Adi Shankracharya

Upon the death of his mother, a young sanyasin defies tradition to perform her funeral rites. The upholders of tradition are appalled, but he doesn’t give a damn. It was his mother, and she had every right to a decent funeral. The incident typifies the character of Shankracharya who was at once the rescuer of Vedic knowledge, a reviver of Hinduism which had become stagnant in his days, a social and political reformer, and above all a philosopher of outstanding merit who achieved in a very short life years of life, what a long line of generations fail to achieve.

Dr. S. Radhakrishnan summed up the personality of Shankara succinctly: “He is a philosopher and a poet, a savant and a saint, a mystic and a religious reformer.  Such diverse gifts did he possess that different images present themselves, if we try to recall his personality. One sees him in youth, on fire with intellectual ambition, a stiff and intrepid debater’ another regards him as a shrewd political genius, attempting to impress on the people a sense of unity; for a third, he is a calm philosopher engaged in the single effort to expose the contradictions of life and thought with an unmatched incisiveness; for fourth, he is the mystic who declares that we are all greater than we know. There have been few minds more universal than this.”¹

Shankara’s dates are not certain. Some sources suggest that he lived in the middle or the end of the sixth century AD, while others, say he lived in the seventh century, and some even say in the eighth. What is certain is that he belonged to the Namboodiri sect of Brahmins of Malabar in Kerala, and was born at a place called Kaladi. As the little Shankara grew he was sent to a Vedic School where he was taught by Govinda, who was himself the pupil of the famous sage Gaudapada. The little boy, soon mastered the ancient scriptures, renounced the world and became a wanderer. The length and breadth covered by Shankara, from Kerala to Kashmir, and from Dwarka to Kolkata in the days when there were hardly any roads is itself a remarkable achievement which often goes unnoticed. 

Like most great men, Shankara was a product of his age, and his age was the age of turmoil: Buddhism was on the decline, Jainism was on its peak, and Hinduism had reached its nadir, and few believed it could ever be revived. And yet, Shankara did exactly that. He not only weeded out the useless and pernicious baggage that Hinduism had accrued over the centuries, but he also reinterpreted the entire philosophical system in his celebrated commentaries, about twenty of them, thus restoring Hinduism’s lost glory.

In an age dominated by rituals and sacrifices, Shankara came up with his Advaita Vedanta, a concept which was not exactly his own as we find it in the Upanishads as well, but what Shankara did was to interpret it in his unique style. Vedanta is the name given to the great thought that was produced after the Vedas were composed, hence Veda+ anta, that is, at the end of the Vedas. In Indian as well as Western philosophy, to put it very simply, there are two dominant schools of thought: those that believe that the world is dual, matter and spirit, subject and object and so on. These are called dvaitins (dualists). And the others who do not make this distinction and say that all is one, are called advaitins (non-dualists).

Shankara’s philosophy is called Advaita because he tries to explain all things, the real world and the immaterial entities like souls as aspects of Brahman. All the plurality that we see in the world is the manifestation of maya (illusion),  but the Absolute or Brahman is one, and it has no second, advitiya. It is the Absolute Spirit which is infinite and eternal, it is beyond the confines of time-space, it is pure consciousness and supreme bliss: Sat Chit Ananda.

But to ask questions, as most of us do, like what does this Brahman look like, where does he reside and so on, are meaningless for the Absolute is absolutely indeterminate (anirachanya) and non-dual. It is beyond spirit and mind. It is indescribable because it is beyond the  categories of understanding. We understand things in terms of the properties they have, properties such as the shape they have, th

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