Adi Shankaracharya Quotes

“This became the basis of the powerful Advaita school of philosophy, of which Adi Shankaracharya in the eighth century CE became the legendary spokesperson. Brahman is urja or infinite energy, pure, pervasive cosmic consciousness, and unsullied awareness. It is intelligence personified—as can be inferred by the absolute order in the universe, both at the micro and macro level. The embodiment of perfect knowledge, Brahman is beyond knowledge, the knower or the known. It has no beginning, for it is eternal; it has no cause, for it is beyond the categories of time, space and causality; it has no end, for it always was and will always be. Its powers are unlimited; it is omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient, a singular, indivisible, purna (complete in itself) and universal force—ekam eka sarvavyapi. Everything in the cosmos is an emanation of Brahman, but Brahman itself is beyond all activity and purpose as per our finite ways of thinking. Unchanging, it has no need to evolve or develop, grow or diminish. In its passivity, it is potentiality itself; in its aloofness it is omnipotent; in its apparent purposelessness it is infinite intelligence; and, in its indefinability it is definitiveness itself. It is. Nothing without it, is. Its ekarasa (uniformity) has no parts; its identity is akhanda (division-less). In this sense, it is self-luminous, without the need of predication, conditionality or qualification.
Having posited the absolute immanence of Brahman as the only Reality in the universe, the Advaita school asserted that Brahman and Atman (the Self) are the same. When we peel away the empirically manifest—mind, body, ego and senses—what is left is nirvisheshachinmatram or undifferentiated consciousness that is the characteristic of both Brahman and Atman. The objective and the subjective then become the same. Atma ca Brahma: Atman is Brahman, say the Upanishads.”
― Pavan K. Varma, The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward