Garland of Visions: The Darsanamala of Narayana Guru

In his most important Sanskrit work Darsanamala, Narayana Guru adopts a hitherto uncharted method of viewing the non-dual Brahman from ten different philosophical vantage points and leaving the student-seeker to intuitively perceive on one's own the one ineffable Reality. The ancient Upaniùadic wisdom is thus condensed and restated by the Guru in terms comprehensible to the mind-set of the Age of Science. How brahmavidya naturally becomes the Science of all sciences (sarva-vidya-pratistha) is also implicit in the Guru's restatement of Vedantic wisdom. The present commentary explicates how a genuine seeker could make use of the text for the realization of Brahman as the Reality that constitutes the being of himself or herself, and how each of its ten chapters lay bare a particular facet of Brahman fully resonant with the frame of reference of the chapter concerned.