Sri Hastāmalaka

The man

Of the four disciples the tradition sets closest to Sri Śaṅkara, Sri Hastāmalaka is the one who said the least and is remembered for saying it. He was a boy in a village of Brahmins on the western coast, thought by his own father to be an idiot: he did not speak, did not play, did not learn his letters, did not flinch when other boys struck him. When Sri Śaṅkara came through the village the father brought the boy to him, and the teacher asked the boy who he was. The boy answered in twelve Sanskrit verses on the nature of the Self, each ending with the same line — “nityopalabdhisvarupo’ ham atma”, “I am the Self, whose nature is eternal awareness.” The teacher named him for the ease of it: the truth was to him, the poem says, “like an Amalaka fruit in one’s hand”. He followed the teacher from that day, and the tradition holds that he never composed another line, and that his teacher wrote a commentary on the twelve he had.

That is the whole of his story, and the Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭham’s volume on the preceptors of Advaita says plainly what kind of figure he is: “Unlike Suresvara and Padmapada who have left an indelible mark on the history of Advaitic thought, Hastamalaka and Totaka, two other direct disciples of Sri Sankara, have been revered more for what they were than for any works they have bequeathed to posterity.” He argued with no one, founded no school of interpretation, and left twelve verses that a reader can hold in one hand. But the tradition placed him among the four to whom, it says, the four seats of Advaita were given, and the reason is in the verses: they are the shortest complete statement of the Advaita teaching that the tradition possesses, and they were spoken, it says, by a child who had never been taught.

This page tells the story as the tradition tells it, and it says at each point which telling is speaking, because they differ — about his age, about the seat he was given, and even about which disciple bore the name Ānandagiri. It gives the twelve verses in full, in the translation the Sringeri Pīṭham publishes, and follows the commentary through them. It notes where scholars have doubted that the commentary is Sri Śaṅkara’s. And it asks, at the end, what a teaching that came without teaching has to say to a reader who must be taught.

The sources for this page, and what each can bear

• The Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya of Mādhava-Vidyāraṇya, in Swami Tapasyananda’s English translation (Sri Ramakrishna Math). Its twelfth canto tells the coming of the boy at Śrī Bali; its thirteenth tells the proposal that he write a commentary and the teacher’s account of who he had been; its third canto gives his birth as an incarnation of the wind-god. The Kanchi chapter also cites the Śaṅkara-vijaya of Vyāsācala for the same events and notes that its agreement with Mādhava’s “proves, not their authenticity so much as the dependence of the one on the other”. The poem is centuries later than the events, and the translator says so.
• The Sringeri Śāradā Pīṭham: its abridged Mādhavīya Śaṅkara Digvijayam, part four; its page on Sri Hastāmalakācārya among the primary disciples; and its page on the four Āmnāya Pīṭhams. These are the accounts of a living seat that traces itself to Sri Śaṅkara.
• The Sringeri Pīṭham’s Bhagavatpādīyam project, which publishes the twelve verses with an English translation of each and of the commentary attributed to Sri Śaṅkara, verse by verse. Every verse quoted on this page is from that translation.
• The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭham’s Preceptors of Advaita (1968), chapter 10, on Sri Hastāmalaka, which analyses the verses one by one and the commentary’s argument for liberation in this life; and chapter 11, on Sri Toṭaka, which gives the disciples’ names and the conventional dates. Chapter 10 also records that the tradition of the commentary’s authorship “has been disputed by scholars like Belvalkar”.
• The Sanskrit text as it circulates in a fourteen-verse form, with the teacher’s question and a preliminary answer, on the Sanskrit Documents site; and the 1910 Vani Vilas edition of the Works of Sri Sankaracharya, volume sixteen, in which the commentary is printed, and which the Kanchi chapter cites.
• The Govardhana Pīṭha at Puri on its own page, for its account of the four seats and its dating.
• The Advaita Vedanta Anusandhana Kendra for the lineage verse and the historians’ caution, and Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy for the name Ānandagiri in the literature.

Every quotation is word for word from one of these, and each is linked at the foot of the page where it is free to link. Where the scanned Digvijaya has been misread by the machine that copied it, the printed words have been restored and every restoration is recorded, as the closing note explains. Where the sources disagree, both are given.

Where the life was lived

One place in his life is named by every source, and it is the village where he was found. The Digvijaya calls it “a village of Brahmanas named Sri Bali”; the Kanchi chapter places it: “Sri Bali a brahmana village near Gokarna”; the Sringeri pages call it Sribali and Sri Bali. Gokarṇa is on the coast of what is now Karnataka, a temple town of great antiquity, and the Sringeri abridgement has Sri Śaṅkara come to the village after “Gokarna, Hari-Shankara (present-day Harihar where he sang eleven verses in praise of the combined form of Shiva and Vishnu), as well as Mookambika”. The pin on the map is set near Gokarṇa, and the caption says the village’s exact site is not fixed by the sources.

Two other places belong to him, and both are contested or uncertain. The first is a bank of the Yamunā, far to the north, where the Digvijaya’s thirteenth canto says the soul that became the boy had lived as a yogi before entering a drowned child; that is a story about who he was before Śrī Bali, and the map marks the river with a pin that says so. The second is the seat the tradition gives him after his teacher’s work was done. The Sringeri Pīṭham says Puri, in the east, and the map pins Puri and marks it as that account’s; the Puri seat’s own page lists the four disciples and the four directions in an order that, read strictly, would place him elsewhere, and other accounts a reader may meet give him the west. The Digvijaya itself assigns him no seat. The section on the seat sets out what each source says.

Nothing is recorded of where he died. The Digvijaya, having brought him into Sri Śaṅkara’s party at Śrī Bali, has him travel with it — the father “followed him for some distance and then returned to his place” — and does not part him from it. The map, accordingly, follows the teacher’s road only as far as Sringeri, where the next disciple was found, and stops.

The name: an āmalaka in the hand

His name is a description, and every source explains it the same way. The āmalaka is the Indian gooseberry, a small, hard, translucent fruit; held in the palm, it can be seen through and all at once. The Digvijaya, at the moment of the naming: “As the knowledge of the Self was natural to him like an Amalaka fruit in one’s hand, he became famous under the name of Hastamalaka.” Sri Padmapāda, in the thirteenth canto, gives the teacher’s reason back to him: “His mastery of the Sastras is such that they are to him like a gooseberry fruit (Amalaka) on one’s palm. Hence it is that you have given him the name Hastamalaka.” The Sringeri disciple page: “Because the boy had revealed the essence of Truth with the clarity of a gooseberry held in one’s palm, Sri Shankaracharya named him Hastamalaka.”

The Bhagavatpādīyam introduction draws out two further senses: “Hasta-āmalaka is meant to be ‘an amla berry (āmalakam) in the hand (hasta)’. Śaṅkarācārya used this berry as a metaphor to acknowledge Hastāmalaka’s ‘ripeness’ and his clarity of knowledge regarding Vedānta, and also to reveal the esoteric nature of the Vedāntic scriptures as a whole (to reveal knowledge that is ‘hidden’).” A ripe fruit, a clear one, and one that has been brought out of hiding into the open hand: the name carries all three, and the tradition has never called him anything else. Whatever his father called him is not recorded in any source used here. The name is his teacher’s, and it names not the boy but what the boy held.

The proverb behind it is older than the boy. Hastāmalaka is a stock phrase in Sanskrit for what is perfectly plain, as one might say “as clear as day.” To name a disciple with it was to say that the whole of Vedānta was, for him, not a doctrine to be argued but an object in view. The twelve verses bear the name too — Hastāmalakīyam, “the work of Hastāmalaka,” or Hastāmalaka-stotra, “the hymn of Hastāmalaka,” as the Kanchi chapter calls it; and the fourteen-verse form on the Sanskrit Documents site closes with a third title, Hastāmalaka-saṁvāda-stotra, “the hymn of the dialogue with Hastāmalaka,” because that form includes the question that the verses answer.

When he lived

His dates are his teacher’s, and his teacher’s are disputed. The Kanchi volume states the common reckoning and its caveat in the chapter on Sri Toṭaka: “Sri Sankara, the greatest expounder of Advaita Vedanta is reputed to have flourished between 788 and 820 A.D. This date cannot be regarded as finally settled and a large number of Indian scholars bring down his date to the first or second century A.D. or B.C. However, the latter part of the eighth century has been accepted by thinkers as the most probable date.” The Anusandhana Kendra: “Sankara can be dated more or less reliably to the 8th century CE.” On that reckoning the boy was found at Śrī Bali in the early years of the ninth century, during the teacher’s tour of the west and south.

