Sarvajñātman

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

Consider the problem he was solving. The reasoning of Advaita, by his century, was spread across long prose commentaries that existed as palm-leaf manuscripts in a handful of places, copied by hand, eaten by insects, lost in fires. A student who wanted the argument had to sit where the manuscript was and be taught from it. His answer was verse. The Saṃkṣepaśārīraka — the title means something like the abridged body of the teaching — puts the substance of the Upaniṣadic reasoning into metre, which is how India had carried its most precious material for two thousand years already. Metre resists corruption: a line that has lost a syllable announces itself. Verse can be learnt by a student who owns nothing. The work entered the syllabus and stayed there, read after the introductory manuals and before the great commentaries, and it was still being edited critically in the twentieth century — N. Veezhinathan's edition with English translation appeared in 1972, which is one way of measuring how alive the text remained. Of the man, the tradition records a name and a century or two. It is a recurring pattern in this lineage, and worth noticing rather than apologising for: the people who built it were not interested in being remembered, and arranged their work so that it would not need them.

The turn it rests on

Putting the argument in metre was a decision about transmission: verse survives where manuscripts perish.

What was taught

Compressed the whole Advaita reading of the Upaniṣads into verse, so that a student could carry the argument in memory rather than in a library.