Sri Sarvajñātman

The man

Sri Sarvajñātman is the poet of the Advaita tradition’s first centuries: the one early teacher who chose to put the whole of Sri Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Brahma-sūtras into verse, in twelve hundred and forty stanzas of many metres, and did it so well that a chapter written for the Kanchi maṭha in 1968 could say that “only several centuries after Sarvajnatman the world could produce Vidyaranya, who like Sarvajnatman, wrote in verses on the Advaitic concepts in an admirable way”. The book is the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka, “the Śārīraka in brief,” the Śārīraka being the old name for the Brahma-sūtras and their commentary; and the man is known almost entirely through it.

He is also, of all the early teachers, the one about whose place in time the sources disagree most widely. The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha counts him its third head, ordained by Sri Śaṅkara himself as a boy, and records his passing in 364 BCE. Dasgupta placed him about 900 CE; Swami Satchidanandendra and the Anusandhana Kendra place him in the tenth century, under a king of southern Travancore; and the one thing everyone agrees on — that he salutes a teacher called Deveśvara at the beginning and end of his book — is exactly the thing they read differently, since the tradition says Deveśvara is Sri Sureśvara, Sri Śaṅkara’s own pupil, and the scholars doubt it. This page gives each account in its own words. It does not choose between them, because the sources do not allow it; it tells the reader which is which.

What is not in dispute is the teaching. Sri Sarvajñātman took the doctrine of one indeterminable Ignorance, seated in pure consciousness and concealing it, and argued it through more completely than anyone before him; he held that in the deepest reading there is one soul and one Ignorance, and that the whole world of teachers and pupils, bound and free, is the play of that one soul’s mind; he counted ten words in the Upaniṣads that say what Brahman is, and set the negative texts beneath them; and he settled, by a distinction that later writers made standard, how Sri Śaṅkara could say both that Ignorance belongs to the soul and that it does not exist in deep sleep. A critic from within the tradition called his book “a casket of priceless jewels” in the same breath as he dismissed its central doctrine. Both judgments are on this page.

The sources, and how this page uses them

The first source is the book itself. The Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka was printed at Poona in 1918 in the Ānandāśrama series with the commentaries of Rāmatīrtha and Puruṣottama, and that edition is freely available and linked below; a second edition, with Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama’s Tattva-bodhinī, was published from Benares in 1936 under the editorship of Gopinath Kaviraj, and is also linked. The book’s opening and closing verses, and its closing verse’s mention of a king, are the only words about the author that come from the author, and this page quotes them as translated in the sources below.

The second source is the chapter on him in Preceptors of Advaita, the volume the Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha published in 1968 for the diamond jubilee of Sri Chandrasekharendra Sarasvatī’s accession, written by N. Veezhinathan of the University of Madras. It is on the maṭha’s website and linked. The same scholar published, in 1972, a complete edition and English translation of the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka with a long introduction on the life, the date and the doctrine; that book is in copyright and this page names it without linking it, drawing on it only for facts and for what it reports of the Kanchi tradition’s own account.

The third is Swami Satchidanandendra Sarasvatī’s Method of the Vedānta, whose sixteenth chapter examines the book, translates key verses, and disputes both its authorship tradition and its central thesis. The fourth is Surendranath Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy, volume two (1932), which gives a summary of all four chapters. The fifth is the Advaita Vedānta Anusandhana Kendra’s account of the later teachers. Two pages of the Kanchi maṭha’s own website — its history of the pīṭha and its table of its heads — supply the tradition’s dates. The chapter on Sri Vimuktātman in the same Kanchi volume, by P. K. Sundaram, supplies the connexion between the two men.

The rules are the ones the whole site follows. Nothing in quotation marks was written by this page; every quotation is copied from one of these sources and is traceable through the links at the foot. Where a scanned book has been misread by the machine, the printed word has been restored, and every restoration was logged as the page was built and is disclosed in the note near the end. Where the sources disagree, both are given. Where a claim rests on tradition, the page says “the tradition says.” Nothing has been invented, including the things a biographer would most like to know.

Where the life was lived

The map marks two kinds of place. Kāñcīpuram is the tradition’s: the seat of the Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha, whose list of heads gives Sri Sarvajñātman as its third, and whose website says he “was the author of the masterly ‘Samkshepa-Sareeraka’ and of the ‘Sarvajna-Vilasa’”. The same table gives his birthplace as Tāmraparṇī — the river of the far south, in the Tirunelveli country — and the 1972 introduction, reporting the commentary on the Kanchi succession-hymn, names the village as Brahmadeśa on that river’s bank. The second kind of place is the scholars’: the kingdom of the “king who ruled in southern Travancore in the tenth century A.D.” whom some identify with the Manukulāditya of his closing verse, and the Chola country of the king Āditya whom others prefer. His book itself, in the reading of its sixteenth-century commentator, hints at a home: Madhusūdana Sarasvatī thought the author’s allusion to the Chāndogya’s parable of the man led blindfold from the land of the Gandhāras “is an indication of the place where he himself lived” — a suggestion the Method records without endorsing.

Every one of these is a claim rather than a record, and the map treats it as one. What can be said with confidence is only that he wrote in the south, that his commentators from the sixteenth century onward were southern and Benares scholars, and that his manuscripts survive in the Madras library. The lamp beside his name stands where a portrait would, because there is none.

What his own book says about its author

Three verses of the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka speak of its author. The first is the eighth verse of the first chapter, a salutation to his teacher. In the Method’s translation: “All hail to the dust of the feet of Devesvara that saved the whole band of his pupils! By mere contact with that dust we achieved our highest end and have attained spotless fame throughout the worlds”. The second is the sixty-second verse of the fourth and last chapter, which names both the teacher and the age: “The great sage known by the name of Sarvajnatman, with his heart cleansed (like a pure mirror) by the dust of the lotus feet of Sri Devesvara, has composed the Sanksepa Sariraka, a work to gladden the hearts of all good men, at the time when Manukuladitya of the kingly line was ruling the earth, with unbroken sway.” The 1972 introduction adds that the verses on either side of it show him to have been a devotee of Lord Padmanābha — the Viṣṇu of Thiruvananthapuram, which is one reason the Travancore reading has its supporters.

The name Deveśvara, “lord of the gods,” is the hinge of everything. Deva and sura are synonyms; Sureśvara, “lord of the gods,” is the name of Sri Śaṅkara’s great pupil, the author of the Vārttikas and the Naiṣkarmya-siddhi. Two of the book’s commentators made the identification explicit. Rāmatīrtha, the Method reports, remarks on the opening verse: “Now he pays honour to his direct Guru Suresvaracarya”; Madhusūdana Sarasvatī writes, “Now he pays honour to his Guru, the author of the (Brhadaranyaka) Vartika. All hail to the dust of the feet of Devesvara = ‘of Suresvaracarya’”. Dasgupta accepted this: Sri Sarvajñātman “was a disciple of Suresvaracarya, the direct disciple of Sankara, to whom at the beginning of his work Samksepa-sariraka he offers salutation by the name Devesvara, the word being a synonym of the word sura in Suresvara”. He added a detail found nowhere else on this page: “It is said that his other name was Nityabodhacarya.”

The colophons of the printed editions tell the same story in two voices. The Method notes that the Ānandāśrama edition ends each chapter “composed by Sri Sarvajnatmamuni, the venerable pupil of Sri Devesvara”, while the Benares edition with Madhusūdana’s commentary has, at the end of the first chapter only, “composed by Sri Sarvajnatmamuni, the venerable pupil of Suresvara”. The author’s own words, then, say Deveśvara; the tradition’s gloss says Sureśvara; and whether the gloss is right decides in which century he lived. That question has its own section below.

One more thing his books say about him is a lineage — if it is his. The 1972 introduction reports that at the end of his short Mīmāṁsā treatise, the Pramāṇa-lakṣaṇa, there stands a genealogy in tabular form: Śreṣṭhānanda, his pupil Devānanda, his pupil Deveśvara, his pupil Sarvajñātman. The Anusandhana Kendra states it plainly: in the Pramāṇa-lakṣaṇa “sarvajnAtman mentions the name of deveSvara’s guru as devAnanda, whose guru was SreshThAnanda”. If that table is genuine, his teacher’s teacher was not Sri Śaṅkara, and Deveśvara was not Sri Sureśvara. Veezhinathan, defending the Kanchi tradition, argued that a poet who put even his teacher’s name in verse would not have given his own pedigree in a bare table, and concluded that the genealogy was a later interpolation. T. A. Gopinatha Rao, before him, had taken it as decisive the other way. This page reports both.

The tradition of Kāñcī: the seven-year-old debater

The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha’s account of Sri Sarvajñātman is the fullest life of him that exists, and the Kanchi chapter opens with it in a single sentence: “Ordained as Sannyasin by Sri Sankara himself, Sarvajnatman was nominated successor to the Kamakoti-pitha with Suresvara – his preceptor, as his protector.” The chapter has just explained why there was a pīṭha to succeed to: “In order to keep alive the Advaitic tradition for the benefit of posterity, Sri Sankara established Mathas or centres of religious learning and practices in various parts of India. Badari, Dvaraka, Puri, Sringeri and Kanchi were his far-flung spiritual capitals. Of these, the Matha at Kanchi is the foremost and is termed the Kamakoti-pitha. And, Sri Sankara himself assumed the headship of this pitha.” The maṭha’s own history page puts the succession thus: “Sarvajnatman, the immediate successor of the Bhagavatpada was the author of the masterly ‘Samkshepa-Sareeraka’ and of the ‘Sarvajna-Vilasa’. Jnananda, the grand-disciple of Sri Sarvajnatman wrote a commentary by name Chandrika on Sri Sureswara’s Naishkarmya-Siddhi”.

