Advaita Vedānta approaches evil, suffering, and duality from the standpoint of nondual Brahman, pure consciousness characterized as existence–consciousness–bliss. Since Brahman is without a second, evil and suffering cannot possess ultimate, independent reality; if they did, they would stand as a rival principle to Brahman, which Advaita denies. What appears as a world of plurality, conflict, and pain is traced to māyā and avidyā, the beginningless but not absolutely real power of appearance and the ignorance that veils one’s true nature. Under the spell of this ignorance, the one Self is experienced as many individual selves, and the seamless reality of Brahman is fragmented into subject and object, good and evil, pleasure and pain. Duality itself is thus not a fundamental feature of reality but an error in perception, comparable to mistaking a rope for a snake in dim light. When the rope is known as rope, the fear of the snake is revealed as baseless; similarly, when Brahman is known, the apparent reality of evil and suffering is sublated.

To clarify this, Advaita speaks of different levels of reality. At the absolute level (pāramārthika), only Brahman truly is; there is no creation, no separate individual, and therefore no evil or suffering. At the empirical level (vyāvahārika), however, the world of bodies, minds, moral law, and karma is taken as real for all practical purposes, and within this framework good and evil, joy and sorrow, are experienced and must be addressed. A further level, the illusory or dream-like (prātibhāsika), includes hallucinations and dreams that are later recognized as mere appearance. Evil and suffering belong to the empirical order: they are not dismissed as unreal in a casual sense, but are understood as real only so long as ignorance persists and the higher standpoint has not been realized.

Within this empirical realm, Advaita accepts the law of karma as the governing principle of causation. Actions rooted in ignorance, desire, and aversion generate further experiences of pleasure and pain, binding the apparent individual to the cycle of suffering. Ethical conduct, self-discipline, compassion, and devotion are therefore not optional ornaments but necessary disciplines that purify the mind and prepare it for liberating knowledge. From the highest standpoint, however, there is ultimately no independent doer or sufferer; the entire network of action and consequence belongs to the domain that is transcended when one’s identity as pure awareness is recognized. Evil actions, on this view, arise from misidentification with the body–mind complex and the consequent forgetfulness of one’s true nature.

The practical and ultimate responses to suffering are thus carefully distinguished. On the one hand, as long as the sense of individuality persists, suffering is taken seriously and met through dharma, right action, and an understanding of karma, so that life becomes a field for spiritual maturation rather than mere resignation. On the other hand, the final resolution lies in jñāna, the direct realization that the innermost Self (Ātman) is not other than Brahman. When this nondual awareness dawns, the basis of the problem itself—the sense of being a finite subject opposed to an external world of objects, forces, and threats—falls away. Pain may still arise at the bodily or mental level, but its sting, grounded in the conviction “this is happening to me as a separate self,” is undermined, and the apparent reality of evil and suffering is seen as belonging only to the realm of ignorance and appearance, never to the essence of what truly is.