Adi Shankara

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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.

The bare facts of his life are thin and much of the surviving biography is hagiography written long after. Tradition places his birth in Kerala, in the south, and holds that he renounced the world as a boy, studied under a teacher in the Advaita line, composed his major works, debated rival philosophers across the subcontinent, founded monastic centers at its four cardinal points, and died young, near thirty-two. Scholarship can fix little of this with confidence; the commentaries themselves are firmer ground than the legend. What is not in doubt is the body of writing: a commentary on the Brahma Sutras, commentaries on the principal Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, and shorter treatises, of which several attributed to him are now thought to be by other hands.

His teaching turns on a single distinction. Brahman — the absolute, pure being and awareness without limit — is the one reality; 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 way a coiled rope is mistaken in dim light for a snake. The individual self, ātman, is not a portion of brahman or a creature joined to it but brahman itself, mistaken about its own nature. 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. The great Upanishadic sentence tat tvam asi, “that thou art,” is read by him as a statement of plain identity.

The position was contested from within the tradition as much as from outside it. Later Vedāntins — Rāmānuja above all — held that Shankara’s absolute, drained of all qualities and relation, left no room for a personal God or for genuine devotion, and built rival systems in which the self remains distinct from the divine it loves. Advaita and these qualified non-dualisms have argued the point ever since.

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 — a resemblance the Theosophical and comparative literature pressed hard. The likeness is real and has its own long history of notice. It is also a likeness across very different vocabularies, and each side means something exact by its own terms.

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

→ Related: Gnosis · The One · Neoplatonism