Sri Maṇḍana Miśra

The man

Every life of Sri Śaṅkara has a chapter in which the young monk walks up to the house of the most learned householder in India, finds the gate shut, and drops into the courtyard from the sky. The householder is Sri Maṇḍana Miśra. He is a ritualist, a follower of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, the champion of the view that the Veda exists to tell men what to do; he is rich, married, famous, and surrounded by scholars; the parrots in the cages at his gate argue about the self-validity of the Veda; and his wife, Ubhaya-bhāratī, is the goddess of learning born on earth under a curse. The two men debate for days with the wife as judge, the garland round the householder’s neck fades, he takes the ochre robe, and is given the name Sureśvara. It is the most famous debate in the history of Indian thought, and a reader who has heard one story about Advaita has probably heard this one.

This page is about the man at the centre of that story, and it has to begin by saying that the story is only half of him. There is also a book. The Brahma-siddhi, “the establishment of Brahman,” survives under the name of Maṇḍana Miśra, and it is not the work of a ritualist who lost an argument; it is one of the earliest, most independent and most influential books of Advaita Vedānta that exists, written by a man who had thought his way to non-duality along a road of his own and did not always agree with Sri Śaṅkara about the map. The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭham’s volume on the teachers of Advaita opens its chapter on him with the two halves joined: “Mandanamisra, the author of the Brahmasiddhi, is one of the best known figures in the literature of Advaita Vedanta, and one of the few teachers of great renown who have left the characteristic hallmark of their thought on the stupendous structure of Advaita.” Whether the author of that book and the householder of the story were the same man is a question the tradition and its scholars have argued about for a century, and this page gives the argument its own section rather than deciding it.

What can be said without deciding it is this. He was a householder, as his name says; the Advaita Vedānta Anusandhana Kendra’s survey of the teachers after Sri Śaṅkara gives the rule: “A general rule of thumb is that an author whose last name is miSra, or a variant of upAdhyAya, or dIkshita is a householder, while the names of sannyAsins are indicated by daSanAmI suffixes.” He was a master of Mīmāṁsā, the science of Vedic ritual and of how commands mean what they mean, and three of his six books belong to it; the 1937 editor of the Brahma-siddhi, S. Kuppuswami Sastri, calls him “a high authority on Mimamsa” and, in that school, “next in importance only to the greatest Acarya of the Bhatta school—Kumarilabhatta”. He was a philosopher of language, following the grammarian Bhartṛhari. And he was an Advaitin who taught that Brahman is bliss and its own light, that difference cannot be real, that ignorance lives in the soul and hides Brahman, and that hearing the Upaniṣads is the beginning of the road and long meditation the rest of it — positions which, as this page will show, Sri Vācaspati Miśra took over whole and made into the Bhāmatī school, so that the tradition’s own scholars say that the school of the Bhāmatī was really his.

He belongs on this site for two reasons beyond the story. The first is that he is the one great early Advaitin who never left the household, and who wrote, as a householder, that the householder’s life is not a lesser road: Kuppuswami Sastri records that he “recognises the value of Samnyasasrama but refuses to elevate it above the grhasthasrama” The second is his temper. The same editor, having set out every point on which he differed from Sri Śaṅkara, judged that “Mandana had the courage to refuse to play to the gallery and fearlessly preferred to remain a sweetly reasonable, accommodating and eclectic type of advaitin”. A reader who has found Advaita presented only in its most uncompromising form may find in him a teacher of the same truth who kept the rituals, kept the household, kept meditation, and kept his own counsel.

And this page, like its companions, tries not to pretend to know what nobody knows. There is no portrait of him and none is shown. Where he was born is claimed by four regions a thousand miles apart; when he lived is disputed by two centuries; whether he became Sri Sureśvara is disputed by the tradition’s own scholars; and his book was lost for so long that the modern historian of Indian philosophy who first described it had to do so from a manuscript he was lucky to find. This page gives every one of those uncertainties rather than choosing between them, and says where each piece of information comes from.

The sources, and how this page uses them

The Brahma-siddhi itself was printed for the first time in 1937, at Madras, in the Government Oriental Manuscripts Series, edited by S. Kuppuswami Sastri with the commentary of Sri Śaṅkhapāṇi as its second part. That edition, which is on the Internet Archive and is linked at the foot of the page, has a long English introduction — on the manuscripts, on the identity of Maṇḍana and Sureśvara, on his date, on his place in Indian philosophy and on the commentaries — and a foreword by the general editor of the series, P. P. Subrahmanya Sastri, who disagrees with the introduction on the identity question. The introduction is the principal source for this page and is quoted at length; the foreword is quoted where it dissents. A reader should know what the introduction is: not the Brahma-siddhi but a careful account of it by the scholar who had spent twenty years finding its manuscripts, and who signs it from the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library on 16 June 1936. The Brahma-siddhi has never been fully translated into English; a French translation by Madeleine Biardeau appeared in 1969, and Allen Thrasher’s English summary appears in the volume of Karl Potter’s Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies devoted to Advaita, and both are named here for the reader who can find them.

The second source is the tradition writing about him. The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭham hosts, on its own website, the chapter on him from Preceptors of Advaita, the volume brought out in 1968 to mark the diamond jubilee of Sri Chandrasekharendra Sarasvati’s accession to the Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha; the chapter is by R. Balasubramanian, and it is the fullest short account of the book’s teaching in English that can be read freely. It is linked and quoted throughout the sections on what he taught. The Śaṅkara-digvijaya of Mādhava, in Swami Tapasyananda’s translation for the Sri Ramakrishna Math, tells the story of the debate in its seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth cantos, and the translator’s footnotes give the scholarly reservations; this page tells the story as the poem tells it and gives the footnotes after. The Anusandhana Kendra’s survey of the later teachers places his book among them.

The third source is the modern history of Indian thought. Surendranath Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy, volume two (Cambridge, 1932), has a section on the identity question and a section on the Brahma-siddhi itself, written from a manuscript and from the proofs of the 1937 edition, which Kuppuswami Sastri let him read in Madras in December 1928; it is quoted for both. Dineshchandra Bhattacharya’s History of Navya-Nyāya in Mithilā (Darbhanga, 1958), a history of the logicians of north Bihar, argues in its first chapter for a later date for Sri Maṇḍana than the Madras editor gives, and is quoted for that argument. The Government of Bihar’s tourism department has a page on the shrine at Mahishi in Saharsa district that the local tradition calls his birthplace, and it is quoted for that tradition and for nothing else.

The fourth source is a critic. Swami Satchidānandendra Saraswatī’s Method of the Vedanta, in A. J. Alston’s English translation, devotes its sixth chapter to the Brahma-siddhi, examining it before any other interpreter of Sri Śaṅkara because, in the author’s words, “it furnishes the entry into all the later systems that followed”. He summarises its positions with page references to the 1937 edition and then disputes them from the standpoint of a man who held that Sri Śaṅkara’s own method had been lost by every school after him. Because he quotes the book so exactly before disagreeing with it, his chapter is one of the best guides in English to what the book says; this page uses it for both purposes and gives his disagreement its own section as one view.

Nothing on this page is invented. Every passage in quotation marks is copied from one of these sources and can be checked through the links at the foot of the page, except for the three works named above that are still in copyright and are cited by name only. The sources were read from scanned copies, and where the machine has misread a letter the printed word has been restored in the quotation and the correction recorded. The 1937 editor writes Sanskrit in the transliteration of his day and the Anusandhana Kendra in a keyboard scheme of its own; both are left as they stand. No modern encyclopaedia has been used, and no picture is shown, for reasons given in the note near the end.

Where the life was lived

The map below has more pins than the evidence deserves, and the reader should know why. No source records a journey of Sri Maṇḍana’s. His own book says nothing about where he lived. Everything on the map comes from the lives of Sri Śaṅkara, which were written five hundred years and more after the events, and which disagree with one another; and from a living local tradition in Bihar, which the poems do not know. Swami Tapasyananda, translating the Digvijaya, set the disagreement out in a footnote that this page can do no better than quote: “The place where Mandana, the ritualist, lived is another controversial matter. He was a resident of Mahishmati according to Madhava-Vidyaranya. But the text is not, however, clear about the situation of this place. In verse 28 in Canto 3, however, Mandana’s paternal home is stated to be situated in the capital of Kashmir. Chidvilasa also seems to speak of him as a resident of Kashmir. Vyasachala speaks of him as a resident of Mahishmati in Vidarbha. According to Anantanandagiri” — and the sentence continues, across a page of the scan — “he lived in Bylabindu near Hastinapura. To identify these ancient names with their modern counterparts is difficult. Telang, however, points out that Mahishmati is mentioned in Raghuvamsa (VI-43) as situated on the Narmada. In the Magha (II.64) it is represented as the capital of Sisupala. Dr. Garret’s dictionary identifies it with Chuli Maheshvar. Thus all these three, the capital of Kashmir, Bijlabindu somewhere north of Delhi, and the banks of the Narmada—all these places divided by vast distances claim to have been the residence of Mandana. It is a very strange situation indeed!”

So the poems give three homes. Mādhava’s Digvijaya, the life the Sringeri tradition follows, puts him at Māhiṣmatī, which the poem’s own tenth canto places on the Narmadā when it says that after his initiation Sureśvara “lived many days on the banks of the Narmada”; the old city of Māhiṣmatī is generally identified with Maheshwar in Madhya Pradesh, and the pin follows that identification while the caption says it is the tradition’s. The same poem, in its third canto, gives his father’s house as the capital of Kashmir, and Cidvilāsa agrees; Vyāsācala puts Māhiṣmatī in Vidarbha, the Berar country of Maharashtra; Anantānandagiri puts him near Hastināpura, north of Delhi. The Kashmir and Hastināpura pins are set by region only, and Vidarbha is left in the caption, because no town can be named.

The fourth home is not in the poems at all. In Mahishi, a village of Saharsa district in the Mithilā country of north Bihar, there is a shrine called Maṇḍan Bhāratī Dhām, and the Government of Bihar’s tourism page on it says: “Mandan Dham is located in Mahishi village of Saharsa district. It is also known as the birthplace of Pandit Mandan Mishra, the great scholar, and philosopher of the 8th century.” The same page records the local telling: “It is said that Pandit Mandan Mishra along with his wife Bharati made valuable contributions to Indian philosophy, who was a senior contemporary of Adi Shankaracharya. Adi Shankaracharya visited Mahishi for a philosophical debate with Mandan for the promotion of Sanatan Dharma.” The page adds that “People from different states come to this Dham, especially people from South India.” This page pins Mahishi because the tradition is alive and the Mithilā claim has something the others lack: Mithilā was, for a thousand years after him, the home of Mīmāṁsā and Nyāya learning in the north, the country of Sri Vācaspati Miśra who followed him so closely, and a Miśra of Mithilā is exactly what a Brahmin of his name and learning would have been. But that is an argument from plausibility, not a record, and the caption says so. The tourism page’s “senior contemporary” and the poem’s “disciple who became Sureśvara” are, as the section on the identity question will show, two different men in the scholars’ eyes, and the Mahishi tradition has taken the scholars’ side.

A reader who wants a single answer will not get one from this page. What the map shows honestly is that the tradition remembered Sri Maṇḍana as the greatest householder-scholar of his age and wanted him for its own country, in Kashmir, in Mithilā, on the Narmadā and in the Doab alike. That is itself a fact about him, and perhaps the only geographical one.

What his own book says about its author

Almost nothing, and the little is worth setting out exactly. The Brahma-siddhi has no verse naming its author’s parents, teacher, town or king. It is known to be his because those who came after him said so: Dasgupta reports that “both Sridhara in his Nyaya-kandali (p. 218) and Citsukha in his Tattva-pradipika (p. 140) refer to Mandana as the author of the Brahma-siddhi”, and that many other writers cite “the author of Brahma-siddhi (Brahma-siddhi-kara)” without any other name; and, he adds pointedly, “in none of these references, so far as it is known to the present writer, has the author of Brahma-siddhi been referred to as Suresvara”.