The seats keep their own chronologies. The Govardhana Pīṭha at Puri, which names him as one of its founding ācāryas in one account and not in another, gives Sri Śaṅkara’s birth as “507 BC” and its own foundation as “486 BC”. The Sringeri Pīṭham writes of the four seats as functioning “after more than twelve centuries”, which agrees with the historians. The card for this page gives the eighth century and the tradition’s alternative is recorded here. The Kanchi volume’s own comment is the fairest: “Nor are the teachings of Sri Sankara affected in any way by the absence of certainty regarding his date.” Twelve verses on the eternal Self are affected by it least of all.

Within the teacher’s life, the sources place him with some consistency. The Digvijaya puts his coming in the twelfth canto, after the debate with Sri Maṇḍana Miśra and before Sringeri and the coming of Sri Toṭaka; the Sringeri abridgement calls him “the third important disciple”, after Sri Padmapāda and Sri Sureśvara. The Kanchi chapter places it “In the course of his triumphal tour of India as the authentic exponent of Advaita philosophy”. He was, on every account, a disciple of the teacher’s maturity, not of his youth.

What the tradition says he was before: the wind-god’s birth

The Digvijaya’s third canto describes how, when Śiva took birth as Sri Śaṅkara, the other gods took birth as the men who would help him. “The deity Vayu took birth as the son of the fanatical ritualist Prabhakara under the name of Hastamalaka who always humbled the pride of his opponents.” The Kanchi chapter on Sri Toṭaka records the same: “According to tradition, Totakacharya, whose original name was Giri was the amsa of Agni, while Hastamalaka and Padmapada were the incarnations of Vayu and Sri Narayana.”

Two things in that sentence are worth a pause. The first is the father. The Digvijaya calls him “the fanatical ritualist Prabhakara” in the third canto, but when the poem reaches the village in the twelfth it describes him with respect: “one named Prabhakara who was noted for his learning, his adherence to Vedic rites, and his life of holiness and beneficence”. The two descriptions are not contradictory; a man devoted to ritual is a fanatic only to a poet who thinks ritual is not enough, and the poem thinks so. The son born to such a father, in the tradition’s design, was the one disciple who needed no instruction at all — as if the wind had been born into the house of the fire-altar to show that the Self is not reached by rites.

The second is the phrase “who always humbled the pride of his opponents”. Nothing in the rest of the poem shows Sri Hastāmalaka debating anyone; he barely speaks after the twelve verses. The phrase is formulaic, applied in the same canto to Sri Toṭaka too, and this page does not build on it. What the tradition means by making him the wind is better read from the verses themselves, which return again and again to what pervades everything and is touched by nothing — “The one Self which pervades everything in this universe, but which nothing can taint, which is always pure like space” — and from the poem’s image of the boy when he was found: “shining in appearance like a fire-brand covered with ashes”, the Kanchi chapter’s “a live coal hidden in ashes”. Fire under ash, wind in a still body: the tradition’s figures for him are of a power that does not show.

Śrī Bali: the village, the father and the silent boy

The Digvijaya sets the scene with care, because the boy’s silence is to be measured against the noise of a very pious place. Sri Śaṅkara had been staying near the shrine of the Devī at Mūkāmbikā, and “On one of those days, he visited with his disciples a village of Brahmanas named Sri Bali, where every house emitted the holy smell of the smoke of Agnihotra sacrifice. In that place, inhabited by about two thousand Brahmanas who had abandoned all prohibited actions and spent all their time in the study of the Veda, in the performance of Swadharma and Yajnas, no untimely death ever took place. There was a temple in that village, in which was installed Lord Siva and His Consort in combination, who looked like an ornament of gold studded with gems, or the sky with the disk of the moon.”

In that village was a man who had everything and one sorrow. “Among the inhabitants of that village was one named Prabhakara who was noted for his learning, his adherence to Vedic rites, and his life of holiness and beneficence. Though he had plenty of cattle, wealth and relatives, he was not happy because his only son was dumb and behaved like an idiot. Though the boy was handsome in appearance and very gentle and patient in demeanour, his behaviour in other respects was like that of an idiot— hearing nothing, talking nothing, and sitting in some corner alone in reverie.” The Sringeri disciple page describes the boy with the tradition’s fondness: “The boy possessed extraordinary beauty—radiant as the sun, serene as the moon, and patient as the earth—yet he appeared to be a simpleton. His sacred thread ceremony was conducted with great difficulty, and he exhibited none of the qualities expected of a Brahmin youth: he neither played nor spoke, never showed anger, and refused to study.”

The father had a question, and the poem records it as a scholar’s question: he wanted to know “the cause of his son’s strange behaviour— whether it was due to possession, the result of past actions, or merely his nature”. Then the news: “He now heard that a great personage accompanied by many disciples and moving with a big library of books, had come to the village, and he decided to approach him with his son. Following the injunction that one should not visit with empty hands a deity, a king or a spiritual teacher, he approached Sankara with a load of fruits and prostrated at his feet.” The detail of the library is the poem’s own, and it is telling: the teacher arrives in the village of two thousand Vedic scholars carrying his books, and is about to meet a boy who has never opened one.

“His son, who was shining in appearance like a fire-brand covered with ashes, was also made to prostrate before him. But the boy, idiotic as he was in behaviour, continued to be in the prostrate position and refused to get up. The sage, however, lifted him up in his infinite mercy, and as the boy was standing there, with face looking down, his father asked Sankara to enlighten him on the cause of the strange behaviour of his son.” The Kanchi chapter notices what the poem’s image is doing: the boy, “‘a live coal hidden in ashes’ would not get up, but remained prostrate demonstrating, as it were, his grievous malady”. A boy who will not rise from a prostration before a teacher is not, to a reader of this tradition, a boy who is ill.

The father’s speech is the one place in any source where Sri Hastāmalaka is described by someone who had lived with him, and it deserves to be read whole:

“He is now seven years old, and his mind seems to be undeveloped. He has not even learnt the alphabets, not to speak of the Vedas. The early period of his life has thus gone in vain. Boys of his age come and call him for play, but he does not join them. Seeing him sitting silent, boys beat him; still he will not show any sign of annoyance. Sometimes he comes for food, sometimes he abstains from all food. He does not heed any instruction. I never try to rectify him by punishment, but have left it to his fate to direct his future.”

The Kanchi chapter summarises the same speech from Mādhava and Vyāsācala: “Thirteen years had gone by and so far he had shown no sign of sensibility. Of course, he could not learn the Vedas so far, though the formal ceremony of initiation had been performed. In the midst of his playmates, the boy would remain listless; even physical harm inflicted on him failed to evoke angry reactions of any kind. In the matter of diet, too, he was indifferent. It was, thus, by the force of sheer karma that he was growing up”. The reader will have noticed that the father’s son is seven in one account and thirteen in the other; the discrepancy has its own section below.

“Who are you?” — the answer, and the naming

The teacher does not answer the father. He asks the boy. “When the Brahmana thus finished his submission, the Acharya addressed the boy thus: ‘Who are you? Why are you thus behaving like an inert being?’” The Kanchi chapter renders it “Who art thou? Why dost thou behave as one possessed?”. It is the same question that Sri Govinda had asked at the cave on the Narmadā, when a boy of eight had prostrated at his door; and now the boy who was asked it is asking it. The tradition has arranged the two scenes to answer each other.

The boy’s reply, in the poem’s summary of its opening: “O great teacher! Certainly I am not an inert thing. Even an inert thing becomes conscious in association with me. I am one with undivided Bliss, free from the six states of grief, namely, infatuation, hunger, thirst, old age and death, as also from the six conditions of beginning, continuance, growth, change, decay and destruction. This consciousness of the Atman is common to all liberated ones.” Then the poem’s own account of what happened: “In this way, in twelve verses, he expounded the doctrine of the spiritual Self. As the knowledge of the Self was natural to him like an Amalaka fruit in one’s hand, he became famous under the name of Hastamalaka. The Acharya was surprised to see that this boy had the knowledge of the Atman even without the instruction of a teacher, and he blessed him, placing his hands on his head.”

