Ādi Śaṅkara

Ādi Śaṅkara — Śaṅkarācārya, “the teacher Śaṅkara”, or Śaṅkara Bhagavatpāda — is the most influential philosopher in the history of Hinduism and, for many, the greatest metaphysician India has produced. He systematized Advaita Vedānta, “non-dual Vedānta”: the teaching that the ultimate reality, Brahman, is one without a second; that the individual self (ātman) is not different from Brahman; and that the world of multiplicity is an appearance (māyā) superimposed on Brahman through ignorance (avidyā). Liberation (mokṣa), he taught, comes not through ritual action or devotion alone but through knowledge (jñāna) — the direct realization, awakened by the scriptures, that “I am Brahman”.

His commentaries on the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gītā and the Brahma Sūtras became the foundation of a school that dominates Indian philosophy to this day and, through Vivekananda and others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, came to represent “Hindu philosophy” to the world. His half-legendary life — a boy renunciant who crossed India on foot, defeated rival philosophers in debate, founded monasteries at its four corners, and died at thirty-two — is one of the great hagiographies of Indian tradition.

Dates and sources

When did he live?

Śaṅkara’s dates are uncertain. The widely accepted scholarly range is the late seventh to early eighth century CE — often c. 700–750 (the traditional date of 788–820 CE is also commonly given). Some Advaita monasteries claim dates as early as the fifth century BCE, which modern scholars reject. Hajime Nakamura’s influential study placed him around 700–750.

What did he write?

Hundreds of works have been attributed to Śaṅkara, but scholars (beginning with Paul Hacker, and later Sengaku Mayeda) have shown that most are later compositions by followers. The works almost certainly authentic are:

• Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya — the commentary on Bādarāyaṇa’s Brahma Sūtras, his masterpiece;
• commentaries (bhāṣyas) on the principal Upanishads — Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Chāndogya, Taittirīya, Aitareya, Īśa, Kena, Kaṭha, Praśna, Muṇḍaka, Māṇḍūkya (with Gauḍapāda’s Kārikā);
• the commentary on the The Bhagavad Gītā (Gītā-bhāṣya), whose authenticity is widely accepted;
• the Upadeśasāhasrī (“A Thousand Teachings”), an independent treatise on teaching Advaita.

Many beloved devotional hymns (the Bhaja Govindam, Saundaryalaharī, Nirvāṇa Ṣaṭkam) and popular texts like the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi (“Crest-Jewel of Discrimination”) are traditionally attributed to him but are probably later.

The hagiographies

Our stories of his life come from the Śaṅkara-vijayas (“Conquests of Śaṅkara”), Sanskrit hagiographies written many centuries later (the best known, attributed to Mādhava-Vidyāraṇya, dates from around the fourteenth to seventeenth century). They are legend, not history — but legend that tells us how the tradition understood him.

The life (as tradition tells it)

Kālaḍi

Śaṅkara was born in Kālaḍi, a village in Kerala on the banks of the Pūrṇā (Periyar) river, to a Nambūdiri Brahmin couple, Śivaguru and Āryāmbā, who had prayed for a son to Śiva at the temple of Vaḍakkunnāthan in Trichur. Śiva offered them a choice: many dull sons who would live long, or one brilliant son who would die young. They chose the one.

His father died when he was a small child. A prodigy, he mastered the Vedas by eight. He longed to become a saṃnyāsin, a renunciant, but his mother refused.

The crocodile

One day, bathing in the river, the boy was seized by a crocodile. He called to his mother: the crocodile would let go only if she allowed him to renounce. In terror, she agreed; the crocodile released him. Śaṅkara promised his mother that he would return to perform her funeral rites, whatever the rules of renunciation — and later did, despite the opposition of the local Brahmins, cremating her himself in the backyard of their house.

Govinda and the Narmadā

He travelled north and found his guru, Govindapāda (Govinda Bhagavatpāda), in a cave on the banks of the Narmadā river. Govinda was the disciple of Gauḍapāda, author of the Māṇḍūkya Kārikā, the earliest surviving systematic Advaita text. According to legend, when Govinda asked who he was, the boy answered with the ten verses now known as the Daśaślokī: “I am not earth, nor water, nor fire, nor air, nor space… I am the one, auspicious, the remainder — Śiva.” In one story, when the Narmadā flooded, Śaṅkara contained the waters in his water-pot.