What the book does show is what he had read, and that fixes him in time better than any colophon. The Kanchi chapter: “Mandana quotes a passage from Bhartrihari’s Vakyapadiya, and also a verse from Gaudapada’s Mandukya-karika in the Brahmasiddhi.” It continues: “He cites the authority of Kumarila Bhatta’s Slokavartika either for approval or criticism many a ti”me, and quotes and criticises Prabhākara’s Bṛhatī, while “Salikanatha, a disciple of Prabhakara, quotes extracts from Mandana’s Brahmasiddhi and criticises them in his Prakaranapanchika.” Dasgupta adds the negative evidence, which is as telling: “though he quotes some writers who flourished before Sankara, such as Sabara, Kumarila or Vyasa, the author of the Yoga-sutra-bhasya, and makes profuse references to the Upanisad texts, he never refers to any writer who flourished after Sankara”. So he read Bhartṛhari and Sri Gauḍapāda, argued with Kumārila and Prabhākara, was answered by Śālikanātha, and knew no one later. The Kanchi chapter notes one more thing: “Though Mandana does not quote or refer to any passage from Sankara’s works, there are internal evidences to show that he is quite conversant with Sankara’s standpoint, particularly with regard to karma and jnana.” Whether that means he had read Sri Śaṅkara, or that Sri Śaṅkara had read him, or that both were answering the same older arguments, is the whole of the dating question, which the next section takes up.

The book also shows, in its first word, what kind of Advaitin he was. It opens with a verse of salutation whose key word is akṣaram, “the imperishable,” and, as the Kanchi chapter explains, he reads that word in the grammarians’ way, as “the syllable,” and builds on it a doctrine that Brahman is of the nature of the Word; the section on the Word and Om below gives it. Kuppuswami Sastri counts this the first of the marks that separate him from Sri Sureśvara: “Mandana maintains the Sphotavada and Sabdadvaita of Bhartrhari, in an elaborate manner, in his Sphota-siddhi and easily reads it into the Advaita-siddhanta in his amplification of the word ‘aksaram’ in the opening verses of the Brahmasiddhi.” And it closes with a verse in which, for once, the author speaks of his own work; the editor quotes its opening words — “Sadyah praksalayanti ghanamapi jagatam tirthadustarkapankam” — which say that the Brahma-siddhi at once washes away the thick mud of bad reasoning that the world’s schools have left in the sacred fords. It is the only boast in the book, and the editor thought it earned: “An impartial estimate of Mandana’s works would certainly result in a full vindication of the claim which Mandana himself puts forward in the concluding verse of his Brahmasiddhi”.

When he lived: three reckonings

Everyone agrees on the frame. The Kanchi chapter: “So Mandana was later than Bhartrihari and Gaudapada and earlier than Salikanatha, and must have been a younger contemporary of Kumarila Bhatta and Prabhakara.” Kuppuswami Sastri, in the same terms: he “was later than Bhartrhari and earlier than Salikanatha” and “must have been a younger contemporary of Kumarila and an elder contemporary of Samkara and Suresvara”. The disagreement is about where that frame sits in the Christian calendar, and it turns entirely on the date of Sri Śaṅkara, which is disputed by two centuries.

The first reckoning is the Madras editor’s. Relying on a 1929 article that placed Sri Śaṅkara’s literary activity in 632 to 664, and on the date of Bhartṛhari’s death recorded by the Chinese pilgrim I-tsing, he drew up what he called a “provisional scheme of dates” in which Gauḍapāda is 520–620, Kumārila 600–660, Prabhākara 610–690, “Mandana: 615-695 A.D.”, Sri Śaṅkara 632–664, Śālikanātha 650–730, Sri Padmapāda 625–705 and Viśvarūpa, that is Sri Sureśvara, 620–700 — adding, with a scholar’s care, that “the dates given are of a tentative character”. On this reckoning Sri Maṇḍana was born in the early seventh century and the whole first generation of Advaita belongs to it.

The second reckoning is the one the Kanchi chapter and Dasgupta share, though they reach it differently. The Kanchi chapter does not give a year; it says only, “In all probability he was an elder contemporary of Sankara.” Dasgupta, who kept the conventional 788–820 for Sri Śaṅkara, headed his section “Maṇḍana (A.D. 800)” and reasoned from the logician Śrīdhara: “Of these the evidence of Sridhara, who belonged to the middle of the tenth century, ought to be considered very reliable, as he lived within a hundred years of the death of Mandana; whoever Mandana may have been, since he lived after Sankara (a.d. 820), he could not have flourished very much earlier than the middle of the ninth century.” (The words of the running head have been cut from that quotation, and the cut is recorded.) Dasgupta’s own scheme thus puts him at or after Sri Śaṅkara; the Kanchi chapter puts him just before; both put him around 800.

The third reckoning is the 1958 history of the logicians of Mithilā, and it argues from a different kind of evidence. Sri Vācaspati, commenting on Sri Maṇḍana’s Vidhi-viveka, quotes a passage that the Russian scholar Stcherbatsky traced to the Buddhist logician Dharmottara, whose work survives in Tibetan; and, the history says, “According to Vacaspati Mandana was refuting the views of Dharmottara in the original passage of the Vidhiviveka. This makes Mandana a junior contemporary of Dharmottara.” Dharmottara is dated by the Kashmir chronicle to the reign of Jayāpīḍa about 800. The history adds the Tibetan historian Tāranātha’s report that the Pāla dynasty was founded a year, or seven years, after the death of “Acarya Mimamsaka” (spyod-pa)” — “The reference is evidently to Kumarila, who died thus in the first or second decade of the 8th century A.D. Mandana therefore cannot be placed before 800 A.D.” Its conclusion: “Mandana was an earlier contemporary of Sankaracarya, whose date cannot be placed before 800 A.D.”

This page cannot judge between the three, and should say why. The first depends on a date for Sri Śaṅkara that most scholars have not accepted, though the tradition’s own reckonings are earlier still; the third depends on a chain of identifications through Tibetan sources that not every scholar accepts; the second is the conventional one and rests on the conventional date for Sri Śaṅkara, which this site treats, on every page, as one estimate among several. What all three agree on is the order: after Bhartṛhari and Sri Gauḍapāda, alongside or just after Kumārila and Prabhākara, before Śālikanātha, and — on two of the three — a little before Sri Śaṅkara. The card for this teacher on this site says “eighth century,” which is the middle reckoning, and the timeline below gives all three. One consequence should be noticed: on the first and second reckonings he is Sri Śaṅkara’s elder, which is what every version of the story assumes; on the Madras editor’s own scheme he is born seventeen years before the master and outlives him by thirty.

The story: the parrots at the gate

The story is told in Mādhava’s Śaṅkara-digvijaya, and this page tells it as the poem tells it, in Swami Tapasyananda’s translation, before saying what the scholars make of it. It begins not with Sri Maṇḍana but with his teacher. In the seventh canto Sri Śaṅkara comes to Prayāga and finds Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, the greatest of the ritualists, slowly burning himself to death in a fire of chaff in penance for a sin of his youth. Kumārila cannot debate; but he can send the monk to the one man who can. He describes him: “He is the champion of the gospel of ritualistic works and of life in the world. He is ever engaged in the performance of rituals. He is a householder of great wealth, fame and learning. You have got to defeat this great opponent of the path of renunciation, and for this I would advise you to go to his place immediately. His wife Ubhaya-bharati is also a great scholar. It is said that she is Saraswati herself born in a human body because of the curse of sage Durvasas. Mandana is superior even to me in his mastery of the philosophy of work. And among my disciples, he is the one dearest to me.” And he tells the monk what to do with him once he is won: “Engaging yourself in debate with him, with Ubhaya-bharati as the umpire, you have to defeat him and make him your disciple. You can then entrust him with the duty of writing annotations on your works.” The poem, that is, knows from the start that the debate is about a commentator; the man who loses it will write the Vārttikas.

The eighth canto brings the monk to Māhiṣmatī. He asks the way of the maidservants going to fetch water for the great man’s house, and they give him the most famous directions in Sanskrit literature: “You will find nearby a house at whose gate there are a number of parrots in cages, discussing topics like this: ‘Has the Veda self-validity, or does it depend on some external authority for its validity? Are Karmas capable of yielding their fruits directly, or do they require the intervention of God to do so? Is the world eternal, or is it a mere appearance?’ Where you find the strange phenomenon of caged parrots discussing such abstruse philosophical problems, know” — and, after the page-break in the scan — “that to be the gate of Mandana’s house.” The three questions the parrots argue are the three questions of the debate to come: the authority of the Veda, whether ritual needs a God, and whether the world is real. The poet has put the whole argument in the birds’ mouths before the men have opened theirs.

The gate is shut, because the householder is performing the yearly rite for his ancestors, and the monk enters “from the sky”. What follows is the one passage in all the lives of Sri Śaṅkara in which the master is insulted to his face, and the poem does not soften it. Sri Maṇḍana, furious at a shaven monk appearing at a rite from which monks were excluded, asks where the shaveling has come from; the monk, taking “shaven” as a question about his head, answers that the shaving began at the neck; and the exchange descends, for a page, into puns and abuse, “Mandana proud and angry all the while, and Sankara calm and humorous”. It ends when the two sages who are the householder’s guests at the rite intervene — for in the poem they are Jaimini and Vyāsa themselves, the authors of the two Mīmāṁsās — and Vyāsa tells his host that “this behaviour of yours towards a Sannyasin, who is a knower of Brahman and who has abandoned all worldly desires, is quite improper”. The householder calms himself and offers food. The monk declines it: “I came here for Vada bhiksha (an offering of philosophic disputation) and not a Bhiksha of edibles. And the wager in the disputation should be that the defeated one should become the disciple of the victor.” A reader may notice how carefully the poet has shaped this: the Advaitin will not eat until he has argued, and what he asks for as alms is the other man’s life.

The terms are agreed, and they are the terms of that world. Each states his thesis. The monk: if he loses, “I shall cease to be a Sannyasin, abandon my ochre robe, and assume the white dress. Let Ubhaya-bharati be the umpire to determine success or failure.” The householder states the ritualist’s case in full, and it is worth hearing because it is a serious case: “The Vedantas or the Upanishads cannot be a proof of a subject-objectless Pure Consciousness, unoriginated and infinite. For, words can reveal only objects which are originated entities, but never a pure subject-objectless Consciousness, which does not form an effect. Therefore the non-Vedantic part of the Veda, dealing with such effects produced by works, is the real Sabda-Pramana (verbal testimony). In the light of it, actions alone constitute the steps leading to Moksha, and embodied beings have to perform action (Karma) till the end of their lives. If I happen to be defeated in argument, I shall take to the life of Sannyasa. As requested by you, let my wife Ubhaya-bharati, who is learned enough for the work, be the judge in this contest.” The wife hangs a garland on each man’s neck and says that “That person is to be considered defeated whose wreath is seen to fade.” And then, in the poem’s most human touch, “she went to the inner apartments of the house for completing her household duties as also to cook the Bhiksha (or food offering) for the Sannyasin and meals for the master of the house.” The judge of the greatest debate in India goes in to make lunch.

The story continued: the garland, the verdict and the name

The debate itself, the poem says, was watched from above: “Brahma and the Devas, who were eager to attend it, assembled in the sky above that house.” And it was conducted, after the abuse at the gate, as the tradition wished all debate to be conducted: “Quoting authority after authority from the Veda and supporting the same with weighty” “arguments they conducted the debate in a highly dignified manner, each contending party showing due respect to the other. As days passed, the debate became keener and keener and larger and larger numbers of scholars swelled the audience. It was remarkable that though both of them were vitally interested in victory, the two disputants did not evince any bitterness or enmity towards each other. Five or six days passed in this way in debate, Ubhaya-bharati appearing every day at noon to inform her husband that food was ready and to invite the Sannyasin for his Bhiksha. As they sat firm in their seats, refuting each other’s learned arguments, there was not the slightest excitement in their behaviour, nor any angry word in their speech, even when confronted with confounding situations. On the other hand, a sweet smile played on their shining faces all through the debate.” The poem then gives, over fifty verses, the substance of the argument — the ritualist’s case that the Veda commands and does not describe, the Advaitin’s that the great texts of the Upaniṣads state a fact about the Self which no command could convey and which, once known, leaves nothing to be done — and it should be said plainly that the argument the poem puts into Sri Maṇḍana’s mouth is the Mīmāṁsaka’s argument, not the Brahma-siddhi’s. The author of that book had already accepted that the Upaniṣads reveal Brahman; his quarrel with Sri Śaṅkara was about what happens next. The poem knows only the ritualist.