The Kanchi chapter says what the reply was: “In answer, ‘the great soul’, inhabiting the body of the boy uttered the twelve verses of the Hastamalaka-stotra. They set forth, in the main, the nature of the Self or the Atman. The refrain of all of them is: I, the Self, am eternal Awareness, nityopalabdhisvarupo’ ham atma.” The Sringeri abridgement: “To this the boy replied in twelve verses expounding the doctrine of the spiritual self. These verses comprise what is famous as Hastamalakiyam”. The verses are given in full in a later section. Here it is enough to notice the form of the answer. Asked who he is, the boy does not give his name, his father’s name or his village, which is what the question ordinarily asks; he says what he is, and says it twelve times over with a refrain, as if the question had only one answer and it needed repeating until the questioner stopped asking.

Then the teacher turns to the father, and the poem gives him a speech that is at once a diagnosis and a request:

“It is not befitting that this boy should stay with you. And since his behaviour is like that of an idiot, what good can you derive by his stay with you? This apparently dumb son of yours knows the truth of the Atman by virtue of his practices in his past life. Otherwise, how could this boy, without the knowledge of the ‘R’s’, thus expatiate on the nature of the Self? He must be having inborn intuitive knowledge. He has not the least attachment to house and property. Nor has he any sense of ‘I-ness’ with regard to the body. How can one who knows all these objects, including the body, as external and unconnected with oneself, have any identification with them?”

“Saying so, the Acharya took that boy also into his party and started towards his next destination. The boy’s father also followed him for some distance and then returned to his place.” The Sringeri abridgement: “Shankara took him along as Hastamalaka, the third important disciple.” The Sringeri disciple page adds the formal step: “Recognizing immediately that this soul was not destined for householder life, the Acharya accepted him as a disciple and initiated him into the order of sannyasa.” The father’s own words, as the teacher later recalled them to the other disciples, are given in the section on his antecedents; they end with a proverb about a swan.

Seven or thirteen?

The sources do not agree about how old the boy was, and this page reports both figures rather than choosing. The Digvijaya, in the father’s speech, is explicit: “He is now seven years old”. The Sringeri abridgement of the same poem: “his young son seven years old”. The Bhagavatpādīyam introduction: “It is believed that Hastamalaka was just seven years old when he narrated these 12 verses, in response to a question from Shankara.”

The Kanchi chapter, drawing on Mādhava and Vyāsācala together, says thirteen: “An affluent villager, Prabhakara by name, together with a sick son, thirteen years old, approached Sankara hoping to get his son healed”, and again, “Thirteen years had gone by and so far he had shown no sign of sensibility.” The Sringeri disciple page, on the same maṭha’s site as the abridgement that says seven, says: “When Sri Shankaracharya visited the village, the boy had reached his thirteenth year.”

The Kanchi chapter’s footnote cites canto 12, verse 47 of Mādhava for the father’s approach, and Vyāsācala’s poem alongside it; it is possible that the two poems differ and that the chapter followed Vyāsācala, or that a variant reading of Mādhava’s verse gives a different number. This page has not seen the Sanskrit of both and does not guess. What can be said is that the two figures carry different meanings, and the tradition seems to have wanted both. Seven is the age at which a Brahmin boy’s formal study begins; a seven-year-old who has “not even learnt the alphabets” is not yet remarkable for it, and his father’s despair is the despair of a man looking ahead. Thirteen is the age by which a boy should be well into the Veda; a thirteen-year-old who has learnt nothing, “though the formal ceremony of initiation had been performed”, has failed, and his father’s despair looks back. Either way the point is the same: the knowledge the boy had was not the knowledge his age was supposed to bring.

Antecedents: the yogi on the Yamunā

The tradition did not leave the boy’s knowledge unexplained. In the thirteenth canto, when Sri Padmapāda proposes that Sri Hastāmalaka be the one to write the great exegesis on the teacher’s commentaries, the teacher declines, and the disciples ask the question that any reader of the twelfth canto would ask: “O great teacher! How did he gain this knowledge of the Atman without receiving instruction in scriptures and other spiritual practices?” The teacher’s answer is the story of another life:

“Once there lived on the banks of the Yamuna a highly evolved saint who had overcome the bondage of Samsara. One day a Brahmana woman who had come for bath in the Yamuna left her two-year-old child on the bank and got into the stream with her companions. The child, slowly crawling from the place where he had been left, fell into the river. Picking up the dead body of the child, the woman came near the hermitage of the ascetic and began to cry aloud in great distress. Taking pity on the mother, the Yogi, by his psychic powers, entered into the body of the inert child, who rose up as Hastamalaka. For this reason, he had a spontaneous knowledge of all scriptures without the aid of any instruction. He is a knower of the Self and there is nothing that he does not know.”

The Sringeri disciple page tells it with one difference, and the difference sharpens the story. In its version the mother did not merely leave the child on the bank; she left it with the yogi. “One woman, carrying her two-year-old child, placed the baby beside the sage and requested him to watch over the child while she bathed. The sage, absorbed in samadhi, remained oblivious to the world around him. The child crawled unnoticed toward the river and drowned. When the mother discovered her child’s lifeless body, she wept inconsolably before the sage. Awakening from his meditation, the sage was deeply moved by the mother’s grief. Through his yogic powers, he abandoned his own body and entered that of the deceased child.” In this telling the yogi’s act is not only compassion but reparation: the child was in his keeping. The Sringeri page draws the lesson: “he was, in truth, a realized sage who had compassionately taken birth to comfort a grieving mother and later became the disciple of Sri Adi Shankaracharya”.

The story does three things for the tradition. It explains the knowledge: a boy who has never studied knows everything because he is not a boy but an old yogi who has already known it. It explains the silence: a man who has entered a child’s body to console a mother has no reason to speak until someone asks him the one question worth answering. And it explains the age at which the story places the change — a two-year-old — which is before speech, so that the boy Prabhākara raised had never spoken as himself at all. The historians have nothing to say about any of this. The tradition tells it as fact, and this page tells it as the tradition’s.

There is also, in the story, a glance at the teacher who tells it. Sri Śaṅkara, when he was a boy, had been given up for dead in a river — the crocodile at Kāladi — and had come out of it a monk. He tells his disciples of a child who was actually dead in a river and came out of it a knower of the Self. The poem does not draw the parallel. It does not need to.

Why he wrote no commentary

The thirteenth canto is about a book that had to be written — the great vārttika, or exegesis in verse, on the teacher’s own commentaries — and about who should write it. The teacher had chosen Sri Sureśvara, the former Sri Maṇḍana Miśra, the converted ritualist; the other disciples objected. Sri Padmapāda’s speech puts forward two alternatives, first himself and then Sri Toṭaka: “If an alternative person is required, there is Totaka who, by virtue of his great austerities and your grace, has acquired the blessing of the goddess of learning.” Then he proposes a third: “Here is Hastamalaka. He is competent to write the exegesis. His mastery of the Sastras is such that they are to him like a gooseberry fruit (Amalaka) on one’s palm.”

The teacher’s answer is the fullest character of Sri Hastāmalaka that any source gives, and it should be read with the recognition that it is the teacher’s own recollection of the day at Śrī Bali:

“He is no doubt very clever, but he is always absorbed in the Spirit and has very little external awareness. He did not learn the three R’s, nor did he study the Vedas under an instructor. He had no interest in food or play, nor did he ever speak a word. Fearing that he was possessed by some ghost, they brought this boy to me. When he saw me, he prostrated before me again and again, and stood before me with palms folded in salutation. All were astonished to see the sudden change in the boy’s behaviour. Then, when I asked him about his name, the name of his father, etc., he began to speak in beautiful verses conveying the spirit of Vedanta philosophy. Hearing his son’s wonderful power of expression for the first time, his father was astounded and said to me: ‘How wonderful is your power! This boy, who was considered dumb and idiotic till now, is now expounding the truth of the Atman in a way that even highly intelligent scholars cannot do. He must have been born as a liberated soul. Let him now follow you as a disciple. For, a swan can live only in a lotus pond and not in the midst of thorny shrubs.’ Ever since his father left him, he has been with me. But one like him, whose mind is immersed in Brahman from infancy, will not be able to concern himself with such scholarly undertakings like writing an exegesis on the commentaries.”

