Sri Padmapādāchārya

The man

He is the disciple who walked on the river. Every account of Sri Śaṅkara that the tradition has handed down tells the story: the teacher on one bank of the Ganga, the young monk Sanandana on the other, a summons, no boat, and a lotus rising under each footfall as he crossed — and the new name given on the far bank, Padmapāda, the lotus-footed. It is the kind of story that makes a modern reader smile, and it has hidden a more remarkable fact behind it. The same man wrote the oldest surviving commentary on Sri Śaṅkara’s greatest work, and the way he read that work — what he took the master to mean by ignorance, by the “I”, by the relation between the one Self and the many souls — became, through a chain of later writers, one of the two ways in which Advaita Vedānta has read itself ever since. The school is not named after him but after the book that explained his book, the Vivaraṇa. Yet he is its fountainhead, and a student who takes up the Vedānta-paribhāṣā or the Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṅgraha today, a thousand years later, is still reading Sri Padmapāda at one or two removes.

Almost nothing is known about him that is not either in his book or in the hagiographies, and the two kinds of evidence do not touch. The book, the Pañcapādikā, gives no birthplace, no date, no teacher’s name except in the salutation, and — as one modern critic has pointed out — does not even carry the name Padmapāda in its colophons. The hagiographies, on the other hand, give him a father, a river, a home country, a first meeting with the master at Kāśī, a pilgrimage, a jealous uncle, a fire, a miracle of memory and a monastery, and they were written centuries after the events they relate by men who said, in so many words, that they were relaying report. This page keeps the two kinds of evidence apart. It tells the life as the tradition tells it, marking at every point which tradition and how far its own tellers vouched for it; it describes the book from the book; and it lets the reader see where the one does and does not support the other.

He belongs on this site for three reasons. He is, with Sri Sureśvara, Sri Hastāmalaka and Sri Toṭaka, one of the four direct disciples whom the whole tradition names, and he was by that tradition’s account the first among them and the most loved. He is the first interpreter of Sri Śaṅkara whose work survives, and therefore the first witness to how the master’s own students understood him. And he stands at the head of a line of thought — about what ignorance is, and whether the sentence of the Upaniṣad can by itself set a person free — that this site’s pages on Sri Prakāśātman, Sri Vācaspati Miśra and Swami Satchidānandendra Saraswatī take up from where this page leaves it. The 1948 translator of his book, a retired Mysore judge who spent his last years on the task, put the case for reading him in a sentence that has not dated: “Being the earliest commentary on Samkara-bhasya the Pancapadika even in its abridged form deserves a careful study by every student of Advaita philosophy.”

The sources, and how this page uses them

Four kinds of record are used here, and the reader should know their weight. The first is the Pañcapādikā itself, read in the English translation of D. Venkataramiah, published by the Oriental Institute at Baroda in 1948 as the hundred-and-seventh volume of the Gaekwad’s Oriental Series. Venkataramiah (1867–1947) was a judge of the Mysore High Court who took up the translation in retirement and died a year before it appeared; his introduction, which sets out the traditional life and then summarises the book’s argument section by section, is the fullest account of Sri Padmapāda in English, and its dates and opinions are cited here as his. The book is on the Internet Archive and is linked at the foot of the page. It was read from a scanned copy, and where the machine has misread a letter the printed word has been restored in the quotations and the correction recorded.

The second is the Śaṅkara-digvijaya attributed to Mādhava, in the English translation of Swami Tapasyananda published by the Sri Ramakrishna Math, Madras. This is the traditional life of Sri Śaṅkara that the maṭhas have made canonical, and Sri Padmapāda is its most fully drawn disciple: he has a canto of his own, the fourteenth, called “The Pilgrimage of Padmapāda.” But its author is unusually candid about what he is doing. Of the most famous episode in Sri Padmapāda’s life, the burning of his book, he says: “the whole incident is a mere tradition that I have come across. I vouch no more for it.” This page treats the Digvijaya as what it is, a devotional poem drawing on older report, and says “the Digvijaya says” wherever it is the source. The 1948 introduction, which follows the same poem, is used alongside it.

The third kind of record is the living tradition of the four monasteries. The Sringeri Śāradā Pīṭham’s own website carries a page on Sri Padmapādāchārya and a page on the four primary disciples; the Govardhana Pīṭha at Puri publishes a list of its own heads beginning with him; and the Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭham hosts the chapter on him from Preceptors of Advaita, a volume of essays edited by T. M. P. Mahadevan and published in 1968 for the diamond jubilee of the late Kanchi Jagadguru. These are the tradition speaking for itself, and they do not agree on every point; where they differ, this page gives each.

The fourth is the modern history of Indian thought, in two representatives. Surendranath Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy, volume two (Cambridge, 1932), has a section on Sri Padmapāda and long passages on the school he founded, and its author announced that “Padmapada’s method of treatment, as interpreted by Prakasatman, has been taken in the first and the second volumes of the present work as the guide to the exposition of the Vedanta.” And Swami Satchidānandendra Saraswatī’s Method of the Vedanta, in A. J. Alston’s English translation (1989), devotes a chapter to the Pañcapādikā from the standpoint of a critic who thinks it misread the master. Both are on the Internet Archive and both are linked. This page uses Dasgupta for the outline of the doctrine and the later history, and Swami Satchidānandendra for the dissenting reading, which is given its own section and presented as one view among others.

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. Where this page says “the tradition says,” it means one or more of the second and third kinds of record; where it says “the Pañcapādikā says,” it means the book in Venkataramiah’s translation. No modern encyclopaedia has been used, and no picture of him is shown, for reasons given in the note near the end.

Where the life was lived

The map is India, because the tradition sends him across the whole of it. It begins him on the Kāverī in the old Chola country of the Tamil south, sends him north to Kāśī on the Ganga to find his teacher, keeps him beside that teacher through years of travel of which the poem names the stations only in passing, and then, in his own canto, sends him on a pilgrimage that runs down the east coast — Kāḷahasti, Kāñcī, Cidambaram, the Kāverī again, his uncle’s house in his native country, Rāmeśvaram at the tip of the peninsula — and across to Kerala on the west coast, where he rejoins the master. Two further places belong to him in the tradition though the poem does not put him there: Sringeri in the Karnataka hills, where the master says he had heard the disciple read the first five chapters of his book, and the monastery he was given at the end, which the traditions place at Dwaraka in Gujarat, at Puri in Odisha, or at Sringeri itself, and which is pinned here at all three with the disagreement stated. His own book names none of these places. Everything on the map is the tradition’s.

Present-day coastlines are used and only India’s outline is drawn. The pins are places named in the Śaṅkara-digvijaya, the 1948 introduction and the monasteries’ own pages; the dotted line joins the stations of the pilgrimage canto in the order the poem gives them and is not a surveyed route. The Kāverī pin stands for the whole Chola country of his birth, since no town is named; the Digvijaya calls the mountain of his early austerities “Bala” and the Sringeri website calls it Ahobila, and the pin follows the second, in the Nallamala hills of present-day Andhra Pradesh, with the first name in its note. The three monastery pins are alternatives, not stations, and the line does not join them.