The story behind the sentence is told, the 1972 introduction reports, in a sixteenth-century hymn on the succession of the Kanchi ācāryas, the Jagadguru-ratnamālā-stava attributed to Sadāśiva Brahmendra, and in Ātmabodhendra Sarasvatī’s commentary on it, the Suṣamā. According to that account he was born in a village called Brahmadeśa on the banks of the Tāmraparṇī, to a father named Vardhana. During Sri Śaṅkara’s tour of victory the scholars of the place were defeated in debate; but Vardhana’s son Mahādeva, then seven years old, carried on the discussion for three days more, and yielded only on the fourth. He then asked to become a monk; Sri Śaṅkara initiated him, gave him the name Sarvajñātman, “he whose self is the all-knowing,” and chose him as his successor at Kāñcī, to hold the seat under the guardianship of Sri Sureśvara. The hymn is also the source for the statement, which the introduction records, that he vanquished the Jainas; and for the reckoning that he presided together with Sri Sureśvara for seventy years and then alone for forty-two, attaining his end in the Kali year 2737. The maṭha’s table of its heads gives the same tradition in tabular form: third in the line, born at Tāmraparṇī, attained siddhi at Kāñcī in 364 BCE, after a pontificate of 112 years.

This page does not present that account as history, and neither, in its own way, does the Kanchi chapter, which gives the sentence about the ordination and then turns at once to the books. The story of the child who out-argued the greatest debater of his age for three days has the shape of many such stories in the lives of the ācāryas, and its dates belong to the tradition that places Sri Śaṅkara in the fifth century before Christ. But it is the tradition of a living institution that has preserved his memory continuously and counts him among its founders, and a reader who wants to understand why he is called “Sarvajña” — the all-knowing — and why a Kāñcī commentator two centuries after Sri Śaṅkara could sign himself “the glory of the Sarvajña seat” should know it. The maṭha’s history page records that Hiriyanna, editing Sri Jñānottama’s commentary on the Naiṣkarmya-siddhi in 1925, read the phrase as “the glory of the Sarvajnasrama by which term we have to understand the Sarvajna Peetha or the Pontifical seat at the Advaita Matha in Kanchipuram”.

Who was his teacher? Deveśvara and Sri Sureśvara

The question of the teacher divides the sources, and the division is worth setting out in full because it is the only real biographical controversy about him. On one side stand the commentators Rāmatīrtha and Madhusūdana, the Kanchi tradition, the Kanchi chapter, Veezhinathan and Dasgupta: Deveśvara is Sri Sureśvara; Sri Sarvajñātman was his direct pupil and Sri Śaṅkara’s grand-pupil. Dasgupta thought the identification “does not come into conflict with anything else that is known about Sarvajnatma Muni either from the text of his work or from other references to him in general”.

On the other side stands Swami Satchidanandendra, whose objections are three, and are quoted here at length because they are the case against the tradition in its strongest form. First, the name: “Anyone who reflects on the way in which this Teacher is referred to under the bare name ‘Devesvara’ without any embellishment as ’Acarya’ or ‘author of the Vartika’ is bound to doubt very much if Suresvaracarya could have been the person the author had in mind.” Second, the doctrine: “Sarvajnatman, when writing an original treatise expressing his own opinions, elaborately defends the theory of indeterminable root Ignorance, which is not found in the system of the Vartika. On this ground alone we may say that he cannot possibly have been a direct pupil of the author of the Vartika. There could never be such a radical difference of opinion between Teacher and pupil without some very special cause.” Third, the king: whether Manukulāditya is Āditya Chola or a tenth-century ruler of Travancore, “In either case it is difficult to make out that Sarvajnatman himself was a contemporary of Suresvaracarya, the author of the Vartikas.” Of the Kanchi succession tradition — that the Bṛhat-Śaṅkara-vijaya has Sri Śaṅkara appoint Sri Sureśvara to watch over the Sarvajña Pīṭha and Sarvajñātman to the Kāñcī Pīṭha — he says only: “For our part, we are inclined to dismiss all this as based on fallible popular tradition; we note that the actual commentators are happy to accept the name Devesvara.” He closes: “And this is perhaps enough on the identification of the author, when exact information is not available.”

The Anusandhana Kendra takes a middle path that is worth recording because it explains how the two views arose: “sarvajnAtman salutes his guru deveSvara in his works. The name deveSvara is usually seen as a synonym of sureSvara”, and “on this basis, sarvajnAtman is sometimes identified with nityabodhaghana” — the same tradition, presumably, that gave Dasgupta his “Nityabodhācārya”; the account then gives the genealogy from the Pramāṇa-lakṣaṇa already quoted, observes that “there is some confusion over whether sarvajnAtman was a direct disciple of sureSvara or not”, and concludes that “sarvajnAtman was probably a younger contemporary of vimuktAtman”. A fact from the book itself bears on the same point: in its fourth chapter, on the nature of the cessation of Ignorance, the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka follows the Iṣṭa-siddhi — the Method notes of verses IV.12–15 that “Here he follows the teachings of the Ista Siddhi and of Suresvara’s Brhadaranyaka Vartika” — so that whatever his date, Sri Sarvajñātman wrote after, or alongside, the author of that book. The 1972 introduction reads verse IV.14 as a reference to Sri Vimuktātman’s view and calls the two men contemporaries.

The reader may reasonably ask what turns on it. Two things. If Deveśvara is Sri Sureśvara, then the doctrine of one indeterminable Ignorance seated in Brahman was taught, within a generation of Sri Śaṅkara, by the pupil of his most faithful pupil, and the Vivaraṇa reading of Advaita has the oldest possible pedigree. If not, the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka is a tenth-century book, written when Sri Padmapāda’s Pañcapādikā and Sri Vimuktātman’s Iṣṭa-siddhi were already in circulation, systematising a position that had grown up over two centuries. The book reads the same either way; the history of the tradition does not. Both possibilities are open on this page.

When he lived: four reckonings

Four dates are given for Sri Sarvajñātman in the sources on this page, and they span thirteen centuries. The reader deserves to see how each was reached.

• The fourth century before Christ. The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha’s table of its heads gives the year of his siddhi as 364 BCE, after a pontificate of 112 years, following Sri Sureśvara (407 BCE) and Sri Śaṅkara himself (477 BCE). The 1972 introduction reports the succession-hymn’s reckoning as Kali 2737, which it renders 365 BC, on the fourteenth day of the dark fortnight of Vaiśākha; and it notes that the lists preserved at Dvārakā and Puri place Sri Śaṅkara in about 500 BCE, while the ancient Sringeri tradition takes him to 44 BCE. These are the dates of the traditional chronology of the maṭhas, and they stand or fall with it.
• About 900 CE. Dasgupta reasoned from the conventional date of Sri Śaṅkara: “Taking the approximate date of Sankara’s death to be about A.D. 820 and taking into consideration that Suresvara, the teacher of Sarvajnatman, occupied his high pontifical position for a long time, the supposition that Sarvajnatman lived in A.D. 900 may not be very far wrong.” He added that this “does not come into conflict with the fact that Vacaspati, who probably wrote his earlier work the Nyaya-suci-nibandha in A.D. 842, also wrote his commentary on Mandana’s Brahma-siddhi when Suresvara was occupying the pontifical position. Sarvajnatma Muni was thus probably a younger contemporary of Vacaspati Misra.” This reckoning accepts the identification of Deveśvara with Sri Sureśvara and stretches the latter’s life to make it fit.
• The tenth century. This is the reckoning that starts from the king. The Method records that “Some historians, accepting the popular tradition mentioned above, have proclaimed that ‘Devesvara’ was ‘Suresvara’, and that Manukuladitya was just another name for King Aditya Cola. Others, disregarding this, declare that Manukuladitya was the name of a king who ruled in southern Travancore in the tenth century A.D.” The Anusandhana Kendra, on the strength of the Pramāṇa-lakṣaṇa genealogy, makes him “probably a younger contemporary of vimuktAtman”, whom it places in the tenth century; the devotion to Padmanābha in his closing verses points the same way for those who favour Travancore.
• Between the two. The Kanchi chapter itself gives no year. Its author, in the 1972 introduction, argued that the Pramāṇa-lakṣaṇa genealogy was interpolated and that Sri Sarvajñātman was the direct pupil of Sri Sureśvara and grand-pupil of Sri Śaṅkara; he then gave Sri Śaṅkara the maṭhas’ date. Anyone who accepts the pupilage but not the maṭhas’ chronology arrives, like Dasgupta, at the ninth century.

This page’s card says “traditionally 4th century BCE; scholars place him c. 9th–10th century CE,” because that is the honest summary. The one relative date on which all the scholarly sources agree is that he wrote after Sri Padmapāda and alongside or after Sri Vimuktātman, and before Sri Ānandabodha, who criticised him in the eleventh or twelfth century; and that the earliest surviving commentaries on his book are from the sixteenth. Whatever the absolute date, his place in the order of the tradition is secure: the first complete verse exposition of the Śārīraka-bhāṣya, and the first full statement of the doctrine of one Ignorance in Brahman.