Two details here are not in the twelfth canto and are worth having. The teacher says that he asked the boy “about his name, the name of his father, etc.” — the ordinary questions — and that the boy answered them with the verses; and the fourteen-verse text of the hymn, discussed later, preserves exactly such a question, asking the child his name, his people and where he has come from. And the father, in the teacher’s recollection, is the one who asks that the boy be taken: “Let him now follow you as a disciple. For, a swan can live only in a lotus pond and not in the midst of thorny shrubs.” In the twelfth canto the teacher asks the father; in the thirteenth the father asks the teacher. Both may be true of the same afternoon.

After the Yamunā story the teacher closes the matter: “Yet, a person so indrawn like him is not suited to write scholarly works which require a good deal of externalisation of consciousness.” The Sringeri disciple page gives the same judgement in its own words: “Some disciples suggested that Hastamalaka, given his Self-realization, should compose a Vartika—a Sanskrit commentary in verse—on the Sutra Bhashya. Sri Shankaracharya declined this proposal, explaining that Hastamalaka’s consciousness remained perpetually absorbed in the Supreme Self. He would never descend to the mental plane required for scholarly activities such as writing treatises.” And it says why he sat in the classes at all: “Though Hastamalaka attended the Acharya’s teachings, it was not to acquire knowledge but to confirm his own direct experience of Reality. He had no need for dialectical training or scholarly pursuits.”

The tradition is making a point here that it makes nowhere else so clearly. Advaita is a tradition of commentators; its great names are men who wrote. Sri Hastāmalaka is the disciple whom the greatest of those writers judged too far gone into the truth to be able to write about it. The judgement is not a slight. It is the tradition’s acknowledgement that the writing is for those who have not yet seen, and that a man who has seen need not write — and may not be able to. The exegesis went to Sri Sureśvara, who had come to Advaita late and by argument, and who could therefore argue for it. The twelve verses stayed as they were.

The work: twelve verses and a refrain

Everything Sri Hastāmalaka left is the answer he gave to one question. The Kanchi chapter: “Nevertheless, if tradition may be trusted, a small treatise, Hastamalaka-stotra by name, consisting of twelve verses, may be ascribed to Hastamalaka, the marvelous boy disciple of the great Master. Its distinction is that it is accompanied by a commentary whose author, according to the traditionalists, is none other than Sri Sankara himself.” The Bhagavatpādīyam introduction, on the Sringeri site, sets it against the other disciples’ output: “Ādi Śaṅkarācārya had four primary, direct disciples whose works survive to the present day; Sureśvara, Padmapāda, Toṭaka and Hastāmalaka. Though numerous texts are available for study by Sureśvara, only this particular work by Hastāmalaka has survived.”

The verses are in the bhujaṅgaprayāta metre — the “serpent’s glide,” twelve syllables to a line in a steady rocking rhythm, the metre of many of the hymns that carry Sri Śaṅkara’s own name — and eleven of the twelve end in the same line: sa nityopalabdhisvarūpo’ham ātmā, “that Self, whose nature is eternal awareness, I am.” The Kanchi chapter states the refrain and says what the poem is trying to do with it: “The author of these verses seeks to translate into intelligible language the content of his integral experience, which, being sui generis, does not lend itself to such translation. Hence the profuse use of symbols and metaphors strewn in these verses.” The metaphors are few and they recur: the sun and the eye; a face and its reflection in a mirror; the sun in many pots of water; a cloud across the sun; space; and, in the last verse, a crystal that takes the colour of whatever is put beside it.

The Kanchi chapter notices the difficulty the boy set himself in the first line, and it is the difficulty of the whole tradition: “The initial step in the process of the translation has been to relate, unavoidably, the unrelated Absolute, the contentless awareness, to the activities of mind and sense-organs. The real inspirer of all activities, subjective and objective, is the Atman. The sun energizing the world of objects into their varied activities is a fit analogue of the Atman. The author is very well conscious of the intrinsically indefensible nature of his initial step. The Absolute is, strictly, the relationless, the unconditioned. Hence, his characterization of it as nirastakhilopadhi. Its appropriate analogue may be sought for in the boundless space. (V-1).” To speak of the Self at all is to relate it to something, and the Self is related to nothing; so the boy says it is the cause of the mind’s working as the sun is the cause of the world’s, and then takes the comparison back in the same breath — “when not associated with the limiting adjuncts (in the form of the body, mind and sense-organs), I, (Self) am like space”. That double movement, saying and unsaying, is the whole method of the twelve verses.

The translation used below is the one the Sringeri Pīṭham publishes on its Bhagavatpādīyam site, verse by verse, together with an English rendering of the commentary. Each verse is quoted exactly; the remarks between them are this page’s, and where they draw on the commentary or the Kanchi analysis they say so.

Verses one to four: the sun, the fire and the mirror

“I am the Atma (Self) which is of the nature of eternal Consciousness and which is the cause of the functioning of the mind, eye and all other organs, in the same way as the sun is the cause of the activities of all beings on this earth. But when not associated with the limiting adjuncts (in the form of the body, mind and sense-organs), I, (Self) am like space. English translation and Notes”

The first verse answers the question it was asked. “Who are you?” — “I am the Self.” Then it says what the Self does and what it is. What it does is make the mind and senses work, as the sun makes the world work without doing any of the work itself; what it is, when the body and mind are set aside, is “like space” — everywhere, empty, untouched. The Kanchi chapter calls this “his characterization of it as nirastakhilopadhi”, “with every limiting condition removed,” and the phrase is the key to the poem: every verse that follows removes a condition.

“I am the Self which is of the nature of eternal consciousness, which is changeless and one only (non-dual), whose very nature is eternal consciousness, in the same manner as heat is the very nature of fire, and depending on which the mind, eye and other organs, which are all insentient, function. English translation and Notes”

Fire does not have heat; fire is heat. The Self does not have awareness; the Self is awareness, and everything else — the mind included — is “insentient” and borrows its light. The Kanchi chapter: “Every object, not excluding the mind and sense organs, is inert. Their formations, functions and operations point to an Intelligence that supervises, controls, and directs them. (V-2).” A reader who has assumed that the mind is the thing that is aware has, by the end of the second verse, been told that it is not; the commentary, at the fifth verse, will name the schools that made that assumption.

“The reflection of a face in a mirror has no real existence apart from the reflected face. So also, the Jiva, who is only the reflection of the Self or Pure Consciousness in the intellect (or mind) has really no separate existence apart from the Self. That Self, which is of the nature of eternal consciousness, I am. English translation and Notes”

This is the poem’s account of the individual. The jīva — the person who says “I” and means this body and this history — is the Self reflected in a mind, as a face is reflected in a mirror; and a reflection is not a second face. The commentary, in the Sringeri translation, draws out the whole doctrine from the image: “When one face is reflected in a number of mirrors the reflections may be of different shapes and sizes, according as the mirror is plain or convex or concave. The reflection in a particular mirror shakes if that mirror shakes. The reflection is hazy if the mirror is not clean. But all these differences in the various reflections do not at all affect the face that is reflected. In the same manner the Jivas or the individual souls which are only reflections of the same Self in different minds have different characteristics, depending on the nature of each mind, but the Self which is the original does not at all take on the characteristics of the minds, but remains ever the same.” And it says why the Upaniṣads exist: “The aim of all the Upanishads is to remove this wrong identification.”

“Just as when the mirror is removed the reflection of the face ceases to exist and the face alone remains without any false appearances in the form of reflections, so also, when the mind (the reflecting medium) ceases to exist, the Atma is free from all wrong notions caused by the reflection. English translation and Notes”

If the reflection is not real, what is liberation? The fourth verse says: take away the mirror. The commentary is careful to say what “the mind ceasing to exist” does and does not mean: “The cessation of the mind thus means only the loss of the mind in its present form with its accumulated Vasanas or impressions left by past actions and thoughts, which are the cause of likes and dislikes and all their disastrous consequences. When these Vasanas are eliminated, the mind becomes pure and makes the Jiva capable of realizing his real nature. He then dissociates himself completely from the body and the mind and is no more affected by what happens to them. This is the state of Jivanmukti or liberation even while living.” The commentary is quoting Sri Hastāmalaka’s own life here without saying so. A boy who “does not heed any instruction”, is not annoyed when beaten and does not care whether he eats is a mind from which likes and dislikes have gone; the tradition read the boy’s idiocy as the fourth verse in practice.