Kāśī and the caṇḍāla

Śaṅkara went to Vārāṇasī (Kāśī), the holy city on the Ganges, where he wrote his great commentaries and gathered disciples. The most famous story of his life is set there. On the way to bathe in the Ganges, he met a caṇḍāla — an outcaste, untouchable — with four dogs, and told him to step aside. The man replied:

Do you want this body, made of food, to move away from another body made of food? Or do you want consciousness to move away from consciousness? Is there a difference between the sun reflected in the Ganges and the sun reflected in a puddle in the outcastes’ quarter?

Śaṅkara, struck, bowed to him as his guru and composed the five verses of the Manīṣā Pañcakam, each ending: “He who has attained this vision, whether he is a caṇḍāla or a Brahmin — he is my guru: this is my conviction.” In later tradition the outcaste is revealed as Śiva, and the four dogs as the four Vedas.

Debates

Śaṅkara travelled throughout India in a digvijaya (“conquest of the directions”), debating Buddhists, Jains, Mīmāṃsakas, Sāṃkhyas, Tantrikas and others. The most famous debate was with Maṇḍana Miśra, a great scholar of Mīmāṃsā (the school of Vedic ritual interpretation), in his home at Māhiṣmatī — judged, according to legend, by Maṇḍana’s wife Ubhaya Bhāratī, herself a scholar, who placed garlands on both debaters: the one whose garland withered first would lose. Maṇḍana’s garland withered; he became Śaṅkara’s disciple Sureśvara. But Ubhaya Bhāratī challenged Śaṅkara herself, questioning him on the art of love (kāma-śāstra), of which the celibate monk knew nothing. Śaṅkara asked for a month, entered — in the legend — the dead body of a king, Amaruka, by yogic power, learned the arts of love in the royal harem, and returned to win the debate.

(Historically, Maṇḍana Miśra was an independent Advaita philosopher whose views differed from Śaṅkara’s, and modern scholars doubt that he was Sureśvara.)

The four maṭhas

Śaṅkara is credited with founding four monasteries (maṭhas) at the four corners of India, each headed by one of his chief disciples and associated with one of the Vedas:

Direction	Maṭha	Location	Veda
South	Śṛṅgeri Śāradā Pīṭham	Karnataka	Yajurveda
West	Dvārakā Śāradā Pīṭham	Gujarat	Sāmaveda
East	Govardhana Pīṭham	Purī, Odisha	Ṛgveda
North	Jyotir Maṭh	near Badrinath, Uttarakhand	Atharvaveda

The heads of these maṭhas still bear the title Śaṅkarācārya. (A fifth, at Kāñcīpuram, also claims foundation by him.) He is also credited with organizing the Daśanāmī (“ten names”) order of renunciants, whose members take one of ten suffixes — Giri, Purī, Bhāratī, Sarasvatī, Tīrtha and others — still used by Hindu monks today.

Death

Śaṅkara is said to have died at thirty-two — at Kedārnāth in the Himalayas, according to most traditions (his samādhi shrine there was destroyed in the 2013 floods and later rebuilt), or at Kāñcīpuram.

The background: Vedānta and its rivals

The Upanishads

Vedānta means “the end of the Veda” — the Upanishads, the philosophical texts at the end of the Vedic corpus. Their central teaching is the identity of the innermost Self (ātman) with the ground of all being (Brahman), expressed in the four great sayings (mahāvākyas) — see Ātman is Brahman:

• prajñānaṃ brahma — “Consciousness is Brahman” (Aitareya 3.3)
• ahaṃ brahmāsmi — “I am Brahman” (Bṛhadāraṇyaka 1.4.10)
• tat tvam asi — “That thou art” (Chāndogya 6.8.7; see Tat Tvam Asi — Salt in Water)
• ayam ātmā brahma — “This Self is Brahman” (Māṇḍūkya 2)

But the Upanishads also contain passages that seem to describe Brahman as a personal creator, the world as real, and the soul as distinct. Reconciling them is the task of Vedānta. The Brahma Sūtras of Bādarāyaṇa (perhaps early centuries CE) systematize Upanishadic teaching in 555 terse aphorisms — so terse that only commentary makes them intelligible. The Upanishads, the Brahma Sūtras and the Bhagavad Gītā form the prasthāna-traya, the “triple foundation” every Vedāntin must interpret. See Vedānta.

