship, and so on—because the mind requires such supports. Later, through negation (apavāda), these attributes are rescinded to reveal nirviśeṣa brahman, Brahman without attributes. The teacher is doing something structurally similar to a mathematician introducing a simplifying assumption in a proof and then lifting it once its purpose is served, except that here the assumption is not just simplified but recognized as belonging to a different level of discourse altogether.

The discipline for the student is to learn to inhabit both levels without confusion: to live within the empirical world of duties, relationships, and practices, while simultaneously not absolutizing that plane; and to contemplate the ultimate non-dual reality without prematurely denying the empirical order in which body and mind still operate.

Classroom Sequences: How Concepts Are Built and Dismantled

The commentarial tradition often reads like a classroom unfolding in slow motion. A typical sequence around the key concept of īśvara (Lord) might run as follows.

A student arrives with a belief in a powerful deity separate from the world. The teacher, following scripture, refines this into the notion of Brahman as the inner ruler (antaryāmin) and the material and efficient cause of the universe. Śaṅkara, for instance, in his Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad Bhāṣya on the antaryāmin section (3.7), allows a richly theistic language to stand. At this stage, the student’s devotion is anchored: “I live in a universe pervaded and governed by a conscious Lord; my ethical and ritual life have ultimate bearing.”

Only later, in commenting on identity statements, the teacher underscores that the same consciousness that is the inner ruler of all beings is also the innermost Self (ātman) of the inquirer. The dualistic posture of “I here, God there” is gently eroded. When the student is ready, the teacher can say—and Śaṅkara does say in several places—that the distinction between īśvara and jīva is itself a product of ignorance (avidyā-kalpita), meaningful only so long as ignorance persists. The personal God is not mocked or discarded; the role of that concept is acknowledged and then allowed to subside.

Causality undergoes a similar didactic destiny. In the early portions of study, precise causal accounts of bondage are given: past actions (karma) lead to subtle impressions (saṃskāra), which manifest as desires, which drive action, which generate further karma. The loop is carefully analyzed, sometimes in almost psychological detail. For a student still identified with being a doer, this explanation is both true and necessary; it supports the discipline of restraint and the cultivation of virtues.

Yet as inquiry into the Self deepens, the question turns: who, exactly, is bound by karma? Śaṅkara’s repeated answer is that the Self, as pure consciousness, is never bound; bondage belongs to the misidentified body-mind complex, which is itself an object in consciousness. At the ultimate level, the very story of bondage and liberation is described as beginningless but not ultimately real, like a dream that appears from sleep and subsides back into it without ever affecting the sleeper. The earlier causal narrative is not exposed as a lie, but re-located as a teaching operating at the empirical level—a ladder whose use is precisely to be outgrown.

Epistemic Stakes: Reasoning That Self-Erases

It is tempting to file all this under “paradoxical spirituality” and stop there. But the method has sharp epistemological edges. Śaṅkara is not dismissive of reasoning; he deploys the full apparatus of pūrvapakṣa (objection) and siddhānta (established conclusion), precise definitions, and careful refutation. What distinguishes adhyāropa–apavāda from mere dialectical sport is that reasoning is tasked with undermining its own absolutizing impulse.

Take the analysis of the Self as the “seer of seeing” (dṛg-dṛśya viveka), a theme drawn from upaniṣadic passages and elaborated in later manuals. First, through a chain of reasoning, the student is led to see that objects are seen by the senses, the senses are illumined by the mind, the mind is observed in states of waking, dream, and deep sleep, and that there must be an unchanging witness of these changing states. The conclusion—“I am that witnessing consciousness”—is reached through inference and reflection.

But the same texts insist that this witnessing consciousness is not an object and cannot be grasped as an inferred entity alongside others. The reasoning is therefore simultaneously constructive and destructive: it builds a conceptual pathway only to show that what it points to was self-evident all along and never truly an object of thought. The intellect is used to see its own inability to capture the Self, not as a failure but as a recognition of the Self’s non-objectifiable nature.