The works: three books

The Kanchi chapter credits him with three works, and the 1972 introduction and the Anusandhana Kendra agree. The first and greatest is the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka, which has its own section below. The second is a short prose manual: “He also wrote another work on Advaita entitled Panchaprakriya which is divided into five sections. The first of them deals with the different kinds of meanings which a word may have. The next three sections treat of what are described as the ‘great-sayings’ of which ‘tat tvam asi’ is a familiar example and point out how they should be interpreted. The last section is devoted to the elucidation of the nature of bondage and release. This work summarizes the teachings of the Samkshepasariraka.” It was printed in the Madras University Sanskrit Series in 1946 in an edition by T. R. Chintamani; that edition is in copyright and is named here without a link.

The third is a book on the other Mīmāṁsā: “Apart from his works on Advaita, he wrote a short treatise Pramanalakshana on the Mimamsa system. This work deals with the various pramanas of the Mimamsakas and closes with an estimate of their epistemological doctrines and it is available in manuscript in the Madras Government Oriental Manuscripts Library.” A Vedāntin writing a handbook of the ritualists’ theory of knowledge is less surprising than it sounds; Sri Maṇḍana had come to Advaita from Mīmāṁsā, and Sri Sureśvara, if he was the teacher, had once been Kumārila’s pupil. It is at the end of this book that the disputed genealogy stands. The Kanchi maṭha’s history page adds a fourth title, the Sarvajña-vilāsa, which none of the other sources on this page mentions and which is not described.

In all three books, the 1972 introduction notes, he names his teacher as Deveśvara; and in all three he signs himself Sarvajñātman, sometimes Sarvajñātma Muni, occasionally Sarvajña. Dasgupta, in 1932, knew only the first: the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka, he wrote, “is probably the only work of his that is known to us”. The other two were identified from the Madras manuscripts in the decades after.

The book: the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka, its plan and its title

The Kanchi chapter’s description of the book is exact and is best given whole. “He is well known to be the author of the work Samkshepasariraka which is a succinct exposition in verses of the views of Sri Sankara as stated in his bhashya on the Brahma-sutra.” “The Samkshepasariraka has one thousand two hundred and forty stanzas in various metres and consists of four chapters. The first comprises five hundred and sixty three verses and corresponds to the first adhyaya of the Brahmasutra termed ‘samanvayadhyaya’, and as such it is the most important adhyaya. It is devoted to the correct interpretation of the different texts of the Upanishads pointing to the attributeless Brahman. The second comprises two hundred and forty eight verses and it corresponds to the second adhyaya of the Brahmasutra termed ‘avirodhadhyaya’. It shows that the Upanishadic teaching is not stultified by other proofs like perception, etc., or by the views of other philosophical systems. The third contains three hundred and sixty six verses and it corresponds to the third adhyaya of the Brahmasutra termed ‘sadhanadhyaya’ and it is devoted to an exposition of the means to the realization of Brahman. The fourth contains sixty three verses and it corresponds to the fourth chapter of the Brahmasutra termed ‘phaladhyaya’ and it deals with the nature of liberation.” Dasgupta counts 365 verses in the third chapter where the Kanchi chapter counts 366; the editions differ by a verse.

The title carries an argument. The four chapters follow the four books of the Brahma-sūtras — harmony of the texts, absence of contradiction, the means, the fruit — but something is deliberately left out: “Though the titles of the four adhyayas of this work correspond to those of the Brahmasutra, and the subject-matter treated of in each is the same as in the bhashya of Sri Sankara on the corresponding chapters of the Brahmasutra, all reference to the nature of the qualified Brahman, the methods of meditative worship thereof and the result arising therefrom, is avoided. On this ground, the title Samkshepasariraka (the gist of the Sarirakabhashya of Sri Sankara) is significant.” The book, that is, is not an abridgement of the commentary but a distillation of it: everything concerning the Brahman with qualities, its meditations and their heavenly rewards, is set aside, and what remains is the teaching about the Brahman without qualities alone. The Method makes the same observation from the other side: the book “substantiates the view that the Vedanta of the Brahma Sutras is solely concerned with communicating the metaphysical principle of the Absolute in its true nature, void of empirical attributes”.

Two features of the writing are remarked on by everyone who has read it. The first is that it is verse, and good verse. The Method: “Everywhere the various topics are expounded in a style that is most attractive to read, the sentences composed of sweetly-ringing words, disposed in verses of varied metres.” The Kanchi chapter: “His style is easy and unpedantic. He has an admirable literary sense”. The second is that it is a work of reconciliation. “He is most concerned with finding a way of reconciling the apparent contrary statements of Sri Sankara. His treatise is systematic, critical, and without any trace of dogmatic assertion. He does accept the foundations laid by his predecessors, yet he makes improvement on them. He is best in detail and in criticism.” The Method, less warmly: “The author takes great pains to show that a number of earlier Teachers agree with his own system.” The two judgments describe the same book. What one reader calls reconciliation, another calls the enlisting of predecessors; both agree that the author’s constant question was how the great commentary’s scattered statements could be made to say one thing.

The Method’s own list of the book’s chief topics is long and is worth having in outline, because it is the best map of the work in English: the need for studying Vedānta and the account of superimposition with its cause; the thesis that the whole of Vedānta, including every Upaniṣadic text, exists to fix the meaning of the great sayings; how those sayings refer to what is beyond all difference, on the model of “This is that Devadatta”; how the negative texts are subordinate to the positive; how pure consciousness causes the world through Ignorance, and how Ignorance and māyā are one; the division of topics among the first sūtras; the three ways of creation and the choice of appearance; the three standpoints by which the sūtras lead the seeker by stages; one soul and one Ignorance; the real meaning of Sri Śaṅkara’s statements about the seat of Ignorance and deep sleep; bondage and liberation; the indicated meanings of “that” and “thou”; sustained meditation; the right of celibates, householders and forest-dwellers alike to hear the great sayings; the nature of the cessation of Ignorance; and liberation in life. Most of these have a section below.

What he taught: the Self as bliss, and superimposition

The Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka begins where Sri Śaṅkara’s commentary begins, with superimposition, and its first chapter builds the whole system from that one idea. The Method’s summary of the opening verses: “Those who have studied the Upanishads in the proper way come to know the Self which is of the nature of bliss, void of all pain, by nature free from all distinctions. The limited form of a soul undergoing transmigration is an erroneous superimposition onto that. Ignorance of the Self is alone a sufficient cause (nimitta) for the production of that superimposition, which is of the nature of a mutual confusion of the conscious and the non-conscious” (I.26–7). No other defect is needed: “For superimposition, there is no need to assume a cause in the form of the defect of similarity, or other defects pertaining to the object or instrument of knowledge” (I.28–30). And the summary of the chapter’s teaching in a single verse: “Finitude is bondage; by finitude, the inmost Self as pure Consciousness is bound; the cause of this bondage is Ignorance of one’s own Self; putting it to an end through knowledge of one’s true Self is liberation” (I.50).

Why bliss? Dasgupta’s summary of the argument is the fullest. “The pure self is directly perceived in the state of dreamless sleep as being of the nature of pure bliss and happiness without the slightest touch of sorrow; and pure bliss can only be defined as that which is the ultimate end and not under any circumstances a means to anything else; such is also the pure self, which cannot be regarded as being a means to anything else; moreover, there is the fact that everyone always desires his self as the ultimate object of attainment which he loves above anything else. Such an infinite love and such an ultimate end cannot be this limited self, which is referred to as the agent of our ordinary actions and the sufferer in the daily concerns of life.” The reasoning is Sri Maṇḍana’s and Sri Padmapāda’s before him — the self is loved above all things, and only bliss is loved for its own sake — and it is here that Sri Ānandabodha, a century or two later, would find fault; Dasgupta notes that he “criticizes, but without mentioning his name, Sarvajnatman’s view of the interpretation of the nature of self as pure bliss”.

The most careful part of the first chapter answers the objection that a doctrine of mutual superimposition leaves nothing real underneath. If self and not-self are each superimposed on the other, are not both false, and is not the truth the Void? The answer turns on a distinction that Sri Sarvajñātman made standard. Dasgupta: “A distinction is drawn here between adhara and adhisthana. The pure Brahman that underlies all appearances is the true adhisthana (ground), while the Brahman as modified by the false ajnana is a false adhara or a false object to which the false appearances directly refer.” The Method puts the same point: the objection “only arises through failure to distinguish between the general aspect of the substratum (perceived as a mere ‘this’) called ‘the support’ (adhara), and the substratum (adhisthana) in its true nature (the Self), and falsely labelling the mere support as ‘the substratum’. The true substratum never undergoes contradiction and cancellation, so the true nature of the world is not the Void.” In the shell mistaken for silver, the silver is imposed on a “this” before the eye; the “this” as false object is the support; but the shell, which no error touches, is the ground. So with the world: it is imposed on Brahman-as-qualified-by-Ignorance, the false support; but Brahman itself, the ground, “lies untouched” — Dasgupta’s phrase for the real object in every illusion.

The chapter closes its argument with a defence of the very possibility of superimposing anything on the Self. The objector says that in ordinary life we superimpose only on external objects that have parts and resemble what is imposed; the Self has neither. The reply is Sri Śaṅkara’s own — the Method quotes him through Sri Sarvajñātman: “The revered Commentator said ’It is not altogether a non-object’” — and the observation that dreams superimpose without any external object at all, since the waking senses are not then at work (I.39–49). The translator of the Method adds a note that this page passes on as a discrepancy rather than a fault: the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka names Ignorance as the cause of superimposition, whereas “in the doctrine of Sri Sankara superimposition is beginningless and has no cause, since all causality falls within superimposition”. Dasgupta reads the book as holding that “the illusory imposition and its consequences are beginningless and there is no point of time to which one could assign its beginning”. The two readings are both on record.

