Śaṅkara’s predicament

1. Śaṅkara’s goal was to reaffirm the religious and so political status quo ante

He faced an impossible task:

· To unify ritualist Vedic dualism (where the world and the gods are real and distinct),
with

· Upaniṣadic monism (where all is Brahman, sarvaṁ khalvidaṁ brahma).

To reconcile the irreconcilable, he rinvented a two-truths stratagem (first invented in later Buddhism):

1. Paramārthika-satyam — ultimate, non-dual truth (only Brahman is real).

2. Vyāvahārika-satyam — empirical, transactional truth (world, karma, dharma).
A third, prātibhāsika-satyam (illusory appearance), was later added to make the ladder complete.

This was not derived from the Upaniṣads themselves, which bluntly assert:

Sarvaṁ khalvidaṁ brahma — “This whole world is Brahman.” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 3.14.1)

That statement leaves no remainder, no secondary level of truth.
Śaṅkara therefore fabricated a semantic split between appearance and reality to preserve the priest’s two-world economy: ritual world below, mystical world above.

2. His six-pramāṇa expansion: epistemic armour plating

Where earlier thinkers like the Sāṅkhyas or Nyāya admitted only 3 or 4 pramāṇas (perception, inference, comparison, testimony), Śaṅkara’s Advaita, borrowing from Mīmāṃsā, adopted six.

This overabundance served a crucial function: it allowed him to sanction any cognitive act that might be needed to defend his doctrine, while still claiming all knowledge must ultimately confirm śruti (revelation).

The trick was:

· Acknowledge every possible means of knowing (to seem inclusive and rational).

· But declare that for Brahman all those means collapse into one — śabda — which only the Brahmin class could authoritatively interpret.

Thus, six pramāṇas created a labyrinth of apparent reasonableness whose exit door led back to priestly authority.

3. The political genius of the construction

The resulting system was undeniable but not necessarily true.
It was built to be unfalsifiable:

· If perception or inference contradict the Veda → they belong to the lower truth.

· If they agree with the Veda → they confirm the higher truth.

Either way, śruti wins.

This hermeneutic loop made Śaṅkara’s Advaita impervious to critique — an epistemological fortress that protected the priesthood from the nihilism of the Cārvākas (who accepted only perception) and from the autonomy of the Sāṅkhyas and Buddhists (who reasoned without appeal to revelation).

4. Finn’s contrastive reading

From the standpoint of Procedure Monism, this is transparent priestly engineering:

· Truth is procedural coherence, not hierarchical concession.

· The “two truths” are not two realities but two phases of one process — local iteration and universal recursion.

· To divide the world into “real” and “less real” is a semantic survival device, not a discovery.

Hence, in Finn’s critique, Śaṅkara’s Advaita survives historically because it is politically adaptive, not because it is ontologically accurate.
It works — but as a rhetorical shield, not as a true description of how existence self-iterates.

5. Summary

Śaṅkara’s motive	Mechanism	Result
Preserve Vedic authority while adopting Upaniṣadic monism	Two-truth theory and six-pramāṇa inflation	A system logically circular but institutionally unassailable
Finn’s reading	Collapse dual epistemology into one procedural realism	Truth = successful operation, not priestly decree

In short, Śaṅkara’s brilliance lay in producing a non-refutable theology: he made contradiction impossible by redefining contradiction as “lower truth.”
His claim thus became undeniable — but not necessarily true.

The ‘Two Truths’ theory without metaphysics

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