The Kāverī, and a young man at Kāśī

The tradition begins him in the Tamil country. The Sringeri Śāradā Pīṭham’s page tells it in a sentence: “On the banks of the Kaveri River in the ancient Chola kingdom lived a devout Brahmana named Vimala, who was blessed with a remarkable son.” The Digvijaya gives the same country in the young man’s own mouth. When he arrives at Kāśī and prostrates before Sri Śaṅkara, the master asks who he is, and he answers: “I am a Brahmana belonging to the Chola country where flows the great river Kaveri, whose waters have got the unique power of producing devotion in the minds of men who drink of it. I am going round the country to meet men of spiritual illumination, and in the course of my travels, arrived here recently.” The speech that follows is one of the most quoted in the poem, and it is worth giving a little of it, because the tradition has made it the model of how a seeker should ask: “O merciful one! Deign to help me, sinking in the ocean of Samsara, to reach the shore of safety across it. Out of mercy for this weeping destitute, deign to pour the nectar-like rain of thy gracious looks on him. If thou hesitatest, pondering over my worthiness or otherwise for thy grace, thou wilt lose thy reputation for boundless grace, for grace is not conditioned by considerations of merit.”

The Sringeri page fills in what the poem assumes: that he had “mastered the Vedas and showed a distinct aversion to worldly life” while still in his teens, that he refused marriage, and that he set out with the single purpose of finding a teacher. His name in the world is not recorded anywhere this page has been able to check. The Digvijaya introduces him as Sanandana and treats that as the name Sri Śaṅkara gave him at his initiation; the Sringeri page says the same, that the master “accepted him as a disciple, initiating him into Sannyasa and giving him the name Sanandana”. Both say he was the first of the disciples, and the Sringeri page says he was first “not just chronologically, but in several other aspects”.

Two things about this beginning deserve a reader’s attention. The first is that the tradition places him at Kāśī, on the Ganga, at the moment when Sri Śaṅkara was there “expounding His profound Bhashyas (commentaries)” — that is, at the moment the commentaries existed to be expounded. Whatever else is legend, the tradition is consistent that Sri Padmapāda came to the master as a student of the written work, and that his whole relation to Sri Śaṅkara was a relation to the Bhāṣya. The second is the emphasis, in every telling, on devotion rather than learning. Sri Sureśvara is the disciple who argued; Sri Hastāmalaka is the disciple who was already free; Sri Toṭaka is the disciple who served. Sri Padmapāda is the disciple who loved, and the Sringeri site’s page on the four calls him “The embodiment of supreme devotion (Bhakti)”. It is a paradox the tradition does not remark on that the disciple remembered for devotion is the one who wrote the hardest and most technical book.

The Sringeri Śāradā Pīṭham’s page on Sri Padmapādāchārya and its page on the four primary disciples, and canto six of the Śaṅkara-digvijaya in Swami Tapasyananda’s translation, are the sources for this section; all three are linked at the foot of the page. The Digvijaya’s numbering of verses is given in the translation in brackets, and the meeting is at canto six, verses 39 to 71.

Lotuses on the Ganga

The Digvijaya tells the story that gave him his name at the end of the same canto, and the telling is worth having in full, because later versions have simplified it. The master, it says, had many disciples and was equally fond of them, “some like Sanandana attained to great prominence because of their inherent worth. Sanandana rose in wise men’s estimation because of his very austere life, his devotion to study and his capacity to understand the subtleties of philosophic thought. Moved by deep affection for that devoted disciple, he taught him his commentaries three times, revealing the highest truth of the Vedas. This made the other disciples rather jealous of him.” The miracle, in this telling, is not a display but a correction: it is done to settle a quarrel among students. “So, in order to convince them of his inherent superiority, Sankara one day called that disciple, who was then standing on the opposite bank of the Ganga, to come to him immediately. Thereupon, when he stepped into the Ganga with the conviction that devotion to the feet of the Guru, which had enabled him to go across the ocean of Samsara, would surely not fail him in crossing this river, the holy Ganga brought out lotuses to support him wherever he placed his feet on her waters.” And then the name: “Sankara clasped him to his breast with overwhelming love and wonder, and gave him the name of Padmapada, the lotus-footed one.”

The Sringeri page tells it the same way and adds that the embrace was “a mark of affection and honor no other disciple had received”. Neither source dates it or places it more exactly than “the Ganga,” and this page does not. What the story is doing, in the tradition’s own terms, is clear enough: it is saying that the disciple’s faith in his teacher was complete, and that the teaching he received — three times over, the poem insists — was the master’s own commentaries. A reader who wants to know what to make of a man crossing a river on lotuses may prefer to notice what the tradition has chosen to attach the miracle to. It did not attach it to a debate, or a vision, or a healing. It attached it to the transmission of a book.

There is a smaller point in the story that turns out to matter. The poem says the other disciples were jealous because he was taught three times. Whatever the historical worth of that detail, it records the tradition’s own sense that the Pañcapādikā is the work of the student who had heard the master explain the Bhāṣya more often than anyone else — that is, the tradition’s own ground for giving the book the authority it has had. When the later Vivaraṇa school treated the Pañcapādikā as the key to the Bhāṣya, and when Swami Satchidānandendra in the twentieth century denied that it was, both were arguing about exactly this claim. The lotuses are the tradition’s way of stating it.

The Kāpālika, and the man-lion

The second story the tradition tells of him is violent, and it is told to show what his devotion was made of. The Digvijaya places it in its eleventh canto, on the master’s travels. A Kāpālika — a follower of one of the extreme tantric orders — comes to Sri Śaṅkara and asks for his head as an offering to Bhairava; the master, the poem says, consents, on condition that it be done when the disciples are away, and sits down in meditation. The Kāpālika approaches with his sword raised, “when the whole plot that was developing suddenly flashed on the mind of the disciple Padmapada, otherwise known as Sanandana.” What follows is the poem’s account of the disciple possessed: “Padmapada had attained Siddhi in the Mantra of Nrisimha, the Man-Lion Incarnation of the Lord who was attracted by Prahlada’s devotion and who always removes the sufferings of people that surrender to Him. The consciousness of Nrisimha took possession of him, and he became the Nrisimha himself for the time being.” He tears open the Kāpālika’s chest, the poem says, “as the Nrisimha did to Hiranya”, and the other disciples, returning from their bath, “saw the Acharya in Samadhi and the corpse of the Kapalika lying nearby”.

The Sringeri page tells the same story, adding that the master “further cautioned the Kapalika to take his head without the knowledge of His disciples, particularly Padmapada”, and that afterwards “With great difficulty, Sri Shankara helped Padmapada return to his normal form.” Both sources then have the disciples ask how the man-lion came to favour him, and both give the answer as his own story of an earlier life. In the Digvijaya he tells them: “In my early days, I performed austerities for a very long time in the holy forest on the top of the mountain Bala in order to propitiate Lord Nrisimha, who always responds to the whole-hearted devotion of votaries.” A hunter who passed daily asked what he was doing alone in a cave; he described the being he was seeking, “who has a human body up to the neck and a lion’s face above”; and “the hunter went into the forest, and not long after, returned with the Nrisimha (man-lion) tied with creepers”. The Sringeri page names the place Ahobila and gives the moral in the Lord’s own words: that “even Brahma, the creator, had not shown the same earnestness in contemplation as this illiterate hunter had demonstrated”.

Two things should be said plainly. The first is that these are stories, told by the tradition for its own ends, and that no one who tells them claims a witness. The second is that the tradition has not chosen them at random. In the story of the lotuses the disciple’s devotion is to the teacher; in the story of the hunter it is an unlettered man’s devotion that brings God on a rope while the learned ascetic waits in his cave; and in the story of the Kāpālika the disciple’s devotion becomes, for a moment, the fiercest form of God. A reader may take them as the tradition’s portrait of a temperament — ardent, fearless, and entirely given — and then turn to the book, which is cool, exact and argumentative from the first line to the last, and consider that the same tradition insists both are the one man.