The end comes as the terms required: “Now, Ubhaya-bharati (who was none but Goddess Saraswati herself) accepted that the cogent arguments of Sankara had overcome the contentions of Mandana, thereby subjecting him to the humility of defeat. Like a shower of sweet-smelling flowers, came her words giving a verdict, which in effect was a directive to her husband to adopt the life of Sannyasa, abandoning home and herself. As she thus gave her verdict in favour of the distinguished Sannyasin, the flower wreath which she had put at the start round her husband’s neck was found to fade. And, unlike on ordinary days, she now invited them both, Sankara and Mandana, for their Bhiksha in the noon; for, from now onwards Mandana was no longer a householder but a Sannyasin, according to the wager agreed upon in the beginning.” The two invitations to lunch are the poet’s way of marking what has happened: on the first day the monk was fed as a guest and the husband as master of the house; on the last both are fed as monks, by a woman who has just, with her own word, made herself a widow to the world.

But the poem does not let the defeated man go quietly, and its ninth canto contains the passage that a reader who cares about Sri Maṇḍana should weigh most. His first thought after losing is not for himself: “O great Sannyasin! Defeat in debate is something new for me. Still it does not depress me. But alas! That the teachings of Jaimini have been refuted, is a matter of great concern for me. Jaimini is one who knew all about the past, present and future. He knows the true purport of the Veda. He also stands for the good of all the worlds. How could he, the greatest among ascetics, then formulate a false body of teachings in his Sutras?” And Sri Śaṅkara’s answer is the one that made the two Mīmāṁsās into one tradition: “The sage has not committed any mistake. The trouble lies in this, that we of little understanding are not able to grasp his ideas correctly.” The ritual, he goes on to explain, was laid down by Jaimini as a preparation for those not yet ready for knowledge; the two teachings are one road at two stages. Sri Maṇḍana asks to hear it, “If it is convincing, I shall accept it without the least sense of pride of learning or position.” A reader who knows the Brahma-siddhi will notice, and this page will return to it, that the poem has here put into Sri Śaṅkara’s mouth almost exactly the book’s own view of the relation between ritual and knowledge: means and end, one road.

Then, the canto says, the wife spoke. As her husband finishes a hymn of surrender — “here am I resolved to abandon everything precious in life—disciples, home, wife, wealth and the rest—and to take refuge at Thy feet” — she tells the assembly a prophecy an ascetic had made to her mother when she was a girl: that Brahmā would be born as the scholar Maṇḍana to defend the Vedic way, that she would be his wife, and that “God Siva Himself will grace this earth in a human form. Now your daughter’s” “husband will have to meet in debate this Siva-incarnation in the form of a Sannyasin. Defeated in the debate, your daughter’s husband will have to renounce the household life and follow his Master as a Sannyasin.” And then she claims her own turn: “But please remember, you have not gained complete success over my renowned husband, as I am his better half. Before you make him your disciple, you have to defeat me also in debate.” When the monk demurs that “It is not proper to fight with women, be it with words only”, she answers with the Upaniṣads themselves: “What difference does it make whether a controversialist, who challenges you and attacks your doctrines, is a man or a woman? The duty of a controversialist is to defeat his opponent whoever it might be. Look at the ancient examples of Yajnavalkya debating with Gargi and of Janaka with Sulabha.” Her debate with Sri Śaṅkara, which lasts seventeen days and ends in the famous question about the science of love that sends him into the body of the dead king Amaruka, is her own story and not his, and is told on this site elsewhere. What matters for this page is that in the poem the householder’s defeat is not complete until his wife concedes it, and that she makes the monk earn it twice.

The tenth canto closes the story. When the king’s body has been left and the monk has returned, and the lady has departed to her own realm, he takes his new disciple and teaches him: “Having thus received instruction on the nature of the Atman, the disciple prostrated himself before Sankara and said, O great teacher! By your grace, ignorance has been dispelled, and I have become blessed. Mandana was given the name of Sureswara—a name that came to be favoured by the guardian Dames of the Quarters and was to be known far and wide in times to come. Attaining to the position of the chief disciple of Sankara, he remained in a state of blessedness that was superior even to that of Brahma, the creator. Immersed in the study of, and reflection on, Vedanta, and thereby poised ever in the blessed Self, Sureswara, noted among the egoless saints, lived many days on the banks of the Narmada.” (The words of a running page-head have been cut from that quotation and the cut is recorded.) From this point the poem knows him only as Sureśvara, and his later story — the writing of the Vārttikas and the Naiṣkarmya-siddhi, the succession at Sringeri — is told on this site’s page for Sri Sureśvara. This page follows the other man: the one who, if the scholars are right, stayed at home and wrote the Brahma-siddhi.

One man or two? Sri Maṇḍana and Sri Sureśvara

This is the question a reader of this page cannot avoid, and this section sets out both sides in their own words. The tradition’s answer is the poem’s. The general editor of the 1937 edition, P. P. Subrahmanya Sastri, stated it at the head of his foreword: “Tradition has always been consistent and unanimous on the identity of Mandanamisra and Suresvaracarya. When it was discovered that Suresvara went by an earlier name Visvarupacarya, it was accepted without question, with the suggestion that the grhasthasrama name of Suresvara should have been Visvarupacarya also.” Dasgupta, writing in 1932, agreed about the tradition and disagreed about its worth: “General tradition has always identified Mandana with Suresvara and Visvarupa”; “The tradition probably started from Vidyaranya’s Sankara-dig-vijaya, where Mandana is spoken of as being named not only Umbeka, but also Visvarupa (viii. 63). He further says in x. 4 of the same work that, when Mandana became a follower of Sankara, he received from him the name Suresvara. But the Sankara-dig-vijaya is a mythical biography, and it is certainly very risky to believe any of its statements, unless corroborated by other reliable evidences.” Swami Tapasyananda, the poem’s own translator, gave the same caution in his footnote: “It is to be noted that there is a well-known Vedantic text by name Brahmasiddhi, attributed to Mandana Misra. Whether this Mandana is the same as the ritualistic philosopher whom Sankara had to confront, is a matter of controversy, because the views of the author of Brahmasiddhi are mostly Vedantic and not of the ritualistic philosophy. It may be that the work is by the same Mandana after he came under the influence of Sankara, but that for some unknown reason his old name came to be attached to the work. But the greater possibility is that the ritualist Mandana” “who became Sureswara, under Sankara’s influence, is a different person from the author of Brahmasiddhi and that the personalities of the two have got mixed up.”

The case against the identity was first made in 1923. The foreword records that “The first challenge to this identity came from Prof. Hiriyanna of Mysore”, who noticed that Sri Vidyāraṇya, in his Vārttika-sāra, treats the author of the Brahma-siddhi and the author of the Vārttika as two different authorities, and that the views attributed to the one are contradicted by the other. Dasgupta took the point further: “Now, if Vidyaranya, the author of the Varttika-sara, knew that Mandana, the author of the Brahma-siddhi, was not the same person as Suresvara, he could not have identified them in his Sankara-dig-vijaya. This naturally leads one to suspect that the Vidyaranya who was the author of the Vivarana-prameya-samgraha and the Varttika-sara was not the same Vidyaranya as the author of Sankara-dig-vijaya.” That is, the identity rests on a poem whose authorship is itself in doubt. Then the Madras editor, having compared the Brahma-siddhi line by line with Sri Sureśvara’s books, laid out ten points of doctrine on which the two authors differ and concluded that they were “several data of overwhelming cumulative weight, which would be quite sufficient to kill the common belief in the Mandana-Suresvara equation, and to exhibit Mandana and Suresvara as two different individuals, maintaining strikingly divergent views within the purview of Advaitism.” The points are given through this page as the teaching is described: the doctrine of the Word, which Sri Maṇḍana holds and Sri Sureśvara ignores; the seat of ignorance, which Sri Maṇḍana puts in the soul and Sri Sureśvara in Brahman; meditation after hearing, which Sri Maṇḍana requires and Sri Sureśvara denies; the value of ritual, which one keeps and the other rejects; the householder’s life, which one honours and the other leaves. And the editor noticed a tone as well as a doctrine: Sri Sureśvara, refuting these positions, shows what he called an “unmistakable animus” against their author, which is hard to explain if the author was himself.

His three conclusions are the strongest statement of the case and are quoted whole: “firstly, that Mandana, the author of the Brahmasiddhi, was never a disciple of Samkara, did not become a samnyasin, was not identical with Suresvara and represented an advaitic prasthana different from Samkaraprasthana; secondly, that Suresvara, who was known as Visvarupa in his grhasthasrama, was a pupil of Kumarila when he was a grhastha and came to be known by the name of Suresvara when he became a samnyasin and a disciple of Samkara; that, in his Varttika and Naiskarmyasiddhi, he controverted many an advaitic doctrine expounded by Mandana in his Brahmasiddhi; and that Suresvara nowhere departed from his avowed allegiance to Samkaraprasthana; and thirdly, that Mandana should have written his Brahmasiddhi after seeing Samkara’s bhasyas, more particularly the Brahmasutrabhasya; and that Suresvara should have written his Naiskarmyasiddhi, mainly as a Samkara counterblast to the Brahmasiddhi probably in compliance with Samkara’s desire.” He added that “even in the midst of the scurrilous and blasphemous references to Samkara in the Madhva work, called Manimanjari, one could find that the correct tradition differentiating Mandana from Visvarupa is preserved.” That is a point the reader should weigh: a hostile witness has no motive to divide one man into two.

The defence of the identity is not a weak one, and the same volume contains it. The foreword observed that on the editor’s own dates the two men were near contemporaries, and asked how one could have copied the other: “If both these lived so near to each other, it is impossible to imagine that the latter would incorporate in extenso large extracts from the former, without any kind of acknowledgment, particularly when we are asked to believe that the two were opposed to each other doctrinally.” It argued that the doctrinal differences “are neither unnatural in the circumstances of the case nor wholly and fundamentally opposed to each other” — a man who changed his teacher might well change his mind on ten points. And it recorded a solution proposed by Sri Narasimha Bhāratī, the Sringeri pontiff whose death the foreword places in 1913, when the Guruvaṁśa-kāvya, the poem of the Sringeri succession written by a paṇḍit of his predecessor’s court, was found to speak of a Maṇḍana whom Sri Śaṅkara met on the way to Viśvarūpa and who lived and died a householder. His Holiness “explained graciously that in ancient days Mandana was merely an honorific title and that there was no contradiction as the references under question were to two independent personalities who were both known by the name of Mandana, one who was the Grhastha who had the benefit of Sankara’s advice and lived and died as a Grhastha and the other, the famous Grhastha Visvarupa who later on became a Sann”“yasin and died as Suresvara.” On this reading there were two Maṇḍanas, and the tradition and the scholars are both right about different men. The foreword also quotes Cidvilāsa’s Śaṅkara-vijaya-vilāsa, which “identifies Mandana and Suresvara in unmistakable terms”, and notes that Sri Vidyāraṇya’s Digvijaya calls the same man Umveka and Viśvarūpa. The Sanskrit verse it prints has Sri Śaṅkara give the new monk the name Sureśvara because he saw him to be surajyeṣṭhāṁśajāta, born of a portion of the eldest of the gods.