Rivals

Śaṅkara’s commentaries are full of polemic against:

• Pūrva Mīmāṃsā — the ritualists, who held that the Veda’s purpose is to enjoin action (sacrifice) and that liberation comes through performing duties. Śaṅkara: the Upanishads teach not action but knowledge of an existing reality, Brahman.
• Sāṃkhya — a dualist school positing two ultimate realities, consciousness (puruṣa) and matter (prakṛti). Śaṅkara: unconscious matter cannot be the cause of an ordered world.
• Buddhists — whose doctrines of momentariness and no-self (see Gautama Buddha and Anattā (No-Self)) he attacked, especially the Yogācāra “mind-only” idealism — even though his own doctrine of the world’s unreality was accused of resembling theirs.
• Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika — the logicians and atomists.

The doctrines

Brahman

Brahman is the one ultimate reality. It is sat-cit-ānanda — being, consciousness, bliss — not as three properties, but as what Brahman is. It is nirguṇa: without qualities, attributes or distinctions — “not this, not this” (neti neti, as Yājñavalkya taught). It is not an object of knowledge, since it is the knower itself; it is self-luminous (svaprakāśa) consciousness, the witness (sākṣin) of all experience.

Brahman with qualities (saguṇa) — God as creator, sustainer and destroyer, the Lord (Īśvara) who is the object of devotion — is real from the practical standpoint, but is Brahman as conceived through the limiting adjuncts of māyā.

Ātman is Brahman

The individual self (jīva) — the embodied, limited, suffering person who thinks “I am this body, these thoughts, this history” — is really nothing other than Brahman. The jīva appears separate only because of its limiting adjuncts (upādhis) — body, senses, mind, intellect — just as the space inside a pot appears separate from space as a whole. Break the pot, and the “pot-space” is seen to have always been the one space (ghaṭākāśa — the pot-space analogy). Or: one sun reflected in many pools of water appears as many suns; the reflections tremble with the water, but the sun is unmoved.

Superimposition

The Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya begins with a famous introduction on adhyāsa — superimposition:

It is a matter not requiring any proof that the object and the subject — whose spheres are the notion of the “you” and the “I”, and which are by nature as opposed as darkness and light — cannot be identified. All the more can their attributes not be identified… Nevertheless, it is a natural procedure of the world, rooted in false knowledge, to superimpose each on the other, and their attributes on each other, mixing up the real and the unreal, and to say “I am this”, “this is mine”.

Superimposition is “the apparent presentation, in the form of remembrance, of something previously observed, in some other thing”. The classic example: in dim light, a rope is mistaken for a snake (rajju-sarpa). We see a snake; we are afraid; we tremble. When light comes, we see the rope — and realize there never was a snake. Similarly, through ignorance, we superimpose the world, the body and the individual ego on Brahman, and Brahman’s consciousness on the body and mind. Knowledge does not create Brahman or change anything real; it removes the error.

Other classic images: mother-of-pearl mistaken for silver; a mirage of water in the desert; a post mistaken for a man in the dark; the dream world that vanishes on waking.

Māyā and avidyā

The world, then, is māyā — see Māyā. Śaṅkara himself uses the word avidyā (ignorance) more often than māyā; later Advaitins developed the theory of māyā more fully. Crucially, the world is not simply unreal like a “hare’s horn” or “a barren woman’s son” (things that cannot exist at all). Nor is it real in the way Brahman is real (unchanging, uncontradicted). It is anirvacanīya — “indescribable” as either real or unreal. It is real enough to be experienced and acted in; but it is “sublated” (bādhita) — contradicted and cancelled — by knowledge of Brahman, as the snake is sublated by seeing the rope.

The famous half-verse traditionally attributed to Śaṅkara sums it up:

Brahma satyaṃ jagan mithyā, jīvo brahmaiva nāparaḥ. Brahman is real; the world is illusory; the individual self is nothing but Brahman.

