Adi Shankara

• 1. Introduction

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  Adi Shankara is today often called the most important Indian philosopher, yet reliable information on his actual life is scant. He was an Indian Vedic scholar-monk and teacher of Advaita Vedanta in the eighth century. The strange thing is that the man who became a heroic figure was, in his own time, probably unknown. No Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain source mentions him until the eleventh century. For three hundred years after his death he left almost no trace. So how did an obscure scholar become a divine folk-hero, an incarnation of Shiva who supposedly conquered all of India in debate? Why do over three hundred texts bear his name when scholars accept only a handful as truly his? And what did he actually teach about the self and the universe that made later movements claim him so fiercely? The answers begin not in the eighth century, but in the fourteenth.

• 2. The Invented Conqueror

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  The Vijayanagara Empire holds the key to the Shankara most people know. When the Sringeri mathas began receiving patronage from its emperors, they shifted allegiance from Advaitic Agamic Shaivism toward Brahmanical Advaita orthodoxy. The legendary Shankara was a creation of this medieval moment, not the eighth-century man himself. Vidyaranya, also known as Madhava, served as the twelfth Jagadguru of the Sringeri Sarada Pitham from 1380 to 1386 and as a minister in the empire. He found that Shankara's elevated philosophy had no appeal to gain widespread popularity. So he created legends to turn the scholar into a divine folk-hero who spread his teaching across India like a victorious conqueror. In his doxography Sarvadarsanasangraha, Vidyaranya presented Shankara's teachings as the summit of all darsanas. Rival Vaishnava traditions of Dvaita and Visishtadvaita were demoted, placed just above Buddhism and Jainism. Bhedabheda was not mentioned at all, written out of the history of Indian philosophy. Vidyaranya even founded a matha and proclaimed that Shankara himself had established it. His royal support and methodical efforts made Shankara a rallying symbol. Such was the influence of the Sarvadarsanasangraha that early Indologists treated Advaita Vedanta as the most accurate interpretation of the Upanishads.

• 3. Hagiographies And Legends

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  At least fourteen different hagiographies of Shankara's life survive, and they contradict one another. They were written many centuries to a thousand years after his death, in Sanskrit and other languages, filled with legends and fiction. Many carry the title Sankara Vijaya, the conquests of Shankara. The Brhat-Sankara-Vijaya by Citsukha is the oldest but survives only in excerpts. The Sankaradigvijaya by Madhava and the Sankaravijaya by Anandagiri are the most cited. One scholar noticed that Anandagiri's text mixes together stories about historically different people who all bore the name Shankara, likely meaning more ancient scholars such as Vidya-sankara and Sankara-misra. A story found in every hagiography places Shankara at age eight at a river with his mother, Sivataraka, where a crocodile seizes him. He calls out, begging her permission to become a Sannyasin, or the crocodile will kill him. She agrees, the crocodile releases him, and he leaves home for education. He reaches a Saivite sanctuary and becomes the disciple of a teacher named Govinda Bhagavatpada. The oldest hagiographies say he was born in Kerala, in a village named Kaladi, to an aged childless couple devoted to serving the poor. They named the child Shankara, meaning giver of prosperity. His father died while he was very young, delaying his initiation into student life, which his mother then performed.

• 4. The Forgotten Rival

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  Mandana Mishra overshadowed Shankara until the tenth century. An older contemporary, Mandana was the major representative of Advaita in his era. He was a Mimansa scholar and a follower of Kumarila Bhatt, yet he also wrote a seminal Advaita text that survives today, the Brahma-siddhi. The theory of error set out in the Brahma-siddhi became the normative Advaita Vedanta theory of error. For a couple of centuries Mandana was the most influential Vedantin. The later tradition could not leave such a figure outside the fold. It absorbed Mandana by identifying him with Sureshvara, a ninth-century figure, claiming Mandana became Shankara's disciple after losing a public debate. His student Vachaspati Mishra, believed to be an incarnation of Shankara sent to popularize the Advaita view, wrote the Bhamati, a commentary on Shankara's Brahma Sutra Bhashya. The Bhamati school he founded takes an ontological approach, seeing the jiva as the source of avidya and treating yogic contemplation as the main factor in liberation. One scholar, Satchidanandendra Sarasvati, argued that almost all later Advaitins were shaped by Mandana Mishra rather than by Shankara. In this view, most post-Shankara Advaita actually deviates from Shankara, and only his little-influential student Sureshvara represents him correctly.

