Sri Adi Shankara

A country arguing with itself

Picture a subcontinent in the eighth century with no shared school of thought and no shortage of confident ones. Buddhist universities were at the height of their intellectual reach. Jain logicians were formidable. Within the Vedic fold itself, ritualists held that the whole point of the scriptures was correct action, and that talk of liberation through knowledge was a distraction from the fire altar. There were sects organised around a single deity that regarded every other sect as mistaken, schools that argued the self was a momentary series with nothing continuous in it, and schools that argued there were countless separate selves each permanently sealed off from the others. All of them quoted texts. Many of them quoted the same texts.

Into that argument walked a man who, in about thirty-two years, restated the whole Vedic tradition as a single coherent position, wrote the commentaries that every later school of Vedanta would be obliged to answer, walked from one end of the country to the other to defend it in public debate, wrote hymns so simple that they are still sung by people who have never read a line of philosophy, and set up four monastic seats at the corners of India so that the work would outlive him. The Sringeri seat, which he established in the south, records his life as running from 788 to 820 of the common era, and has maintained an unbroken succession of teachers ever since.

His dates are genuinely contested. The Sringeri tradition gives the eighth to ninth century, which is also where most modern historians place him. Some of the other maṭhas preserve a far earlier dating. It is honest to say that the question is not settled from outside the traditions and that this site follows Sringeri, which is the seat whose records are most continuous.

The India he was born into

If Sringeri's dates are right, he was born a generation after the Arabs took Sindh (711) and a generation before Charlemagne was crowned in Rome; the eighth century is the same century everywhere, but it does not feel like it from Kerala. The great empires of the classical age were gone. The Guptas had been dust for two hundred years and no single power ruled the country. In the south the Pallavas held Kāñcī, where the shore temples of Mahabalipuram were still new, and were fighting a long war with the Chāḻukyas of Bādāmi; in the Deccan the Rāṣṭrakūṭas were rising, and in the 760s one of their kings would begin cutting the Kailāsa temple out of the living rock at Ellora; in Bengal the Pālas were about to make Nālandā and the new university of Vikramaśīla the last great Buddhist establishments in India; in Kashmir Lalitāditya had built the sun temple at Mārtāṇḍa. Kerala itself was ruled from Mahodayapuram, near present-day Kodungallur, by the Chera kings, whose court was forty kilometres from Kaladi and whose Nambūdiri Brahmins had, over the preceding centuries, made the Kerala Vedic recitation the most exact in India. That exactness is the soil he grew in.

Intellectually it was a crowded, quarrelsome, extraordinarily rich age, and the previous section has described the quarrel. Two things about it should be added. First, the great Buddhist logicians — Dignāga, Dharmakīrti and their successors — had set a standard of argument that anyone entering the debate now had to meet; the reason Sri Śaṅkara's commentaries argue like lawyers is that he was arguing with lawyers. Second, the Tamil country to the east of Kerala was in the middle of the most intense devotional movement India has ever seen: the Śaiva Nāyanmārs and the Vaiṣṇava Āḻvārs were singing in the temple towns, and the temple, rather than the fire altar, was becoming the centre of religion. He would take both seriously. His arguments answer the logicians; his hymns belong with the singers; and his four seats were placed at four temples.

Where the life was lived

The tradition's geography is enormous. Born at Kaladi, on the Periyār river in what is today the Ernakulam district of Kerala, some forty-five kilometres from Kochi; a teacher found on the Narmadā, at the island shrine of Oṃkāreśvara in present-day Madhya Pradesh; the commentaries written at Kāśī and at Badarī in the Himalaya; a debate at Māhiṣmatī, today's Maheshwar on the Narmadā; a seat founded at Śṛṅgeri on the Tuṅgā in Karnataka; a return to Kaladi for his mother; a circuit of the country that the tradition takes through Rāmeśvaram, Kāñcī, Dvārakā, Purī, Kashmir and Badarī; and an end, in the account Sringeri and most others follow, at Kedārnāth in the high Himalaya, at thirty-two. On foot. The map below plots the places the tradition names on today's India, and traces the order in which it tells them, simplified. It should be read as the tradition's map, not as a surveyed itinerary; no eighth-century document records where he walked.