Verses five to eight: the mind of the mind, and the sun’s sun

“I am that Self which is of the nature of eternal consciousness, which is different from the mind, eye and other organs, but is itself the mind of the mind, the eye of the eye, the ear of the ear and so on. It is however inaccessible to the mind and sense-organs. English translation and Notes”

The phrase is from the Kena Upaniṣad, and the commentary says so: “This is based on the Kenopanishad which says:– ‘He (the Self) is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of speech, the vital air of the vital air and the eye of the eye’ (1.2).” It is the one scriptural citation that the twelve verses can be said to contain, and it is characteristic that the boy who “did not learn the three R’s” should have his one quotation from the Upaniṣad that asks, in its first verse, who it is that makes the mind think. The commentary here also names an opponent, the only one in the work: at the end of its note on the fourth verse it says that “Some (such as the Charvakas and Buddhists) consider the mind itself to be the Self or Atma. This view is refuted in the next verse.” The refutation is the verse itself: the mind cannot be the Self because the Self is what the mind sees by.

“The Self, being self-luminous, shines by itself to those whose minds have become absolutely pure. Though only one, the Self appears as many and different in different intellects, in the same way as the sun, though only one, appears as many when reflected in different pots of water. I am that Self which is of the nature of eternal consciousness. English translation and Notes”

If the mind cannot reach the Self, the fifth verse has left the reader with nothing to do. The sixth verse answers: the Self “shines by itself to those whose minds have become absolutely pure”. The commentary’s note on this verse is the longest in the work and it is the clearest statement of the Advaita view of practice that the Hastāmalakīyam literature contains: “Identity with Brahman is not some thing that requires to be newly established, because it is always there. Everyone is in reality always identical with Brahman, but wrongly considers himself to be different because of beginningless Avidya or ignorance of one’s real nature. Therefore the scriptures do not enjoin that identity with Brahman should be established, but only that the false identification with things other than Brahman should be given up. When the identification with other things ceases, the identity with one’s own Self, which is natural, automatically prevails.” Nothing is gained; something is given up. The sun in the pots of water, the image the verse closes with, will be used twice more.

“Just as the sun who gives light to all eyes does not reveal the illumined objects by turns to one person after another (but all eyes are able to see at the same time), so also the Self which is only one gives consciousness to all intellects simultaneously. English translation and Notes”

An objection is being answered here, and the commentary says which: “The doubt raised was how, if there is only one Self (Atma), it can illumine all intellects at the same time.” If the Self were a thing among things it would have to attend to one mind and then another. It is not; it is to minds what daylight is to eyes. The Kanchi chapter: “Just as a single sun, simultaneously, enables a multitude of eyes to behold various things, so does the non-dual Atman, at one and the same time, enable Jivas to perceive their respective objects (V-7).”

“Just as the eye sees clearly only objects that are illumined by the sun, but not what is not so illumined, the sun itself is able to make the eye capable of seeing objects only because it is itself illumined by the Self. English translation and Notes”

The poem has been using the sun to explain the Self, and now it turns the analogy inside out: the sun itself sees by the Self. The Kanchi chapter: “As the Atman is the mind’s mind and the eye’s eye, so too it is the sun’s sun (V-8).” The commentary takes the verse to the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad’s teaching of the inner controller and to the Taittirīya: “The inner self of the deity of the sun is the same as the inner self of all beings, namely, Brahman”. It is the moment in the poem where the largest thing a boy on the Karnataka coast could see is set below the thing he was talking about, and the poem does not raise its voice to do it.

Verses nine to twelve: the cloud, the sky and the crystal

“The one sun appears as many reflections in different containers of water, moving or still, but the sun remains unaffected by the nature of the water in which it is reflected. Similarly, the one Self, though reflected in different intellects that are ever-changing, remains changeless and untainted by the character of the intellects. English translation and Notes”

The sun in moving water shakes; the sun in still water is still; the sun is neither. The commentary’s note is brief and says what the image is for: “The Jiva, through ignorance, identifies himself with the body-mind complex and attributes to himself the joys and sorrows of the body-mind complex. When the Jiva gives up his identification with the body-mind complex he realizes that he is Brahman.”

“Just as a very ignorant person whose vision is obstructed by a cloud thinks that the sun, covered by a cloud, is devoid of brilliance, so also, to a person who is deluded by Avidya the Atma appears as bound. That Atma which is of the nature of eternal consciousness I am. English translation and Notes”

This is the poem’s only account of bondage, and it says that bondage is a way of seeing. The Kanchi chapter: “Bondage of the Jiva is an incredible fact. It consists in the appearance, to the ignorant Jiva, of the Atman as bound, baddhavatbhati mudhadrshteh.” The commentary uses the tradition’s oldest illustration: “It is not as if he is initially in bondage and becomes liberated when he realizes that he is in fact Brahman itself. It is only the ignorance of one’s real nature that has to be removed. When what appears to be a snake is realized to be only a rope, it is not as if the snake has gone away and a rope has come in its place. It was only the rope that was always there, but was wrongly seen as a snake.” The Kanchi chapter’s phrase for what remains when the cloud passes is the tradition’s own: the Self is “eternally pure, awake, and free, nityasuddhabuddhamuktasvabhavah (V-10)”.

“The one Self which pervades everything in this universe, but which nothing can taint, which is always pure like space, which is free from the impurity in the form of attachment and aversion, which is immortal, that Self of the nature of eternal consciousness, I am. English translation and Notes”

The eleventh verse returns to the first: “always pure like space”. Space is in the jar and in the dirt in the jar and is dirtied by neither. The commentary: “Space pervades all objects, but is never tainted by the impurities in those objects. So also the Self is never tainted by the defects such as attachment, aversion, anger, greed, etc., in the minds of living beings which the Self pervades. It is always absolutely pure, changeless and immortal.” The Kanchi chapter draws the balance the poem has kept throughout: “The transcendence of the Atman must be understood together with the complementary truth of its immanence in all phenomena.”

“O All-pervading Lord! Just as a crystal looks different due to different limiting adjuncts, you also appear to be different because of being reflected in different intellects. Just as the reflections of the moon in different vessels of water also move in accordance with the movement of the water, you also appear to undergo change because of association with different intellects. English translation and Notes”

The last verse is different from the others. It drops the refrain, and it is addressed to someone: in the Sringeri translation, “O All-pervading Lord!”; in the Sanskrit, viṣṇo, the vocative of Viṣṇu, whose name means the one who pervades. The boy who has said “I am the Self” eleven times ends by saying “you” — and what he says to the pervading Lord is what he has said of the Self: that its apparent variety is the variety of the minds it is reflected in, as a crystal takes the colour of a cloth and the moon in a bowl of water moves when the water moves. The commentary: “The reflection of Brahman in the intellect is the Jiva or individual soul. The Jivas, as such, appear to be different from one another, but this difference is due only to the intellect which is the upadhi or limiting adjunct. In essence, every Jiva is Brahman who is changeless.” The Kanchi chapter: “The concluding verse reaffirms the nondual status of the Atman while it traces all plurality to the limiting adjuncts and media of reflection.” Advaita has never thought that to say “I am the Self” and to say “O Lord” are two different things to say. The twelfth verse is the tradition’s proof of it in a single stanza.

The teacher’s commentary on the pupil

That Sri Śaṅkara wrote a commentary on his disciple’s twelve verses is the tradition’s constant claim, and the tradition knows how unusual it is. The Bhagavatpādīyam introduction: “Shankara himself was compelled to write a commentary on the Hastamalakiyam. It is extraordinary that the master of masters would compose commentary upon the work of his young student.” The Sringeri disciple page: “The spontaneous verses spoken by this young aspirant were so profound that the illustrious Acharya himself later composed a commentary upon them.” The Kanchi chapter, more cautiously: “Its distinction is that it is accompanied by a commentary whose author, according to the traditionalists, is none other than Sri Sankara himself.”

The Kanchi chapter’s footnote gives the edition and the doubt together: “Cf. pp. 163 ff, Vol. XVI of The works of Sri Sankaracharya, Sri Vani Vilas Edition. It is only fair to point out that the traditional view has been disputed by scholars like Belvalkar. Cf. Mallik Lectures on Vedanta Philosophy, Part I (first edition), p.218.” S. K. Belvalkar was a Sanskrit scholar of the early twentieth century whose lectures on Vedānta questioned the attribution of many minor works to Sri Śaṅkara. This page has not read the passage cited and does not report his grounds. It reports that the doubt exists, that the Kanchi chapter thought it fair to mention, and that the two Sringeri pages present the commentary as Sri Śaṅkara’s without qualification. The reader may hold both: the commentary is the one the tradition has read with these verses for as long as the verses have been read, and its authorship is a question historians have raised.