What he taught: one Ignorance, its names, and its seat

Ignorance, in the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka, is one thing with many names and two faces, and the book’s enduring contribution is to say where it lives. The Method gives the roll of names from the first chapter: “Amongst the various names of Ignorance are timira, tamisra (darkness), andha-tamasa (blind darkness), jadima (non-consciousness), maya, jagat-prakrti (Nature as primordial cause of the world), acyuta-sakti (the power of Visnu), andhya (darkness), nidra, susupti (sleep), anrta (the false), pralaya (dissolution), gunaikya (the state of equilibrium of the three constituents).” (I.317–8). Its two faces are the world’s inertness and the mind’s delusion: “The twofold nature of Ignorance is evident in ordinary direct experience — its non-consciousness in the objects of the world and its nature as delusion in man. By these two powers our natural state of liberation is concealed” (I.320–2). And it is positive, not a mere absence: “Because non-being cannot conceal anything, Ignorance cannot be bare absence of knowledge. Ignorance must therefore be of positive nature, since the Bhagavad Gita (V.15) says that it conceals knowledge” (I.320). Dasgupta’s image for its hold on Brahman is memorable: it “is defined as being positive in its nature (bhava-rupam) and, though it rests on the pure Brahman, yet, like butter in contact with fire, it also at its touch under certain circumstances melts away”. The Method’s version of the same verse: “It is supported on partless Consciousness like a pat of ghee on the sacrificial fire.”

Where does it live, and what does it hide? This is the question on which Sri Sarvajñātman made his name. The Kanchi chapter: “Sarvajnatman’s most important contribution is his view regarding the locus and content of avidya. He holds that the pure consciousness is the locus and content of avidya as against Vacaspati who maintains that the individual soul is the locus of avidya, while Brahman is its content. The latter view is refuted by Sarvajnatman on the ground that the notion of individual soul derives its existence from avidya and as such it is posterior to avidya. The latter cannot abide in a substratum which is decidedly subsequent to it.” The argument is simple and, for the Vivaraṇa school, decisive: the soul is a product of Ignorance, so Ignorance cannot sit in the soul; it must sit in what is there before the soul, which is consciousness itself. But not, the chapter is careful to add, consciousness in its absoluteness: “Sarvajnatman further contends that the pure consciousness is the locus and content of avidya neither in its absolute form, nor in its blissful form, but in the form of inner self (pratyakchaitanya). This he proves on the basis of the experience ‘I do not know myself.’” Dasgupta says the same: the association of Ignorance “is not with the one pure Brahman, nor with individual souls, but with the pure light of Brahman, which shines as the basis and ground of individual souls (pratyaktva); for it is only in connection with this that the ajnana appears and is perceived”, “as when one says, “I do not know what you say””. The Method’s translation of the decisive verses of the third chapter: “For we are only aware of Ignorance as seated in Consciousness; we are not actually aware of it as seated in the non-dual reality. The assertion that Ignorance has its seat in the Absolute is really only meant to deny that Ignorance has its seat in Consciousness as qualified by the mind and so on. There is not a shred of proof that it has its seat in the Absolute when the latter is considered in its pure transcendence” (III.13–14); “Therefore the finally accepted view is that it is pure Consciousness that is the seat of Ignorance, and also the entity that it conceals” (III.15).

Then the reconciliations, which are what the Kanchi chapter most admires. Sri Śaṅkara had said in one place that Ignorance does not exist in deep sleep and in another that it exists in Brahman in that state; he had also said that the soul is the seat of Ignorance. “It is Sarvajnatman who explains the apparently contradictory statements of Sri Sankara regarding the presence of avidya in Brahman in deep sleep. To any serious student of Advaita, the contradiction in the statements of Sri Sankara, viz., avidya does not exist in the state of deep sleep and avidya exists in Brahman in that state remained unsolved. And, Sarvajnatman explains this view of Sri Sankara by stating that avidya is not determinately perceived in the form of ‘I do not know myself’ in the state of deep sleep and it is with this view that Sri Sankara has said that avidya does not exist in that state. Really it exists in that state in Brahman, as it is evident from the reminiscent experience in the form ‘I did not know anything when I was asleep’.” And for the soul: “Similarly Sarvajnatman explains Sri Sankara’s statement that the individual soul is the locus of avidya, by contending that avidya though present only in the pure consciousness is revealed in the form ‘I am ignorant’ by the intellect which is the limiting adjunct of the individual soul. It is well-known that the nature of a revealing medium is such that what is revealed through it appears as though present in the medium itself. The mirror which reflects the face appears to contain the face. In the same way, the intellect which is the revealing medium of avidya reveals it as present in itself and consequently in the consciousness delimited by it, that is, the individual soul. Avidya, however, is present in the pure consciousness.”

The Method translates the second-chapter verses in which the reconciliation is worked out, and they show the author’s way of holding both ends of a rope. “Ignorance as a non-conscious power is established as existing outside the soul. The world beginning with the ether-element is projected by that under the control of the supreme Lord. That same Ignorance manifests in the soul as ‘I am ignorant’” (II.165, 167). “Though Ignorance appears before the Lord, it does not cause Him any suffering; but it is a source of suffering to the individual soul, which is affected by delusion” (II.173). “The individual soul knows a little, the Lord is omniscient. This does not imply that Ignorance is present in the case of the soul, but not present in the case of the Lord. What it implies is that the soul is affected by Ignorance, whereas the Lord is not. Since the Lord has no ego-sense, and has Ignorance under his control, and assumes any body He wishes, He does not have the feeling ‘I am ignorant’. The Lord is omniscient, of the very nature of unveiled knowledge, and illumines all Ignorance and its effects with His own self-luminous light” (II.177–87). And the conclusion: “The ultimately correct doctrine, therefore, is that pure Consciousness alone is the true seat of Ignorance; and this pure Consciousness it was which created the universe, with its distinction between the soul, the Lord and the world” (II.189). To the objection that this sullies the Absolute, the reply is that the sullying is itself imagined: “On the view that Ignorance has its seat in the Absolute, it does not follow that the Absolute is sullied by Ignorance, as this notion is itself only imagined — so there is no fault in the teaching” (II.195–7).

One consequence he drew with unusual firmness. Since Ignorance and māyā are the same thing under two names, and since Ignorance is only an instrument, Brahman is the sole cause of the world, and not Brahman-with-Ignorance. Dasgupta: “ajnana not being itself in any way the material cause of the world, Sarvajnatman strongly holds that Brahman in association and jointly with ajnana cannot be regarded as the material cause of the world. The ajnana is only a secondary means, without which the transformation of appearances is indeed not possible, but which has no share in the ultimate cause that underlies them.” The Method’s verdict on this whole edifice is given in the dissenting section below; here it is enough to record its concession that “the line of thought generally speaking follows the system of the Vivarana throughout”.

What he taught: the seven theories and the one soul

The second chapter contains the passage for which the book is most often cited by historians and most often argued over by Advaitins: a review of seven theories of Ignorance held by earlier teachers, followed by their refutation, and the statement of the author’s own. The Method translates the seven from verses II.132–8, and they are a small history of early Advaita in themselves.

• “Ignorance is pervasive in the same way that a universal pervades the particulars subsumed under it. The Absolute is the original, and the imagined individual souls are like its reflections. Amongst these, Ignorance affects the ignorant ones, but not the enlightened ones. It forsakes any individual that undergoes destruction, and takes possession of whatever souls exist, behaving in this respect like a universal with its particulars.” — the first view.
• “There are many Ignorances, and souls are infinite in number. The ignorant souls attain the highest end of life through metaphysical knowledge, some in one world-period, some in another. Maya (different from Ignorance) has its seat in the Lord. It projects every aspect of the universe, beginning with the ether-element.” — the second, which is the view of many Ignorances and a distinct māyā, the view Sri Vācaspati’s school would hold.
• “Just as there is no contradiction in saying that a bird both is and is not in the sky (when it is present in the sky as viewed from one part of the earth, but not present in the sky viewed from any other part of the earth — even though the ether of the sky itself is partless), even so, there is no contradiction in saying that Ignorance both is and is not present in the pure Absolute (according to the point of vantage from which it is viewed).” — the third.
• “Ignorance enters pure Consciousness through the medium of the mind. The mind stands outside Consciousness and imposes relationship with Ignorance on the Absolute” — the fourth.
• “The Absolute is the one subject to Ignorance. He is reflected in many different minds. Having in this way assumed the form of the different individual souls, the Absolute is bound in some of them, while in others He is liberated through the destruction of (a part of) Ignorance.” — the fifth.
• “The Maya of the Lord enmeshes the souls afflicted with Ignorance, like a net enmeshing fish. This net is removed for some at the will of the Lord. Whether Maya is called real or illusory is a matter of indifference” — the sixth.
• “The series of errors, followed by impressions left by those errors, is different in the case of each soul. This series is beginningless. It is destroyed by a combination of knowledge and action.” — the seventh, which is the doctrine of combining knowledge with works that Sri Śaṅkara and Sri Sureśvara had spent their lives refuting.