A commentary as an offering, and a curse

The Digvijaya tells how the book came to be written in its thirteenth canto, and the setting is a quarrel. The master, it says, wished an exegesis on his Brahma-sūtra commentary and proposed Sri Sureśvara — the former Maṇḍana Miśra, the great ritualist who had lost the debate to him and taken sannyāsa. The other disciples objected. “If you command this Sanandana (Padmapada), would it not materialise? He adopted Sannyasa directly from Brahmacharya, without passing through the householder’s life. He is well instructed and well qualified.” The master agreed that “Sanandana is certainly well qualified” and, calling Sri Sureśvara aside, withdrew his permission, telling him to write an independent work instead. That work was the Naiṣkarmya-siddhi, and the poem says the disciples were convinced by it. But Sri Sureśvara, the poem says, had already pronounced a curse: “I started on the work of writing an exegesis on the commentaries of our Acharya at his command. Others have obstructed it. Whoever may produce such a work hereafter, may it not gain currency in the world of scholars!”

Then the poem comes to the book. “Some time after, Sanandana (Padmapada), too, as directed by the teacher, wrote a treatise on the Acharya’s commentary on the Vedanta Sutras. The first part of it is the famous Panchapadika and the remaining portion is called the Vritti. Padmapada has tried to show in these works, with great scholarship and force of reasoning, that the Acharya’s arrangement and interpretations of the Sutras of Vyasa are on the correct line. He offered this as his Guru-dakshina (a thanks-offering to the teacher).” And the master, looking at the planets, tells Sri Sureśvara in private what the curse will do: “In this work called Panchapadika, only five chapters, especially those portions dealing with the first four Sutras, will receive the attention of posterity” — and then, in the sentence that binds this page to the page on Sri Vācaspati Miśra: “Owing to your Prarabdha you will have another birth as Vachaspati, when you will write an extensive exposition of the commentaries on the Sutras. That work will be the guide for men to understand the meaning of the commentary for all time.”

This is the tradition’s own explanation of two facts that it could see: that the Pañcapādikā survives only as a fragment, and that the Bhāmatī of Sri Vācaspati, not the Pañcapādikā, became the commentary every student reads. It explains both by a curse and a rebirth, and it should be read as a story that carries a judgement rather than a record that carries a date. The reader who wants to know what modern criticism has made of the rebirth story will find it on the page on Sri Vācaspati Miśra, and the twentieth-century view that the whole account is “poetic sleight-of-hand” is given there and in the section on the dissenting reading below. What is not in dispute is what the poem takes for granted: that Sri Padmapāda’s book was written as a commentary on the whole of the master’s Bhāṣya, at the master’s wish, and offered to him.

The pilgrimage, the uncle, and the fire

The fourteenth canto belongs to him. It opens with a request to go on pilgrimage and the master’s answer, which the tradition has treasured as a teaching in its own right: “The proximity of the Guru is the real place of pilgrimage. The washings of his feet are the holy waters. The attainment of the Atman through the Guru’s instruction is the real experience of the Holy Presence which men seek indirectly through the adoration of holy images installed in temples. It is better to be near the Guru, serving him, than go about from place to place. When one has walked long distances and become completely exhausted and sleepy, how can one meditate on the Atman?” The disciple persists, the master consents, and the poem follows him south: to Kāḷahasti, where “He bathed in the river called Suvarnamukhi, worshipped Lord Siva with flowers of affection”; to Kāñcī, “which, according to the wise, offers the best means for overcoming the travails of Samsara”, where he worships Ekāmreśa and Kāmākṣī; to the temple of the dancing Śiva that the poem calls Puṇḍarīkapura and the tradition knows as Cidambaram; to the Kāverī; and to the house of his mother’s brother in his own country.

The uncle, in every version, is a follower of Prabhākara, the great teacher of the ritualist Mīmāṁsā, and Sri Padmapāda shows him the book. “On reading it, while he was delighted with the extraordinary scholarship and intelligence displayed by his nephew in it, that delight was all but turned into hostility by certain apprehensions.” The nephew, leaving for Rāmeśvaram, entrusts the manuscript to him: “Let this book be in your safe keeping till I return. This book is my life. Just as you all love your homes and wealth, so do I cherish this book.” And the uncle reasons himself into a crime: “When this book becomes public, the teachings of my Acharya Prabhakara will be adversely affected. For, the arguments raised in this are irrefutable. So the destruction of this book is necessary in the interests of our doctrine. It is better that one’s house is burnt than that one’s faith is destroyed. So I shall set fire to this house where this book is kept.” The poem adds, in a later passage, a second rumour: “It is said that in order to prevent this, the uncle added to his food some drug that had the effect of making the intellect dull”.

And then the narrator stops the story to disown it. The sentence has already been quoted above and is repeated here because it governs everything in this section: “It is more sinful to spread unfounded rumours and scandals than to commit the misdeeds concerned. Hence let me hasten to add that the whole incident is a mere tradition that I have come across. I vouch no more for it.” Venkataramiah, in 1948, noted the same reservation from the Sanskrit: “Vidyaranya says that he is not quite sure of the authenticity of this incident but that he is relying only on report.” (He, like most of his generation, took the poem’s author to be Vidyāraṇya; the translation used here says Mādhava, and this page does not decide the question.) A story that its own oldest surviving teller declined to vouch for should not be repeated as fact, and this page does not. It is repeated as what the tradition has said about why the book is short, and the reader will find below what a modern critic has said about it.

The poem then takes him to Rāmeśvaram, on the strait between India and Lanka, and gives three accounts of the name; and it brings him back to his uncle’s house, where junior disciples meet him and where, from a passing pilgrim, they learn where the master is. They go to Kerala, “the land of coconut palms, where the Acharya was then sojourning after he had done his duty towards his mother”, and find him at a temple of Viṣṇu at a place the translation calls Mahasurapura. The disciple’s complaint to his teacher is the most human passage in the canto: “I feel even now that my brain has lost its original clarity and power. How is it that a servant of yours should fall into such a miserable plight?” And the master’s answer is the miracle the tradition sets beside the lotuses: “I had foreseen these happenings and had spoken about them to Sureswara. While we were staying at Sringa-giri, you read out to me five chapters (Panchapadi) of your work. The memory of what I then heard has not been erased from my mind yet. I shall dictate it, and you may take it down.” The translator adds in brackets: “So this incomplete work of Padmapada came to be known as Panchapadika.” And the poem ends the episode with the disciple, who “took down the whole book as dictated by him, and on completion of it, wept and danced in ecstatic joy”.

Venkataramiah summarised the whole tradition in his introduction, and his summary has one detail the reader will want, because it explains the book’s title in the tradition’s terms: the master “consoled him by dictating the Tika on the first five padas (i.e., four sections of the first chapter and the fifth section of the second chapter)— verbatim as he had heard that portion read to him while they were in Sringeri (S.D., p. 505).” A pāda is a quarter-chapter of the Brahma-sūtras, and “the book of five pādas” is what the name Pañcapādikā means. But what survives covers only the first four sūtras of the first pāda, and Venkataramiah saw the difficulty: “Since the Tika on the first five padas was restored and the work still bears the name Pancapadika it is difficult to account for the loss of all but the gloss on 1. 1-4. Vidyaranya is silent on the point and even so early as the time of Prakasatman (950 A.D.) the author of the Vivarana, the work appears to have suffered this further mutilation.” The tradition, in other words, explains why five pādas are all that survived; it does not explain why only four sūtras did.