• 5. Knowledge That Liberates

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  "That you are" sits at the heart of everything Shankara actually wrote. The central theme of his authentic works is the liberating knowledge that the individual self, jivatman, is identical with Atman-Brahman. Moksha is attained in this very life by recognizing this identity, mediated by the Mahavakyas, the great sentences of the Upanishads. The most famous is Tat Tvam Asi, found in the Chandogya Upanishad. Three others carry the same special weight: aham brahmasmi, "I am Brahman," from the Brhadaranyaka; prajnanam brahma, "Prajnanam is Brahman," from the Aitareya; and ayam atma brahma, "This Atman is Brahman," from the Mandukya. According to Shankara, one unchanging entity, Brahman, alone is real, while changing entities have no absolute existence. The difference between the individual self and Brahman seems real at the empirical level, but that difference is only an illusion. The longest chapter of his Upadesasahasri, chapter eighteen, is devoted to the insight "I am ever-free, the existent." Shankara insisted that right knowledge arises at the moment of hearing the Mahavakyas, without the need to meditate on them. On this point he broke with Mandana Mishra, who held that the great sentences alone could not produce knowledge of Brahman without deep meditation called prasamkhyana.

• 6. Reason And The Vedas

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  Perception and inference were, for Shankara, the primary and most reliable means of knowledge. Where these means help one gain what is beneficial and avoid what is harmful, he saw no need to refer to scripture. One of his main concerns was establishing the Upanishads as an independent means of knowledge beyond the ritually oriented Mimansa exegesis of the Vedas. He never simply rested his case on ancient texts. He proved each thesis point by point using the pramanas of reason and experience, accepting the Vedas and Upanishads as a source only as he developed his theses. In matters of metaphysics and ethics, he held that the testimony and wisdom in scriptures become important. His arguments on revelation concern apta vacana, the sayings of the wise, the testimony of reliable experts past or present. The Advaita tradition treats such testimony as epistemically valid, reasoning that a human being needs countless facts but with limited time can learn only a fraction directly. In the early twentieth century, Stcherbatsky criticized Shankara for demanding logic from Madhyamaka Buddhists while resorting to revelation himself. Shankara also cautioned against pulling a verse out of context, insisting a treatise can only be understood through the six characteristics he called the Samanvayat Tatparya Linga.

• 7. Against Ritual

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  Oblations to God assume the self within is different from Brahman, and Shankara discouraged exactly that. In his Upadesasahasri he treats the doctrine of difference as wrong. He who knows the Brahman is one and another is yet another, does not know Brahman. Shankara recreated the voice of a novice trapped in this error: I am one and He is another, I am ignorant, bound, a transmigrator, while he is the god not subject to transmigration. By worshipping Him with oblation and offerings, the novice hopes to escape the ocean of transmigratory existence. To Shankara this question, "How am I he?", reveals the delusion. The sentence "Thou art That" removes the delusion of a hearer, so that one knows one's own Atman, the witness of all internal organs, and not through any action. With this realization the performance of rituals is prohibited, since the use of rituals contradicts the realization of identity with the highest Atman. Yet Shankara did not throw out ethics. Self-knowledge, he asserted, is realized only when the mind is purified by an ethical life observing the Yamas, including Ahimsa, non-injury in body, mind, and thought. Rituals such as the fire ritual yajna can help draw and prepare the mind for the journey to Self-knowledge.

• 8. The Crypto-Buddhist Charge

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  "Crypto-Buddhist" is the accusation that has trailed Shankara for over a thousand years. His Advaita showed influences from Mahayana Buddhism, despite his own critiques of it, and opponents seized on the resemblance. Ramanuja, founder of Vishishtadvaita Vedanta, called him a Prachanna Bauddha, a crypto-Buddhist undermining theistic Bhakti devotionalism. Around 800 CE the scholar Bhaskara of the Bhedabheda tradition attacked Advaita as "this despicable broken down Mayavada that has been chanted by the Mahayana Buddhists." S.N. Dasgupta wrote that Shankara's Brahman was very much like the sunya of Nagarjuna, and that the debts of Shankara to the self-luminosity of Vijnanavada Buddhism can hardly be overestimated. The tradition rejects the label by pointing to differing views on Atman, Anatta, and Brahman. Nirvana, the term more common in Buddhism, is the blowing out of craving aided by accepting that there is no Self at the center of perception. Moksha, the term more common in Hinduism, is a similar release, yet aided by realizing that one's inner Self is not a personal ego-self but a Universal Self. That single disagreement over whether a Self exists separates the two schools. The gap explains why, on the 21st of September 2023, a 108-foot statue of Shankara could be unveiled near the Omkareshwar Temple in Madhya Pradesh, honoring a man whose own century barely noticed him.