A-U-M: Awakening to Reality

Advaita Vedanta can be a source of tremendous confusion and frustration for even the most committed student. With this book on one of the most significant and challenging of the Upanishads - the Mandukya - Dennis Waite has provided a tremendously clear, meticulous, and comprehensive resource for those of us who are dead serious about penetrating this subject.I am grateful for the care with which each topic and even each sentence is presented, always with the intention of making sure to adhere to clarity so that the reader will be protected from misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Forays into confusion can be painful and waste time, as Dennis well knows, so I am deeply grateful for this book as it really leaves us no choice but to understand what the Manduykya Upanishad is saying.

Explains in-depth understanding of a challenging Zmandukya Upanishad

To me, there is no other aspect of Advaita more important (self-knowledge and it's attainment) and worthy of discussing so thoroughly, as has Mr. Waite! Not only is this book exhaustive in its treatment of this subject, but it has also assisted with bolstering my understanding of the writings of Hindu philosophers (e.g. Sankara) and the Upanishads and as a whole! It's giving a newbie to Advantage, a great bit of help. I can now delete the hundreds of articles on my drive that I planned to read in favor of this book, because collectively they don't say much.

This is the best work on Mandukya Upanishad I've read. Mandukya is my favorite and i have three other works on it (from Swami Chinmayananda, Swami Nikhilananda, James Swartz). Elegantly written, all comprising book (there are various extras, quotes from other authors...), beautifully explained. I can read it over and over again.

Dennis Waite has done it again! His previous works on Advaita have adroitly combined scholarly precision and fidelity to the source texts of Vedanta with a clear writing style that makes these ancient teachings far more accessible to those of us with little understanding of Sanskrit. Now, in his latest work, Mr. Waite has “drilled down,” as it were, from a broad discussion of Advaita to a specific examination of one of the most important texts of the tradition. The result is a book of great value to any serious student of Vedanta, and also to anyone interested in philosophy generally.A-U-M, Awakening to Reality, is a study of the famous Mandukya Upanishad with the 215 verse commentary (kArikA-s) by Gaudapada. Judging from the extensive bibliography, it would appear that no potential source or translation was overlooked in this effort to penetrate the meaning of this Upanishad and Gaudapada’s commentary thereon. A full translation of the Upanishad is included in an Appendix, along with other useful reference material, including a glossary of Sanskrit terms.In the main body of the book, Mr. Waite does something different from the usual sequence in which this work is laid out. Instead of a verse-by-verse translation, the author unfolds Gaudapada’s philosophy in logical segments, which form the core chapters on “The World Appearance,” “Causality,” “Creation,” “Nature of Reality,” “Self-Knowledge,” and “Practical Aspects.” This enables him to move back and forth and pull together verses from different sections of the kArikA-s as they apply to the philosophical problem under review. As a consequence, the reader is treated to a crystal clear explanation of Gaudapada’s wisdom by a scholar who has lived intimately with this teaching for decades.

The Mandukya Upanishad, the shortest (it has just 12 verses) and , according to a general opinion, the most important of the 12 main Upanishads, has the added interest in being associated with the authoritative karikas of Gaudapada, grand-mentor of Shankaracharia, the initiator of Advaita Vedanta. Of the former it has been said that his is ‘a rational analysis of the totality of our experience in all three states: waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. Incomplete and insufficient will be any philosophy that is based on the waking state alone’ (Swami Brahmananda).‘When everything has been said, the fact remains that Vedanta is the only way of thinking that claims to study life in all its aspects in a scientific manner. It treats of truth, wisdom, and happiness, subjects of eternal interest to mankind. The credit of having brought to the notice of thinkers the value of its all-comprehensive method revealed in the Upanishads, and of having successfully built an impregnable system on that solid basis, will ever belong to Gaudapada.’ (Swami Satchidanandendra Saraswati).This new book, authored by the well-known (and, one could say, prolific writer in the field of Advaita Vedanta - this is his 7th book), has several features that make of it an important addition to the literature in this specialized area, one that is becoming much better known than it was some 10-20 years ago.Beginning with a few general remarks, something that strikes the reader is the clarity of the writing and the logic of the exposition of its contents which, at first sight, appears to be an introductory text for the un-initiated. Far from it! - and it is not a question of its length (420 pages) or even of the exhaustive coverage of everything that is relevant to the Upanishad itself and Gaudapada’s running commentary in the karikas. Clear and didactic it is, but the tools (armamentarium), organization of the work, and employment of many important Sanskrit words together with their English translation, plus a long Glossary (41 pp.), make of this book an indispensable reference for the modern reader of both this important Upanishad and Gaudapada’s contribution.An important feature of the book consists in the numerous references (81 in all!) – most of them with short-to-medium length descriptions of the tenets or arguments of the, mostly modern, authors consulted when DW was in the process of preparing this work (Annotated Bibliography – 33 pp.)Apart from the illuminating Introduction (36 pp.) and ‘What the Mandukya Upanishad is About’ at the beginning, the following 7 sections are: The World Appearance, Causality, Creation, Nature of Reality, Self-Knowledge, Practical Aspects, and Conclusion. They are all important, certainly, but I found ‘Nature of Reality’ to be like a centre-piece.There are 7 Appendices at the end, comprising altogether 95 pp. To give one an idea of the completeness of the work, one of the Appendices (No. 5) deals with pronunciation and transliteration, using a recently proposed method: ITRANS. Lastly, a full Index, containing also a list of all the karikas mentioned in the book.

Simply the best book on Advaita philosophy. Written in a simple and concise manner after extensive research, this is the best book I have come across on the subject of Advaita philosophy. Highly recommended!