Padmapādāchārya

The full-length study of this teacher is still being written. What is below is the complete short life, and it is accurate as far as it goes.

The life

He was born Sanandana, son of a brahmin named Vimala, on the banks of the Kāverī in the old Chola country — the delta of rice fields and temple towns in what is now Tamil Nadu. He had the Vedas by his teens, refused marriage, and before meeting his teacher went to the Ahobila hills, in the Nallamala range of the eastern Deccan, for austerities as a devotee of Narasiṃha. Then he walked to Kāśī, on the Ganges, where Śaṅkara was expounding the commentaries. What the tradition records of him afterwards is an appetite for exactness. He had the Bhāṣyas explained to him three times over. The name he is remembered by comes from the story of lotus footprints appearing in the river as he crossed to reach his teacher — which the tradition tells as a story and which need not be believed to see what it is saying about the quality of the man's attention. His Pañcapādikā comments on Śaṅkara's commentary on the first four Brahma-sūtras, and it is the earliest such commentary; every later reading of Śaṅkara's opening moves passes through it, and the whole Vivaraṇa school is built on it. He was appointed, as the accounts have it, to the western seat at Dvārakā on the Gujarat coast — though the maṭhas' own records differ on which disciple went where, and this page follows the source it cites rather than pretending the question is settled.

The turn it rests on

He wrote the commentary that made his teacher's commentary teachable.

What was taught

Author of the Pañcapādikā, an early and influential commentary on Shankara's Brahma Sūtra bhāṣya.