Two levels of truth

To make sense of both the Upanishadic texts that describe a real world and a personal God and those that deny all difference, Śaṅkara distinguishes levels of reality:

Level	Sanskrit	What is real at this level
Ultimate	pāramārthika	Brahman alone, without distinctions
Empirical / practical	vyāvahārika	The world, individual souls, God as creator, duties, scriptures, the path
Illusory	prātibhāsika	Dreams, the snake in the rope

From the practical standpoint — where all of us live until liberation — the world is perfectly real; ethics, ritual, devotion and scripture all apply. Śaṅkara is not a world-denier in everyday life; he insists that castes, duties and the authority of the Veda hold vyāvahārika. But from the ultimate standpoint, “there is no dissolution, no creation, none bound, none striving, none seeking liberation, none liberated” (Gauḍapāda, Kārikā 2.32).

The authority of scripture

How can one know Brahman, which is not an object? Not by perception or inference, which deal only with objects; but by scripture (śruti, the Veda, especially the Upanishads), which is the only valid means of knowledge (pramāṇa) for Brahman. The mahāvākyas, heard from a qualified teacher, reflected upon and meditated on — śravaṇa (hearing), manana (reflection), nididhyāsana (contemplation) — awaken the direct realization that one is Brahman. Reason has a role — to remove doubts and refute objections — but cannot by itself establish Brahman. This sets Śaṅkara apart from Western rationalists and connects him to theologians: see the Faith vs. Reason.

Knowledge, not action

Against the Mīmāṃsakas, Śaṅkara argues that liberation comes from knowledge alone, not from action (karma) or even from a combination of knowledge and action. Action — ritual or moral — produces results (heaven, merit) that are impermanent; Brahman is not produced. Action presupposes the distinctions (agent, action, result) that knowledge dissolves. Ethical action and devotion are, however, valuable preparation: they purify the mind (citta-śuddhi), making it fit for knowledge.

The qualifications for the seeker (adhikārin) are the “fourfold means” (sādhana-catuṣṭaya): discrimination between the eternal and the non-eternal (viveka); dispassion toward enjoyment here and hereafter (vairāgya); the six virtues — calm, self-control, withdrawal, forbearance, faith, concentration; and longing for liberation (mumukṣutva).

Jīvanmukti

Liberation is not something attained after death in another world. One can be liberated while living — a jīvanmukta. After realization, the body continues for a while, carried by the momentum of past karma that has already begun to bear fruit (prārabdha), like a potter’s wheel that keeps spinning after the potter stops. But the liberated person is no longer identified with it. At death, there is no further rebirth.

Śaṅkara on the Bhagavad Gītā

Śaṅkara’s Gītā-commentary is the oldest surviving. He reads the Gītā as teaching that knowledge is the means to liberation, and that action without attachment (karma-yoga) purifies the mind for knowledge. When Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna that the Self “is not slain when the body is slain” (2.20), Śaṅkara takes this as the core teaching: the Self is actionless, and one who knows this is free. This reading — knowledge over action and devotion — was later contested by Rāmānuja (devotion) and, in modern times, by Tilak and Gandhi (action). See The Bhagavad Gītā.

Objections

Rāmānuja’s seven untenabilities

The most famous critique came from Rāmānuja (eleventh–twelfth century), founder of Viśiṣṭādvaita — see Śaṅkara vs. Rāmānuja. In the Śrī Bhāṣya he lists “seven untenabilities” (saptavidha anupapatti) of the Advaita doctrine of avidyā, including:

1. Locus. Where does ignorance reside? Not in Brahman, which is pure knowledge; not in the individual soul, which is itself a product of ignorance.
2. Nature. Ignorance cannot conceal Brahman, which is self-luminous.
3. Indescribability. Everything must be either real or unreal; “indescribable” is a contradiction.
4. Proof. No valid means of knowledge establishes such an ignorance.
5. Removal. If the knowledge that removes ignorance is itself part of the illusory world, how can it be effective?

Advaitins (Vācaspati Miśra, Prakāśātman and others) developed elaborate replies — e.g. that ignorance resides in the jīva and the jīva is produced by ignorance, in a beginningless cycle like seed and sprout.