Dasgupta’s own conclusion tried to hold both: “It may therefore be concluded that Mandana, the author of the Brahma-siddhi, was not the same person as Suresvara, unless we suppose that Mandana was not only a Mimamsa writer, but also a Vedanta writer of great repute and that his conversion by Sankara meant only that he changed some of his Vedantic views and accepted those of Sankara, and it was at this stage that he was called Suresvara. On this theory his Brahma-siddhi was probably written before his conversion to Sankara’s views. It seems likely that this theory may be correct”. And Swami Satchidānandendra, who as a monk of the tradition had every reason to accept the poem, declined to decide: “We shall leave this contentious problem alone here, as it is the province of historians. But we may observe that it does not appear easy to accept the identity of Mandana and Suresvara, given the differences in literary style and philosophic method in the books attributed to them.” He put the difficulty exactly: if the two were one man, or if Sri Sureśvara came after, then “the main points in Mandana’s doctrine that were in contradiction with that of Bhagavatpada ought to have been refuted by Suresvaracarya. But they are not.” (A page-number has been cut from that quotation.) His resolution was practical: “Here we shall accept the traditional view that Mandana wrote before Suresvaracarya, and proceed to examine his position now.”

This page takes the same course and says so. Where it tells the story it says “the Digvijaya says”; where it describes the teaching it describes the Brahma-siddhi, whoever wrote it; and where it speaks of Sri Sureśvara it means the author of the Vārttikas, whose own page on this site tells his story. The reader who wants a verdict should notice one thing that all parties agree on: the book that survives under Sri Maṇḍana’s name was written by a householder who disagreed with Sri Śaṅkara on real points, was answered on those points by Sri Sureśvara with some heat, and was nevertheless treated by the whole later tradition — by Sri Vācaspati, Sri Citsukha, Sri Ānandapūrṇa, Sri Vidyāraṇya and the rest — as one of its own masters. Whether he ever wore the ochre robe, he was never put outside the fold.

The works: six books

The Kanchi chapter lists them, and the list has not changed: “In addition to the Brahmasiddhi which is considered to be one of the major classical treatises on Advaita, he wrote three works on Mimamsa–the Mimamsanukramanika, the Bhavanaviveka, and the Vidhiviveka, one work on the philosophy of language – the Sphotasiddhi, and one work on the theories of error, viz., the Vibhramaviveka.” Six books in three sciences, and the order in which a reader meets them tells something about the man.

• Mīmāṁsānukramaṇikā — a short verse survey of the topics of Jaimini’s twelve books, the kind of book a teacher writes for his pupils. It shows him as a working teacher of the ritual science.
• Bhāvanā-viveka, “the discernment of bhāvanā” — on the Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṁsā theory of how a Vedic command moves a man to act: the “bringing-into-being” that the verb-ending expresses. This is Kumārila’s school, and the book defends it.
• Vidhi-viveka, “the discernment of injunction” — on what a Vedic command is, against the rival Mīmāṁsā of Prabhākara and against the Buddhists. This is the book Sri Vācaspati commented on in his Nyāya-kaṇikā, and through that commentary it became one of the most-read books of the ritual science; it is also the book through which, as the section on his date showed, the logicians of Mithilā tried to fix his century.
• Sphoṭa-siddhi, “the establishment of sphoṭa” — a defence of the grammarians’ doctrine that meaning is carried not by the separate sounds of a word but by a single indivisible word-essence that flashes on the mind when the last sound is heard. Bhartṛhari held it; Kumārila and Sri Śaṅkara both rejected it; Sri Maṇḍana defended it against his own Mīmāṁsā teacher.
• Vibhrama-viveka, “the discernment of error” — a short verse treatise on the theories of how false perception happens: whether the silver seen in the shell is a memory mistaken for a perception, or a real thing seen elsewhere, or something that is neither. The Kanchi chapter notes that “the discussion of the theory of akhyati in the Vibhrama-viveka and the Brahmasiddhi is almost identical”.
• Brahma-siddhi, “the establishment of Brahman” — the book this page is about, and the only one of the six that is Vedānta.

Two things stand out from the list. The first is that five of the six are not Vedānta at all: they are books of ritual science, grammar and epistemology, written by a man who was a master of those fields before he wrote his one book of Brahman. The 1937 editor thought that this was the point of him: “He shows a refreshing independence of judgment, but never carries it to the point of a rebel mentality”; he is “perfectly loyal to Kumarila” as a Mīmāṁsaka and yet “criticises him in a fearless manner” where his own reasoning led elsewhere. The second is the pattern of the titles. Three are vivekas, discernments; two are siddhis, establishments. The foreword notes that the name siddhi “as a title to a class of works seems to go back even to early Buddhistic times”, citing Vasubandhu and Dharmakīrti, and observes that the Advaita tradition’s later “Siddhi literature” — Sri Sureśvara’s Naiṣkarmya-siddhi, Sri Vimuktātman’s Iṣṭa-siddhi, Sri Madhusūdana’s Advaita-siddhi — begins with his. The Kanchi chapter on Sri Vimuktātman lists the four great Siddhis of Advaita, and his is first.

By 1937 the other five had all been printed — the Kanchi chapter’s footnotes cite editions from Benares and Madras — so that the editor could compare the Brahma-siddhi “with his other known works, all of which are now available in print”. The Brahma-siddhi, the one that mattered most to this tradition, was the last to appear, and the reason is worth a section of its own.

The book: how the Brahma-siddhi was lost and found

For most of a thousand years the Brahma-siddhi was known by quotation. Everyone cited it; almost no one had it. Dasgupta, writing the second volume of his history in the late 1920s, said of it: “But the work has not yet been published, and its manuscripts are very scarce: the present writer had the good fortune to obtain one.” Of the four old commentaries he could name, he found “only the latter two works are available in manuscripts”, and he had to describe the book’s doctrines from what other writers reported of them, until, as he records in a footnote, “A copy of the manuscript of the Brahma-siddhi and its commentary was consulted by me in the Adyar and the Govt. Sanskrit MSS. Libraries after the above section had been written, and a thorough examination of its contents, I am happy to say, corroborates the above surmises. The Brahma-siddhi is expected to be shortly published by Prof. Kuppusvami Sastri, and I consulted the tarka-pada of it in proof by the kind courtesy of Prof. Sastri in Madras in December 1928.”

The printing took a long time. The foreword tells the story: “In the course of the systematic search for rare and valuable manuscripts by the staff of the Library, a rare manuscript of the Brahmasiddhi was discovered as early as 1920, when Professor S. Kuppuswami Sastri was the Curator. The first instalment of the text was sent to the press as early as 1922. The publication was delayed so long by various circumstances. It is therefore a matter of some satisfaction that the work has at last been published as scholars all over the world have been enquiring after it ceaselessly for some time now.” The volume finally appeared in 1937 as number four of the Madras Government Oriental Manuscripts Series, with the text as Part I and Sri Śaṅkhapāṇi’s commentary as Part II, and it is still, as Swami Satchidānandendra’s translator noted decades later, “the only one extant”. The Kanchi chapter’s footnotes cite it by page, and so does this one.

The four commentaries deserve a word, because they are the book’s afterlife. The editor: “So far, four commentaries are known to have been written on Mandana’s Brahmasiddhi. The earliest of them is the Tattvasamiksa by Vacaspatimisra, written in the former half of the 9th century A.D. It is known only through references, and no manuscript of this commentary has yet been discovered to exist anywhere at the present moment.” The loss of Sri Vācaspati’s Tattva-samīkṣā is among the heaviest in Advaita, since he refers to it repeatedly in the Bhāmatī as the place where he has worked things out. Then “Citsukha, who flourished in the beginning of the 13th century, wrote a brief commentary on the Brahmasiddhi, called Abhipraya-prakasika”; Sri Ānandapūrṇa Vidyāsāgara “wrote, in the latter part of the 16th century, a copious commentary on the Brahmasiddhi, called Bhavasuddhi”; and the one printed with the text “is by one Sankhapani, about whom nothing definite is known. The only information available about this commentator from a Malabar tradition is that he was a Nambudiri Brahmin of Malabar.” One manuscript of Sri Śaṅkhapāṇi’s work carries on its fly-leaf a second title, Samīkṣā-phakkikā, from which the editor conjectured “that Sankhapani’s commentary closely follows Vacaspatimisra’s Tattvasamiksa” — so that, through the Malabar commentator, something of the lost Mithilā one may survive.

How the book is built is stated by the Kanchi chapter: “The work is divided into four chapters: (1) the Brahma-kanda, (2) the Tarka-kanda, (3) the Niyoga-kanda and (4) the Siddhi-kanda. Of these, the third chapter is the biggest occupying nearly half of the work and the last one the smallest.” The first chapter, on Brahman, “is devoted to elucidate the substance of the first verse through the authority of Scripture and reasoning” and ends with “a discussion about the place of karma and knowledge in the scheme of discipline leading to liberation”. The second, on reasoning, argues “the superiority of the scriptural testimony vis-à-vis perception and other means of knowledge in respect of our knowledge of the trans-empirical reality” and then examines “the nature of difference and the views of the Vaiseshikas, the Bhattas, and the Bauddhas thereon”. The third, on injunction — the one that fills half the book — holds “that Brahman-realisation does not fall within the scope of injunction”, and also contains “The explanation of the Advaita view of liberation and the refutation of the Prabhakara theory of akhyati”. The fourth asks “how the Upanishads convey the sense of Brahman, not already known, through words whose meanings are known in the sphere of ordinary thought”. It is written, as Dasgupta established from its quotations before he saw it, in mixed prose and verse; the verses state the positions and the prose argues them. A reader who has the 1937 edition open will notice that the longest chapter is the one about commands. That is the Mīmāṁsaka in him: the question he could not leave alone was whether the Upaniṣads tell us to do anything.

What he taught: Brahman is bliss, and its own light

The Brahma-siddhi begins where the Upaniṣads begin, with the nature of Brahman, and its first contribution is to insist that bliss is a positive thing. The Kanchi chapter: “His arguments to show that bliss which is Brahman is not absence of misery or absence of desire, but a positive state of happiness are elaborate and exhaustive. He argues that the transcendental bliss, of which the empirical pleasure is only a fragment, should be conceived positively and not negatively; for only a positive category admits of specification and determination. The more and the less are possible only in the case of a positive category.” This matters because a whole line of Indian thought — the Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika schools, and some Mīmāṁsakas — held that liberation is simply the end of pain, a state with nothing in it; and because a reader might suppose that a philosophy in which the world is unreal must end in a blank. Sri Maṇḍana’s argument is that we know it does not, because of the way we love ourselves: “Brahman or the Self is bliss, because it is the seat of supreme love. There is not only the authority of Scripture but also the evidence of experience to show that the Self is of the nature of bliss. For all the creatures including the smallest worms, the Self is dear. The love of one’s self, says Mandana, is nowhere more evident and better expressed than in the desire of every creature, ‘Let me not go out of existence; let me live forever.’ This love of the Self is consistent only if it be of the nature of bliss.” A worm does not want to keep living because living is the absence of something. The wish to be is the surest sign of what being is.

The second contribution is the argument that the Self is its own light, and here the chapter pauses to admire the reasoning: “Mandana’s argument to establish the self-luminosity of Brahman or the Self serves as a model of philosophical reasoning. Brahman, argues Mandana, is never an object in relation to a knowing subject. It cannot be known in the way in which other things are known. The Self which is pure consciousness lights up all our experiences and reveals all the objects of the world, which being insentient are incapable of revealing themselves. While everything else is presented to the Self as an object, the Self is not presented to anything, not even to itself.” From that one observation everything follows: “It follows, therefore, that the ordinary categories like cause and effect, substance and attribute, whole and parts, etc., do not apply to it. It is not an object in relation to a subject; and so it is not in space and time. It is not a cause in relation to an effect, not a substance in relation to attributes, not a whole in relation to its parts, not an identity in the midst of diversity. In short, it is supra-relational and so supra-rational.” And the conclusion, which a reader may need to read twice: “It is for these reasons that Mandana says that the self-luminosity of the Self which is the knower is its cognizability. It is not cognizable in the usual sense of the term. If we say that the Self is cognizable, it is because it is self luminous. Its self-luminosity is what is meant when it is treated as cognizable.” When the Upaniṣads say “know the Self,” they cannot mean “make it an object,” because it is what every object is shown to; they mean “let it shine as it is.”

