Prakāśātman

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 is the other half of Advaita's long internal argument, and almost nothing of him is known but his position. His book explains Padmapāda's Pañcapādikā, which had explained the opening of Śaṅkara's commentary on the Brahma-sūtras — three layers deep into the tradition, and still the place where the sharpest questions get asked. His answer to the question Vācaspati had answered the other way is that śravaṇa, the hearing of the Upaniṣadic sentence, is what actually reveals; reasoning and meditation clear the ground for it. For the relation between the one consciousness and the many who seem to have it, he used pratibimba, reflection: as one moon appears in every vessel of water in a courtyard, consciousness appears as this person and that, and as the Lord, without ever being divided. He quoted the Upaniṣadic line 'it became the likeness of every form' and the Brahma-sūtra that admits the comparison with the sun's image in water. Neither his dates nor his region are recorded; the tradition preserved the argument and let the man go. The two schools that descend from him and from Vācaspati are still taught side by side in the maṭhas, which is a curious kind of immortality: to be remembered entirely as a question and the best available answer to it.

The turn it rests on

Where Vācaspati made meditation principal, he made hearing principal; the two positions have organised Advaita's internal debate for a thousand years.

What was taught

Held that hearing the Upaniṣadic sentence is itself the principal means, and that the individual and the Lord are reflections of one consciousness — the moon seen in many vessels of water.