[Advaita-l] Why the 'Wrong' View is Right: Mastering the Art of Pūrvapaksha

[Sundar Rajan]

Subject: Why the 'Wrong' View is Right: Mastering Purvapaksha – A Modern
Reflection

Dear Advaita-l members,

I'm sharing the full text of a recent Article I wrote connecting Adi
Shankara's purvapaksha method to contemporary phenomena like viral social
media hooks, modern yoga, and meditation practices. While presented in an
accessible/popular style, it aims to highlight the enduring relevance of
the classical three-stage inquiry (purvapaksha → uttarapaksha → siddhanta)
in everyday insight and self-inquiry.

The article views best with formatting on Medium:
https://medium.com/@sundar2rajan/trust-first-truth-second-c5924b8e3696

Full text:

Trust First. Truth Second.

The 8th-Century Secret Behind Viral Content

I was three scrolls deep into my feed — somewhere between a friend’s
vacation photos and a recipe I’d never make — when a post stopped me cold.

“Yoga is not yoga.”

I read it again. My brain did that little stutter-step thing where it tries
to process a sentence that contradicts itself. Of course yoga is yoga.
That’s like saying coffee is not coffee. What kind of algorithmic nonsense
had the feed gods served up now?

But I didn’t scroll past. I tapped. I read more.

And that annoyed me, because it meant the hook worked.

You’ve felt this too. Some bold, slightly absurd statement that makes you
go “wait, what does that even mean?” — and before you can help yourself,
you’re reading the whole thing. It’s designed to do exactly that. Every
social media strategist and content creator knows the formula: cognitive
friction gets clicks.

But here’s the part that stopped me a second time, much harder than the
first. That technique — the one we think was invented by some growth-hacker
in a WeWork conference room — is actually a direct echo of a debate method
used over a thousand years ago by one of the most brilliant philosophers in
Indian history.

His name was Adi Shankara. And the method has a name too.

Purvapaksha.

The Method Behind the Madness

I’ll admit, the first time I encountered the word Purvapaksha in a
philosophical text, my eyes glazed over. It sounded like academic jargon —
the kind of term that exists mainly so scholars can use it in footnotes.

Then I understood what it actually meant, and I started seeing it
absolutely everywhere.

Purvapaksha literally translates to “the prior view.” It’s the opening move
in a three-stage method of inquiry, and it works like this:

First, you state the common belief — and you state it fairly. Not as a
straw man you’re about to demolish. You present it in its strongest
possible form. You acknowledge why it makes sense. You meet people exactly
where they are. Shankara would do this with such thoroughness that his
opponents sometimes wondered if he was arguing for them.

Then you challenge it. Not by trashing it, but by showing it’s incomplete.
There’s more to the picture than what’s visible from the usual angle.

Then you land the deeper truth. The one that was always there, hiding in
plain sight, obscured by the very reasonableness of the common view.

Surface to depth, in three moves. Purvapaksha, Uttarapaksha, Siddhanta.

Seeing how a master like Shankara used this pattern makes it much easier to
apply the same logic to product narratives, viral hooks, or any argument
you need to land in the 21st century.

Shankara used this method to debate scholars across the entire Indian
subcontinent. Before arguing that the world is an illusion — maya, a claim
that would get you laughed out of most dinner parties today, let alone a
thousand years ago — he would first state his opponent’s position with more
clarity than they could manage themselves.

“The world must be real because we experience it through our senses. We
touch things. We stub our toes. How can that be illusion?”

He’d present their case so well you’d start nodding along. And only then
would he pull the rug.

The trust came first. The deeper truth came second. The order matters
enormously.

Now look at your Instagram feed again.

The Connection Nobody Told You About

“Yoga is not yoga.”

Shankara would have recognized that hook immediately. He’d probably have
appreciated it, too — and then pointed out that it’s missing two-thirds of
the argument.

Because the hook itself isn’t the Purvapaksha. It’s the spark that forces
the Purvapaksha into view. “Yoga is not yoga” doesn’t state the common
belief — it attacks it. It creates friction against what you already think,
and that friction is what makes you suddenly aware of your own assumption.
The common view you’d never bothered to examine — “yoga is postures,
obviously” — is now visible precisely because something just contradicted
it.

The hook cracks open the door. But the full three-stage journey —
acknowledging the common view fairly, challenging it with deeper evidence,
arriving at the established truth — that’s what the rest of the article,
the podcast, the book chapter is for. The hook gets the click. The method
does the actual work.

And the method is identical to what Shankara was doing in 8th-century
India. Meet people where they are (that’s the intellectual empathy). Show
them the picture is bigger than they thought (that’s the challenge). Guide
them somewhere they didn’t expect to go (that’s where the real value lives).

The technology changed — stone tablets to smartphones. The method didn’t
change at all.

So What Does “Yoga Is Not yoga” Actually Mean?

Let’s run the full three stages on that hook, because the answer is
genuinely interesting.

The common view: Yoga is physical postures, breathing exercises, stress
relief. You roll out your mat, move through some poses, maybe sweat a
little, and walk out feeling looser and calmer. That’s yoga. And it’s
fantastic — genuinely, measurably beneficial. Nobody’s dismissing any of
that.

