Adi Shankara

The historical record on Śaṅkara is not extensive. He lived a remarkably brief life — the traditional accounts give him thirty-two years, modern scholarship is generally comfortable with his having lived to perhaps mid-thirties — and produced an enormous body of work in that time. The traditional dates of 788–820 CE are contested by modern scholarship, which mostly places him a half-century to a century earlier (c. 700–750 CE).

He was born in Kalady, a village in present-day Kerala, in a Nambūdri Brahmin family. The traditional accounts report that he took monastic vows in childhood (his mother permitted it after a crocodile-grabbing-the-leg incident interpreted as a sign), studied with the master [[krishna|Govinda]] Bhagavatpāda, and at a young age began traveling the subcontinent — debating, teaching, founding institutions. He died young, by traditional account in the high Himalayas at Kedarnath.

The work

Śaṅkara’s writing is the philosophical center of the Advaita [[the-upanishads|Vedānta]] tradition. His major works:

• Commentaries (bhāṣyas) on the principal [[the-upanishads|Upaniṣads]], the Brahma Sūtras, and the Bhagavad Gītā — the prasthāna trayī, the triple foundation of [[the-upanishads|Vedānta]]. These commentaries are the central record of his philosophical position and the principal text studied by his successors.
• Upadeśa Sāhasrī (A Thousand Teachings) — his major independent prose-and-verse work; a sustained articulation of Advaita.
• Smaller philosophical works — the Aparokṣānubhūti, the Ātmabodha, the Tattva-Bodha, and others (some of these are of disputed authorship; the modern scholarly consensus is that not all the works traditionally attributed to him are actually his).
• Devotional hymns — Saundarya Laharī, Bhaja Govindam, Dakṣiṇāmūrti Stotra, and many others. The juxtaposition of austere philosophical Advaita with these bhakti compositions has long puzzled commentators; the tradition’s standard reading is that Śaṅkara recognized that bhakti was an appropriate practice for those not yet capable of pure jñāna, and that his own devotional hymns spring from an integrated practice.

The teaching

Śaṅkara’s Advaita rests on a few core claims:

• Brahman is the only ultimate reality. Brahma satyaṃ jagan mithyā jīvo brahmaiva nāparaḥ — brahman is real, the world is not real-as-it-appears, the individual soul is brahman, not different.
• The world’s appearance is māyā. Not a denial of the world’s reality at the empirical level — the world is fully real-as-experienced — but an insistence that what appears as a manifold of distinct things is, at the deeper level, the play of the one brahman manifested through superimposition.
• Liberation is recognition. Mokṣa is not produced; it is the dropping of the misrecognition that took the manifest world for the absolute. The means is jñāna (knowledge); ritual practice (karma kāṇḍa) and devotion (bhakti) are preparatory but not the final means.
• The two truths. Vyāvahārika satya (conventional truth) and paramārthika satya (absolute truth). The world, the self, the gods, even brahman as a personal Lord (saguṇa brahman) are real at the conventional level; nirguṇa brahman — brahman without attributes — is the absolute level. Liberation moves the practitioner from the first to the second.

Honest about Śaṅkara

Śaṅkara has been a contested figure — both in the medieval [[the-upanishads|Vedānta]] tradition and in modern scholarship. The major contests:

• The Mādhyamaka question. Some critics (including Rāmānuja in the 12th c.) accused Śaṅkara of being a crypto-Buddhist — of importing Madhyamaka Buddhist categories into [[the-upanishads|Vedānta]]. Modern scholarship treats this charge as overstated but recognizes substantive parallels and likely some indirect influence.
• The dating. Traditional dates (788–820 CE) have been substantially revised by modern scholarship. The earlier dating matters because it places him before some of the figures he was traditionally said to have debated.
• The works. The traditional canon attributes hundreds of works to him; modern scholarship has narrowed this substantially. The commentaries on the prasthāna trayī, the Upadeśa Sāhasrī, and a handful of others are securely his; many shorter works are likely later in his school but not his.
• The Neo-[[the-upanishads|Vedānta]] question. The 19th- and 20th-century presentation of Advaita as the singular essence of Hindu thought ([[swami-vivekananda|Vivekananda]], Radhakrishnan) has shaped the global reception of Śaṅkara. Some contemporary scholars (Paul Hacker, Rambachan, Hatcher) have argued that the modern Advaita is a substantial re-shaping that is not always faithful to the historical Śaṅkara.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[vedanta]]
• Parallels: [[meister-eckhart]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Śaṅkara. A Thousand Teachings: The Upadeśasāhasrī of Śaṅkara. Trans. Sengaku Mayeda. SUNY, 1992. Source class: primary text.
2. Śaṅkara. The Bhagavad Gītā with the Commentary of Śrī Śaṅkarācārya. Trans. Alladi Mahadeva Sastry. Samata, 1977. Source class: primary text.
3. Śaṅkara. Eight [[the-upanishads|Upaniṣads]] with the Commentary of Śaṅkarācārya (2 vols.). Trans. Swami Gambhirananda. Advaita Ashrama, 1957. Source class: primary text.
4. Sengaku Mayeda. A Thousand Teachings: The Upadeśasāhasrī of Śaṅkara. SUNY, 1992. Source class: book / scholarly study + translation.
5. Karl H. Potter (ed.). Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Vol. 3: [[advaita-vedanta|Advaita Vedānta]] up to Śaṃkara and His Pupils. Princeton, 1981. Source class: book / scholarly reference.
6. John Grimes. The Vivekacudamani of Sankaracarya Bhagavatpada. Ashgate, 2004. Source class: primary text + commentary.

Lenses still to grow

• Śaṅkara’s debates — the traditional accounts of his disputations with Maṇḍana Miśra, Bhāskara, and the Buddhists.
• The four maṭhas — Sringeri, Dwaraka, Puri, Jyotirmath — as continuing institutions.
• The Daśanāmī monastic order — Śaṅkara’s continuing monastic lineage.
• Śaṅkara’s hymns as devotional poetry in their own right.
• Comparative work with [[meister-eckhart|Eckhart]] — the Otto study and the subsequent comparative tradition.