The commentary is printed in the sixteenth volume of the Vani Vilas edition of Sri Śaṅkara’s works, published at Srirangam in 1910, which is linked below in a public copy; its pages on the Hastāmalakīya-bhāṣya are the ones the Kanchi footnote cites. The Sringeri Bhagavatpādīyam translation, quoted throughout the sections above, renders it verse by verse. One further scrap of the literature belongs here. The Kanchi footnote continues: “Besides the authors referred to, Anandagiri also briefly mentions Hastamalaka in his Sankaravijaya; 1868 A.D. Edition; cf. pp. 250 and 267.” That Ānandagiri, author of a Śaṅkara-vijaya, is the fourteenth-century commentator, not the disciple; the section on the name Ānandagiri sorts out the several men who bore it.

What the commentary adds: eternal awareness, and liberation in this life

A commentary on twelve verses that say the same thing twelve times must find something to say, and the Kanchi chapter is interested in what this one found. “The author of the bhashya on these verses raises a few supplementary questions, a brief reference to some of which may also be made in order to underscore the major implications of the Hastamalaka-stotra.” The first is whether awareness can be eternal at all, since every act of awareness we know of begins and ends: “The affirmation in verse two that Atman is eternal awareness or cognition calls for some elucidation since ‘bodha’ or awareness, generated by the sense organs in contact with their objects is obviously ephemeral.” The answer distinguishes two things the word covers: “Awareness is of two kinds–what is generated and what is eternal. The former, being knowable, is no better than objects like pot and, therefore, is inert. That the generated awareness is a ‘knowable’ is clear from expressions like: I have had the awareness (= knowledge) of the pot, of the cloth, etc. Such awareness is experienced. Only such experienced and particularized instances of awareness may be treated as ephemeral.” The thought “I see the pot” comes and goes and can itself be noticed; what notices it does not come and go. The second question is how one knows there is such a thing, and the answer is the world: “The awareness of the objective manifold, jagatprakasa, may be cited as the requisite proof. None may deny that the world is presented to our consciousness in acts of cognition. In the complex of factors involved in this situation, every known factor is inert. The one factor not known but knowing, the Atman, therefore, is the source of the jagatprakasa. While illuminating all else, it shines forth in its own right, svaparaprakasavan.”

The third question is the one the boy’s life poses. If liberation is the removal of the body-idea, can a man be liberated while he still has a body? The Kanchi chapter sees that the boy himself is the tradition’s answer: “the fact may be noted that he may be cited as the living proof of the state of jivanmukti, implicit in the Advaitic position that Jiva is, in truth, nityopalabdhisvarupa. None of the verses directly mentions it; the Commentary, however, argues the case as follows.” It gives the objection its full weight — that as long as the senses work, egoistic experience cannot stop; that the effects of ignorance persist after ignorance has gone, “as in the case with the illusory experience of the double moon”; that scripture says pleasure and pain never cease for the embodied — and then the reply:

“One who lives alone may acquire the knowledge of the real, tattvajnana. No dead man ever grows wiser. In fact the circumstances leading to right knowledge, such as the study of scriptures, ratiocination, the cultivation of moral virtues, etc., are relevant only to the living. The latter alone may take the step of renunciation, the sine qua non of illumination. Hence right knowledge or Atmajnana can accrue only to the living and it must entail emancipation in a state of embodiment.”

The chapter closes its account with a sentence that is the fairest verdict on the twelve verses this page has found: “the sage Hastamalaka is not concerned to develop a full-fledged system of philosophy with its complement of metaphysics, ethics, logic, and so forth. He just reveals, in the brief compass of twelve verses, his vision of non-dual Reality as plenary Consciousness. The charge of acosmism against his position, therefore, far from detracting from the merit of his affirmation is bound to prove a compliment.” Acosmism is the philosophers’ word for a view in which the world has no independent being. The boy who was thought an idiot because he took no interest in the world would not, one supposes, have minded the charge.

Twelve verses, or fourteen?

The text of the hymn circulates in two forms, and the reader who looks for it will meet both. The form the Sringeri Pīṭham publishes and the Kanchi chapter analyses has twelve verses, all in the boy’s voice. A second form, printed for instance on the Sanskrit Documents site, has fourteen: it opens with a verse in Sri Śaṅkara’s voice, in a different metre, asking the boy who he is, and then a verse of preliminary answer before the twelve begin. The site’s text of the question, transliterated: kastvaṁ śiśo kasya kuto’si gantā kiṁ nāma te tvaṁ kuta āgato’si — “Who are you, child? Whose? Where are you going? What is your name? Where have you come from?” — and of the boy’s first reply: nāhaṁ manuṣyo na ca deva-yakṣau na brāhmaṇa-kṣatriya-vaiśya-śūdrāḥ, na brahmacārī na gṛhī vanastho bhikṣurna cāhaṁ nijabodharūpaḥ — “I am not a man, nor a god or a spirit; not Brahmin, warrior, merchant or servant; not a student, a householder, a forest-dweller or a mendicant; I am of the nature of my own awareness.” The renderings are this page’s own and are given for the reader who has no Sanskrit. The fourteen-verse text closes with a colophon calling the whole śrīhastāmalakācāryaracitaṁ hastāmalakasaṁvādastotram, “the hymn of the dialogue with Hastāmalaka, composed by Sri Hastāmalakācārya.”

The two forms are not really in conflict. The Digvijaya’s thirteenth canto, quoted above, has the teacher recall that “when I asked him about his name, the name of his father, etc., he began to speak in beautiful verses” — which is exactly the question the first verse of the longer form asks, name and people and origin; and the boy’s first answer in that form, that he is not any caste or any stage of life, is the answer of one who has been asked his name and his father’s. The longer form has, in other words, preserved the frame of the story; the shorter has kept the teaching without the frame. The Sanskrit Documents page also notes a variant reading in its eleventh verse, which is a reminder that a text passed down in recitation for many centuries arrives with small differences. This page follows the Sringeri and Kanchi count of twelve, because both institutions do and because the commentary attributed to Sri Śaṅkara is on twelve, and it records the longer form here so that a reader who meets it will know what it is.

The seat: Puri, by the Sringeri account

The tradition of the four seats is stated by every institution that descends from Sri Śaṅkara, and the Anusandhana Kendra gives it in the historian’s careful form: “Sankara’s four well-known disciples were named Padmapāda, Hastāmalaka, Toṭaka and Sureśvara (Vārttikakāra). Tradition has it that Sankara appointed these four disciples as heads of the four maṭhas that he founded.” The Sringeri Pīṭham’s page on the Āmnāya Pīṭhams sets out the assignment: “Eastern Amnaya — Poorvamnaya Govardhana Math — Acharya: Sri Hastamalakacharya — Location: Puri, Odisha”. Its abridged Digvijaya says the same in a sentence: “He assigned Sureshwara to Sringeri, Padmapada to Dwaraka, Hastamalaka to Puri and Totaka to Badri.” And its page on the primary disciples: “Poorvamnaya Govardhana Peetham (East) Location: Puri, Odisha First Acharya: Sri Hastamalakacharya Presiding Deity: Sri Jagannatha”

The Puri seat’s own page names the four disciples and the four directions, but in a sentence that does not quite line up: “He also appointed his disciples Padmapada, Hasthamalaka, Sureshwara and Totaka as the Shankaracharyas of the four Peethas in East, south, west and north respectively.” Read strictly, that puts Sri Padmapāda in the east at Puri and Sri Hastāmalaka in the south at Sringeri, which no other account does; the list was probably not meant to be read in strict order. The reader will also meet accounts that give Sri Hastāmalaka the western seat at Dvārakā and Sri Padmapāda the eastern one at Puri. This page has not verified those from the seats’ own publications, and records only that the assignment of the two disciples between the eastern and western seats is not uniform across the tradition, while the assignment of Sri Sureśvara to Sringeri and Sri Toṭaka to the Himalayan seat is. The card for this page and the pin on the map follow the Sringeri account, and say so.