His own view is the one the Method states in its summary of his place in history: “There is one Ignorance. It is the ‘cause’ in the sense of ‘instrument’ for the production of the whole world beginning with the ether-element. In this role it is called ‘Maya’. It is called ‘Ignorance’ (avidya) when it manifests as delusion in the mind of the individual soul. He maintained that the whole phenomenal universe of variety is created by the Ignorance of one soul, because he believed that the profoundest state of Vedanta was that in which it taught that there was only one Ignorance and only one soul.” The verses in which he says it to the pupil are among the boldest in the literature. “All souls other than yourself, whether liberated or in bondage, whether enlightened or metaphysically ignorant, the whole universe from the ether-element down to the earth-element — know all this to be but the play of your own mind, itself springing from Ignorance. Do not think anything else for a moment” (II.128). “Therefore it is the Absolute which, having descended to the state of an individual soul through Ignorance, has come to abide in your form; and from that vantage-point it observes the world from the ether-element to the earth-element and the whole company of individual souls as vibrations of your mind” (II.162). And the teacher, the Veda and the discipline themselves: “Enlightenment arises for the Absolute (after it has descended into the form of the individual soul) through the Teacher, the Veda and the traditional discipline imagined through its own Ignorance. When its Ignorance has been destroyed through the rise of metaphysical knowledge, it becomes established in its own true form as the light of Consciousness.” (II.163).

The pupil, naturally, objects that this contradicts experience: there are plainly other people, some bound and some free. The answer, in the Method’s summary, is that “it is not the purpose of the Veda to expound any distinction between bound and liberated souls; its purpose is to expound the identity of the true Self of the hearer with the Absolute”; that “Experience of duality does not contradict it, for this experience is itself contradicted by realization that all is the one Self. And there can be no other experience that could contradict it” (II.219); and that an imagined teacher can still teach truly, “by analogy with the fact that death can arise from a merely imaginary snake”. This is the doctrine of one soul, eka-jīva-vāda, in its first full statement. Later Advaitins treated it with respect and caution — the Vivaraṇa school generally preferred many souls with one Ignorance, and the Bhāmatī school many of both — and it was left to Sri Prakāśānanda and Sri Madhusūdana, centuries later, to take it up again. Sri Sarvajñātman himself, the Method observes, offered it not as a dogma but as the deepest of several standpoints: the book elsewhere accepts the reflection theory of many souls for teaching purposes, and the Kanchi chapter records that “As regards the elucidation of the nature of the supreme lord and the individual soul, Sarvajnatman adopts the well-known theory, the pratibimba-vada, and in this he seems to have been influenced by the views of Padmapada.”

What he taught: the ten words that say what Brahman is

Among his signatures is a piece of exegetical arithmetic. The Upaniṣads describe Brahman in hundreds of sentences; which words in them state its very nature? Following the Brahma-sūtra’s rule that the qualities affirmed of Brahman in one text are to be gathered with those in others, he went through the affirmative texts and counted. The Kanchi chapter: “Relying on the method of gathering the unrepeated words found in the affirmative Upanishadic texts to arrive at the exact nature of Brahman — the method prescribed by the author of the sutras in the aphorism ‘anandadayah pradhanasya’ (III, iii, 11), Sarvajnatman affirms that, on the whole only ten words convey the essential nature of Brahman in an affirmative manner. And those words are: nitya, suddha, buddha, mukta, satya, sukshma, sat, vibhu, advitiya and ananda.” In the chapter’s own rendering of the result: “Sarvajnatman holds that Brahman is eternal, pure, consciousness, ever-released, truth, subtle, existent, all-pervasive, absolute, and bliss.”

The negative texts — “not gross, not subtle,” “neither this nor that” — he treated differently, and the difference defines his school. They cannot be counted, because “the elements that are to be negated in Brahman are numerous, the words found even in all the negative Upanishadic passages are not exhaustive and hence many words should be gathered.” And they do not, by themselves, teach: “Sarvajnatman says that the negative Upanishadic texts, by denying all duality, confirm the knowledge of the absolute nature of Brahman arisen from the affirmative Upanishadic passages.” The affirmative sayings carry the knowledge; the negations guard it. The section on the great sayings below shows what he built on this; the page for Sri Maṇḍana Miśra shows the opposite view, held within Advaita itself, that only negation can speak of what has no qualities — a view Sri Sarvajñātman argued against directly, as the dissenting section records.

The boldest application of his method concerned God’s lordship. Is being the Lord — the controller of souls and worlds — part of Brahman’s very nature? His answer, reported by the Kanchi chapter: “The question whether lordship is natural to Brahman or not is answered in the negative by Sarvajnatman, on the ground that lordship involves a reference to the controlled beings; and whichever is dependent on something else is illusory, and hence lordship, being illusory, cannot be natural to Brahman.” A sūtra seemed to say otherwise, and his handling of it drew from the Kanchi author a phrase this site has quoted before about other independent minds: “This conclusion seems contrary to the view of the author of the sutras, who in the aphorism ‘parabhidhyanattu tirohitam tato hyasya bandhaviparyayau’ (III, ii, 5) holds that lordship is natural to Brahman. Sarvajnatman, with a refreshing independence of judgment, points out that the author of the Sutras has said so from the opponent’s stand-point and it is not his final view.” He then cited a second sūtra treating lordship “on a par with attributes like possession of desire, etc., which cannot be said to be natural to the attributeless Brahman”. God’s rule over the world, in his reading, belongs to the world: real from within it, dissolved with it in the final truth — not a diminishment of the Lord, but a refusal to bind the absolute to what depends on something else.

What he taught: “That thou art” and the man remembered

How can any sentence say what is beyond all difference? His answer became the tradition’s. The words of “That thou art” cannot keep their full dictionary meanings — “that,” the omniscient cause of worlds; “thou,” the limited hearer — for so read, the sentence is absurd. Nor do they fail of meaning altogether. Each keeps part and lets go part: the consciousness remains, the limitations fall away. The Method summarises: “The text ‘That thou art’ refers by a special figurative usage, in which the words lose one part of their meaning and retain another (jahad-ajahal-laksana), to a meaning that is a pure identity without any differentiation (akhandartha), as do worldly statements of recognition, such as ‘This is that man...’” (I.149–66). The worldly parallel is the old example the schools shared: you knew Devadatta years ago in another town; you meet him today, aged and altered, and someone says “this is that Devadatta.” The “this” and the “that” carry incompatible times and places; the recognition drops what conflicts and lands on the one man. So the great saying drops the remoteness of “that” and the finitude of “thou” and lands on the one consciousness.

He defended the mechanism with care. Figurative usage does not need its object certified by some other means of knowledge first: “There is no rule saying that figurative usage presupposes for its object something within the range of another means of valid cognition. It is enough if the entity to which it is applied (here the Self of the hearer) is evident” (I.152). And in the sūtra on the harmony of the texts he found the doctrine anticipated in a prefix: secondary agreement of words yields a synthesis of related elements, but “the primary form of agreement occurs when the two words refer to a pure undifferentiated identity” (I.217–8). The Method notes that in all this “The sequence observed here in interpreting the meanings of the words ‘that’ and ‘thou’ follows the view of Suresvara.” Even the pattern of the book’s opening sūtra-analysis serves the same thesis: the first sūtra explains “thou,” the second “that,” and the fourth their oneness — a division the Method reports while doubting the special pleading it took to reach it.

Two further refinements are recorded. For the seeker’s own sentence “I am Brahman,” he allowed a total figurative usage in which both words surrender their primary meanings entirely (I.169); and for texts like “Devadatta is a lion,” where retaining any primary meaning breeds contradiction, a usage based on shared qualities — “the mechanism is the same as in such worldly expressions as ’The little fellow is fire’ (referring to the brilliance and keenness of a young student)” (I.170). Even the mildest texts, he held, point past their qualities: “Even less important texts like ‘The Absolute is Reality, Knowledge, Infinity’ (Taitt. II.1) should be understood as communicating a meaning that is beyond differentiation” (I.175–9).

What he taught: how words can reach the wordless

An objector presses: the Absolute “is not within the range of speech or the mind” (I.242–4) — so how can the Veda be a means of knowing it? His reply does not claim that Brahman becomes an object. It claims that knowledge from the texts works by removal: “The metaphysical idea derived from the upanishadic texts can be a valid means of cognition merely through burning up Ignorance, the cause of the world-appearance, which it does when its form (as the Absolute) is apprehended.” He argued that his own Mīmāṁsā teachers already accepted the principle: “The followers of Kumarila hold that a sentence yielding …a valid means of cognition, even if consciousness is not itself in any sense an object.” — and the followers of Prabhākara likewise; so too here: “though pure Consciousness is not an object, nevertheless knowledge of Consciousness derived from the upanishadic texts can be a valid means of cognition in regard to it by destroying the Ignorance that conceals it” (I.245–6).

Against those within Advaita who gave the negative texts first place — the Method identifies the view as Sri Maṇḍana Miśra’s — he argued that negation alone never yields a nature: “For the function of a sentence conveying negation is only to put an end to superimposed distinctions; it cannot, like a positive sentence, directly state the true nature of anything.” His homely proof: “Ignorance of the rope will not be brought to an end by the mere statement ’This is not a snake’; knowledge that actually illumines the nature of the rope” is also required (I.253–6). The negative texts, then, are “only auxiliaries contributing to an understanding of the harmony of the metaphysical texts of the Upanishads by correcting the literal meaning of the positive texts in favour of a figurative one” — or, on a second view he allowed, “mere confirmation of the knowledge previously obtained from the positive ones, as when we say ’This is a rope, not a snake’” (I.257–8). The Method’s own margin note is part of the record: “It is clear that this explanation of the operation of the negative texts stands in contradiction both with Sri Sankara’s Brahma Sutra Commentary and with the Brhadaranyaka Vartika of Suresvara”, and it quotes Sri Śaṅkara’s Bṛhadāraṇyaka commentary against him: “But if the desire is to express the true nature of the Absolute, void of all conditioning adjuncts and particularity, then it cannot be described by any positive means whatever. The only possible method then is to refer to it through a comprehensive denial of whatever positive characteristics have been attributed to it in previous teachings, and to say ‘neither this nor that’”. Here as everywhere, both the doctrine and its critique are on the page.