The whole of canto fourteen, in Swami Tapasyananda’s translation, is linked at the foot of the page, and the verse numbers are given there in brackets; the uncle’s story is verses 95 to 116, the reunion and the dictation verses 153 to 175. The 1948 introduction’s summary is at its pages xiv to xvi.

Which monastery? Three traditions

The tradition agrees that Sri Śaṅkara, before his death, sent his disciples out to teach, and that Sri Padmapāda was one of those who presided over a seat. It does not agree where. The Sringeri Śāradā Pīṭham’s page on the four disciples says that “Bhagavatpada entrusted each of His primary disciples with the task of heading one of the four Amnaya Peethams He established, as its first Acharya”, and lists Sri Padmapādāchārya as first Āchārya of the “Paschimamnaya Dwaraka Peetham (West)” at Dwarka in Gujarat, with Sri Hastāmalaka at Puri. The Govardhana Pīṭha at Puri, on its own website, says the reverse: that the master “appointed his disciples Padmapada, Hasthamalaka, Sureshwara and Totaka as the Shankaracharyas of the four Peethas in East, south, west and north respectively”, and its published list of its own heads begins “1 Anantashri Padmapad”. (The Puri list follows that monastery’s own much earlier dating of Sri Śaṅkara, which this page neither adopts nor disputes.) And the chapter on him in Preceptors of Advaita, hosted by the Kanchi Pīṭham, reports a third placing: “According to the Sankara-vijaya of Anandagiri, the manuscripts of which are available in the Madras and the Mysore Government Oriental Manuscripts libraries, Sri Sankara appointed Padmapada as the first Acharya at the Sringeri Matha.”

Swami Tapasyananda, introducing his translation of the Digvijaya, set out the whole difficulty with a candour that a reader should have in front of him. “Traditionally, four Maths are supposed to have been founded by Sankara at the four regions of India— at Sringeri in the south under Sureswara, at Dwarka in the west under Hastamalaka, at Badari in the north under Totaka, and at Puri in the east under Padmapada.” But, he went on, “this four-Math theory has been propounded first in Chidvilasa’s Sankara-vijaya”, a late text, and the poem he was translating “seems to be non-partisan, and maintains only that Sankara in his last days sent several of his disciples to preach the doctrine at ‘Sringa-giri and other centres’”. He concluded that the popularity of the four-maṭha scheme “seems to have originated from the fact that the Orders of Dasanami Sannyasins recognise and accept affiliation with only these four Maths”.

This page therefore reports three placings — Dwaraka, Puri and Sringeri — and takes none as established. Each is held by a living institution or an old text, and each institution has kept the teaching alive for centuries under whichever name it honours. A reader who visits Dwaraka will be told one thing and a reader who visits Puri another, and both will be told it sincerely. What all the traditions agree on is that he was among the disciples sent out, and that the work of a seat — teaching, initiating, guarding the commentaries — was his in the last part of his life. His own book says nothing about any of it.

When he lived

His date is his teacher’s date, and the tradition and the historians agree on that much. Venkataramiah wrote in 1948: “Being a direct disciple of the great saint Sankaracarya there is hardly any difficulty in fixing Padmapada’s age. Sankaracarya according to tradition lived for 32 years, and painstaking research has shown that this period was covered by the years 788-820 A.D. Thus Padmapada’s time can be precisely fixed at 820 A.D. and scholars have generally agreed on this point.” Dasgupta headed his section “Padmapāda (A.D. 820)” and gave the reason: “Padmapada is universally reputed to be a direct disciple of Sankaracarya, and, since the manner of his own salutation to Sankaracarya confirms this tradition, and since no facts are known that can contradict such a view, it may safely be assumed that he was a younger contemporary of Sankaracarya.”

The reader should know that the 788–820 dating of Sri Śaṅkara, which both of these scholars took as settled, is not settled in the tradition and has been challenged by scholars since; Swami Tapasyananda’s introduction argues at length that it belongs to a later teacher and that the master “must have lived somewhere between the 5th and the 7th century A.D.”, and the site’s page on Sri Śaṅkara sets out the question. Whatever date is given to the teacher must be given to the disciple. This page therefore says “eighth century” where a date is needed, as the site’s cards do, and asks the reader to hold it loosely. Of the length of his life, of his death, and of where he died, no source consulted for this page says anything at all.

Dasgupta’s other sentence on the biography is the one this page has tried to honour throughout: “There are many traditional stories about him and his relations with Sankaracarya; but, since their truth cannot be attested by reliable evidence, it is not possible to pronounce any judgment on them.”

The book: what survives, and what it was

Two works are attributed to him, and the tradition and the historians agree on both. Dasgupta: “Only two works are attributed to him, viz. the Panca-padika, which is a commentary on Sankara’s commentary on the first four sutras of the Brahma-sutra and Sankara’s introduction to his commentary known as the adhyasa and the sambhavana-bhasya, and the Atma-bodha-vyakhyana, called also Vedanta-sara.” The foreword to the 1948 translation puts the second in its place: “The second work attributed to Padmapada is the Atmabodha-vyakhyana, also called the Vedantasara. Although he had left us two works his reputation is based on the sure foundation of the Pancapadika.” This page has not been able to consult the commentary on the Ātmabodha and says nothing about its contents.

The Pañcapādikā as it survives is a commentary on a very small part of a very large book: the introduction to Sri Śaṅkara’s Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya, the famous opening pages on superimposition, and the commentary on the first four sūtras — the catuḥsūtrī, which the whole tradition treats as containing the system in essence. Venkataramiah gives the tradition’s account of its original shape: “Padmapada’s commentary on the Bhasya is known as the Tika, the first part being styled the Pancapadika, the rest Vrtti. From internal evidence it is perceived that Padmapada in all probability wrote his gloss on the entire Bhasya but what is left to us is only the Tika relating to the Bhasya on Badarayana-Sutras, 1. i. 1-4.” The “internal evidence” is real and the reader can check it: the surviving text several times refers forward to what “the Vṛtti” will say on later sūtras, and Venkataramiah lists four such references in a footnote. Swami Satchidānandendra, no friend of the book’s doctrine, accepted the same evidence: “There is some indication in the body of the surviving portion that the author intended to write a complete commentary.” Whether the rest was written and lost, or never written, no one now can say.

The book opens with five verses, and the first and the fourth tell a reader most of what the book itself discloses about its author. The first is a prostration “to Brahman, the beginningless, blissful, the changeless, of the nature of knowledge, eternity and existence; (the ground of) the non-existent multiplex of duality, the Witness.” The second salutes Bādarāyaṇa, the author of the sūtras; the third salutes Sri Śaṅkara in a verse built entirely on double meanings that make the teacher and the god Śiva one; and the fourth is the disciple’s bow to his fellow students, “the teachers, renowned for their knowledge (Lit. Wealth) of the Bhasya,— those who drink the nectar flowing from the Bhasya-lotus, which owes its birth to the Manasa-lake of his (Bhasyakara’s = Samkara’s) mouth,— the loving disciples who, like the bees, are eagerly lifting up their faces from all quarters.” It is this salutation, with its picture of a circle of disciples gathered round a living teacher’s spoken commentary, that Dasgupta had in mind when he said that “the manner of his own salutation to Sankaracarya confirms this tradition”. Then the fifth verse: “I now begin in all earnestness the exposition of the Bhasya which bears the weight rendered heavy with the cluster of words, etc., and which is limpid yet profound.”

