Some books argue a case. This one keeps company with a mind.
D. Samarender Reddy—a physician by training, an economist by education, a poet and Advaita seeker by disposition—spent years writing down whatever the day handed him: an aphorism, a quarrel with Sartre, a Ramana Maharshi dialogue that would not let him go, a poem in English, a line of Hindi film song that said what English could not. Then he retired, blocked almost everyone on his phone, and went into deliberate solitude to find out what would still be there once the noise stopped. This book is what was still there.
It moves without warning, and without apology, between registers. A rigorous exposition of the vasanas and the four factors that keep them alive gives way to a poem about growing old badly. Gaudapada’s ajata vada—no creation, no bondage, none liberated—sits a page away from a wry note on what women are actually like, and a page after that, a confession from a man who cannot stop waiting for a life that never quite turns the corner.
Inside you will find:
- Advaita Vedanta worked out plainly: name-and-form analysis, the three states, the witness, maya as nothing but the belief that happiness lies outside
- Extended dialogues from Ramana Maharshi on rebirth, heaven and hell, death, and the futility of the question itself
- Poems in English, Hindi and Urdu registers, on love, loss, God, and the comedy of the ego
- Arguments with Sartre, Emerson, Kant, Walzer and the Buddha, conducted at full temperature
- Aphorisms compressed enough to carry around for weeks: “All spirituality is nothing but the pot searching for the clay.”
What holds the book together is not a thesis but a temperament—unillusioned, funny about its own suffering, unwilling to let a consoling idea pass unexamined, including the consoling ideas of Vedanta itself.
This is a book for readers who have already done some reading: who know the vocabulary of nonduality and are tired of being sold it; who want philosophy that has been lived at cost rather than assembled from summaries; who can hold a Sanskrit term, a Hindi film lyric and a line of Eliot in the same breath.
Open it anywhere. It was written to be entered at any page and closed at any page, which is more or less how it was written.
Paperback
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HJ1PZ4VW
Kindle edition
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HJ1PKT3D
India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0HJ1PKT3D
Know Thyself 