Swami Satchidānandendra, who disputes much in the book, does not dispute this, and his chapter gives Sri Maṇḍana’s own image for why anything needs doing at all if the Self is already knowledge: “We answer that it is like the case of a transparent piece of crystal, the colour of which is concealed when it lies next to a brilliantly coloured object. One may need to remove the object before one can see the crystal in its true form. It is the same in the case of the Absolute;” — one does not act upon the crystal to make it clear; one moves the flower. The whole of Sri Maṇḍana’s account of the path, which a later section gives, is an account of moving the flower.

What he taught: difference cannot be real

The second chapter of the book is called the chapter on reasoning, and its heart is a refutation of difference — the claim that the world really is many. The Kanchi chapter picks out one passage as a specimen of his method: “Mandana’s discussion of the knower-known relation is very interesting. One of the arguments adduced in favour of the reality of difference centres round the knower-known relation. The object which is known implies that there is a knower independent of and external to it. The knower is inferred from the known, and so the knower and the known are different from each other. Though Mandana spares just twelve lines for the purpose of refuting this view, he is able to show with a remarkable dialectical dexterity that the knower-known relation, far from lending support to the reality of difference, undermines it.” The argument is this: “His contention is that the knower-known relation is intelligible and consistent only when the oneness of reality is accepted. In the course of the discussion Mandana points out that, if difference is accepted as real, the Self or the knower and the object which is known cannot be related, since the two are of different nature; the Self or the knower is knowledge pure and absolute, whereas the object which is known is insentient.” If consciousness and the stone are really two different kinds of thing, nothing can bring them together; the fact that we know stones is a fact against the twoness.

The obvious reply is the mind: surely the inner organ, the antaḥkaraṇa, stands between the two and joins them. Sri Maṇḍana had heard it: “He rejects the contention that the internal organ (antahkarana) could relate the knower which is consciousness and the object which is its opposite. The explanation that is given in terms of the modification (vritti) of the internal organ, which by its proximity to the sentient Self acquires luster by which it is able to reflect the objects, though the underlying consciousness which is the Self remains unaffected by the modifications of the internal organ does not, declares Mandana, serve to show that objects are really seen, and that they are different from the knower. If it be said that the internal organ gets the reflection of the Self, it only means that the internal organ which is insentient appears to be sentient. And so this ‘getting the reflection’ of the sentient Self by the internal organ is not real but illusory. We cannot under these circumstances argue by depending upon this acquired power of reflection of the internal organ, which is mithya, that objects are really seen and that they are different from the knower.” The go-between, in other words, is itself a borrowed light, and a borrowed light cannot prove that there are two things in the room.

The chapter adds a remark about where this argument went: “It may not be out of place to point out here that the line of reasoning which Mandana has adopted in the discussion of the knower-known relation has very much influenced Anandabodha, who himself admits that he has gathered his materials from others. This admission is significant in view of the fact that most of the arguments which we find in the works of Anandabodha have been borrowed by the later writers of the Vedanta school.” So the twelve lines travelled: to Sri Ānandabodha in the eleventh or twelfth century, and through his Nyāya-makaranda to the whole dialectical literature of later Advaita. Dasgupta, working from quotations before he had the book, found the same argument reported in Sri Vācaspati’s Nyāya-kaṇikā: “Mandana held that reality manifests itself in unlimited conceptions of unity or universality, whereas differences appear only as a result of limited experience”. Unity is what we see when we see whole; difference is what we see when we see part. That is the Advaitin’s reply to common sense, stated before Sri Śaṅkara’s pupils had finished stating theirs.

One further doctrine in this chapter is worth a paragraph because Dasgupta thought it made Sri Maṇḍana a pioneer. Reporting the passage Sri Vidyāraṇya quotes from the Brahma-siddhi, he writes: “It is said there that according to the author of the Brahma-siddhi it is the individual persons (jivah, in the plural) who by their own individual ignorance (svavidyaya) create for themselves on the changeless Brahman the false world-appearance. Neither in itself, nor with the maya, or as reflection in maya, is Brahman the cause of the world (Brahma na jagat-karanam). The appearances then are but creations of individual ignorance, and individual false experiences of the world have therefore no objective basis.” How, then, do we all see the same world? “The agreement of individual experiences is due to similarity of illusions in different persons who are suffering under the delusive effects of the same kinds of ignorance; this may thus be compared with the delusive experience of two moons by a number of persons.” Dasgupta’s verdict: “If this account is correct, as may well be supposed, then Mandana Misra may be regarded as the originator of the Vedantic doctrine of drsti-srsti-vada, which was in later times so forcefully formulated by Prakasananda.” That is a large claim — that the view that the world exists only as it is seen, which the sixteenth-century Vedānta-siddhānta-muktāvalī made famous, was already in the eighth — and this page reports it as Dasgupta’s reading of one quoted passage, not as settled. But it sits well with what the Kanchi chapter says of his view of ignorance, to which this page now turns by way of the Word.

What he taught: the Word, and the syllable Om

No other Advaitin of the first rank taught what this section describes, and it is the surest sign that the Brahma-siddhi was written by a grammarian’s philosopher and not by a pupil of Sri Śaṅkara. The Kanchi chapter: “Being influenced by Bhartrihari, the noted grammarian-philosopher, Mandana introduces the sabdadvaita in the course of his interpretation of the significance of the word ‘aksharam’ contained in the opening verse of the Brahmasiddhi. Brahman, says Mandana, is aksharam or of the nature of sound (sabdatmata), because the scriptural texts establish the identity of the” “mystic sound ‘Om’ or ‘Pranava’ with Brahman. The Prasna Upanishad, for instance, says: “That which is the sound Om is verily the higher and the lower Brahman.’ The sound Om is not indicative of Brahman; on the other hand, Om, according to this text, is Brahman.” The argument is a grammarian’s to the last letter: the Upaniṣad says Oṁ-kāra, “the syllable Om,” and the suffix -kāra, by a rule of Pāṇini’s commentators, “refers to the preceding letter or word, and which has its purport in the word and not in the object which the word refers to”. So the text is talking about the sound itself, and it says the sound is Brahman.

He knew the objection that the Upaniṣads elsewhere make Om a mere aid to meditation, and answered it: “Mandana does not deny that Shruti texts sometimes teach meditation on Pranava as Brahman, since it is difficult to meditate on Brahman which is devoid of attributes without some image or symbol as an aid. Just as a piece of wood or stone taken as the symbol of a deity is worshipped as if it were the deity, so also Brahman is to be meditated upon by means of Om since it is the name for Brahman.” But not every text is a text about meditation: “If a Shruti text purports to bring out the nature of Om without commending it for meditation, it must be interpreted as teaching the identity of Om with Brahman. The Taittiriya Upanishad, for example, declares the identity of Om with Brahman when it says: ‘Om is Brahman; Om is this all’. Again, the Chandogya Upanishad says: ‘Just as all leaves are permeated by the stalk, so is all speech permeated by Om. Verily, the syllable Om is all this’.”

And he went further than a doctrine about Om. The chapter says he “vindicates by means of elaborate arguments that the phenomenal world is only an illusory appearance of sabda which is the reality”, and meets the obvious fear head on: “If the ultimate reality is said to be sabda, there is the fear that it may not be identical with the Self or Brahman of the Upanishads; for sabda, it may be thought, is insentient, while the Self is said to be of the nature of knowledge. There is no room for any such fear, for Mandana clearly shows that sabdatattva is identical with knowledge which is Brahman. Knowledge manifests objects in a clear and distinguishable way only when it comes to be associated with sound. Sound is identical with knowledge, for it is the potency of sound (vaksakti) that illuminates objects.” A reader who has never met this idea may find it strange; it is the grammarians’ oldest thought, that we cannot know a thing without in some way naming it, and that the power of naming and the light of knowing are one power seen from two sides. Bhartṛhari had made it the foundation of a whole philosophy; Sri Maṇḍana carried it into Advaita.

Nobody followed him there. Kuppuswami Sastri made it the first of his ten differences from Sri Sureśvara: “Mandana’s attitude towards Sabdadvaita is much more than favourable; it is respectful. But Samkara completely differs from Mandana in this respect, and criticises, and entirely discards the Sphota doctrine of Bhartrhari. Suresvara, who closely follows Samkara, completely ignores the Sphota-doctrine.” He gave it a kind word all the same: Sri Maṇḍana “accepts the sphotavada, without losing himself in the mysticism of sabda-brahman”. The doctrine of the Word died with him in this tradition; the doctrine of Om as the name of Brahman, and of meditation on it as a legitimate aid for those who cannot yet hold the attributeless, did not, and every Advaita teacher since has taught the second half of what he said while quietly dropping the first.

What he taught: ignorance is in the soul, and is about Brahman

Every school of Advaita after Sri Śaṅkara had to answer two questions the master had left open: where does ignorance sit, and what does it hide? The Brahma-siddhi is the earliest surviving book to answer both, and its answers became the answers of the Bhāmatī school. The Kanchi chapter first clears away a distinction that later Advaita made and he did not: “Mandana does not make any distinction between the two terms avidya and maya. He uses them as synonyms. It is only in the post-Sankara period that the two terms came to be used in different senses.” Then it states his view of what ignorance is: “Avidya, says Mandana, is not of the nature of Brahman; nor is it something other than Brahman; it is neither real nor unreal. It is thus known as maya, mithyavabhasa. Since it is neither real as Brahman nor unreal as the sky-flower, it is said to be anirvachaniya.” Swami Satchidānandendra’s reading is more exact on one point: “He does, however, in several places (B.Sid. p.9,20,32,33,122) speak of two forms of metaphysical Ignorance, respectively non-perception and wrong perception. But for Mandana Ignorance more particularly means positive error.” — and he quotes the book’s reason: “Non-apprehension, being a nonentity, cannot be the cause of anything. It cannot be the cause of erroneous vision, or it would cause it in coma and dreamless sleep.” Not seeing is not enough to make a world; there must be a mis-seeing.

Then the two answers. “Mandana argues that the jiva is the seat or locus of avidya which obscures the true nature of Brahman and thus has Brahman as its object.” The soul is ignorant; Brahman is what it is ignorant of. He saw the circle in this at once — if the soul is made by ignorance, how can ignorance live in the soul? — and the Method translates his handling of it: “As for the question, ’To whom does Ignorance belong? — we reply, ‘It belongs to the individual souls’. You will say: But are not the individual souls identical with the Absolute?” “We reply: Yes, this is so from the standpoint of the highest truth. But the souls are falsely imagined as different. You may say: But whose false imagination is it that introduces differences? It cannot be the false imagination of the Absolute. For the Absolute is of the nature of knowledge, and hence free from false imagination. Nor can it be the false imagination of the individual souls. For they depend on false imagination for their existence. The argument would be circular.” The Kanchi chapter gives his two answers: “First, avidya does not admit of logical analysis in terms of consistency and cogency. How can we expect avidya to stand to reason? Therefore the objection that avidya which is dependent on the jiva for its existence cannot itself be the cause of the jiva is meaningless. Second, since both avidya and jiva are beginningless like the sprout-seed series, there is no logical priority as between jivatva and avidya; as for chronological priority, the question does not arise as neither has a beginning in time.” In the book itself these are offered as the views of “some” and “others,” and the Method quotes the first in the book’s own words: “Nothing is impossible for the power of illusion. An illusion (maya) is something inexplicable. If it had been something explicable, there would have been a reality and not an illusion.”