What kind of book is it? Venkataramiah described it exactly. “It sets forth the fundamental doctrines of the system, in particular that bearing on superimposition or adhyasa which is pivotal to the Vedantic non-dualism as taught by Samkara. We have in it an epistemological discussion of high value to students of modern philosophy. Samkara’s exposition of adhyasa is brief, though lucid, as all his writings are but the elaboration and the rebuttal of other schools were left to Padmapada. The rival doctrines of the Naiyayikas, the Bhattas, the Prabhakaras, the Vijnanavadins and the Madhyamikas of the Buddhistic school are all subjected to a searching examination and refuted with great argumentative skill. This exposition of adhyasa-bhasya occupies nearly half the present work.” A reader coming to it from the master’s own prose will find it slower and more technical, because it is doing a different job: it is defending a position against trained opponents, sentence by sentence, in the way that Indian philosophical commentary does. That is why it matters. It is the first record of how the master’s own circle argued for him.

What he taught: ignorance as a power

The centre of the book, and the centre of every later argument about it, is what it says ignorance is. Sri Śaṅkara had opened his commentary with the observation that we habitually confuse the Self with what is not the Self, and had called this confusion superimposition, adhyāsa, and said it is “based on wrong knowledge (mithya-jnana)”. The Pañcapādikā, glossing the phrase mithyā-jñāna-nimitta, made a move that the whole later school followed. Venkataramiah’s translation of the passage: “The word ‘ mithya ’ means ‘ inexpressible ’ (anirvacaniya), and by the word ‘ ajnana ’ is meant the potency of avidya which is of the nature of insentience and is the negation of jnana. And ‘ tannimitta ’ means ‘ having that (viz., mithyajnana) as the material cause.’” Three things are said at once. “False” means not simply wrong but indescribable, neither real nor unreal. “Ignorance” is not the mere absence of knowledge but a potency, a power, insentient in nature. And this power is the material of superimposition, the stuff out of which the confusion is made, as clay is the material of a pot.

The next section makes the power beginningless and universal. “It cannot but be admitted that there exists this potency of nescience in things external, as well as internal, its existence being a constant accompaniment of their inner nature. Otherwise (i.e., if nescience is not admitted) the appearance of illusory objects becomes inexplicable.” And the book is careful to say what the power does and does not do in ordinary life. It does not hide a pot from you: “that nescience does not cause any impediment to the manifestation of the real nature of insentient objects since their non-cognition is caused merely by the absence of the (necessary) means of valid knowledge”. Its one work is on the Self.

Later in the book comes the passage that every historian quotes, the roll-call of the names under which the scriptures speak of this one thing: “which is variously described in Sruti, Smrti, Itihasa (history), and Purana in different contexts as namarupa, avyakrta, avidya, maya, prakrti, agrahana, avyakta, tamas, karana, laya, sakti, mahasupti, nidra, aksara, akasa; that which having prevented caitanya from manifesting itself as of the nature of Brahman which is its essential characteristic, brings about its individuation (jivatva); that which serves as the wall on which are picture-illusion, action, and residual impressions of past cognitions; that which exists in deep slumber enveloping (avarana) the light (of atman) and remaining only as mental traces of the world-projection (viksepa)—that is the beginningless avidya.” Name-and-form, the unevolved, ignorance, illusion, nature, non-perception, the unmanifest, darkness, the cause, dissolution, power, the great sleep, sleep, the imperishable, space: the Pañcapādikā reads all of these as one principle, which veils and which projects, which is the wall on which the picture of the world is painted, and which remains in deep sleep when everything else has gone.

Dasgupta’s summary of the passage is the clearest short statement of what the book did with the idea: “It is this entity that obstructs the pure and independently self-revealing nature of Brahman, and thus, standing as the painted canvas (citra-bhitti) of ignorance (avidya), deeds (karma) and past impressions of knowledge (purva-prajna-samskara) produce the individual persons (jivatvapadika).” And he assigned the book its place in the history: “It is probably he who of all the interpreters first described ajnana or avidya as being of a material nature (jadatmika) and of the nature of a power (jadatmika avidya-sakti), and interpreted Sankara’s phrase “mithya-jnana-nimittah” as meaning that it is this material power of ajnana that is the constitutive or the material cause of the world-appearance.” Whether the master meant this is the question on which the school divided in the twentieth century, and it is taken up below. What is certain is that this is where the doctrine of a positive, material root-ignorance — mūlāvidyā, as the later school called it — first appears in a surviving text.

What he taught: the knot of the “I”

If ignorance is a power, what is the ordinary person made of? The Pañcapādikā’s answer is the ego, ahaṁkāra, and its analysis of the ego is the part of the book that has worn best. The “I” that each of us takes for granted is, it says, a compound of two things that do not belong together: the light of consciousness, which is the Self, and an insentient transformation of ignorance, which is the mind. Venkataramiah’s note puts the technical term in a sentence: “The ego-notion (ahampratyaya) contains two elements—the sentient and the insentient—a complex of the self and the not-self—citacidgranthi.” Cit-acid-granthi, the knot of the conscious and the unconscious: the phrase is the book’s own, and the tradition has kept it.

The book explains the knot with an old example, the red flower and the clear crystal. A crystal set beside a hibiscus looks red; the redness is not in it, but it cannot be seen without it. “just as in the crystal there exists the illusory relation of the upadhi (viz., japakusuma), in atman there exists the illusory relation of ahamkara; hence on account of the (erroneous) relation of these dual forms (cit and acit—the intelligence and the inert) it becomes as it were a knot (granthi) so that ahamkara is spoken of as granthi (i.e., a tangle of the conscious and unconscious elements).” But the book also notices where the example fails, and the failure is the point. A crystal cannot show you its own redness; it is inert. The Self is not inert. “the crystal cannot reveal what is erroneously imposed upon it, so also atman cannot reveal the ‘ahamkara’ which is imposed on it. The answer is that in the case of the crystal there is inertness (jadatva) and so it has no power to manifest the redness, whereas the relation of cit (with ahamkara) manifests itself even in the absence of the cognitive activity required for revealing ahamkara and its properties.” The “I” is lit from within by the very thing it misrepresents. That is why it feels so certain, and that is why, for this book, the whole discipline consists in learning to tell the light from what it lights.

Dasgupta’s paraphrase carries the analysis a step further into the psychology, and is worth having because it shows how much of later Vedānta’s account of the mind is already here: “This transformation is called antahkarana, manas, buddhi and the ego or the ego-feeler (aham-pratyayin) on the side of its cognitive activity, while on the vibratory side of its activity (spanda-saktya), it is called prana or biomotor functions. The association of the ego with the pure atman, like the association of the redness of a japa flower with a crystal, is a complex (granthi) which manifests the dual characteristics of activity of the avidya stuff and the consciousness of the pure self (sambhinnobhaya-rupatvat).”

What he taught: the face in the mirror

The Pañcapādikā is the first surviving Advaita text to use the image that the Vivaraṇa school made its signature: the reflection. Sri Śaṅkara had compared the individual soul to the sun or moon reflected in water. The Pañcapādikā says what the comparison is for: “Now as regards the illustration of the reflection of the face in the mirror as well as of the moon in water, what is intended to bring home is the fact that the ‘not-this’ (atman) as evidenced in the expression ‘I am doer’ is an entity not distinct from Brahman but on the contrary that only, just as the reflected image is not distinct from the object.” The image, it goes on, teaches that “the only elements to be regarded as illusory are their (viz., object and reflection) appearance as distincts (the one as different from the other)”. The face in the mirror is not a second face; the soul is not a second consciousness. What is false is only the seeming that there are two.