What of the texts that describe Brahman with attributes — the Lord of all, to be meditated on in the heart? He would not cut them loose: “Even the texts concerned with the Absolute as associated with attributes are everywhere related to (those proclaiming) the reality without attributes.” (I.463). His reason is a small masterpiece of his method: “The Absolute as associated with attributes consists of a real and an unreal element; knowledge of the Absolute associated with attributes contains a true and an untrue element. The texts in the Veda teaching the Absolute as associated with attributes are of the same (double) kind. Hence those texts have one meaning which is subordinate, and another which refers to the real in its true form without attributes.” (I.464). Like the cognition “this is silver” on the shell, such texts “manifest something real and something false at the same time”; read for their real element, they too teach the attributeless. Nothing in scripture is wasted; everything is ranked.

What he taught: the path — renunciation, hearing, pondering, meditation

The third chapter turns to practice, and here the book is at its most demanding. The Kanchi chapter: “Coming to the practical side of Advaita, Sarvajnatman speaks of asceticism as a necessary condition for attaining the knowledge of Brahman.” Rites are not despised but assigned their distance: “He holds that the remote means such as the performance of rituals including the optional ones (kamya-karma) lead to the desire to know Brahman; and after this result is achieved the remote means should not be pursued.” Uncommonly among Advaitins, he let even self-interested ritual count toward awakening the desire to know — and then dismissed all ritual once that desire is born.

The near means are three. In the Method’s summary: “the inner discipline which leads immediately to an intuitional knowledge (avagati) of the Absolute is hearing, pondering and sustained meditation on the …texts of the Upanishads” (III.327, 329). Their work is diagnostic: “The function of hearing and the rest, when repeated, is to put to an end nonapprehension, doubt and wrong apprehension.” And their definitions are exact: “Hearing means ascertainment according to proper exegetical rules of what it lies within the power of the highest texts of the Upanishads to communicate. Pondering has for its subject-matter the true nature of reality. Sustained meditation means absorbing the mind in pure Consciousness” (III.343–5) — though he records a second view on which sustained meditation is “an intellectual conviction that falls short of direct experience” (III.346). The Kanchi chapter gives the doctrine its point: “Sarvajnatman holds that the Upanishadic texts alone give rise to the intuitive knowledge of Brahman; and sravana, manana, and nididhyasana remove the impediments which are present in the intellect of the aspirant who has such a knowledge and which hinder the knowledge from becoming effective in dispelling avidya.” The texts teach; the disciplines only clear the ground. On the page for Sri Maṇḍana Miśra the reader will find the opposite emphasis — meditation as the ripening of what hearing begins; the two positions became the two schools’ marks.

Who may walk this path? His answer is generous and firm at once. The Method lists among the book’s chief topics its “affirmation of the right of lifelong celibates, householders and forest-dwellers alike to hearing and so on of the supreme upanishadic texts”; and yet renunciates come first in fruit: “The metaphysical knowledge arising from the supreme texts of the Upanishads usually accrues, in the case of renunciates, here in this very life (III.348). Hearing and so on performed by those who are not renunciates will bring rewards in a future life” (III.359). A householder is not turned away; he is told, gently, that the harvest may wait a life.

What he taught: the end of Ignorance, and liberation in life

What exactly happens when knowledge dawns? The last chapter’s answer gave the tradition one of its subtlest doctrines. Knowledge needs no helper: “Only metaphysical knowledge can bring Ignorance to an end. No other extra means is required in addition” (IV.1–11). And the ending of Ignorance fits no category: “The cessation of Ignorance is different from being, from non-being, from being and non-being combined, and from neither-being-nor-non-being” (IV.12); liberation “is neither different from Consciousness, nor non-different, nor both different and non-different, nor neither-different-nor-non-different” (IV.14) — the verse in which his readers have heard the Iṣṭa-siddhi’s “fifth kind” of reality, as the page for Sri Vimuktātman explains. Or more simply: “Or else it is the Self alone that is the cessation of Ignorance, being the idea that arises from the supreme texts.” (IV.15). Knowledge, having consumed everything, consumes itself: “The knowledge arising from the supreme texts of the Upanishads brings all transmigratory experience to an end and extinguishes itself, too, like water sprinkled onto burning iron, which cools the iron and is itself eliminated” (IV.28). Dasgupta’s one-line summary: “The true light of Brahman is always there, and emancipation means nothing more than the destruction of the ajnana.”

On the liberated-in-life he offered layered views, translated in the Method. First: “The fire of right knowledge totally consumes Ignorance and its effects immediately. So it is certain that the enlightened one has immediate liberation (sadyo-mukti). But this does not mean that the texts teaching liberation in life are useless or meaningless. They relate to one who is imagined (by others) to be liberated in life” (IV.38–9) — the living sage, on this reading, exists only in the eyes of the unliberated who still see a world with a sage in it. Second, an accommodation: usages like “‘remnant of Ignorance’, ‘faint odour of Ignorance’, ‘impression of Ignorance’ and so on do not refer to Ignorance or to a part of it, but to the perception that Ignorance has been cancelled — this is the view given in Sri Sankara’s commentaries” (IV.41–2). Third, an appeal past argument to the sages themselves: “There must be such a thing as liberation in life, as there are people who have experienced it. There is a suggestion of duality in that state, as that also is known from experience. We speak of a remnant of Ignorance to accommodate this suggestion of duality. In all this, the proof is one’s own experience (the experience of the enlightened person)” (IV.43). The enlightened man lives out the karma that launched his body and then, in the Method’s rendering of IV.57–8, “he attains total transcendence”; the paths of flame and of the gods lead only to the Absolute with attributes, “for there are Vedic texts teaching that Brahma and others were released without travelling any path of that kind”. Dasgupta closes his account where the book closes: “In the last chapter he describes the nature of emancipation and the attainment of Brahmahood.”

A dissenting reading

This site’s pages give every teacher his critics, and Sri Sarvajñātman’s sharpest critic within the tradition is Swami Satchidanandendra Sarasvatī, whose Method of the Vedānta supplied many of the translations above. His admiration is real — in his words, “Of the works which adopt the standpoint that Indeterminable Ignorance is the material cause of the world, the Sanksepa Sariraka could fairly be said to stand supreme.” It is treasured, he grants, “as a casket of priceless jewels by earnest enquirers into the method of Vedanta”. But his own school holds that Sri Śaṅkara taught no root Ignorance at all — only superimposition, the natural mistake, needing no positive stuff to explain it — and so his verdict falls hard: “But from the standpoint of recognizing the true classical method of the Vedanta, our subject in the present work, the Sanksepa Sariraka has little to offer that requires special study.” And of the doctrine that consciousness is both seat and object of Ignorance: “It hardly needs to be pointed out that this whole doctrine is a baseless fabric, seeing that the existence of Ignorance as anything …than superimposition has never been proved.”

The same critic’s summary of what the author was attempting is, even so, the fairest one-sentence account of the book’s ambition that this page has found: “takes the gist of the teaching about positive indeterminable Ignorance in various earlier systems and tries to establish that that is the one theory approved by Sri Sankara in his commentaries, and that this is the one theory that can set the Vedanta on a firm foundation, free from …objections, when supported by reason and experience.” On the seven theories, the Method suggests — in a passage too damaged in the scan to quote exactly — that he seems to have been trying to reduce the various theories of indeterminable Ignorance to some kind of unity, collecting and summarising them as he went: the work, that is, of a systematiser, done so thoroughly that the system afterwards bore his shape. The reader now has both scales: the tradition’s “casket of priceless jewels,” and the dissenter’s “baseless fabric.” The book itself is linked below, and can be weighed.

The commentators: eight readers across the centuries

A book’s afterlife can be read in its commentaries, and the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka has eight. The Kanchi chapter lists them, and the list is itself a small map of where Advaita was studied between the sixteenth century and the twentieth.