This placing of ignorance in the soul was the point on which the other great school of Advaita parted from him most sharply, and the parting is visible in the texts. Dasgupta reports Sri Sarvajñātman, the tenth-century author of the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka, saying “that ignorance (avidya) is supported (asraya) in pure consciousness (cin-matrasrita-visayam ajnanam), and that, even where from the context of Sankara’s Bhasya it may appear as if he was speaking of the individual person (jiva) as being the support of ajnana, it has to be interpreted in this sense. Objections of Mandana, therefore, to such a view, viz. that ignorance rests with the individuals, are not to be given any consideration; for Mandana’s views lead to quite different conclusions (parihrtya Mandana-vacah tad dhy anyatha prasthitam).” “Setting aside what Maṇḍana says, for it sets out in a different direction” — that is how the Vivaraṇa line remembered him: as the one great teacher whose views had to be set aside by name. This site’s pages for Sri Sarvajñātman and Sri Prakāśātman tell that side; the page for Sri Vācaspati tells how the same doctrine, ignorance in the soul, became the mark of the Bhāmatī school.

One more of his positions on ignorance became a technical term and should be named. Dasgupta, from the Laghu-candrikā: “According to Sankara, as interpreted by many of his followers, including Suresvara, the dissolution of ignorance (avidya-nivrtti) is not a negation, since negation as a separate category has no existence. So dissolution of ignorance means only Brahman. But according to Mandana there is no harm in admitting the existence of such a negation as the cessation of ignorance; for the monism of Brahman means that there is only one positive entity. It has no reference to negations, i.e. the negation of duality only means the negation of all positive entities other than Brahman (bhavadvaita). The existence of such a negation as the cessation of ignorance does not hurt the monistic creed.” This is bhāvādvaita, the non-duality of positive being: Brahman is the only thing, but the absence of ignorance may still be counted, as an absence, without making two. Kuppuswami Sastri notes that the fourth chapter of the book ends “by setting forth his bhavadvaita interpretation of the negative Upanisadic texts (nisedhavakyani)” — the “not this, not this” of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka denies every positive thing other than Brahman and no more. Sri Vimuktātman would later spend a chapter of the Iṣṭa-siddhi on this very problem, and this site’s page on him tells how.

What he taught: hearing, thinking, and the long work of meditation

This is the doctrine on which the whole later quarrel turned, and the reader should have it in the book’s own terms before hearing the objections. The Kanchi chapter: “How is avidya to be removed? Avidya, says Mandana, is destroyed by the practice of aids (sadhana) like sravana or the understanding of the truth from the scriptural texts, manana or the investigation of the truth in the light of reason, dhyanabhyasa or repeated contemplation upon the truth as enjoined by Scripture. Repeated contemplation upon the truth preceded by sravana and manana annuls the multifarious cognitions of diversity (bheda-darsana), as it is opposed to it.” Three steps, then: hear, reason, and contemplate again and again. The reason a third step is needed is the reason the Nyāya logicians had given against the Vedāntins, and he accepted it: “According to Mandana, the knowledge which we get from the Upanishads is indirect and mediate (paroksha) and necessarily involves relation in some manner like any other cognition arising from a valid verbal testimony. Meditation upon the content of the verbal cognition is necessary in order to transform the indirect and mediate knowledge into direct and immediate experience. So repeated contemplation (prasankhyana) on the import of the principal texts (mahavakyas) is a ‘must’ in order to attain the direct intuition of Brahman.” Words give knowledge about; only contemplation turns knowledge-about into seeing.

His reason for saying so is given in the Method’s translation of the book, and it is an argument from ordinary experience that anyone can test: “Even when vision of reality has arisen, it may not carry a powerful impression. In this case, if there is a strong impression arising from erroneous vision, what should be correct cognitions may turn out to have wrong objects. For example, we may see someone who has lost his sense of direction failing to remember the correction he had received from a trustworthy person and continuing on in the wrong direction. Similarly, we see the continuation of fear arising from the erroneous notion of a snake even in the case of a rope that has been correctly known as such, when that correct knowledge is forgotten.... Therefore even after vision of reality has arisen from the right authority, the Veda, the sages recommend repeated affirmation of the metaphysical truth to overcome or root out entirely that more powerful impression acquired naturally from the beginningless repetition of erroneous vision. That is why the Upanishads say, ’It should be pondered over, it should be subjected to sustained meditation’, and they also lay down a series of practical measures such as inner and outer control, chastity, sacrifice and other disciplines. What did they give that teaching for if they did not mean it? (B.Sid. p.35)” A man told the right road can still take the wrong one out of habit; a man who knows the rope is a rope can still start at it in the dark. Knowledge that is true but not yet strong needs strengthening, and the Upaniṣads’ own commands to ponder and meditate are the strengthening.

Then comes the most original idea in the book, which is that the means themselves are a form of the disease. The Kanchi chapter: “The knowledge that results from sravana, manana and dhyanabhyasa is itself one which involves distinctions. Sravana implies the distinctions of the teacher, the taught, and the teaching, and so the knowledge which arises there-from is a form of avidya. For the sake of our understanding, this can be characterised as the good phase of avidya. It serves to remove the multifarious cognitions of difference due to avidya. The latter can be called the bad phase of avidya. Not only does it remove the world of diversity projected by avidya but also removes itself, just as the clearing-nut purifies the turbid water of dirt by removing it and also removes itself, just as poison nullifies another poison and also annihilates itself. When all the illusory differences conjured up by avidya as well as the different aids (sadhana-bheda) like sravana, manana, etc., disappear, the jiva shines forth remaining in its natural state, pure and unperturbed.” The clearing-nut is the seed Indian villages drop into muddy water: it draws the mud down and sinks with it. Teacher, text and pupil are three, and three is not the truth; but they are the three that end all threes, and go down with them.

He found this in the Upaniṣad, and the verse he chose is the one that most embarrasses a simpler Advaita: “Mandana quotes the authority of the scriptural text which declares: ‘Knowledge and ignorance, he who knows these two together crosses death through ignorance, and attains immortality through knowledge’. The meaning of the text, according to Mandana, is this: avidya and vidya must be taken together, as the former is the means to the latter or as the former is dependent on the latter. The bad phase of avidya is ‘mrityu’ which is removed by the good phase of it consisting of sravana, manana and dhyanabhyasa, and the knower of truth thus remains what he has always really been, the eternal, free, self-luminous consciousness.” The verse is the eleventh of the Īśā Upaniṣad. Sri Śaṅkara read its “ignorance” as ritual and its “knowledge” as meditation on the gods, both for the unready; Sri Maṇḍana read it as saying that the path is made of the same stuff as the wall it breaks through. The two readings are two whole theologies, and the reader will meet the difference again in the dissenting section below.

What he taught: error, ritual, the horse, and liberation in life

Three more positions complete the picture, and the first is one that every later Advaitin took over without acknowledgment. The Kanchi chapter: “Mandana’s contribution to epistemology is as valuable as his contribution to the metaphysics of Advaita. His refutation of the Prabhakara theory of akhyati is thorough and elaborate. Though the theory of akhyati alone is examined in the Brahmasiddhi, the other important theories of erroneous cognition are discussed in his Vibhrama-viveka.” Prabhākara’s theory, akhyāti, held that there is no such thing as a false perception: when a man takes shell for silver he really perceives the shell’s shine and really remembers silver, and merely fails to notice that these are two experiences and not one. Sri Maṇḍana, though a Mīmāṁsaka, would not have it; and the chapter notes the effect: “By maintaining the Bhatta theory of viparita-khyati which is practically the same as the Nyaya theory of anyatha-khyati, Mandana prepares the way for the anirvachaniyakhyati of Advaita.” Error is a positive mis-seeing; and once that is granted, the Advaitin can ask what the seen-but-unreal silver is, and answer “indescribable” — which is the doctrine Sri Vimuktātman, Sri Padmapāda and Sri Prakāśātman would make the centre of the school. Kuppuswami Sastri put the underlying thought in an epigram of his own making: “yes (sat) and no (asat) are the fulcra of all epistemology as they are of all metaphysics; that yes and no are but phases of the same reality; that all appearances are the offspring of a cross between yes and no; that it will be evident through the germination of yes and no, that yes is no and no is yes and that error (bhrama) is the antechamber of truth (prama).”

The second is the doctrine that made him, in the Kanchi chapter’s phrase, “the foremost among ‘integrative Advaitins’”: that ritual and knowledge are not enemies. “According to him, karma and knowledge are related as means and end. He does not accept the view that karma and knowledge, being diametrically opposed to each other, could not be brought into relation. He maintains that both karma and meditation play a vital role in bringing about Self-realisation.” The argument is careful: “Whereas the usefulness of contemplation is visible, that of the karmas is imperceptible. The karmas belonging to the asramas are exceptional means (sadhana-visesha). Though he readily admits that it is possible for one who observes life-long celibacy to attain Self-realisation exclusively through contemplation in association with the control of the mind, etc., without performing scriptural rites, he says that one who combines the contemplative and the ritualistic disciplines will be able to reach the goal far more quickly than otherwise.” And then the image that every reader of the Brahma-siddhi remembers: “The asrama-karmas are helpful to the seeker after truth as a horse is to the wayfarer in reaching the goal quicker. Though the goal may be reached by plodding on without a horse, yet a horse is sought to be employed for gaining time or for avoiding inconvenience. Karmas are of as much service to a seeker after truth as a horse is to one who would otherwise have to trudge the whole distance on foot.” The rites are a horse. One can walk; but why walk? The chapter’s summary: “Mandana is a firm believer in asrama-dharmas, not as ends in themselves but as very valuable means to the end.” Kuppuswami Sastri saw in this not timidity but nerve: he “has the courage to adopt a reasonable compromise with the Mimamsakas by assigning to karma and upasana their place in his scheme of Brahman-realization”. It is also, a reader may notice, exactly what the Digvijaya makes Sri Śaṅkara say to the defeated ritualist about Jaimini: that ritual is the preparation and knowledge the goal, one road at two stages. The poem gives the winner the loser’s book.

The third is liberation in life, on which he has often been misread. “Like other Advaitins, Mandana too upholds the doctrine of jivanmukti or liberation in the living state. He contends that at the onset of knowledge ignorance and all karmas, the fructified as well as the unfructified, disappear.” That created a difficulty, because the Chāndogya says the liberated man is released only when the body falls, and if all karma including the ripened karma that holds the body ends at once, the body should drop at once. His solution was to read the text two ways: “One interpretation results in the advocacy of sadyo-mukti or complete liberation from embodied existence immediately following Brahman-realisation, while the other involves the acceptance of jivanmukti. Since Mandana refers to both sadyo-mukti and jivanmukti, he is compelled to explain the sthitaprajna described in the Gita in two ways. From the point of view of sadyomukti, the sthitaprajna may be taken as a sadhaka who has closely approximated to realisation and is awaiting it. According to the second interpretation, the Gita description of sthitaprajna may be taken to refer to a jivanmukta.” The chapter’s conclusion: “Though prarabdha ceases to exist like other karmas together with avidya at the onset of knowledge resulting in complete liberation from embodied existence, it may be that in certain cases the body persists for a short while even after realisation, because of the impression of prarabdha. There is therefore no justification for the view that Mandana does not advocate jivan-mukti.” Kuppuswami Sastri agreed, with a qualification that shows the man’s sobriety: “He recognises the possibility of jivanmukti but sees clearly the difficulties in the view which recognizes the possibility of jivanmuktas reincarnating themselves in many an embodied existence.” The same problem, whether a man who has seen can go on living and why, was taken up by Sri Sarvajñātman a century or two later with the same two answers, as this site’s page on him shows; and by Sri Vimuktātman, with a sharper edge.

