Adi Shankara

Adi Shankara, or Shankaracharya, was an Indian philosopher and monk, probably of the early eighth century CE, who became the best-known teacher of Advaita Vedanta, the non-dualist reading of the Upanishads. He argued that the individual self and the ultimate reality, Brahman, are one and the same, and that the world of separate things is an appearance produced by ignorance. Today he is often presented as the greatest of Indian philosophers and the reviver of Hinduism, though historians stress that much of that image was built centuries after his death.

The sources for Shankara's life are late. The traditional biographies, called Shankara-vijayas, "Shankara's conquests", date mostly from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries and contradict each other on many points. Monasteries that claim descent from him have assigned him dates as early as the fifth century BCE. Scholars of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries settled on 788 to 820 CE, a date still widely repeated. More recent scholarship generally places him in the first half of the eighth century, roughly 700 to 750, because his works answer Buddhist and Mimamsa thinkers of the sixth and seventh centuries, while a commentary on him by Vachaspati Mishra dates from the ninth.

There is a further puzzle. Shankara seems to have been fairly little known in his own lifetime. Contemporary Buddhist and Jain writers do not mention him, and for two centuries the leading Advaita thinker was his older contemporary Mandana Mishra. His towering reputation grew from around the fourteenth century, when the monastery of Sringeri, enjoying the patronage of the Vijayanagara Empire, promoted him as the founder of its tradition.

According to the hagiographies, Shankara was born to a Brahmin family in Kaladi, in today's Kerala. His father died when he was a child. Drawn to renunciation from an early age, he is said to have won his reluctant mother's permission while a crocodile held his foot in a river. He then travelled north and became the disciple of Govinda Bhagavatpada, himself said to be a pupil of Gaudapada, the author of an early non-dualist work.

The stories describe him writing his great commentaries while still young, then touring the whole of India to defeat rival thinkers in public debate: Mimamsa ritualists, followers of other Vedanta schools, Buddhists and Jains. In one famous episode he defeats Mandana Mishra, who becomes his disciple. He is credited with founding four monasteries, at Sringeri in the south, Dvaraka in the west, Puri in the east and Jyotirmath near Badrinath in the north, and with organising the Dashanami order of monks. Most accounts say he died aged about 32, many placing his death at Kedarnath in the Himalayas. Historians treat these episodes as tradition rather than established fact; the founding of the monasteries, in particular, is uncertain.

Vedanta is the school of interpretation based on the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras. Shankara's version holds that Brahman, pure consciousness and being, is the only ultimate reality, and that the atman, the true self in each person, is identical with it. Great Upanishadic sayings such as "you are that" express this identity.

Why, then, do we experience a world of many separate beings? Shankara's answer is avidya, ignorance, which works through superimposition: we project the features of one thing onto another, as when a rope in dim light is mistaken for a snake. In the same way we confuse the self with body, mind and personal ego, and see the one Brahman as a world of distinct objects. This appearance is often called maya. The world is not simply nothing; it is real at the level of everyday experience, but not at the highest level, rather as a dream is real while it lasts.

Liberation, moksha, therefore comes from knowledge, not from ritual or good works alone. Ethical discipline, renunciation and meditation prepare the mind, but what frees a person is the direct realisation, gained above all through hearing and reflecting on the Upanishads, that they were always Brahman. For Shankara, scripture was the decisive source of this knowledge, and reasoning served to remove doubts and defend the reading against rivals.

More than three hundred texts are attributed to Shankara, but most are probably the work of later followers or of others who bore the same title. Scholars generally accept as genuine his commentary on the Brahma Sutras, his commentaries on the ten principal Upanishads, his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, and the Upadeshasahasri, "A Thousand Teachings", an independent treatise. The popular Vivekachudamani, "Crest-Jewel of Discrimination", is now mostly regarded as later. Many devotional hymns credited to him are also doubtful.

Shankara's writings argue against the Samkhya school, against Mimamsa, which made Vedic ritual the heart of religion, and against Buddhist schools, especially the idealists who held that only consciousness exists. Yet his rivals noticed similarities between his doctrine of appearance and Buddhist ideas, including the emptiness teaching of Nagarjuna, and some later Vedantins called him a "crypto-Buddhist". Scholars still discuss how far Advaita absorbed Buddhist methods, though Shankara's affirmation of an eternal, real self sharply separates him from Buddhism.

His followers Padmapada and Sureshvara founded lines of interpretation that developed into a long scholastic tradition. Later Vedanta teachers built opposing systems in reaction: Ramanuja's qualified non-dualism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and Madhva's dualism in the thirteenth both rejected the idea that the world and personal God are less than fully real.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reformers such as Vivekananda presented Advaita as the essence of Hindu thought, and it became central to how Hinduism was explained to the West. The heads of the monasteries associated with him still bear the title Shankaracharya. Whatever the historical Shankara's standing in his own time, he is now a central figure of Indian philosophy and of the religious history of India.