The challenge: But when you crack open the actual source texts, the
physical postures turn out to be one branch on a much larger tree.
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras lay out eight limbs of yoga, and asana is just the
third — a preparatory step on a ladder that climbs through ethical living,
breath control, sense withdrawal, concentration, meditation, and ultimately
samadhi. The Bhagavad Gita goes further still, describing yoga not as any
single practice but as an entire path of inner transformation — through
action, devotion, knowledge, and meditation. Calling the physical practice
“yoga” is like calling the stretching before a marathon “running.”

The deeper truth: In its original context, yoga is dhyana — a vehicle for
spiritual transformation. The goal isn’t flexibility. It’s not even stress
relief. It’s a fundamental shift in the way consciousness relates to
itself. The poses aren’t the destination; they’re the parking lot outside
the building where the actual work happens.

That’s the full arc. And the same exact logic applies to meditation.

The Meditation Version

The common view: Meditation is a wellness tool. Download an app, find a
quiet corner, focus on your breath for ten minutes. The science is legit —
lower cortisol, better focus, improved emotional regulation. It works. It’s
good for you. Your therapist recommends it. So does your Apple Watch.

The challenge: But the traditions these apps are drawing from describe
something that makes “stress management” sound like using a particle
accelerator to crack walnuts. In those frameworks, meditation isn’t about
calming down. It’s about radical transformation — a path toward liberation,
toward a kind of bliss that goes way beyond “I feel less anxious after my
morning session.”

The deeper truth: Real meditation, in the traditional sense, isn’t
something you do for twenty minutes before checking email. It’s something
that happens when conditions are right — a shift from effortful
concentration to effortless awareness. The app version and the ancient
version share a name the way a campfire and a supernova both involve
“fire.” Technically correct. Wildly different in scale.

The modern, app-based version isn’t “fake meditation.” It’s a gateway. For
a huge number of people, ten minutes with an app is the first time they’ve
ever watched their own mind on purpose. That’s not insignificant; plenty of
traditional practitioners started the same way — with something small,
accessible, and a little bit clumsy.

So it’s not that one is “real” and the other isn’t. They simply optimize
for different things: one for accessibility and mental-health outcomes, the
other for long-term existential transformation.

One adjusts the psyche. The other transforms consciousness.

The Litmus Test Nobody Wants to Hear

Now here’s where this gets uncomfortably practical, and where the
Purvapaksha method really earns its keep.

There’s a question every person who has ever tried to meditate has asked
themselves. You know the one. You open your eyes after twenty minutes and
think: “Did that count? Was I actually meditating? Or was I just sitting
there with my eyes closed planning dinner and reliving an argument from
2019?”

We’ve all been there. And our first instinct is to reach for numbers. How
many minutes? How many sessions this week? What does my app streak say?
There’s a whole industry built on quantifying the unquantifiable, turning
inner experience into a dashboard.

That instinct — the desire to score your meditation like a workout — is
itself a Purvapaksha. A common view that seems perfectly reasonable until
you examine it.

Because you can’t put a number on an internal experience. Someone can sit
motionless for an hour with a mind running through spreadsheets and
celebrity gossip. Another person can sit for five distracted minutes and,
in the last thirty seconds, touch something real. The timer says one thing.
The experience says something completely different.

So instead of a scorecard, what if we used a simpler test?

Were you absorbed — even for a moment? Not thinking about the breath, but
actually being with it, where the usual background noise dimmed, even
briefly.

Did you feel a sense of peace? Not the forced kind where you’re trying to
relax. The kind that just shows up when the inner chatter settles on its
own.

Did you catch even a flicker of quiet joy — not connected to any external
cause? Not “I’m happy because something good happened,” but a subtle
pleasantness that seemed to arrive from nowhere in particular.

If the answer is yes to any of those — even faintly, even for a few seconds
— you touched something real. That’s the measure.

And what’s beautiful is how precisely this lines up with the oldest sources
we have. The Bhagavad Gita doesn’t measure meditation in minutes logged. It
describes success as a profound state of inner satisfaction and joy. That’s
it. Not the streak. Not the dashboard. The actual felt quality of what
happened when you sat down and paid attention.

The Part That Snuck Up on Me

Here’s what I didn’t expect when I started pulling on the Purvapaksha
thread.

I’d been using it myself — on myself — without knowing it had a name.

Every time I caught myself thinking “I meditate for stress relief” and then
felt a quiet nudge that something deeper was going on, that was the method
at work. Every time I assumed my practice was “working” because I felt
calmer, then noticed that calmness was just the surface of something I
couldn’t quite name — Purvapaksha, Uttarapaksha, Siddhanta. Common view,
challenge, deeper truth. Playing out in my own head, on its own schedule.

If you work in product, coaching, or marketing, you already use this
structure intuitively: start with the story your audience already believes,
complicate it with new evidence, then land the new frame.

Shankara didn’t just create a debate technique. He mapped the way insight
actually moves — from what we think we know, through the discomfort of
realizing it’s incomplete, to the deeper reality that was waiting
underneath the whole time.

A thousand years later, that same movement stops your scroll on Instagram.

And if you’re paying attention, it does something a lot more interesting
than get clicks. It asks you to look at anything you think you understand —
your practice, your work, your assumptions about what you’re doing and why
— and wonder whether there’s a deeper truth hiding inside the perfectly
reasonable surface.

Not replacing the surface. Expanding it. Including it and going further.

That’s the whole invitation. One Purvapaksha at a time.

Namaskar,
Sundar Rajan

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