SORTS OF RELIGION 29understand Shankara. For if appearance depends on Reality, then
appearance and Reality are such that appearance bears a genuine and non-
illusory or non-apparent relationship to Reality; both appearance and
Reality exist, and the former depends on the latter. On Shankara’s view,
Reality can bear no such relationship to anything. Further, the properties of
Reality can be more glorious than appearance’s properties only if Reality
has more glorious properties than those of appearance, and so on this view
Reality has properties. But according to Shankara, Reality is nirguna or
qualityless. So the levels of being line will not do as an exposition of
Advaita Vedanta.
There remains the levels of truth line. Some elementary points
regarding this are: (1) strictly, truth has no degrees; as a property of
propositions, which seems what is here relevant, it is either present or not;
(2) no doubt “more true” can be given some use, and if one is very careful
no doubt this will cause no confusion; then we need to ask exactly what this
sense is: compare “more perfect;” (3) if two propositions are contradictory
then one must be true and the other false.
Now on a levels of truth view, the truth about Reality is one level of
truth and the truth about appearance is another level of truth. Reality is
qualityless Brahman. Thus when Brahman is described as being,
consciousness, and bliss – sat, cit, ananda – this (if Brahman is really
qualityless) is but to deny that Brahman has the properties of being non-
existent, unconscious, and miserable. The truth about Reality, on
Shankara’s view, is that Brahman exists, and for any property, Brahman
lacks it. This is a bit sparse, but it is the truth at the level of reality. The
other level concerns appearance. There is something funny about the
phrase “the truth about appearance” when used in this context. The reason
for this is simple: strictly speaking, appearance does not exist. That is the
truth about it. Perhaps, then, appearance is simply the way Reality looks to
the unenlightened. But the unenlightened are part of appearance. Thus
they do not exist, and so cannot be appeared to. The levels of truth view is
that Reality appears to be one way and is another; there are perceptual
experiences but they are all unreliable or misleading and there are
perceivers but they are misled. But then these misleading experiences and
misled perceivers must be real. But strictly they do not exist; they are not
merely less glorious than the Real, but altogether non-existent. It is thus
not easy to see how the lower level of truth is to be conceived. On it,
appearance is as hard to make out as Reality.
Having spent some time in indicating some of the complexity involved in
interpreting Advaita Vedanta, and given some indication of the sort of features
that lead to objections by such non-Advaitic figures as Ramanuja and Madhva,
let me turn to offering a brief and fairly straightforward description of this
tradition. There is an ultimate and independent reality that is apersonal. To say