Advaita Vedānta is often approached through a haze of misunderstanding, especially around its teaching on reality and the world. It is sometimes equated with nihilism, as though it claimed that nothing exists at all. In fact, it carefully distinguishes levels of reality: the absolute level where Brahman alone is, the empirical level of everyday experience, and the illusory level of dreams and misperceptions. The world is described as *mithyā*—neither absolutely real like Brahman nor utterly non-existent like a logical impossibility. This subtle view is easily flattened into the crude claim that “the world is unreal,” which then feeds further criticisms of pessimism and world-denial. Yet the tradition itself repeatedly affirms that, from the empirical standpoint, the world and its laws must be taken seriously.

A related cluster of criticisms concerns ethics, action, and social responsibility. Because Advaita teaches the ultimate non-duality of self and Brahman, some infer that individual agency is meaningless and that any action is as good as any other. This reading gives rise to charges of passivity, moral relativism, and even quietism. Advaita, however, ties ethical living—truthfulness, self-control, non-harming, and adherence to *dharma*—directly to fitness for liberation. A mind distorted by greed or cruelty is said to be unfit for stable insight into non-duality, and karma is taken seriously at the empirical level. Far from encouraging apathy, the mature non-dual vision is described as naturally expressing itself as compassion and harmlessness within the world of experience.

Another frequent misconception is that Advaita dismisses God, devotion, ritual, and practice as irrelevant. Because it ultimately teaches the identity of jīva, Īśvara, and Brahman, some assume that devotion to a personal God has no real place. Yet Advaita explicitly accepts Īśvara as the intelligent and moral order of the empirical universe, and recommends *bhakti*, prayer, and Vedic ritual as powerful disciplines for purifying the mind. Its critique is not of ritual per se, but of mistaking ritual and external observances for the final means to liberation. Likewise, the path is not merely intellectual speculation: it unfolds through ethical preparation, devotion and karma-yoga, meditation, and systematic study, reflection, and deep contemplation under guidance.

There is also the charge that Advaita is world-denying, anti-experience, or reserved only for monastics and intellectual elites. The teaching that the world is a manifestation of Brahman is often overlooked, and renunciation is misconstrued as compulsory physical withdrawal rather than inner non-attachment. While the tradition has a strong monastic stream, it does not exclude householders or ordinary seekers; what it emphasizes is maturity and inner preparation rather than social role. The culmination it points toward is not a blank void or the literal disappearance of the person, but a direct, non-conceptual recognition of awareness as one’s true nature, even as the body–mind continues to function. From other philosophical schools, further criticisms arise—about the status of *māyā*, the coherence of non-duality, and the relation between absolute and empirical knowledge—but these debates unfold against the backdrop of a tradition that understands itself as grounded in the Upaniṣads and refined through rigorous reasoning and contemplative experience.