On Advait Vedanta: Know the fact but do not stop at the fact

Acharya Prashant
9 min readApr 2, 2022

The following excerpt is from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Shuzan held out his short staff and said,
“If you call this a short staff, you oppose reality.
If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact.
Now, what do you wish to call this?”

~ ‘The Short Staff’, a Zen Koan

Questioner (Q): Acharya Ji, like this confusing Koan, a few things in your teachings are difficult to grasp for my petty, stability-seeking mind. In your song ‘Are you looking for me?’, you said it is stupid to wind your legs around your head, so I stopped the little yoga I did. My current yoga is just listening to your videos. I don’t know if peace will come just by that, but it surely has given me a better understanding of life and gives me relaxation, at least for a few minutes.

So, I queue your videos on YouTube and keep going. I see that this is conditional peace because as your video’s effect fades, my peace can fade too. I work from home now, so there is no external pollution; my mind is the culprit.

Where am I going? Am I your intellectually poor disciple who needs to stick to just one of…

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