• Viśvaveda’s Siddhānta-dīpa. “The earliest of them seems to be the Siddhanta-dipa by Visvaveda and it is available in manuscript [R. 1558(b)] in the Madras Government Oriental Manuscripts Library.” Two of the great later commentators built on it; Madhusūdana names its author with reverence as his teacher’s teacher in learning.
• Vedānanda’s Sambandhokti. “Another commentary called Sambandhokti is by Vedananda and it is also available in manuscript [R. 2919] in the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras.” The 1972 introduction describes it as an attempt to show the mutual connexion of the verses; nothing is known of the author’s life.
• Rāmatīrtha’s Anvayārtha-prakāśikā. “Ramatirtha, the disciple of Krishnatirtha, wrote a commentary known as Anvayarthaprakasika published in the Anandasrama Sanskrit series, Poona. He has based his commentary on the commentary Siddhantadipa already referred to.” It is the commentary in the 1918 Poona edition linked below; the 1972 introduction, citing P. K. Gode, places its author in the middle of the sixteenth century. It was Rāmatīrtha who wrote of the opening verse, “Now he pays honour to his direct Guru Suresvaracarya”.
• Puruṣottama’s Subodhinī. “His disciple Purushottama wrote a commentary called Subodhini. This also has been published in Anandasrama Sanskrit series, Poona.” It shares the 1918 volume with his teacher’s work.
• Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama’s Tattva-bodhinī. “Nrisimhasrama, the disciple of Jagannathasrama who was a contemporary of Krishnatirtha, the preceptor of Ramatirtha referred to above, wrote a commentary called Tattvabodhini published in the Princess of Wales Sarasvatibhavana texts series.” This is the commentary in the Benares edition of 1936, edited under Gopinath Kaviraj, also linked below. Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama was the great sixteenth-century master of the Vivaraṇa line, and his choosing this book to expound says where he thought its allegiance lay.
• Madhusūdana Sarasvatī’s Sāra-saṁgraha. “Madhusudanasarasvati wrote an authoritative commentary Sarasangraha and it is published in the Kasi Sanskrit series. This commentary is based on the one by Visvadeva referred to above.” The author of the Advaita-siddhi, the most formidable dialectician the school produced, chose to comment on this book and on the Gītā and very little else; the Method quotes his gloss identifying Deveśvara with Sri Sureśvara, and his handling of the circularity objection.
• Two more, known by report. “Apart from these commentaries, Aufrecht mentions one more commentary known as Vidyamritavarshini. Another commentary by one Pratyagvishnu is referred to by Madhusudanasarasvati in his Sarasangraha.” Dasgupta and the 1972 introduction give the Vidyāmṛta-varṣiṇī to one Rāghavānanda Sarasvatī.

Dasgupta’s summary of the same list ends with a phrase that is a fact about the tradition’s memory: the book “was commented upon by a number of distinguished writers, none of whom seem to be very old”. Six centuries or more separate the poet from his first surviving commentator. In the interval the book was read, cited, argued with — by Sri Ānandabodha, by Sri Citsukha’s generation, by Sri Vidyāraṇya — but not, so far as the manuscripts show, glossed line by line until the sixteenth-century revival that also gave us the great commentaries on the Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa and the Bhāmatī. When it came, it came from both the Vivaraṇa and the Benares scholarly worlds at once.

The other schools, seen from this life

This section, like its counterparts across the site, is written from the Advaita side, and nothing in it is meant to diminish the schools it names; each is a serious tradition, held by serious people, with arguments its followers still find sound. Sri Sarvajñātman’s book engages them chiefly in its second chapter, whose task, in the Kanchi chapter’s words, is to show “that the Upanishadic teaching is not stultified by other proofs like perception, etc., or by the views of other philosophical systems”.

• The Buddhist schools. His nearest rivals, because they too taught that the world is not what it seems. Dasgupta: “In that chapter Sarvajnatma Muni tries to show the difference of the Vedanta view from the Buddhist, which difference lies mainly in the fact that, in spite of the doctrine of illusion, the Vedanta admits the ultimate reality to be Brahman, which is not admitted by the Buddhists.” His distinction between the false support and the true ground of an illusion was drawn precisely so that his own doctrine could not collapse into theirs. He argued the point on the merits, as one philosopher to another, and the Buddhist analysis of experience is treated throughout as an account to be answered rather than a heresy to be denounced.
• Sāṁkhya and Nyāya. “He also shows how the experiences of waking life may be compared with those of dreams. He then tries to show that neither perception nor other means of proof can prove the reality of the world-appearance and criticizes the philosophic views of the Samkhya, Nyaya and other systems.” The Sāṁkhya view of a real, evolving Nature and the Nyāya view of a real world of substances and qualities are the two accounts of the world’s reality he had to meet, and his list of the names of Ignorance quietly annexes the Sāṁkhya’s own vocabulary — prakṛti, the equilibrium of the three constituents — as names for māyā. The three ways of accounting for creation that his book compares are the Nyāya’s new beginning, the Sāṁkhya’s real transformation and Advaita’s appearance; he chose the third without claiming the other two were foolish.
• The Mīmāṁsā. His own second science: he wrote a handbook of its theory of knowledge, and he borrowed from Kumārila and Prabhākara the principle that a sentence can yield valid knowledge about consciousness even though consciousness is not an object — the Method records him appealing to both. Where he differed from them was where every Advaitin differed: the Upaniṣads state a fact, not a duty; “because knowledge is not subject to human will it cannot be enjoined”; and “The contents of the Vedanta are not anticipated (by the Purva Mimamsa)”. Sri Śaṅkara’s tradition and the Mīmāṁsā share a Veda and a method, and his book treats the ritualists as elder colleagues rather than opponents.
• The Jainas. The Kanchi tradition, as the 1972 introduction reports it from the succession-hymn, says that he vanquished the Jainas in debate. No such debate appears in his book, and this page records the statement as the tradition’s. Jaina thought was a living presence in the Tamil country of the tradition’s early centuries, and a Kāñcī pontiff would have met it.
• Within Vedānta: the Bhāmatī line. His most consequential disagreement was with fellow Advaitins. Against Sri Vācaspati Miśra’s view that Ignorance lives in the soul and covers Brahman, he held that it lives in and covers pure consciousness; against Sri Maṇḍana Miśra’s reading of Sri Śaṅkara on the soul as its seat, the book says explicitly, in the Method’s report, that “one should not follow Mandana’s way of interpreting this point (which prejudices liberation in life)” (II.174). Both men have pages on this site that give their side. The disagreement is a family one: about where the one Ignorance sits, not whether Brahman alone is real.
• The later Vedāntas of difference. Sri Rāmānuja, Sri Madhva and the other great teachers who held that Brahman and the soul are eternally distinct came after him and are not addressed in his book. This page notes only that his doctrine that God’s lordship is not natural to Brahman marks, very exactly, the point at which those schools would part company with his; the reader will find them treated with the respect they deserve on this site’s page on the other schools.

Legacy

The Kanchi chapter’s verdict is generous and specific: “Sarvajnatman is a great philosopher who has influenced profoundly the Advaita-thought in the subsequent ages. As Madhusudanasarasvati characterizes him, he knows the traditional interpretation of the Advaita Vedanta. His views are very respectfully cited by Appayya Dikshita, Madhusudanasarasvati and Brahmanandasarasvati.” The three names are the three greatest Advaitins of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and each in his way took something from him. From him the Vivaraṇa school took its settled doctrine that Ignorance rests on and hides the inner consciousness, and its way of reconciling Sri Śaṅkara’s scattered statements about the soul and deep sleep; from him Sri Prakāśānanda and Sri Madhusūdana took the doctrine of one soul; from him every later writer took the distinction between the false support and the true ground of an illusion. His ten words for Brahman, his account of “That thou art” as recognition, and his ranking of the negative texts below the positive became the common property of the school’s manuals.

He was also answered. Sri Ānandabodha, in the eleventh or twelfth century, “criticizes, but without mentioning his name, Sarvajnatman’s view of the interpretation of the nature of self as pure bliss”. The Bhāmatī school never accepted his placing of Ignorance. And in the twentieth century Swami Satchidanandendra made the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka the central exhibit in his case that post-Śaṅkara Advaita had drifted from the master by inventing a root Ignorance the commentaries never taught — a case this page has set out in the dissenting section. A book that is still being argued with a thousand years after it was written has, by any measure, lived.

There is a second legacy that belongs to the tradition rather than to the scholars. The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha counts him the third of its heads and the immediate successor of Sri Śaṅkara; his name is the reason its seat is called the Sarvajña Pīṭha, and why a commentator in the Chola country could sign himself “the glory of the Sarvajnasrama”. Whatever a historian makes of the dates, the maṭha’s memory of him has been continuous, and its diamond-jubilee volume of 1968 gave him his first full modern chapter. The same scholar’s 1972 edition and translation — the Method’s translator calls it “a very thorough and informative edition and translation” — made the whole book available in English for the first time. And the poet’s own hope for his book, expressed in its final verses, was modest: “a work to gladden the hearts of all good men”. The Kanchi chapter’s comparison with Sri Vidyāraṇya, four centuries later, suggests that in the tradition’s judgment it did.

For the seeker

What a reader who is not a scholar might take from this life begins with its central image: Ignorance as a pat of butter on the fire of consciousness. Sri Sarvajñātman held that whatever hides the truth from us rests on the very thing it hides, and is already melting. The self that says “I do not know myself” is, in that very sentence, the one that knows; the not-knowing is a guest in the house of knowing, and cannot outlast its host. A seeker who has felt that his ignorance is somehow more real than his understanding has been told, by a teacher of the first rank, that it is the other way round.

The second thing is his ranking of the scriptures — and, by extension, of every teaching one meets. Ten words say what Brahman is; everything else in the Upaniṣads either supports them or clears the way for them; even the negations, “not this, not this,” are servants of the affirmation. A person bewildered by the sheer quantity of what has been said about the Self may find it steadying to be told that it comes down to ten words, all of which he already half-understands — eternal, pure, awake, free, true, subtle, existent, everywhere, one, bliss — and that the rest of the work is subtraction.