The Digvijaya’s translator has a long introduction on the four-seat tradition and is candid that the poem itself does not describe it: he traces the theory to a later text and to the affiliations of the Daśanāmī orders, the ten lineages of Advaita monks, “known as Puris, Bharatis and Saraswathis with Sringeri Math; Giris, Aranyas and Vanas with Jyothi Math; Ashramas and Tirthas with Dwaraka Math; and Parvatas and Sagaras with Puri Math”. Whatever the history, the meaning the tradition gives the arrangement is clear from the Sringeri page’s description of the four men, which reads like the four verses of a hymn: “Sureshwara – celebrated for his vast learning and scholarly prowess; Padmapada – distinguished by his intense devotion and unwavering faith; Totaka – renowned for his exemplary service and humble dedication; Hastamalaka – blessed with supreme Self-realization from childhood”. Learning, devotion, service and realisation: the four seats, in this reading, are the four ways a disciple can be complete, and the boy from Śrī Bali holds the one that needs no book.

Ānandagiri: one name, several men

A reader who follows Sri Hastāmalaka into the literature will meet the name Ānandagiri attached to him, to Sri Toṭaka, and to a third disciple, and then to a famous commentator who lived five centuries later. The confusion is real and the sources themselves are its cause, so this page sets them side by side.

• The Kanchi chapter on Sri Toṭaka lists Sri Śaṅkara’s chief disciples as “Sanandana, who later on become Padmapada, Anandagiri better known as Hastamalaka, and Giri who seems to have also another name, Kalanatha”. Here Ānandagiri is Sri Hastāmalaka.
• The Digvijaya, in the same passage where Sri Sureśvara is told to write his exegesis, has the teacher ask the others to write too: “he asked Anandagiri (the same as Totaka) and other disciples to write works on Advaita”. Here Ānandagiri is Sri Toṭaka, and the Sringeri abridgement follows it: “Ananda Giri (Totaka) and other disciples produced works full of spiritual fervour”.
• The Digvijaya’s third canto, listing the gods who took birth to help the teacher, names Sri Hastāmalaka and Sri Toṭaka separately and then a third man: “Brahma was born as Mandana (known in his early life as Viswarupa), Ganesa as Anandagiri, and Varuna as Chitsukha.” Here Ānandagiri is neither, but a distinct disciple, and the canto adds a variant: “also that Anandagiri was the incarnation of Nandi, the bull of Siva”.
• The Kanchi footnote on the commentary refers to “Anandagiri also briefly mentions Hastamalaka in his Sankaravijaya”. That is the author of a Śaṅkara-vijaya printed in 1868, whom scholars generally identify with the Ānandagiri who wrote sub-commentaries on Sri Śaṅkara’s works in about the fourteenth century, and whom Dasgupta’s History cites for exactly such notes — “References to Dramidacarya’s commentary on the Chandogya Upanisad are made by Anandagiri in his commentary on Sankara’s commentary on the Chandogya Upanisad.” The translator of the Digvijaya lists his Śaṅkara-vijaya among the sources and distinguishes it from that “of Anantanandagiri (to be distinguished from Anandagiri)”.

Nothing on this page depends on resolving the tangle, and it cannot be resolved from these sources. What can be said is this. “Giri” is one of the ten Daśanāmī names, the one the Digvijaya’s translator associates with the Himalayan seat; a disciple called Giri who became a monk might well bear the name Ānandagiri, and that is presumably why the Digvijaya identifies him with Sri Toṭaka, whose given name was Giri. The Kanchi chapter’s identification with Sri Hastāmalaka is unexplained and may be a slip. The later commentator is certainly a different person. When this page says Ānandagiri, it says which one it means.

The other schools, seen from this life

Sri Hastāmalaka argued with no one, and this page will not make him argue now. But his twelve verses take a position, and the commentary the tradition attaches to them names, once, whom the position is against; and the way it does so is a model of how Advaita has thought about the schools it differs from.

The commentary’s one named disagreement is at the fourth and fifth verses: “Some (such as the Charvakas and Buddhists) consider the mind itself to be the Self or Atma. This view is refuted in the next verse.” The Cārvākas were the materialists of ancient India, who held that consciousness is a property of the body and ends with it; the Buddhist schools held that what we call a self is a stream of momentary mental events with no unchanging witness behind it. The fifth verse’s answer — that the Self is “the mind of the mind, the eye of the eye” and cannot be an object to what it illumines — is Advaita’s standing reply, and it is given without heat. The commentary does not call either school foolish; it says what they hold and why the verse disagrees.

The Kanchi chapter’s last word on the verses, “The charge of acosmism against his position, therefore, far from detracting from the merit of his affirmation is bound to prove a compliment.”, is directed at critics from the schools of devotional Vedānta, who have long charged Advaita with dissolving the world and its Lord into an impersonal awareness. The twelfth verse is the fairest place to test the charge, because the boy who says “I am the Self” eleven times turns in the twelfth to address “O All-pervading Lord!” — viṣṇo. Advaita does not think that there is a contradiction between the two; the Viśiṣṭādvaita of Sri Rāmānuja and the Dvaita of Sri Madhva think that there is, and that the difference between the soul and its Lord is real and eternal. They are great schools, with their own realised teachers and their own scriptures read with the same seriousness. The difference is a difference about what the twelfth verse’s crystal and cloth are finally saying: whether the colour is truly in the crystal. Advaita says it is not; the others say the crystal and the cloth are both real and both God’s. A reader is invited to weigh the twelfth verse and decide, and to notice that the boy did not think the question needed a treatise.

The Mīmāṁsā of Kumārila and Prabhākara is present in this life in a different way — in the father. Prabhākara of Śrī Bali was, the poem says, “noted for his learning, his adherence to Vedic rites”, a man of the sacrifice; and the story of his son is the tradition’s gentlest statement of what it thinks about rites. It does not say they are wrong. It shows a village of two thousand men performing them faultlessly, and one boy in it who did not need to. The father is not mocked; he brings fruit, he weeps for his son, he gives him up with a proverb about a swan. Advaita’s relation to the way of works has always been of this kind: it honours the path and says that there is a place it does not reach.

Legacy

Sri Hastāmalaka’s legacy is one poem and one story, and both have done what larger legacies have not: they have stayed exactly as they were. The twelve verses are recited in the Sringeri Pīṭham’s tradition among the works of the master and his disciples, and the Bhagavatpādīyam project has given them a fresh translation with the commentary; the Kanchi Pīṭham gave them a chapter in its 1968 volume; the Sanskrit Documents site carries them in both their forms. The story is told on the pages of the living seats and in every telling of Sri Śaṅkara’s life.

The lineage hymn of Advaita, recited in the maṭhas to this day, names him in its second verse. The Anusandhana Kendra gives the text: “Śrī Śaṅkarācāryam athāsya Padmapādaṁ ca Hastāmalakaṁ ca śiṣyam, taṁ Toṭakaṁ Vārttikakāram anyān asmad gurūn santatam ānato’smi” — “to Sri Śaṅkarācārya, and to his disciples Padmapāda and Hastāmalaka, to Toṭaka, to the author of the Vārttika, and to the rest of our teachers, I bow continually.” The rendering is this page’s. He is the one of the four whose name the hymn gives no epithet, because the name is already one.

His deeper legacy is a category. Advaita is a tradition of learning, and it would be possible to read its history as a history of arguments won. Sri Hastāmalaka is the tradition’s reminder to itself that the learning is a means. The Sringeri page puts him last among the four with a phrase that sums it: “Sri Hastamalakacharya. The living testament to absolute Self-Realization (Jnana)”. The Kanchi chapter, in its opening sentence, said the same in scholars’ language: he is “revered more for what they were than for any works they have bequeathed to posterity”. Sri Sureśvara wrote thousands of verses to establish what a boy on the Karnataka coast said in twelve, and the tradition has kept both, and has never thought the twelve the lesser.

For the seeker

A reader who is not a scholar may wonder what use a story like this is to him. He has not been silent since infancy; he was taught his letters; he has likes and dislikes and would be annoyed if beaten. The Hastāmalakīyam was spoken by someone who, the tradition insists, needed none of the discipline the tradition prescribes. What is it to the rest of us?

Three things, perhaps. The first is that the verses are a description, not a prescription, and descriptions can be checked. The refrain does not tell the reader to do anything; it tells him what he is, and the twelve verses give twelve ways of looking at his own experience — the mirror, the pots of water, the cloud — each of which is an invitation to look and see whether it is so. The commentary at the sixth verse says that this is all the scriptures ever do: “the scriptures do not enjoin that identity with Brahman should be established, but only that the false identification with things other than Brahman should be given up”. Nothing is to be achieved. Something is to be noticed.