Kaladi

He was born at Kaladi, a village on the bank of the Periyar river in what is now Kerala, to a Nambūdiri brahmin family. The accounts kept by the tradition agree on an unusual childhood: a boy who learned the Vedas early and fast, whose father died while he was very young, and who had decided on renunciation before he was ten.

The famous scene of his leaving is recorded in the traditional biography, the Śaṅkara Digvijaya, in the version preserved at Sringeri. The boy asks his mother for permission to renounce the world; she refuses, because he is her only child and her whole support. Some time later, bathing in the river, he is caught by a crocodile. He calls out that he is dying, and that if she will permit him to renounce he will at least die as a monk. She consents. The crocodile lets him go. Whatever one makes of the crocodile, the point the story is making about the boy is not subtle: he would not be managed.

He kept one promise, and it cost him. A monk is supposed to have no family obligations at all; he returned to Kaladi years later to perform his mother's final rites himself, and was censured for it by people who thought the rule mattered more than the mother. He did it anyway.

Sringeri's own account adds two stories from the childhood, and both are about what a boy with nothing did with what he had. Going from house to house for alms, as a Vedic student must, he came to a woman so poor that all she could find to give him was a single dried gooseberry, which she gave. He stood in her doorway and sang to Lakṣmī — the hymn is the Kanakadhārā Stotram, still sung in Kerala homes — and the tradition says that golden gooseberries rained into her yard; Sringeri records it plainly as the blessing of a destitute woman with prosperity, and leaves the reader to decide what to make of it. The other concerns the river. His mother, walking every day to the Periyār to bathe, grew too weak for the distance, and the boy prayed that the river might come to her; a branch of it, the tradition says, changed course and now runs past the house. The point of both stories is the same, and it is not the miracle. It is that he saw an old woman's difficulty and did something, which is more than most metaphysicians manage.

The teacher on the Narmadā

He went north, on foot, looking for a teacher. He found Sri Govinda Bhagavatpāda on the bank of the Narmadā, and through him the line that runs back to Sri Gauḍapāda — the first teacher we can name who set out this reading of the Upaniṣads in a systematic verse treatise. This matters for how the tradition understands itself. Sri Śaṅkara does not present Advaita as his discovery. He presents it as what the Upaniṣads have always said, held by a succession of teachers, which he is restating because the statement has become obscured. The word for that succession is paramparā: not an appeal to authority so much as a claim about how this particular knowledge travels, which is person to person rather than book to reader.

From the Narmadā he went to Kashi, and it is around Kashi and Badari in the Himalaya that the tradition places the writing.

The tradition remembers the meeting at Oṃkāreśvara in one exchange. The boy stood at the mouth of the teacher's cave and Sri Govinda, from inside, asked who he was. The answer was not a name. It was a set of verses, still recited every day across India as the Nirvāṇa Ṣaṭkam, which say what he is not — not mind, not intellect, not ego, not the five senses, not earth or air or fire, not the body's needs or the mind's likes, not merit or sin, not pleasure or pain, not even liberation — and end each verse with what he is: "cidānanda-rūpaḥ śivo'ham śivo'ham," of the nature of awareness and bliss, I am Śiva, I am Śiva. Whether or not a boy of eight spoke it on a riverbank, it is the most compact statement of the whole teaching ever made, and the tradition put it in his mouth at the moment he asked to be taught. Sri Govinda taught him, and — the account continues — sent him to Kāśī with one instruction: write the commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, so that what the Upaniṣads say can no longer be misread.