The school that grew from the book: Sri Vācaspati and the Bhāmatī

Sri Maṇḍana founded no school and named none. Yet the tradition’s own scholar, having spent the longest section of his introduction on the Brahma-siddhi’s doctrines, ended it with a sentence that this site’s page for Sri Vācaspati Miśra quotes and this page must repeat: “All the distinctive features of what is known as the Vacaspatiprasthana in the post-Sankara literature are really inherited from Mandana’s Brahmasiddhi.” The Kanchi chapter says the same in passing, of the doctrine of meditation: “Vachaspati who is greatly indebted to Mandana follows him in this respect, as in many others.” And Sri Vācaspati said it himself. He wrote his lost Tattva-samīkṣā on the Brahma-siddhi; he wrote the Nyāya-kaṇikā on the Vidhi-viveka; and the Mithilā history records that “Vacaspati aligns himself definitely to the school of Mandana both in Mimansa and Vedanta.” When, a century after Sri Maṇḍana, the greatest scholar of Mithilā came to write his commentary on Sri Śaṅkara’s Brahma-sūtra commentary, he read Sri Śaṅkara through Sri Maṇḍana’s eyes, and the Bhāmatī is the result.

The inheritance can be listed. Ignorance seated in the soul and hiding Brahman: the Brahma-siddhi’s answer, and the Bhāmatī’s. Each soul with its own ignorance, so that the world is as many worlds as there are souls to see them: Sri Maṇḍana’s, as Dasgupta reads the passage Sri Vidyāraṇya quotes, and the Bhāmatī’s. Knowledge from the Upaniṣads mediate, and made immediate only by the mind in long meditation, so that the mind and not the text is the final instrument: the Brahma-siddhi’s, and the Bhāmatī’s. Ritual of the life-stages retained as a helpful means: both. The Bhāmatī school’s reputation for holding that the great texts themselves do not liberate and that a further “pondering” is enjoined is, at root, the Brahma-siddhi’s position that hearing is not the end.

There is one great difference, and it is a difference of loyalty rather than doctrine. Sri Maṇḍana wrote an independent book and criticised Sri Śaṅkara’s positions without naming him; Sri Vācaspati wrote a commentary on Sri Śaṅkara and carried Sri Maṇḍana’s positions into it as the true meaning of the master. Kuppuswami Sastri put it that Sri Maṇḍana “represented an advaitic prasthana different from Samkaraprasthana” — a separate Advaita approach — whereas the Bhāmatī claimed to be Sri Śaṅkara’s own. The effect was that positions which had been one man’s dissent became, within a hundred years, half the orthodoxy. Swami Satchidānandendra, who deplored this, described it with precision: “Broadly speaking, there is hardly one of the schools of post-Sankara Vedanta that is not affected by the thinking of Acarya Mandana, so erudite in matters of Vedic exegesis.” And he listed the topics: “Theory of illusion and of the correction of illusion, analysis of the means of knowledge, selection of the more trustworthy in cases where perception and revelation conflict, the truth about word-meanings and sentence-meanings, showing how the Veda could be an authority for the existence of the Absolute, examination of the methods whereby knowledge is gained, determination of the relation between knowledge and action, settling the question whether hearing and the rest were or were not the subjects of an injunction, consideration of the nature of metaphysical Ignorance, of its seat and of the object which it concealed, estimate of the role of dialectic in Vedanta, refutation of the possibility of differences existing anywhere, observations about meditation on knowledge aurally received, probing the nature of immediate knowledge of the Absolute, establishing a distinction between liberation in life and liberation after the death of the body — it would be no exaggeration to say that on all these topics of investigation the modes of enquiry adopted by Mandana Misra have found favour with the connoisseurs of Vedanta doctrine to this day.” That is a critic’s tribute, and the more telling for it.

A dissenting reading

The tradition never treated the Brahma-siddhi as beyond criticism, and a page that presented only its admirers would misrepresent it. The oldest and hardest criticism is Sri Sureśvara’s, and Kuppuswami Sastri, who did not think Sri Sureśvara was Sri Maṇḍana, judged that the Naiṣkarmya-siddhi was written “mainly as a Samkara counterblast to the Brahmasiddhi probably in compliance with Samkara’s desire”. The points of the counterblast are the points of this page: that ignorance cannot sit in the soul, because the soul is its product; that ritual has no place, even as a horse, on a road that ends in the discovery that there was never anywhere to go; and above all that the great texts liberate by themselves, so that a further meditation is not only unnecessary but a contradiction — for what is left to do when the doer has been found not to exist? This site’s page on Sri Sureśvara gives his side; here it is enough to say that the quarrel is real and old.

The modern statement of the same case is Swami Satchidānandendra’s, and he made it with the Brahma-siddhi open before him. Having translated Sri Maṇḍana’s argument that the impressions of error outlast the knowledge that corrects them, he answered: “The claim is made above that vision of difference and its impressions can be dissolved like medicinal liquids or poisons functioning as antidotes and so forth, through repeated medication. What is here overlooked is that meditation is an activity, and that its results are therefore inevitably temporary. The Veda also supplies a maxim well grounded in reason, ’There is nothing in the world that is not the result of action (and therefore impermanent). What is the good of action?’ (Mund. I.ii.12).” His deeper objection is that the rope-and-snake example proves the opposite of what Sri Maṇḍana wanted: “But these visions are samples of the not-self, associated with conditioning defects (such as darkness, eye-disease, etc.) and with a continued sense of being an individual experiencer. In the Ignorance of transmigratory life such dangers are possible. But” he “does not perceive that they are absolutely impossible once vision of the constant and eternal and immediately evident Self has arisen from such texts as ’This Self can only be expressed as ‘neither this nor that’’, ‘That thou art’ and ‘The Absolute that is immediately evident and directly known’. All duality ceases immediately when every act of ideation is negated by ‘neither this nor that’.” And on the seat of ignorance, he would not even grant the question: “When it is here said that Ignorance belongs to the individual souls, that is correct, as it agrees with experience. However, Mandana goes on to raise the objection ‘To whom does the false Imagination which produces difference belong?’, and to object further that if the answer ‘It belongs to the individual souls’ were given this would imply circular argument. Both these objections, and also the attempted answer, should be ignored” as, in his words, mere logic-chopping. For him, Sri Śaṅkara had said that ignorance belongs to whoever asks, and had refused to make a theory of it; the whole later argument about its seat, which began with this book, was a wrong turning.

The reader should hear the other side of the dissent too, because Kuppuswami Sastri anticipated it. The compromises in the book, he wrote, “came to be viewed by some of Mandana’s contemporaries like Suresvara and by some post-Sankara advaitins like Madhusudanasarasvati, as symptomatic of philosophical nervousness”; his own view was “that Mandana expounded his advaita doctrine with all these features of compromise in an age which was dominated by the uncompromising type of advaita preached by Samkara in an overwhelmingly brilliant style”, and that this was courage. He added a psychological observation: Sri Maṇḍana refused “to be dazzled by the brilliant glamour of Samkara’s exposition in regard to the question of complete renunciation of all kinds of activities (karma)”. Whether that is sobriety or nervousness is what the two schools have disagreed about for twelve hundred years, and it is not a disagreement a website can settle. What this page can say is that both sides agree on what the disagreement is. It is about whether the truth, once heard, needs anything more from us; and a seeker who has heard it and found that it did not stay will understand why the householder of Māhiṣmatī — or Mahishi, or Kashmir — thought the answer was yes.

The other schools, seen from this life

Sri Maṇḍana is the one Advaitin who belonged to another school first, and his book treats the other schools as a man treats the house he grew up in. This section, like its counterparts across the site, is written from the Advaita side, and none of the schools named here is diminished by being placed; each is a serious tradition that has held its position for centuries with arguments its followers still find sound.

• The Mīmāṁsā of Kumārila. This was his own school, and he never left it in ritual matters. Kuppuswami Sastri: he is “perfectly loyal to Kumarila on the main questions of Mimamsa-exegesis but criticises him in a fearless manner when he has to do so in the interest of advaita-siddhanta of the Upanisads”. Three of his six books defend Kumārila’s account of Vedic command. Where he parted from the master was in holding that the Upaniṣads state a fact and not a duty, that Brahman can be known from them, and that liberation is not the mere ending of pain. The Digvijaya makes him Kumārila’s dearest pupil; the Kanchi chapter makes him a younger contemporary; both make him the school’s greatest gift to Vedānta.
• The Mīmāṁsā of Prabhākara. His principal opponent within his own science. The Brahma-siddhi’s longest chapter, on injunction, is largely an argument against Prabhākara’s theory that a Vedic command creates a “something-to-be-done,” a niyoga, distinct from any desired end; the editor says he “exposes fully the hollowness of the Prabhakara concept of niyoga or karya” and reduces command to “contributoriness to a desired end”. And he rejected Prabhākara’s theory that error is only a failure to distinguish. Prabhākara’s pupil Śālikanātha answered him, and the exchange fixes his date. The Prābhākara school remained a living rival for centuries and its account of command is still studied.
• The grammarians. Bhartṛhari was, in the editor’s words, the source from which he “derives his advaitic inspiration mainly” — the pre-Śaṅkara non-dualism of the Word. He defended the grammarians’ sphoṭa against his own Mīmāṁsā teacher and read their doctrine of the Word into the first verse of his book; yet “he does not hesitate to discard the view of Bhartrhari and other Vaiyakaranas in regard to the concept of bhavana”. No later Advaitin kept the grammarians so close.
• Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika. The logicians held that words can only give knowledge that involves relation, and that liberation is the cessation of pain. He accepted the first — the editor credits him with “the clarity of vision and sobriety necessary for duly appreciating the soundness of the contention of the Naiyayikas that Sabda can give rise only to a determinate judgment involving relation” — and built his doctrine of meditation on it; and he rejected the second, showing “the negative conception of apavarga, which, according to the Naiyayikas, consists in the annihilation of all the duhkhas” to be unsustainable. The Vaiśeṣika account of difference as a real category is examined in his second chapter. The logician Śrīdhara, a century later, cited and refuted him, and by doing so preserved the evidence that he wrote the Brahma-siddhi.
• The Buddhist schools. His second chapter examines the Buddhist view of difference alongside the Vaiśeṣika and Bhāṭṭa views, and the Mithilā history believes his Vidhi-viveka answers the logician Dharmottara. He argued against them as a philosopher argues, on the nature of perception and of the word; the tone of his books is not that of the polemics of later centuries.
• The Vedānta of difference-and-non-difference. Kumārila and Bhartṛprapañca held that Brahman and the world are both different and non-different; the editor records that the Brahma-siddhi “refutes the doctrine of bhedabheda advocated by Kumarila and Bhartrprapanca”. That doctrine lived on in Sri Bhāskara, whose commentary has its own page among this site’s texts, and in the school of Sri Nimbārka, described on this site’s page on the other schools.
• The Vedānta of Sri Madhva. The one later school to enter this page does so as a witness. The Mādhva Maṇimañjarī, though written against Sri Śaṅkara, keeps Maṇḍana and Viśvarūpa apart, and the Madras editor counted that as evidence for his own view; a hostile source is a good witness to what it has no reason to change.

What the list shows is a mind formed in four sciences, keeping something from each. The Advaitin in him is the Upaniṣads’; the method is the Mīmāṁsaka’s; the theory of meaning is the grammarian’s; the theory of knowledge takes what it needs from the logicians. Kuppuswami Sastri described the result as “a well-rounded scheme of philosophical thought which passes through important stages of accommodation with the Nyaya, Vyakarana and Mimamsa systems of thinking” that “culminates in the Brahmadvaita of the Brahmasiddhi”. A seeker who has come to Advaita from another discipline and wonders whether it must all be left at the door may take some comfort from that.

Legacy

His legacy is of an unusual kind: a book almost nobody could read, whose positions almost everybody held. Four commentaries were written on it between the ninth and sixteenth centuries, by Sri Vācaspati, Sri Citsukha, Sri Śaṅkhapāṇi and Sri Ānandapūrṇa, and the first of these, by the greatest scholar of medieval India, is lost. The logicians cited him; Śrīdhara in 991 and Sri Vācaspati before him. Sri Sureśvara borrowed from him even while refuting him — the editor notes that “Mandana’s view that istasadhanatva is vidhyartha is found used even by Suresvara” — and that “The criticisms of the concept of bheda found in advaitic literature, including the works of Suresvara, are mostly polemical” “amplifications of the critique of difference in Mandana’s Brahmasiddhi”. Sri Ānandabodha took his twelve lines on the knower and the known and made a whole dialectic of them. Sri Vidyāraṇya quoted him in the Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṁgraha; Sri Prakāśātman recorded his view of māyā; Sri Sarvajñātman argued with him by name; Sri Madhusūdana Sarasvatī thought his compromises nervous. And through Sri Vācaspati, half the later tradition — Sri Amalānanda, Sri Appayya Dīkṣita, the whole Bhāmatī line — taught his doctrines of ignorance and meditation as Sri Śaṅkara’s.