In this way, Advaita avoids two kinds of shortcuts. One is dogmatic: clinging to any provisional teaching—whether devotional, causal, or metaphysical—as final. The other is anti-intellectual: proclaiming “nothing can be said” or “there is no person” without having undergone the rigorous work of seeing why certain statements must finally cancel each other. The discipline of not-knowing here is earned, not assumed.

Ethical Questions: Is Provisional ‘Untruth’ Justified?

The method raises an obvious ethical concern. If a teacher deliberately teaches something that will later be negated, is this not a form of deception? Traditional Advaita does not ignore the worry; it addresses it by sharpening distinctions about truth, intention, and context.

First, the doctrine of two levels of reality is not merely an excuse; it is a way of saying that what is negated later was never untrue within its own frame. To teach a child that the sun “rises” is not to lie, although later astronomy will correct the picture. Likewise, to say to a beginner “You are a doer responsible for your actions” is, in the empirical framework of everyday life, entirely accurate. What is withdrawn later is not the empirical truthfulness of such statements, but their claim to be ultimate.

Second, the tradition repeatedly ties the right use of adhyāropa–apavāda to the character and responsibility of the teacher. A guru, in Śaṅkara’s portrayal, is not an innovator inventing expedient fictions, but a transmitter of a received interpretive method grounded in scripture (śruti) and reason (yukti). The teacher is accountable both upward—to the textual tradition—and downward—to the student’s well-being. The possibility of abuse is recognized implicitly in the insistence that the teacher be established in the very non-duality they expound, and that they themselves have passed through the same stages of superimposition and negation.

Third, there is an internal safeguard: the method itself is self-limiting. Because it requires that every teaching be eventually examined under the lens of non-duality, no particular provisional doctrine can be maintained indefinitely as an instrument of control. A teacher who insists indefinitely on a partial truth—say, on the absolute distinctness of guru and disciple, or on a rigid conception of God—would, by that very insistence, betray the method. In principle, at least, the tradition offers students a criterion: any teaching that cannot be subjected to apavāda, eventual negation at the ultimate level, is suspect as non-Advaitic.

None of this eliminates the risk of confusion. There are genuine dangers: students abandoning ethical responsibilities too soon under the pretext that “nothing is real”; teachers claiming a license to contradict themselves without explanation; or complex two-level teachings being reduced to slogans. Classical Advaita attempts to mitigate these dangers not by diluting the method, but by insisting on gradualism: a clear sequencing of teachings, a sustained engagement with scriptural texts, and a willingness to dwell in conceptual tension rather than rush to a premature “beyond concepts.”

The Discipline of Staying With Provisionality

At its best, adhyāropa–apavāda is not an exotic device but a discipline of attention. It asks the student to see how every concept—Self, God, world, bondage—does something in the mind: it organizes, steadies, and motivates. It also asks the student to see how each concept, if absolutized, becomes an obstacle. The teacher’s responsibility is to introduce just enough structure for the next step, and then to help the student relinquish that structure without falling back into confusion.

Advaita’s insistence on two levels of reality and on the self-erasing use of reasoning is a way to honor both the dignity and the limitation of thought. Non-duality is not offered as one more doctrine to be held against others, but as what remains when even the most refined doctrines have done their work and been set aside. The skill lies in not setting them aside too early—or too late.

For a contemporary reader, the challenge is to resist two temptations: to flatten the method into a single, blunt assertion that “only Brahman is real,” and to romanticize conceptual unknowing without submitting to the trained, text-guided movement of superimposition and negation. Between those extremes lies a patient discipline: to let oneself be taught, stage by stage, into seeing why the intellect must eventually bow out, even as it is honored as an indispensable partner up to that very threshold.

What stage of your own thinking about self, world, or divinity might still be serving a necessary purpose—and how would you know when it is time for that concept to be gently negated?