This is the seed of what the tradition calls pratibimba-vāda, the doctrine of reflection, and the chapter on him in Preceptors of Advaita states the mature form and the alternatives with textbook clarity. “According to the pratibimba-vada, the consciousness that transcends avidya and serves as the original is Isvara; and, the consciousness that is reflected in the intellect in its gross and subtle states is Jiva. Or, the consciousness reflected in avidya is Isvara, and in intellect is Jiva” Against it stands the doctrine of limitation, avaccheda-vāda, which Sri Vācaspati Miśra held — the soul as consciousness fenced off, as space is fenced by a pot — and the doctrine of semblance, ābhāsa-vāda, which Sri Sureśvara held. The chapter assigns the reflection doctrine to this book: “The pratibimba-vada is advocated by Padmapada in his Panchapadika in the section which is designated by later Advaitic writers as Darpana-tika” — the “mirror gloss.” Dasgupta agreed, with a historian’s caution: “The doctrines of avaccheda-vada and pratibimba-vada explained in the first volume of the present work are also at least as old as Padmapada’s Panca-padika, and both Padmapada and Prakasatman seem to support the reflection theory (pratibimba-vada), the theory that the jiva is but a reflected image of Brahman”. The reader should not take the three doctrines as three religions. They are three ways of saying that one consciousness appears as many, each with a picture attached, and the tradition has held all three within a single school.

What he taught: how a sentence can show the Self

The rest of the surviving book is about the first four sūtras, and the great question they raise: how can words, which name things, point to what is not a thing? The Pañcapādikā’s answer is by lakṣaṇā, indication, and its worked example became standard. Venkataramiah summarises it. Of the great sentence “That thou art,” the book says, “The word ‘thou’ should be stripped of its associations like limited knowledge—and the word ‘that’—of its associations like ‘non-immediacy’—; then ‘thou’ in its secondary sense of cogniser, and ‘that’ in its secondary significance of ‘Brahman’ will both denote the identical being.” The everyday model is “this is that Devadatta” — the man seen years ago in another town and recognised now. The words “this” and “that” carry a time and a place each, and the sentence is true only when both are set aside and the one man is left. So with “thou” and “that”: strip the first of its littleness and the second of its distance, and one being is named twice.

The book insists that a sentence which does this is not idle repetition. “Though the vakya is anuvada its validity as a pramana is not imperilled since it dispels the illusion that the Jiva and Brahman are distincts” — it restates an identity that was always there, and is nevertheless a genuine means of knowledge, because it removes a real mistake. From this the later Vivaraṇa school drew its most distinctive claim, that hearing the sentence rightly is itself the immediate cause of liberating knowledge, and the reader will find that claim argued on the pages of Sri Prakāśātman and Sri Vācaspati Miśra. Here it is enough to see the root.

One further doctrine belongs to him personally, and the Kanchi volume states it: “Padmapada, however, maintains that the negative texts merely restate what is presumptively known from the affirmative Upanishadic texts. In the case of the erroneous perception of silver in the nacre, when it is said that ‘this is nacre and this is not silver’, the sentence ‘this is not silver’ merely restates the absence of silver which is presumptively known from the affirmative sentence ‘this is nacre.’ Similarly, the negative Upanishadic texts such as ‘neti, neti’ merely restate the absence of the universe in Brahman which is presumptively known from the affirmative Upanishadic texts that convey Brahman to be truth, consciousness and absolute.” Where Sri Maṇḍana Miśra had made the “not this, not this” of the Upaniṣads primary, Sri Padmapāda made the affirmations primary — Brahman is truth, knowledge, without a second — and the denials their shadow. The chapter adds that Sri Sarvajñātman found this view “faultless, desirable, and commendable”. It is a small point with a large consequence for temperament: a school that begins from what the Self is reads the scriptures differently from one that begins from what it is not.

Finally, on Brahman as the cause of the world, the book is brief and its explainer expansive. Dasgupta: “On the subject of the causality of Brahman Padmapada says that that on which the world-appearance is manifested, the Brahman, is the cause of the world.” It was Sri Prakāśātman who worked out the three ways in which that might be true — “like two twisted threads in a rope, maya and Brahman are together the joint cause of the world”, or that which has māyā as its power is the cause, or Brahman as the support of māyā is the cause — and the reader will find them on his page. And on perception, Dasgupta credits the Pañcapādikā with the first sketch of a theory that Dharmarāja would systematise seven centuries later: “Padmapada is also probably the first to attempt an explanation of the process of Vedantic perception which was later on elaborated by Prakasatman and later writers, and his views were all collected and systematized in the exposition of the Vedanta-paribhasa of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra in the sixteenth century.”

The school that grew from the book

A fragment of commentary on four sūtras became the root of one of the two great lines of Advaita interpretation, and the line took its name not from him but from the man who explained him. The Kanchi volume gives the genealogy: “It was commented on by Prakasatman in his Panchapadika-vivarana. The Panchapadika-vivarana was further commented on by Akhandananda in his Tattvadipana. Anandapurna, who wrote his Vidyasagari commentary on Sri Harsha’s Khandana-khanda-khadya wrote a commentary on the Panchapadika. Nrisimhasrama wrote a commentary on the Panchapadika-vivarana called the Panchapadika-vivarana-prakasika.” And then “Vidyaranya wrote a separate monograph called Vivarana-prameya-sangraha in which the Vedanta doctrines are clearly set forth on the lines of the Panchapadika-vivarana. Ramananda Sarasvati, a pupil of Govindananda, the author of the Ratna-prabha commentary on the Sankara bhashya on the Brahma-sutra wrote his Vivarana-upanyasa, a summary of the main theses of the Vivarana. Dasgupta says that this work was probably the last important work on the Vivarana line.”

Two names in that list are the ones a reader is most likely to meet. Sri Prakāśātman’s Vivaraṇa, probably of the tenth century, is so much the standard reading of the Pañcapādikā that the whole line is called after it, and the Kanchi chapter says without embarrassment that on the central questions it presents “Padmapada’s view as interpreted by Prakasatman in his Vivarana”. Sri Vidyāraṇya’s Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṅgraha, of the fourteenth century, is the digest through which most students have met the school; its author describes it in his second verse as “This compendium of the topics dealt with in the ‘Elucidation’ (the Vivarana of Prakasatman) of the ‘Gloss’ (tika i.e. the Pancapadika of Padmapada) on the ‘Commentary’ (i.e. the Sankarabhasya on the Vedanta Sutras)”, written, he says, to give a continuous account where three layers of commentary had made one hard to follow. Both authors have pages on this site. What matters here is that the school’s name records a fact of history. The Pañcapādikā was not read on its own. It was read through its explainers, and when this page says “the Vivaraṇa view” it means the developed doctrine, not necessarily the exact words of the eighth-century text.

Bhāmatī and Vivaraṇa: what the two lines disagree about

The other great line is the Bhāmatī of Sri Vācaspati Miśra, and the tradition itself — in the Digvijaya’s story of Sri Sureśvara’s rebirth — treats the two as rivals for the same office. They agree on everything that makes them Advaita: one Brahman, without a second; the world an appearance; the soul not other than Brahman; liberation by knowledge. They differ on how to describe the appearance, and the Kanchi chapter names the first and deepest difference. “Avidya, like knowledge, requires a substratum as well as a content. On this issue Padmapada’s view as interpreted by Prakasatman in his Vivarana is that Brahman is both the locus and content of avidya as against the view of Vacaspati Misra that avidya has Brahman as its object and jiva as its support. This is one of the fundamental points of difference between the Vivarana line of interpretation and the interpretation of the Vacaspati line. In this Prakasatman agrees with the view of Suresvara and his (Suresvara’s) disciple Sarvajnatman.”