The third is his account of the path, which is strict and kind at once. Strict, because he thought renunciation the condition of knowledge in this life and said so; kind, because he affirmed the right of householders and forest-dwellers to hear the great sayings and promised them their fruit, if not now. And realistic: hearing, pondering and meditation do not manufacture the truth, which the sentence has already told; they remove the not-seeing, the doubting and the seeing-wrong that stop the sentence from doing its work. Anyone who has understood a teaching and found it did nothing has met exactly the obstacle he describes, and his prescription — repeat the three until the obstacles are gone — is one every later teacher on this site has, in some form, given.

And last, the one soul. It is the hardest thing he taught and the one most seekers will set aside, as most Advaitins did. But its purpose was never to deny the neighbour; it was to deny that anyone’s liberation depends on anyone else’s. “Do not think anything else for a moment”, he tells the pupil, because the pupil is not waiting on the world. A reader who has felt that the world must be put right before the self can be need not follow him all the way to say what he wanted said: that the work is here, and is one’s own, and is not postponed by the number of the unliberated.

A note on pictures, names and dates

There is no portrait of Sri Sarvajñātman from any period near his own, and this site shows only pictures whose age and origin are known and credited. The lamp stands in the picture’s place.

His name is written Sarvajñātman, with the marks that show the palatal nasal and the long vowels; the sources on this page write it Sarvajnatman, Sarvajñātma Muni, Sarvajnatma Muni and, on the Kanchi maṭha’s page, Sarvajnatman. The Method’s translator notes that the author signs himself “either as Sarvajnatman or (more rarely) as Sarvajna or (when a title follows) Sarvajnatma (e.g. Sarvajnatma Muni)”. The name means “he whose self is the all-knowing.” Dasgupta records a tradition that “his other name was Nityabodhacarya”; the Anusandhana Kendra that he “is sometimes identified with nityabodhaghana”; the Kanchi tradition, through the 1972 introduction, that his boyhood name was Mahādeva. His teacher’s name in his own verses is Deveśvara; whether that is Sri Sureśvara is the question this page has laid out without deciding.

The dates on his card — “traditionally 4th century BCE; scholars place him c. 9th–10th century CE” — are given in that double form deliberately. The Kanchi maṭha’s year of 364 BCE belongs to the traditional chronology of the Śaṅkara maṭhas; Dasgupta’s 900 assumes he was Sri Sureśvara’s pupil; the tenth-century date rests on the king Manukulāditya and on the Pramāṇa-lakṣaṇa genealogy. His birthplace on the Tāmraparṇī is the tradition’s; his kingdom, Travancore or Chola, is the scholars’; the map marks both 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 Method’s scan in particular garbles diacritics and running heads — the printed word has been restored, and each restoration was recorded as the page was built; page-headers that the scan dropped into the middle of sentences have been removed; and footnote numerals that the Kanchi web page glues to words have been detached. Two passages of the Method too damaged to quote exactly are paraphrased and said to be. Nothing else has been added.

Timeline

• The tradition’s reckoning — born at Brahmadeśa on the Tāmraparṇī; debates Sri Śaṅkara at seven for three days; ordained and named Sarvajñātman; presides at Kāñcī with Sri Sureśvara for seventy years and alone for forty-two; siddhi in Kali 2737, given as 364 BCE on the maṭha’s table (1972 introduction, reporting the Jagadguru-ratnamālā-stava and its commentary; Kanchi maṭha table of ācāryas).
• Late 8th to early 9th century — Sri Śaṅkara and his direct pupils, on the conventional scholarly dating; Sri Sureśvara’s Vārttikas and Naiṣkarmya-siddhi; Sri Padmapāda’s Pañcapādikā, whose reflection theory the Kanchi chapter says he adopted.
• c. 900 — Dasgupta’s estimate for Sri Sarvajñātman, as pupil of a long-lived Sri Sureśvara and “a younger contemporary of Vacaspati Misra”.
• 10th century — the date favoured by the Method’s report of a Travancore king Manukulāditya, and by the Anusandhana Kendra, which calls him “another notable 10th century author” and “probably a younger contemporary of vimuktAtman”. The Iṣṭa-siddhi, whose doctrine of the cessation of Ignorance he follows in his fourth chapter, is placed by its editor between 850 and 1050.
• His lifetime — the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka in 1,240 verses; the Pañcaprakriyā; the Pramāṇa-lakṣaṇa; and, by the Kanchi maṭha’s account, a Sarvajña-vilāsa.
• 11th–12th century — Sri Ānandabodha criticises, without naming him, his account of the Self as bliss (Dasgupta).
• 12th century — Sri Jñānottama, commentator on the Naiṣkarmya-siddhi and the Iṣṭa-siddhi, signs himself the glory of the Sarvajña seat (Kanchi maṭha, citing Hiriyanna’s 1925 preface).
• 14th century — Sri Vidyāraṇya, the next Advaitin to teach the whole system in verse, in the Kanchi chapter’s comparison.
• 16th century — the commentaries of Rāmatīrtha, Puruṣottama, Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama and Madhusūdana Sarasvatī; Sri Appayya Dīkṣita cites him. The Jagadguru-ratnamālā-stava records the Kanchi tradition of his life.
• 17th–18th century — Sri Brahmānanda Sarasvatī cites him (Kanchi chapter).
• 1918 — the Ānandāśrama edition, Poona, with the commentaries of Rāmatīrtha and Puruṣottama (linked below).
• 1932 — Dasgupta’s account in the second volume of his History.
• 1936 — the Benares edition with Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama’s Tattva-bodhinī, under Gopinath Kaviraj (linked below).
• 1946 — the Pañcaprakriyā printed in the Madras University Sanskrit Series.
• 1964 — Swami Satchidanandendra’s Vedānta-prakriyā-pratyabhijñā, whose English translation is The Method of the Vedānta, devotes its sixteenth chapter to him.
• 1968 — N. Veezhinathan’s chapter in Preceptors of Advaita, Kanchi; 1972 — his edition and English translation of the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka, Madras.

Questions a reader may ask

Was he really Sri Śaṅkara’s grand-pupil? The tradition, two of his commentators, the Kanchi chapter and Dasgupta say yes. The Method says the name Deveśvara, the doctrine of root Ignorance and the king Manukulāditya all tell against it; the Anusandhana Kendra records “some confusion”; the genealogy at the end of his Mīmāṁsā book, if genuine, names a different teacher’s teacher. The section “Who was his teacher?” gives each side in its own words.

Why do the dates differ by thirteen centuries? Because the Kanchi maṭha’s table follows the traditional chronology that places Sri Śaṅkara in the fifth century BCE, while the scholars reckon from the eighth or ninth century CE. The section “When he lived” explains all four reckonings; this page takes none of them as settled.

What is the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka? A 1,240-verse poem in four chapters that distils Sri Śaṅkara’s Brahma-sūtra commentary, leaving out everything about the Brahman with qualities and its meditations so that only the teaching of the attributeless Brahman remains. It is freely available in two Sanskrit editions linked below; a complete English translation exists (1972) and is named on this page.

What did he teach that was new? Chiefly, where Ignorance lives: in pure consciousness itself, in its aspect as the inner self, and not in the soul, which Ignorance produces. From this he derived his reconciliations of Sri Śaṅkara’s statements about deep sleep and about the soul, his identification of Ignorance with māyā, and his teaching that Brahman alone, not Brahman-with-Ignorance, is the world’s cause. He also gave the tradition its ten words for Brahman, its analysis of “That thou art” as recognition, its ranking of the negative texts, and the first full statement of the doctrine of one soul.

Did he really say there is only one soul? He said it is the deepest of Vedānta’s standpoints, and he said it to a pupil who protested. He also used, for teaching, the reflection theory of many souls. Later Advaitins mostly kept the reflection theory and treated the one-soul view as a permitted but extreme position; Sri Madhusūdana, centuries later, gave it a defence.

Was he a renunciate? The tradition says he was ordained as a boy by Sri Śaṅkara, and his book requires renunciation for knowledge in this life; he signs himself “Muni.” Yet he affirmed that householders and forest-dwellers may hear the great sayings and will have their fruit in time.

Where does he stand between the two schools of Advaita? With the Vivaraṇa. The Method says his “line of thought generally speaking follows the system of the Vivarana throughout”; the Kanchi chapter says he followed Sri Padmapāda’s reflection theory; his placing of Ignorance is the Vivaraṇa position against Sri Vācaspati’s. The pages for Sri Padmapāda, Sri Prakāśātman and Sri Vācaspati Miśra give the persons; this site’s page on the schools gives the difference.

Why does a critic call the book both a casket of jewels and a baseless fabric? Because Swami Satchidanandendra admired the verse, the learning and the systematising, and rejected the premise — that there is a positive Ignorance at all, over and above the natural mistake of superimposition. The section “A dissenting reading” gives his case; the reader is free to weigh it against the tradition’s.

Is there a connexion with Sri Vimuktātman? Yes. The fourth chapter’s account of the cessation of Ignorance follows the Iṣṭa-siddhi; the Anusandhana Kendra calls him probably its author’s younger contemporary; the 1972 introduction calls the two men contemporaries. Sri Vimuktātman’s page on this site tells the other half of that story.

Why does this page keep saying “the tradition says”? Because the promise of this site is not to state as fact what is not known. About Sri Sarvajñātman very little is known for certain: that he wrote the Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka and two smaller books, that he honoured a teacher called Deveśvara, that he wrote under a king called Manukulāditya, and that his book was answered within two centuries and glossed within seven. Everything else — the debate at seven, the ordination, the 112 years at Kāñcī, the identity of the teacher — is tradition or inference, and is given here as such, with the respect the tradition has earned and without pretence.