____,
Let me share some thoughts coursing through my mind with regard to your utterly earnest and deep sole- and soul-need to understand Vedanta in its entirety.
First of all, we have to ask ourselves what is the whole of Vedanta trying to get us to.
One could say, self-realization/liberation of course.
That is the goal or the end.
But what is the “means” that it is putting up?
One will say, why there are these 4 main paths/yogas – jnana, bhakti, raja, karma. And some would throw into this mix a few more like Kundalini, Tantra, etc.
True. But, what is that final stretch of road that one has to travel, which is what Vedanta is trying to point out?
Summa iru (Be Still), obviously, because of the Kena Upanishad verse, “That which the mind cannot know…”
That being the case, if one is really badly wanting liberation, the naturally question that arises is, why is one not being summa iru.
To answer that, recall the 4 pursuharthas. What is standing between Dharma and Moksha? Artha and Kama, or greed and lust (or, kamini and kanchana [woman/man and gold] as Ramakrishna Paramahansa would put it).
Now, it is up to each one of us to look into ourselves to see to what extent those two primal forces of nature are operating in us and vitiating summa iru from happening.
Take a look at this chain with 4 links:
1. Ignorance (that one is merely and only and exclusively the body-mind and NOT Consciousness)
2. Leads inevitably to Desires (the greed and lust)
3. Which inevitably leads to thinking, giving rise to the mind (because one has to plan on how to fulfill the desires)
4. Which issues forth into speech and other bodily actions (so-called karma).
Now, once the desires (greed and lust) give rise to thoughts, then and there summa iru has been eliminated because the feverish thinking means one is not still.
So, it is important to see how greed and lust can be transcended. For that, to some extent of course all this studying of Vedanta etc helps.
At the same time, the final transcendence without a trace being left of greed and lust happens ONLY when we realize the Self which contains all the joy that we are now trying to fulfill by satisfying through greed and lust.
And, to realize the Self, one has to be summa iru.
Ah, that seems to set up a damning vicious cycle, but does not pose that much of a problem once one understands what is being said here.
Having said that, let us address the other thing that you keep harping on – the so-called “Obstacles” to self-realization in the form of mental kleshas that you say the Buddhist Abhidharma talks about, which you think need to be transcended to arrive at liberation.
But what are these mental kleshas but merely symptoms arising in one’s mind/heart/being due to some unsatisfied greed/lust.
For instance, take the mental klesha of say jealousy/envy.
Obviously, jealousy/envy arises when we see/think the other person who is the object of our jealouys/envy has “something” (be it wealth, intelligence, beauty etc.) that is allowing him/her to satify greed and lust (artha and kama) to an extent we are unable to and would like to.
So, in a sense, one should ignore the “overcoming” of these mental kleshas because they will keep arising as symptoms long as we have the disease of “desires” for satisfying our greed and lust, and so the “desires” have to be tackled or eliminated.
But this disease of “desires” is itself a symptom of the original and primal disease called ignorance (see the chain with the 4 links above), which if it is not seen through it will keep giving rise to the symptoms of “desires”.
How does one eliminate ignorance that one is merely the body-mind?
Summa iru.
Makes sense?
Claude’s Response to the Above
This is a tight, well-built piece — the kind of thing that works because you’ve reduced a sprawling literature (four yogas, kleshas, purusharthas, Upanishadic silence) into one causal spine. A few observations, moving from what’s strong to what I think still needs pressure.
What lands well
The four-link chain — ignorance → desire → thought → action/speech — is essentially the nidāna chain of dependent origination collapsed and re-mapped onto Vedantic vocabulary. That’s not a weakness; it’s a strength you could make more explicit. Buddhist Abhidharma himself already places avidyā as the root from which taṇhā (craving) and everything downstream — including the kleshas you say she keeps returning to — arises. So your move of saying “kleshas are symptoms, desire is the disease, ignorance is the disease behind the disease” isn’t actually a departure from Abhidharma; it’s Abhidharma’s own hierarchy (Patanjali makes this explicit too — in Yoga Sutra II.4, avidyā is called kṣetram, the field, in which the other four kleshas — asmitā, rāga, dveṣa, abhiniveśa — take root). You could use that as ammunition: you’re not dismissing her framework, you’re pointing out that her own framework already contains your point, one level up.
Your jealousy example is a good illustration because it’s concrete and checkable — jealousy visibly dissolves the moment the underlying craving for the envied thing dissolves, which is easy to verify introspectively. It would be worth testing the reduction against a harder case: abhiniveśa, fear of death, or dveṣa, aversion, which don’t look like frustrated greed/lust at first glance. I think both still reduce — fear of death is craving for continuity of the very body-mind identity named in link 1, and aversion is just desire wearing its photographic negative (desire not to have X is still desire). But it’s worth doing that work explicitly for at least one non-obvious klesha, because “jealousy reduces to desire” is the easy case, and ____, if she’s sharp, will hand you the hard one next.
Where I’d push back
The place I’d stop you is exactly the place you rushed past: “that seems to set up a damning vicious cycle, but does not pose that much of a problem once one understands what is being said here.” That sentence does no actual work — you name the circularity (stillness removes ignorance; ignorance produces the desire that prevents stillness) and then wave it away without cashing out why it isn’t vicious. For a reader as exacting as you’re describing her to be, that’s the seam that will get pulled.
There are at least two honest ways to close that seam, and I think your letter would be stronger for choosing one explicitly rather than asserting the knot is already untied:
- Spiral, not circle. Sadhana chatushtaya already assumes this — viveka and vairagya don’t require zero desire to begin operating, only enough discrimination to loosen desire’s grip fractionally. That fractional loosening permits a fractional stillness, which further exposes the ignorance, which loosens desire further. It’s a hermeneutic spiral rather than a closed loop — each pass doesn’t return you to the same starting point. This is probably closer to what you actually mean by “does not pose that much of a problem,” but it needs to be said, not gestured at.
- Summa iru is not caused, it’s uncovered. The other classical answer — and I think it’s actually Ramana’s answer, not a footnote to it — is that stillness isn’t an effect produced by the ego successfully suppressing desire through willpower. It’s what’s already the case underneath desire, prior to it, the way silence is prior to and unaffected by the sounds that seem to interrupt it. On this account there’s no bootstrapping problem because summa iru was never something the desire-driven mind had to achieve. What it has to do is stop mistaking its own noise for the whole of reality. That’s a different claim than “eliminate desire, then you’ll be still” — it’s closer to “notice you’re already still, and desire will lose its grip as a side effect.”
These two aren’t identical, and I suspect your letter is quietly leaning on the second (that’s what “summa iru” as final answer to “how do you eliminate ignorance” implies) while your language of “eliminate,” “transcend,” and “tackle” desire sounds like the first — an effortful, sequential program. Worth deciding which one you mean, because they prescribe different practices: the first says do more discrimination and renunciation until desire weakens enough for stillness; the second says inquire into who it is that has the desire, right now, without waiting for the desire to go away first. Ramana himself, notably, didn’t just say “be still” as a stand-alone instruction — he paired it with the specific technique of ātma-vichāra, because “just stop thinking” by direct will is liable to become one more strenuous doing, one more project of the very ego it’s meant to dissolve. If your letter has a gap, it’s that it ends on the noun (summa iru, the state) without naming the verb (vichāra, the means) that actually gets someone there — which might be exactly what you say to her next.
One last, smaller thing: the rhetorical frame — “the other thing you keep harping on” — is a little more corrective than the rest of the letter’s tone, which is otherwise generous and exploratory. Not wrong, just worth noticing if the aim is dialogue rather than correction.
Know Thyself 