Then, for a long time, the book itself was nearly gone. It was found in 1920, printed in 1937, translated into French in 1969, summarised in English in the 1980s, and remains without a complete English translation. The scholarly argument over its author — begun by Hiriyanna in 1923, joined by Kuppuswami Sastri, Dasgupta, the foreword-writer and the pontiff of Sringeri — has been running for a century and shows no sign of ending. Meanwhile, in a village in north Bihar, a shrine bears his name and his wife’s, and the state government reports that pilgrims come to it from south India. He is remembered, that is, in two ways that hardly meet: by scholars as the author of the most independent early book of Advaita, and by pilgrims as the man who lost the debate. Perhaps the best summary is the Kanchi chapter’s: “A respected authority on Mimamsa and a reputed teacher of Advaita, a doughty champion of the Upanishadic tradition and a master-mind skilled in dialectical reasoning, Mandana occupies a high pedestal in the imposing edifice of Advaita Vedanta. His contribution to Advaita is of lasting importance. Among the lustrous names that adorn the history of Advaita, Mandana’s is a prominent one.”

For the seeker

What a person who is not a scholar might take from this life is, first, permission. Sri Maṇḍana was a householder who kept his rites, his marriage and his house, and wrote one of the great books of non-dual knowledge without leaving any of them. The tradition’s own editor records that he “refuses to elevate it above the grhasthasrama”, the “it” being the life of renunciation. That is not a licence for laziness; his own path was hearing, reasoning and long, repeated contemplation, and he thought the daily duties a horse for the journey, not a substitute for it. But it is a plain statement, from inside the tradition and from its first century, that the road does not begin at the monastery gate.

Second, a way of holding the truth when it will not stay. Sri Maṇḍana’s most human observation is that a man told the right road can still take the wrong one from habit, and that the knowledge that the rope is a rope can be forgotten in the dark. His answer was not to doubt the knowledge but to repeat it — to let the impressions of the truth grow, as he said, until they are stronger than the impressions of the world. A seeker who has read a page of the Upaniṣads and understood it and found the understanding gone by evening has met exactly what he described, and the tradition has never stopped arguing about whether he was right about the cure. Both sides of that argument are on this page; the seeker may notice that they agree about the disease.

Third, the clearing-nut. Teacher, text and pupil are three; hearing, thinking and meditating are three; the whole apparatus of the path is made of the very distinctions it exists to end. Sri Maṇḍana did not pretend otherwise. He said the path is the good phase of ignorance, which removes the bad phase and then removes itself, as the seed sinks with the mud it clears. A person who has worried that spiritual practice is itself a kind of attachment has been answered, twelve hundred years ago, by a man who agreed that it was, and explained why it should be done anyway.

And last, the wish to be. His argument that Brahman is bliss began not from a text but from the smallest worm’s wish not to die. Everything alive wants to go on being; and that wanting, he said, is not a wish for the absence of something but the surest evidence we have of what the Self is. A seeker who has been told that the goal of Advaita is a blank might sit with that. The love of one’s own existence, which every teacher of detachment tells us to overcome, is in his reading the one thing we have got right.

A note on pictures, names and dates

There is no picture on this page because there is none to show. No portrait of Sri Maṇḍana survives from any period near his own, and the paintings and sculptures that exist are later imaginings of the debate scene. This site shows only pictures whose age and origin are known and credited, and where none exists it shows the lamp, as it does here.

The name is spelled Maṇḍana Miśra with the marks that show the retroflex consonants and the palatal sibilant; the sources on this page write it Mandana, Maṇḍana, Mandanamisra and Mandan, and a reader searching a library catalogue should try all of them. The Digvijaya also calls him Umbeka or Umveka and Viśvarūpa, names which, as the section on the identity question showed, some scholars believe belong to another man; Sri Sureśvara is the name the poem says he received as a monk. “Miśra” is a householder’s title, common among the Brahmins of Mithilā and the north, and Sri Narasimha Bhāratī’s remark that “Maṇḍana” itself may once have been an honorific is recorded above. The word maṇḍana means adornment.

The dates given for him on this site — “eighth century” on his card, and the three reckonings in the section above — are estimates that depend on the disputed date of Sri Śaṅkara, and the reader should treat them as such. The Madras editor’s 615–695, the Kanchi chapter’s “elder contemporary of Śaṅkara,” the Mithilā historian’s “not before 800” and Dasgupta’s “800” are all on the page, with their reasons. His birthplace is unknown; four regions claim it; the map marks them as claims.

Every quotation on this page is copied from a named source and can be checked through the links below; where a scanned book has been misread by the machine the printed word has been restored, and each restoration was recorded as the page was built. Words broken across a page in the scan have been joined, and running page-heads that fell into the middle of a sentence have been cut, with the cut noted in the text. A Sanskrit epithet in the section on the identity question, a rendering of Sri Sarvajñātman’s phrase in the section on ignorance, and an Upaniṣadic phrase in the section on liberation in life are given in the page’s own translation without quotation marks. Nothing else has been added.

Timeline

• before him — Bhartṛhari, whose Vākyapadīya he quotes and whose doctrine of the Word he adopts. The Madras editor takes I-tsing’s record of Bhartṛhari’s death as his chronological landmark and gives him, with a query, 591–651; other scholars place him earlier.
• c. 7th century — Kumārila Bhaṭṭa and Prabhākara, the two masters of Mīmāṁsā; he is a younger contemporary of both (Kanchi chapter; 1937 introduction).
• 615–695 — Kuppuswami Sastri’s tentative dates for his life, on a scheme that places Sri Śaṅkara’s writing in 632–664.
• c. 700–800 — the conventional placing: “In all probability he was an elder contemporary of Sankara.” Dasgupta heads his account “Maṇḍana (A.D. 800).” The Bihar tourism page calls him a philosopher “of the 8th century”.
• after 800 — the Mithilā history’s reckoning: “Mandana, therefore cannot be placed before 800 A.D.”
• his lifetime — the six books: three on Mīmāṁsā, one on the Word, one on error, and the Brahma-siddhi. Śālikanātha, Prabhākara’s pupil, answers the Brahma-siddhi in his Prakaraṇa-pañcikā.
• the Digvijaya’s story — Sri Śaṅkara comes from Prayāga at Kumārila’s bidding; the debate at Māhiṣmatī with Ubhaya-bhāratī as judge; the garland fades; the householder becomes Sureśvara and “lived many days on the banks of the Narmada”. Related on this site’s page for Sri Sureśvara.
• former half of the 9th century — Sri Vācaspati Miśra writes the Tattva-samīkṣā on the Brahma-siddhi (1937 introduction’s dating; the Mithilā history puts Sri Vācaspati a century later). The commentary is lost.
• 991–992 — Śrīdhara’s Nyāya-kandalī, which names him as author of the Brahma-siddhi.
• 10th century — Sri Sarvajñātman’s Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka sets aside his view of the seat of ignorance by name.
• early 13th century — Sri Citsukha’s Abhiprāya-prakāśikā on the Brahma-siddhi.
• 14th century — Sri Vidyāraṇya quotes the Brahma-siddhi in the Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṁgraha; the Śaṅkara-digvijaya attributed to him tells the debate story.
• later 16th century — Sri Ānandapūrṇa Vidyāsāgara’s Bhāva-śuddhi. Sri Śaṅkhapāṇi’s commentary, of unknown date, is the one printed in 1937.
• 1920 — a manuscript of the Brahma-siddhi found by the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras.
• 1923–1924 — Hiriyanna’s notes in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society first argue that the author of the Brahma-siddhi was not Sri Sureśvara.
• December 1928 — Dasgupta reads the proofs in Madras; his History, volume two, appears in 1932.
• 16 June 1936 / 1937 — Kuppuswami Sastri signs his introduction; the Brahma-siddhi is published at Madras with Sri Śaṅkhapāṇi’s commentary.
• 1958 — the History of Navya-Nyāya in Mithilā argues for a date after 800.
• 1968 — R. Balasubramanian’s chapter in Preceptors of Advaita, Kanchi.
• 1969 — Madeleine Biardeau’s French translation of the Brahma-siddhi.
• today — the Maṇḍan Bhāratī Dhām at Mahishi, Saharsa, Bihar, visited, the state says, by pilgrims from across India.

Questions a reader may ask

Did the debate with Sri Śaṅkara really happen? The Digvijaya says it did, and every later life of Sri Śaṅkara repeats it. No document from Sri Maṇḍana’s own time mentions it, and his own book does not. Dasgupta called the poem “a mythical biography”; its translator called the identity of its Maṇḍana with the author of the Brahma-siddhi “a matter of controversy”. This page tells the story as a story and gives the reader the tools to judge.

Was he Sri Sureśvara? The tradition says yes; most modern scholars say no; a Sringeri pontiff proposed that there were two Maṇḍanas; Dasgupta thought he might have written the Brahma-siddhi before his conversion and the Vārttikas after. The section “One man or two?” sets out each view in its own words.

Did he lose? In the poem, yes, and the poem is generous to him in defeat: his first thought is for Jaimini, and his wife makes the winner earn it twice. In philosophy the matter is less simple. The positions the poem has him defend are a Mīmāṁsaka’s, and those he did give up. The positions in his book — ignorance in the soul, meditation after hearing, ritual as a horse — were never given up; they became the Bhāmatī school and are taught to this day.

Why is he called Miśra? It is a householder’s surname, common among the Brahmins of Mithilā and the north. The Anusandhana Kendra’s rule is quoted in the first section; a Miśra never took the monk’s vows, which is one reason the name on the Brahma-siddhi tells against the story that its author did.

Did he think rituals were necessary? No — and yes. He said plainly that a life-long celibate could reach the goal by contemplation alone. He also said the rites of one’s station make the journey faster, as a horse does, and that a householder should keep them. The Kanchi chapter calls this position “the foremost among ‘integrative Advaitins’”; Sri Sureśvara called it wrong.

What did he think of his wife’s learning? The book says nothing of her. The poem gives her the judge’s seat, a prophecy, a seventeen-day debate of her own and the Upaniṣadic precedent of Gārgī; and the shrine at Mahishi bears her name with his. Whether the historical Sri Maṇḍana had such a wife is not known; that the tradition wanted him to is.

Can I read the Brahma-siddhi? The Sanskrit text with Sri Śaṅkhapāṇi’s commentary and the long English introduction of 1937 is linked below and is free to read. There is no complete English translation; the French translation of 1969 and the English summary in the Advaita volume of the Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies are named on this page for the reader who can find them. The Kanchi chapter, also linked, is the best short account of the book’s teaching in English that can be read freely.

Where does he stand between the two schools of Advaita? At the head of one. The Bhāmatī school, so called from Sri Vācaspati’s commentary, holds the Brahma-siddhi’s positions on ignorance and meditation; the Vivaraṇa school, from Sri Padmapāda and Sri Prakāśātman, holds the opposite, and Sri Sarvajñātman set his views aside by name. This site’s page on the schools gives the difference; its pages for Sri Vācaspati, Sri Padmapāda, Sri Prakāśātman and Sri Sarvajñātman give the persons.

Why does this page keep saying “the poem says”? Because the promise of this site is not to state as fact what is not known. About Sri Maṇḍana very little is known: that he wrote six books, that he came after Bhartṛhari and before Śālikanātha, that a logician of 991 knew him as the author of the Brahma-siddhi. Everything else — the parrots, the garland, the name, the birthplace — is tradition, and is given here as tradition, with love and without pretence.