Crypto-Buddhism

Rival Vedāntins, notably Madhva’s followers and Bhāskara, accused Śaṅkara of being a prachanna-bauddha — a “Buddhist in disguise” — because his doctrine of the world’s unreality and his dialectical style resemble Buddhist Madhyamaka and Yogācāra. Gauḍapāda’s Kārikā in particular uses Buddhist terminology. The difference, Advaitins insist, is fundamental: the Buddhists deny a permanent Self; Advaita affirms nothing but the Self.

Other objections

• The problem of the one and the many: if only Brahman is real, who is ignorant, who is bound, who is liberated? Śaṅkara’s answer — that the question arises only from within ignorance — strikes critics as evasive.
• Ethics: if the world and individuals are ultimately unreal, does moral action matter? Advaitins reply that ethics is binding at the practical level and indispensable for preparation.
• Caste: Śaṅkara held that only male members of the three upper castes could study the Vedas and so seek liberation through Vedānta in this life (Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya 1.3.34–38); the caṇḍāla story shows a different vision, which modern Advaitins have emphasized.

The Advaita tradition after Śaṅkara

Śaṅkara’s disciples Sureśvara and Padmapāda founded the two main sub-schools: the Bhāmatī school (from Vācaspati Miśra’s commentary, ninth–tenth century), which held that ignorance resides in individual souls; and the Vivaraṇa school (from Prakāśātman’s commentary on Padmapāda), which located ignorance in Brahman as its object. Later Advaitins — Śrīharṣa (twelfth century), whose Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya (“The Sweets of Refutation”) demolished the categories of the logicians; Vidyāraṇya (fourteenth century), associated with the Vijayanagara empire and the Śṛṅgeri maṭha, author of the Pañcadaśī; and Madhusūdana Sarasvatī (sixteenth century), who defended Advaita against the Dvaita of Madhva — refined the system.

Modern Advaita

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Advaita became the face of Hindu philosophy to the world: through Ramakrishna and his disciple Swami Vivekananda, whose speeches at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 presented Vedānta as a universal religion (“Neo-Vedānta”); through Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai, who taught self-inquiry (“Who am I?”); through Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher and President of India; and through Nisargadatta Maharaj. Western readers — Schopenhauer (who read the Upanishads in Latin), Emerson, Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy), Christopher Isherwood, Erwin Schrödinger (who wrote in the epilogue to What Is Life?, 1944, that the Upanishadic insight “Atman = Brahman” is regarded in Indian thought as “the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world”) — were drawn to it.

Śaṅkara in comparative perspective

• Parmenides: being is one, changeless; change and plurality are the “way of opinion”. The parallel is striking — but Parmenides argues from logic, Śaṅkara from scripture and experience.
• Plato: the Cave and the world of shadows; but Plato’s Forms are many, and the sensible world participates in them.
• Baruch Spinoza: one substance, God-or-Nature; but Spinoza’s substance has infinite real attributes, while Brahman has none.
• Immanuel Kant: phenomena and noumena; but for Kant the noumenon can never be known, while for Śaṅkara Brahman is realized as one’s own Self.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: the Absolute; but Hegel’s Absolute needs history and difference, while Brahman is beyond them.
• Meister Eckhart: the “Godhead” beyond God — Rudolf Otto’s Mysticism East and West (1926) compared Eckhart and Śaṅkara.
• Arthur Schopenhauer: the veil of Māyā as Kant’s world of appearances.

Key terms

Advaita

"Non-duality" — Brahman alone is real; the self is Brahman.

Brahman

The ultimate reality — being, consciousness, bliss.

Nirguṇa / saguṇa

Brahman without attributes / with attributes (as personal God, Īśvara).

Ātman

The Self — the witness-consciousness, identical with Brahman.

Jīva

The individual, embodied self.

Using Śaṅkara in conversation

• On illusion and fear: the snake and the rope — our terrors are often superimpositions on something harmless.
• On identity: the pot-space — the space in a pot was never separate from space itself.
• On caste and dignity: the caṇḍāla’s question — is it the body or the Self you want to move aside?
• On reality: “Brahman is real; the world is mithyā” — not nothing, but not ultimately real.