Adi Shankara

← Encyclopedia

Adi Shankara was the Indian philosopher and teacher, active around the eighth century CE, who gave Advaita Vedānta — the non-dual reading of the Upanishads — its definitive systematic shape. The honorific Adi, “the first,” distinguishes him from the later heads of the monastic orders that trace their lineage to him: each cardinal seat is governed by a Shankaracharya, a title held in succession down to the present, and the prefix marks the original teacher off from the office that bears his name. That office is not the man. The earliest figure who can be fixed by record at the head of one of those seats, the Sringeri lineage, is Vidyaranya in the fourteenth century; the five centuries between him and the founder are reconstructed by the institutions themselves, projected backward onto a date — 788 to 820, in the standard southern reckoning — that the tradition holds and the documentary trail cannot reach.

A life mostly in legend

The bare facts of his life are thin and much of the surviving biography is hagiography written long after. The fullest of these accounts, the Śaṅkaradigvijaya (“Shankara’s conquest of the directions”) ascribed to Mādhava, is itself a late composition, a victory-narrative in which the philosopher traverses the subcontinent defeating rival schools in disputation. Tradition places his birth at Kaladi in Kerala, in the south, to a Brahmin family, and holds that he renounced the world as a boy — by one telling, securing his mother’s consent at the edge of a river only when a crocodile seized his leg and he vowed to take the robe of a sannyāsin if released. He is said to have traveled north to study under Govinda, a teacher in the Advaita line who was himself a pupil of Gauḍapāda, the author of the verse commentary on the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad that the tradition treats as Advaita’s seed-text. He composed his major works, debated rival philosophers across the subcontinent — the ritualist Maṇḍana Miśra among them — founded monastic centers at the four cardinal points of the land, and died young, near thirty-two.

Scholarship can fix little of this with confidence; the dates swing across two or three centuries depending on which synchronism is trusted, and the cardinal-seat foundations, like the long abbatial lineages attached to them, belong to a layer of institutional self-history laid down well after the events it narrates. The commentaries themselves are firmer ground than the legend. What is not in doubt is the body of writing. The core is a commentary, a bhāṣya, on the Brahma Sutras — Bādarāyaṇa’s terse aphorisms summarizing Upanishadic teaching — together with commentaries on the principal Upanishads and on the Bhagavad Gita. These three — sutra, Upanishad, Gita — form the prasthāna-traya, the “threefold foundation” that any Vedānta school must expound to establish itself, and Shankara’s commentaries on all three are the act by which Advaita became a system rather than a tendency. Around this core stand shorter treatises, the prakaraṇas, of which several long attributed to him are now thought to be by other hands; the Vivekachūdāmani, the “crest-jewel of discrimination,” is the most famous of the doubted works, while the Upadeśasāhasrī, the “thousand teachings,” is among the few independent treatises modern philology accepts as securely his.

The single distinction

His teaching turns on a single distinction. Brahman — the absolute, pure being and awareness without limit — is the one reality. It is not a being among beings, not the largest item in an inventory of things, but that which simply is, designated in the tradition as sat-cit-ānanda, being, consciousness, and bliss, three words for one undivided whatever-it-is that admits no internal parts and no external other. The changing world of multiplicity is, in his vocabulary, māyā: neither simply real nor simply unreal but a misperception laid over what truly is. The standing image is a coiled rope mistaken in dim light for a snake. The snake is not nothing — the fright it causes is genuine, the recoil real — yet there was never a snake; when the lamp is brought, the snake is not destroyed but found never to have existed. Māyā has exactly this status: it cannot be called real, since it vanishes under knowledge, nor unreal, since it is undeniably experienced. It is, in the school’s precise term, anirvacanīya, “indescribable” as either.