Kāśī, and the man in the road

At Kāśī — Varanasi, in today's Uttar Pradesh, then as now the university-city of Hinduism — the tradition places three things: his first disciples, his first great argument with himself, and the start of the writing. The disciples came quickly; the first was a young man named Sanandana, who later became Padmapāda, and about whom Sringeri tells the story that when his teacher called him from across the Ganges he walked straight over the water, and a lotus rose under each step. The argument with himself is the more important, and it is one of the two or three stories about Sri Śaṅkara that everyone in India knows. Walking to the river one morning with his students, he met a caṇḍāla — a man of the lowest caste, an outcaste — coming the other way with his dogs, and, being a Brahmin of his time, told him to move aside. The man did not move. He asked a question instead: which do you want to move aside — the body, which is food made of food, the same in me and in you; or the Self, the one witness in every body, which cannot move at all? Is the sun reflected in the Ganges different from the sun reflected in a ditch? Sri Śaṅkara, the tradition says, bowed to the man in the road and answered in five verses, the Manīṣā Pañcakam, each of which ends by saying that whoever has that knowledge — caṇḍāla or Brahmin — is his teacher. The verses exist and are his; the story around them the tradition tells. It is told in his own tradition, about its own founder, against its own prejudice, and that is why it should be told here.

The writing the tradition places at Kāśī and, above all, at Badarī in the Himalaya — Badrinath, in today's Uttarakhand, at over three thousand metres, where he is said to have written the Brahma Sūtra commentary in the cave the pilgrims still visit and to have been visited there by an old Brahmin who argued with him for days over the meaning of a single sūtra and turned out to be Vyāsa, the author. Vyāsa, the story goes, approved the commentary and gave the young man, who had expected to live sixteen years, sixteen more to spread it. From Badarī the tradition brings him down to Prayāg, where Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, the greatest of the ritualists, was ending his life on a slow fire in penance for having learned the Buddhist doctrines under false pretences in order to refute them; Kumārila could not debate, and sent him to the man who could — his own pupil Maṇḍana Miśra, at Māhiṣmatī.

Māhiṣmatī, and a debate judged by a woman

Māhiṣmatī is Maheshwar, on the north bank of the Narmadā in Madhya Pradesh. The tradition says that Sri Śaṅkara, arriving, asked the way to Maṇḍana Miśra's house and was told to look for the house at whose gate the caged parrots argue about whether the Veda is self-evident and whether actions bear fruit of themselves; he found the parrots, and the house, and the householder in the middle of a śrāddha rite, and an argument began at once about whether a shaven-headed monk had any business at a ritual for the ancestors. It was agreed that they would debate properly, and that the judge should be Maṇḍana's wife, Ubhaya Bhāratī, whom both regarded as the most learned person present. She garlanded each disputant with fresh flowers and said that the garland that withered first would show whose argument had died. The debate, in the tradition's telling, ran for many days — the ritualist holding that the Veda exists to command action and that liberation is a result of works, the monk holding that it exists finally to remove ignorance and that no action can produce what is already the case — and at the end Maṇḍana's garland faded and he asked to be initiated. His wife then pointed out that a man is half his wife, that he had defeated only half of Maṇḍana, and questioned the young celibate on the science of love, on which he confessed he knew nothing; the tradition gives him a month to learn it, and tells an extravagant story of how he did. What matters historically is the result. Maṇḍana Miśra became Sri Sureśvara, wrote the great expansions of his teacher's commentaries on the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Taittirīya Upaniṣads and the Naiṣkarmyasiddhi on the uselessness of works for liberation, and was sent to head Śṛṅgeri. Scholars are not agreed that the philosopher Maṇḍana Miśra and Sureśvara were the same man; the tradition is, and this page reports the tradition's account as the tradition's.

Two things about this story are worth noticing rather than arguing over. The debate was on the ritualists' home ground, about their own texts, and was won by showing that the texts they lived by said something more than they had been reading in them; that is how every one of his commentaries proceeds. And the judge was a woman, in the eighth century, chosen by both men because she was the best-qualified person in the room, and she ruled against her own husband. The tradition that tells this is not the tradition of a man who despised either the world or the people in it.