Put in plain terms: where does ignorance live? The Vivaraṇa answers that it rests on Brahman itself, the one consciousness, and conceals it, as a cloud rests on nothing but the sky it hides; there is nothing else for it to rest on, since the individual soul is itself a product of the concealment. The Bhāmatī answers that ignorance belongs to the individual soul — each soul has its own — and has Brahman for its object; the souls are many and beginningless, and so are their ignorances. Each answer has a cost. The Vivaraṇa must explain how the pure consciousness can be the seat of what conceals it; the Bhāmatī must explain how there can be an individual soul before the ignorance that is supposed to make it individual. Each school has spent a thousand years paying its cost with ingenuity, and neither has persuaded the other.

From the first difference others follow. On what the soul is, the Vivaraṇa says a reflection, the Bhāmatī a limitation, as set out above. On the cause of the world, the Vivaraṇa offers the three alternatives that Sri Prakāśātman worked out and the Bhāmatī its own account. And on what the rituals of the Veda do for the seeker, the Kanchi chapter on Sri Vācaspati records a difference the two lines have argued ever since: “Vachaspatimisra holds that performance of rituals and other duties relating to one’s stage and order of life generate in the mind of the aspirant the desire to know Brahman”, whereas “Prakasatman, on the other hand, maintains that the performances of rituals, etc., are responsible for giving rise to the knowledge of Brahman” — the former called vividiṣā-pakṣa, the latter vedana-pakṣa. The seeker who reads the two pages on Sri Vācaspati Miśra and Sri Prakāśātman will find each position argued by its friends. What the reader should not do is take either as “the” Advaita. Both have been taught in the same monasteries by the same teachers to the same students; both are called siddhānta, settled conclusion, by their adherents. The Kanchi volume closes its chapter on Sri Vācaspati with a sentence that this site would make its own: “Just as alphabets are useful in understanding the sounds, though they are less true than sounds being mere lines, the theories that are set forth by Vachaspatimisra, Prakasatman and others are helpful in leading the aspirant to liberation, though they are less true than the latter. These theories, though different, lead one to the same goal, that is, liberation.”

A dissenting reading

In the twentieth century a learned monk, Swami Satchidānandendra Sarasvatī, argued that the whole Vivaraṇa development had taken a wrong turning at its very first step — at this book — and his view is now widely enough held that a reader will meet it and should know what it is. His case is set out in The Method of the Vedanta, and the reader should hear it in his words. He begins by saying why the book must be examined at all: “Be all that as it may, the treatise must in any case be one of the oldest of the Advaita works that have survived, as it quotes texts from the old commentaries on the Brahma Sutras that have not come down (P.P. p.180/42; 201/48). No older gloss on Sri Sankara’s Brahma Sutra Commentary is available today. The Pancapadika, then, even in its truncated form, represents a particular theory of the meaning of Sri Sankara’s Brahma Sutra Commentary that has been current amongst the interpreters of that commentary for a long time and has consequently acquired very great authority. For this reason, also, this system deserves a close examination.”

He then puts the objection in one sentence, aimed at the very passage on mithyā-jñāna-nimitta quoted above: “The doctrine that superimposition requires a material cause, the doctrine that Ignorance is a non-conscious power (sakti), and the doctrine that the word ‘false’ (mithya) means ‘indeterminable’ — none of these doctrines is found anywhere in Sri Sankara’s Commentary”. His argument, across many pages, is that Sri Śaṅkara used “ignorance” to mean a mistake — the superimposition itself, a failure to discriminate — and never a positive stuff out of which the world is made; that the Pañcapādikā turned a mistake into a material; and that everything characteristic of the later school, from root-ignorance to the doctrine that the mind is not a sense, grew from that one substitution. He also doubted the biography: “But the name Padmapada is not found in the colophons of the work, nor is any name of the author mentioned in the gloss on the work called the Vivarana (cp. M.V. p.18).” And of the fire: “The story that the work was once completed and then for some reason destroyed by fire seems to be a mere invention put forward to explain its unfinished state.”

This page presents his reading as one view, held with great learning and sincerity, and not as the settled verdict. The tradition’s reply has three parts, and the reader deserves them too. First, that the master’s own words about the seed of name and form — “indeterminability either as the real or as anything different”, which the Swami himself acknowledges is “ascribed in the Commentary to the seed of name and form” — are close enough to the Pañcapādikā’s “inexpressible” that the disciple may be drawing out rather than importing. Second, that a direct disciple, writing while the teacher’s circle was alive and dedicating the work to that circle, had less room to invent than a critic eleven centuries later can easily imagine. Third, that the question of what a text “really” means is exactly the question the two traditional lines have debated with full rigour since the tenth century, and the Swami’s position is best understood as a third party to that debate rather than as a judge above it. The seeker is not asked to decide. He is asked to know that the argument exists, that it is conducted by people who all revere Sri Śaṅkara, and that the practice — hearing, reflecting, dwelling on the Self — is the same on every side of it.

The other schools, seen from this book

Half of the surviving Pañcapādikā is argument with other schools, and a reader should know who they were and how an Advaitin of this line understands them, without taking the book’s victories as settled facts about the world. Venkataramiah lists the opponents: “The rival doctrines of the Naiyayikas, the Bhattas, the Prabhakaras, the Vijnanavadins and the Madhyamikas of the Buddhistic school are all subjected to a searching examination and refuted with great argumentative skill.” The Naiyāyikas are the logicians, for whom the soul is a real substance with knowledge as a quality; the Bhāṭṭas and Prābhākaras are the two schools of Vedic ritualism that followed Kumārila Bhaṭṭa and Prabhākara; the Vijñānavādins and Mādhyamikas are the two great philosophical schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism.

The argument with the ritualists is the one the tradition remembers, because of the uncle. Prabhākara’s school held that the self is known in every act of knowledge as the knower, along with the known and the knowing — “in every cognition there are three elements, ‘triputi’—the knower, the knowing and the known, where the act of knowing reveals not only the known (i.e., the object) but also the knower” — and that the self, though it is the knower, is itself insentient, lit by a consciousness that arises in it. An Advaitin of this line answers that what is lit by something else is not the light; that the self is not one of three things in a cognition but the awareness in which all three appear; and that the ritualist’s whole scheme of duties done by a self that is essentially an agent depends on the very superimposition the book set out to expose. But it should be said plainly that the ritualist schools were not enemies of the Veda; they were its most exacting servants, and Sri Śaṅkara built his own method of scriptural interpretation on rules they had made. The Pañcapādikā quarrels with them as a son quarrels with a strict father, over the meaning of an inheritance both hold sacred.

The argument with the Buddhists is subtler, and the book’s explainers were careful about it. The Vijñānavādin holds that only consciousness exists and that the appearance of an outer world is consciousness itself taking outward shape; the Mādhyamika holds that nothing, inner or outer, has independent being. Venkataramiah summarised the two positions as the book saw them: “The Vijnanavadins of the Buddhist persuasion hold that adhyasa is nothing more than consciousness taking shape outside of one’s self even when such shape does not correspond to an object, while the Madhyamika Buddhist regards the so-called external” An Advaitin of this line agrees with the first that the world is not what it seems and with the second that nothing in it has independent being, and then parts company: there is, the book says, one thing that cannot be an appearance, because every appearance appears to it, and that is the witness, the self-luminous consciousness that its opening verse salutes. The difference is not that the Buddhist denies and the Advaitin affirms; it is over whether the “seeing” that both agree is left when the objects are taken away is momentary or eternal. That is a real difference and the two traditions have argued it for fifteen centuries with mutual respect for each other’s rigour; the seeker should hold the Advaita answer as his own tradition’s and not as a refutation that the other side has conceded.