The individual self, ātman, is not a portion of brahman or a creature joined to it but brahman itself, mistaken about its own nature. The error has a name — adhyāsa, superimposition, the cognitive act by which the qualities of one thing are laid over another, as redness from a flower seems to color the crystal beside it. What is superimposed onto the limitless self is limitation: a body, a mind, a biography, a death. Strip the superimposition and nothing remains to be found except what was there all along. Liberation, on this account, is therefore not an attainment but a correction: the removal of ignorance, avidyā, so that what was always the case is recognized. Nothing is added to the self in liberation, because the self lacked nothing; nothing is reached, because there was nowhere the self was not. The great Upanishadic sentence tat tvam asi, “that thou art” — spoken in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad by a father to his son — is read by Shankara not as a metaphor of closeness or a promise of future union but as a statement of plain identity, present-tense and already true. The mahāvākyas, the “great sentences” of the Upanishads that assert this identity, are for Advaita not devotional formulae but the very means of knowledge, words whose comprehension is the liberating cognition.

This is why Advaita treats scripture, śruti, as a pramāṇa — a valid means of knowing — rather than as a record of belief. The identity of self and brahman is not the kind of thing the senses can deliver or inference establish, since both operate within the very duality of knower and known that the teaching dissolves; it can be disclosed only by a word that says it. Reason has its office, but a negative one: it clears away the rival construals, the misreadings that would make brahman a maker, a person, a cause among causes. What reason cannot do is reach the conclusion under its own power. The knowledge that ends ignorance comes by hearing, and by the long settling of what is heard.

The contest within Vedānta

The position was contested from within the tradition as much as from outside it. Later Vedāntins — Rāmānuja above all, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries — held that Shankara’s absolute, drained of all qualities and relation, left no room for a personal God or for genuine devotion. On Rāmānuja’s reading the Upanishads do not teach a featureless brahman behind an illusory world; they teach a brahman whose body is the world and the souls within it, real and dependent, distinguished yet never separable — viśiṣṭādvaita, “qualified non-dualism,” non-duality but of a brahman possessed of attributes. Where Shankara makes the personal Lord, Īśvara, a true but provisional appearance of the attributeless absolute, suited to worship but superseded in final knowledge, Rāmānuja makes the Lord the absolute itself, and devotion not a ladder to be kicked away but the standing relation of the soul to the God it loves. Madhva, two centuries later, pressed the objection further into outright dvaita, dualism: the soul is eternally distinct from God, and the talk of identity is talk of dependence misheard as sameness. Advaita and these qualified and frank dualisms have argued the point ever since, across a vast scholastic literature, and the dispute is among the longest-running in Indian philosophy. It is also genuinely open in the technical sense that each side reads the same texts and finds its own doctrine there; the quarrel is over what the prasthāna-traya says, and the Brahma Sutras are terse enough to bear all three commentaries.

After Shankara the school itself divided over how the central error is to be located. The Bhāmatī line, descending from Vācaspati Miśra, placed avidyā in the individual soul and made hearing of the great sentence the start of a long meditative settling; the Vivaraṇa line, systematized by Vidyaranya in the fourteenth century, located avidyā in brahman itself and held the great sentence to produce liberating knowledge directly. The technical disagreements are fine, but they show that “Advaita” after its founder is a tradition of commentators arguing inside a shared frame, not a fixed deposit — and that the figure the honorific Adi sets apart is the origin of a conversation, not its last word.

The corpus in critical and public-domain editions

The text-critical recovery of Shankara is a modern project, and a narrower one than the volume of works circulating under his name would suggest. The decisive labor has been to separate the genuine bhāṣyas — above all the Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya, the prasthāna-traya commentaries, and the Upadeśasāhasrī — from the great drift of later prakaraṇas and devotional hymns attributed to him by a tradition that honored him by ascription. Sengaku Mayeda’s edition and study of the Upadeśasāhasrī set the philological criteria by which the authentic corpus is now assessed, and on those criteria several beloved texts, the Vivekachūdāmani foremost, fall outside it.