The second is the fourth verse’s account of what the noticing requires. It is not that the mind must stop; the commentary is explicit that it is “only the loss of the mind in its present form with its accumulated Vasanas or impressions left by past actions and thoughts, which are the cause of likes and dislikes”. The boy who was beaten and not annoyed is the picture of a mind without those, and the picture is not offered as a miracle but as a state a mind can approach. The seeker’s work is on his likes and dislikes; the seeing comes, the sixth verse says, “to those whose minds have become absolutely pure”.

The third is the story’s smallest detail. The boy, brought before the teacher, “continued to be in the prostrate position and refused to get up”, and had to be lifted. Everything that followed — the question, the twelve verses, the name — came after the teacher “lifted him up in his infinite mercy”. The tradition tells this about its one disciple who did not need a teacher, and it tells it, one suspects, on purpose. Even he was lifted up. The seeker who has not been silent since infancy and cannot answer “who are you?” in twelve verses of perfect metre can at least do what the boy did first, which was to lie down at the feet of someone who knew and wait to be asked.

A note on pictures, names and dates

No portrait of Sri Hastāmalaka exists, and the page shows the lamp rather than a face that would have to be invented. His name is given on this page as Sri Hastāmalaka, with the honorific the site uses for all its teachers, and as Sri Hastāmalakācārya where the sources add the title; the Sringeri pages write Hastamalakacharya, the Kanchi chapter Hastamalaka, and the Sanskrit texts Hastāmalaka. His birth name, if the sources know it, they do not give. The hymn is called Hastāmalakīyam here, as the Sringeri edition calls it; the Kanchi chapter calls it the Hastāmalaka-stotra and the fourteen-verse text the Hastāmalaka-saṁvāda-stotra.

Dates: the page uses the historians’ eighth-to-ninth-century dating of Sri Śaṅkara, which the Kanchi volume, the Anusandhana Kendra and the Sringeri page’s “more than twelve centuries” all support, and records the Puri seat’s traditional dating and the Digvijaya translator’s view in the section on when he lived. The boy’s age is given as seven or thirteen, following the sources that say each, and the page does not choose. The seat is given as Puri following the Sringeri account, and the note that the assignment is not uniform is in the section on the seat.

Quotations: every quotation on this page is word for word from the source named beside it. The Digvijaya is quoted from a scanned copy of Swami Tapasyananda’s translation, in which the machine that read the pages made small errors and ran the printed page-headings into the text; where a quotation includes such an error the printed word has been restored — “prostrate” for “pro- strate,” “that” for “tifat,” “for play” for “fay play,” “in combination” for “im combination,” “all these” for “al! these,” “Sringeri” and “Puri” for the scanner’s “Sringen” and “Pun,” and the like — and two running page-heads (“THE COMING OF SOME DISCIPLES 141” and “PREACHING OF BRAHMA VIDYA 147”) have been removed from inside sentences. Footnote numerals attached to words in the Kanchi chapter (“himself1,” “proof15”) have been dropped. The Bhagavatpādīyam translations have had their editorial labels (“[Verse 1] English Translation of Hastamalakiyam”) removed and nothing else changed; where the translation quotes an Upaniṣad inside double quotation marks, the inner marks have been changed to single ones for display. The lineage hymn on the Anusandhana Kendra page is printed there in a transliteration scheme for plain keyboards; it is given here respelt in standard diacritics and the respelling is the page’s. The Sringeri Āmnāya page’s formatting marks have been replaced with dashes. No other word has been altered, and nothing has been quoted from any source not named.

Two things this page does not do. It does not link to encyclopaedia articles, because the reader is better served by the sources the encyclopaedias summarise, and every one of those is linked below. And it does not resolve what the sources leave open — the age, the seat, the name Ānandagiri, the authorship of the commentary — because a page that reports both sides of a disagreement is more useful to a reader than one that quietly picks a side.

Timeline

• Eighth century, by the historians’ dating — Sri Śaṅkara born in Kerala; the tradition of the Puri seat gives “507 BC”.
• Before the boy’s birth, by the tradition — a yogi on the Yamunā enters the body of a drowned two-year-old to console its mother (Digvijaya, canto 13; Sringeri disciple page). The Digvijaya’s third canto gives his birth as the wind-god’s.
• Early ninth century, by the same reckoning — during his tour of the west coast, after Gokarṇa, Harihar and Mūkāmbikā, Sri Śaṅkara visits Śrī Bali, a village of Brahmins near Gokarṇa; Prabhākara brings his son, aged seven (Digvijaya) or thirteen (Kanchi chapter, Sringeri disciple page); the boy answers “Who are you?” in twelve verses and is named Hastāmalaka (Digvijaya, canto 12).
• Soon after — the party reaches Sringeri, where Sri Toṭaka joins; Sri Padmapāda proposes Sri Hastāmalaka as author of the exegesis on the master’s commentaries, and Sri Śaṅkara declines on his behalf (Digvijaya, canto 13).
• By the tradition — Sri Śaṅkara writes a commentary on the twelve verses (Sringeri pages; Kanchi chapter, noting Belvalkar’s doubt).
• After the master’s tour — the four seats are assigned; Sri Hastāmalaka to Puri by the Sringeri account.
• Fourteenth century — Mādhava-Vidyāraṇya’s Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya, the fullest telling of the story, is composed; an Ānandagiri, not the disciple, writes a Śaṅkara-vijaya that briefly mentions him.
• 1910 — the commentary printed in volume sixteen of the Vani Vilas Works of Sri Sankaracharya.
• 1968 — the Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭham’s Preceptors of Advaita devotes its tenth chapter to him.
• 20th century — Swami Tapasyananda’s English translation of the Digvijaya published by the Sri Ramakrishna Math.
• Today — the Sringeri Pīṭham’s Bhagavatpādīyam publishes the twelve verses and the commentary in English; the Govardhana Pīṭha at Puri continues as one of the four seats.

Questions a reader may ask

Did a seven-year-old really compose twelve verses in perfect Sanskrit metre? The tradition says so and explains it by a previous life; the historians have no evidence either way about the author of the Hastāmalakīyam, and the poem and the story come to us together from sources written centuries afterwards. The Kanchi chapter’s phrasing is the honest one: “if tradition may be trusted”. What is not in doubt is that the twelve verses exist, that they are a complete and orthodox statement of Advaita, and that the tradition has treated them as a disciple’s work commented on by the master for as long as there is any record.

Why does the last verse address Viṣṇu? Because in Advaita the Self that the boy has been describing and the Lord who pervades everything are not two. The word viṣṇu means “the pervader,” and the Sringeri translation renders it “O All-pervading Lord!”. The verse says of the Lord exactly what the earlier verses said of the Self — that his apparent variety is in the minds that reflect him — and so closes the circle. Devotional readers have sometimes found the verse a concession; Advaita readers find it the point.

Was he seven or thirteen? The Digvijaya and the Sringeri abridgement say seven; the Kanchi chapter and the Sringeri disciple page say thirteen. The section on the question explains why both figures make sense and why this page does not choose.

Did he found the maṭha at Puri? The Sringeri Pīṭham says he was the first ācārya of the Govardhana Pīṭha at Puri. Other accounts assign him elsewhere and the Puri seat’s own page lists the disciples in an order that does not match. The Digvijaya itself, according to its translator, does not describe the founding of four seats at all. This page reports the Sringeri account and the disagreement.

Did Sri Śaṅkara really write the commentary? The tradition says yes, and the Sringeri Pīṭham publishes it under his name. The Kanchi chapter records that “the traditional view has been disputed by scholars like Belvalkar”. This page has not examined the arguments and reports the dispute.

Why is his page as long as the pages for teachers who wrote a great deal? Because the reader asked that every teacher on this site be given the same care, and because a short life with one poem turns out to have a great deal in it once the poem is read verse by verse with its commentary, and once the story is told from all the sources that tell it instead of one. The length of the page is not a measure of the man. Twelve verses were.

Where should a reader begin? With the twelve verses themselves, in the Sringeri Bhagavatpādīyam translation linked below, read slowly and with the commentary; then with the twelfth canto of the Digvijaya for the story; then with the Kanchi chapter for the analysis. An afternoon is enough. It was enough for the boy.