Legacy

What did a book of perhaps two hundred pages on four aphorisms leave behind? First, a vocabulary. “Inexpressible,” “the power of ignorance,” “the material cause of superimposition,” “the knot of the conscious and the unconscious,” “the mirror gloss,” “this is that Devadatta”: a student who learns Advaita in any traditional school learns these, and they are his. Second, a line of teachers. Sri Prakāśātman, Sri Akhaṇḍānanda, Sri Vidyāraṇya, Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama, Sri Rāmānanda Sarasvatī and many more wrote to explain him, and through Sri Vidyāraṇya, who governed Sringeri in the fourteenth century, his book became the doctrine of a great monastery; the Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṅgraha is still the text through which the school is first taught. Third, and most simply, a standard. Dasgupta’s verdict from 1932 has not been overturned: “According to Dr. Das Gupta this Pancapadika is one of the most important of the Vedanta works known to us.”

Against this must be set the fact that the tradition’s own story predicted: that the Bhāmatī, not the Pañcapādikā, became the commentary students read on the whole Brahma-sūtra, because it exists on the whole Brahma-sūtra and the Pañcapādikā does not. The Digvijaya has the master foresee that “only five chapters, especially those portions dealing with the first four Sutras, will receive the attention of posterity”, and so it has proved. The school that carries his name in its bloodstream reads him for the first four sūtras and reads Sri Vācaspati for the rest, and has never found this a contradiction. In the tradition the two men are not rivals but two workers on the same wall, one of whom was stopped early.

There is also a legacy of a different kind, which the tradition has cared for more than the historians. He is the disciple of the lotuses: the one who walked across the river because his teacher called. In Advaita, which is often thought of as a path of knowledge alone, he is the standing reminder that the tradition has always known knowledge and devotion to be the same movement seen from two sides — and that the man who wrote the driest surviving analysis of the ego was the one who did not stop at the water’s edge.

For the seeker

What can a reader who is not a scholar take from him? Three things. The first is his method with the “I.” The Pañcapādikā asks you to notice that the sense of yourself is a knot — a light and a shadow tied together — and to spend time, patiently, telling them apart: what in this moment is aware, and what is merely appearing to it? The book calls the confusion of the two the whole of bondage; it follows that the separation of the two, not by force but by seeing, is the whole of the practice. This can be done anywhere, by anyone, without Sanskrit.

The second is his account of the great sentence. “That thou art” is not, for him, a piece of information to be believed but a recognition to be undergone, like “this is that Devadatta” — and a recognition happens only when the accidents of time and place are set aside and the one thing is seen. He would say that the “thou” must be stripped of its smallness and the “that” of its distance before the sentence can do its work. A seeker who finds the words empty has usually not yet done the stripping.

The third is the answer his teacher gave him when he asked leave to go on pilgrimage, which the tradition has preserved for every seeker who thinks the truth is somewhere else: “The proximity of the Guru is the real place of pilgrimage. The washings of his feet are the holy waters. The attainment of the Atman through the Guru’s instruction is the real experience of the Holy Presence which men seek indirectly through the adoration of holy images installed in temples.” He went anyway, the story says, and lost his book, and came back to find that what he had lost was held in his teacher’s memory. The tradition tells the story against him with great affection, and it tells it to us.

A note on pictures, names and dates

There is no portrait of him and there can be none; the lamp at the head of this page stands where a face would go, as it does for every teacher on this site of whom no likeness is possible. The Sringeri page displays a modern devotional painting; this site does not reproduce it, both because its authorship is uncertain and because a painted face invented a thousand years after a man’s death tells the reader nothing about him. The maps show places the tradition names, on present-day coastlines, and the dotted line joining them is the poem’s itinerary, not a surveyed route.

His name is given here as Sri Padmapāda and, where the site’s cards use the fuller form, Sri Padmapādāchārya; the tradition also calls him Sanandana, the name it says he bore before the lotuses. The reader should know, as Swami Satchidānandendra pointed out, that “the name Padmapada is not found in the colophons of the work” — the manuscripts of the Pañcapādikā do not name their author — and that the attribution rests on the unanimous tradition and on the book’s own salutation to a living teacher and a circle of fellow disciples. Dates on this page are the tradition’s and the historians’, and they disagree with each other about the master’s century in the way the section above explains. Quotations are given as they stand in the sources named at the foot of the page; where a scanned text was plainly misread by the machine, the obvious letter has been restored and the change recorded in the site’s notes, and nothing has been quoted that could not be checked against the page.

Timeline

• Eighth century (tradition: 788–820; some scholars earlier) — Born a Brahmin of the Chola country on the Kāverī, the Digvijaya says; the historians date him only by his teacher.
• Youth — Austerities to Nṛsiṁha in a mountain forest (Ahobila, in the Sringeri telling); the story of the hunter.
• Kāśī — Comes to Sri Śaṅkara, in the poem’s sixth canto, and is accepted as Sanandana; the master teaches him the commentaries “three times”.
• The lotuses — Crosses the Ganga at the master’s call and is named Padmapāda, the lotus-footed.
• On the travels — The Kāpālika episode, in the poem’s eleventh canto.
• After Sri Sureśvara’s arrival — Writes the Ṭīkā on the whole Bhāṣya as guru-dakṣiṇā; reads five pādas to the master at Sringeri.
• The pilgrimage — South to Kāḷahasti, Kāñcī, Cidambaram, the Kāverī, his uncle’s house and Rāmeśvaram; the manuscript burnt, the poem says, adding that it is “a mere tradition”.
• Kerala — Reunion with the master; the five pādas re-dictated from memory; the book named Pañcapādikā.
• After the master — Heads a seat of learning: Dwaraka (Sringeri tradition), Puri (Puri tradition) or Sringeri (Ānandagiri’s Śaṅkaravijaya). Nothing is recorded of his death.
• c. 950–1000 — Sri Prakāśātman’s Vivaraṇa (Dasgupta preferred c. 1200); by then only the commentary on four sūtras survived.
• Fourteenth century — Sri Vidyāraṇya’s Vivaraṇa-prameya-saṅgraha makes his school the doctrine of Sringeri.
• 1948 — D. Venkataramiah’s English translation, Baroda.

Questions a reader may ask

Did he really walk on lotuses? The tradition says so and this page reports what the tradition says. No one who wrote it down claimed to have seen it, and the poem that tells it best also, a few cantos later, declines to vouch for another story about him. Read it as the tradition’s way of saying what kind of disciple he was.

Why is the book so short? Because only its commentary on the first four sūtras survives. The tradition says the rest was burnt by a jealous uncle and five pādas were restored from the master’s memory; a modern critic calls this “a mere invention put forward to explain its unfinished state”; and the book itself refers forward to sections that do not exist. The honest answer is that no one knows.

Is the Vivaraṇa view “correct” Advaita? It is one of the two classical lines, and the older of the two by a century. The other, the Bhāmatī, is equally classical. A twentieth-century monk argued that both had strayed from the master. All three positions are held by devout Advaitins, and the practice is the same in each.

Which monastery did he head? Three traditions say three different things — Dwaraka, Puri, Sringeri — and this page reports all three without choosing.

Where should I start reading him? With the opening of the Pañcapādikā, on superimposition, in Venkataramiah’s translation, which is linked below and is free to read; and, for the story, with cantos six, thirteen and fourteen of the Digvijaya in Swami Tapasyananda’s translation, also linked.