For the English reader the foundational document remains George Thibaut’s translation of the Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya, issued in Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East as volumes 34 and 38 — the second completing the work in 1896 — and still the only full rendering into English of Shankara’s commentary on the sutras. The site hosts it in the Vedânta-Sûtras with Śankara’s Commentary; Thibaut’s introduction is itself a landmark, the place where a European Indologist first laid Shankara’s and Rāmānuja’s readings of the sutras side by side and weighed which the aphorist had likelier intended. Among the prakaraṇas, Charles Johnston’s 1925 Crest-Jewel of Wisdom, hosted as the Crest-Jewel of Wisdom, renders the Vivekachūdāmani in a frankly Theosophical register — Johnston was a member of the Theosophical Society — and stands as both a translation and a reception document, an artifact of the late conduit through which Advaita reached the West. The Gita Shankara commented on can be read in the same library through K. T. Telang’s Bhagavadgîtâ, the Indological standard of its generation.

The modern critical and reference literature is dense and almost entirely outside the public domain. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Śaṅkara treats him as the systematizer rather than the founder of a school already underway in Gauḍapāda, and lays out the metaphysics, the theory of consciousness, and the epistemology of testimony in current analytic terms. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Advaita Vedānta covers the same ground from the doctrinal side, including the Bhāmatī–Vivaraṇa split. Natalia Isayeva’s Shankara and Indian Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) is the standard single-author study in English that reads him both against his Indian interlocutors and against the Western philosophers to whom comparison has so persistently drawn him.

The Neoplatonic likeness

His reach extends well past India. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers in Europe and America, encountering Advaita through translation, found in it a metaphysics strikingly close to the Neoplatonic One and to the contemplative strands of Western mysticism. The comparison was pressed hard, and from more than one quarter. Arthur Schopenhauer read the Upanishads in Anquetil-Duperron’s Latin and folded their non-dualism into his own metaphysics of will and representation. Paul Deussen, his admirer, gave Advaita its first full German systematic exposition in The System of the Vedânta (1912) — Englished, as it happened, by Charles Johnston — explicitly construing Shankara as a Kantian-Schopenhauerian idealist avant la lettre. The Theosophical and comparative literature drew the line the furthest, setting Shankara’s brahman beside Plotinus’s One, beside Meister Eckhart’s ground of the soul that is one with the ground of God, beside the gnosis of the late antique seekers, and reading them all as the single perennial philosophy speaking in many tongues. The Neo-Vedānta of the reform era — the Vedānta of the Brahmo Samaj substrate and of Vivekananda after it — both absorbed this comparison and propelled it, presenting Advaita to the West as a monism at once ancient and answerable to modern reason, and seeding in turn the Neo-Advaita of the later satsang teachers.

The likeness is genuine, and so are the differences a comparison must hold open: Plotinus’s One overflows into being and the One is beyond being, where Shankara’s brahman is being and does not emanate anything at all; Eckhart’s ground is reached through a God it must finally let go of, where Shankara’s self was never other than brahman to begin with. But the comparison’s deepest pull lies elsewhere, in a shared shape of the goal. For each of these itineraries the end is not the acquisition of a new state but the falling-away of a misapprehension — and here Shankara’s own logic supplies the last word more exactly than any parallel. On his account the liberated person gains nothing in liberation and travels nowhere to find it. There is no journey, because the self was never in exile; there is no prize, because the self lacked nothing it could be given. What ends is only the long mistaking of the self for what it is not — the lamp brought to the rope, and the snake that was never there.

→ In the library: The Vedânta-Sûtras with Śankara's Commentary (Thibaut, 1896) · The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom (Johnston, 1925) · The Bhagavadgîtâ (Telang, SBE 8, 1882)

→ Related: Gnosis · The One · Neoplatonism · Brahman · Bhagavad Gita · Vedanta Advaita Visistadvaita Dvaita · Hindu Vedanta Tantra · Neo Vedanta · Neo Advaita · Vidyaranya · Brahmo Samaj · Theosophy · Monism · Mysticism · Meister Eckhart