Badarayana

Badarayana composed the Brahma Sutras, the terse aphorisms that systematize the Upanishads and found the school of Vedanta. The thread he draws is the relation of the self, atman, to the ultimate ground, Brahman, and whether they are one, distinct, or somehow both. The sutras are so compressed that they can barely be read without a commentary, and the great commentators who followed, arguing fiercely over what he meant, generated the central debates of later Indian philosophy. Few sentences in history have been weighed as carefully as his.