What he wrote, and how he argued

The core of the work is three commentaries: on the principal Upaniṣads, on the Bhagavad Gītā, and on the Brahma Sūtras. Sringeri names exactly these and calls them definitive. Together the three texts commented on are called the prasthāna-traya, the three points of departure, and after Sri Śaṅkara no school of Vedanta could claim a hearing without commenting on all three. Rāmānuja did. Madhva did. Nimbārka did. They disagreed with him at length, and the fact that they had to structure their disagreement around his choice of texts is the measure of what he achieved.

The Brahma Sūtra commentary is the long one, and it is where the method is clearest. It is not a sermon. It is a legal argument. An opponent's position is stated fairly and at length, then answered from the texts and from reasoning, and the reader is left to judge. Whole sections exist only to demolish readings that nobody today has heard of. He is not writing to inspire. He is writing to close a loophole.

Underneath the argument there are a few moves that the rest of the tradition simply inherited.

The first is the distinction between what a text is trying to tell you and the picture it uses to tell you. Statements about the world are not descriptions of an independent reality to be catalogued; they are means of knowledge aimed at removing a specific error.

The second is the error in question. We do not begin life with a false belief we can find and correct. We begin with something more basic: a running confusion of the one who is aware with the thing being noticed — the body, the passing mood, the job title, the story about ourselves. Sri Śaṅkara's word for this mix-up is superimposition, and the standard illustration, so common in the tradition that it has become shorthand, is the rope taken for a snake at dusk. The fear is real. The sweating is real. The snake is not. And what removes the fear is not courage, and not a change in the rope, but light.

The third is his account of levels. He does not say the world is nothing. He says that as long as the mistake holds, the world behaves with complete regularity and the ordinary means of knowing it work perfectly well. Physics is not overturned; the fire still burns you. What is displaced is the assumption that the whole show, including the person you take yourself to be, is the final layer.

The fourth is how the teaching gets delivered. Knowledge, not effort. Practices do not manufacture what you are; they clear the interference well enough for a statement about it to land. Which is why his short manuals are structured the way they are: definitions first, distinctions second, and then a single sentence you are meant to sit with.

It helps to have the shelf laid out. Of the commentaries, the tradition and modern scholarship agree on the core: the Brahma Sūtra bhāṣya; the Bhagavad Gītā bhāṣya; and commentaries on the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, Chāndogya, Taittirīya, Aitareya, Īśā, Kena, Kaṭha, Praśna, Muṇḍaka and Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣads, the last together with Sri Gauḍapāda's Kārikā. The one independent treatise whose authorship is not seriously questioned is the Upadeśasāhasrī, "A Thousand Teachings," in prose and verse, which contains the only extended portrait of how he actually taught a student face to face. Around these stands a much larger body of short manuals attributed to him — Ātmabodha, Vivekacūḍāmaṇi, Aparokṣānubhūti, Vākyavṛtti, Tattvabodha, Dṛg-dṛśya-viveka, Pañcīkaraṇa, the Daśaślokī and many more — about which scholars argue and the tradition does not; several are almost certainly by later teachers of the school writing in his name, as was the custom, and none the worse for it. Sringeri's Advaita Sharada portal, linked below, publishes the Sanskrit texts of the commentaries with the classical sub-commentaries — Vācaspati's Bhāmatī, the Ratnaprabhā, Ānandagiri's glosses — so that a reader can see, for the first time on a screen, the whole conversation the tradition has had with itself for twelve centuries.

The walking

The tradition's picture of Sri Śaṅkara is not of a scholar at a desk. Sringeri says plainly that he travelled the length and breadth of India on foot, and the geography of what he set up backs that up. He established four seats at the four directions: Śṛṅgeri in the south, Purī in the east, Dvārakā in the west, and the Jyotir seat at Badrinath in the north.

Then he did something that would be politically interesting in any century. He cross-posted the people. Sri Sureśvara, from the north, went south to Śṛṅgeri. Sri Toṭaka, from the south, went north to Badrinath. Sringeri's own record adds that he ordained that priests from Kerala should serve at Badrinath in the far north, brahmins from Karnataka at Paśupatinātha in Nepal, and priests from Maharashtra at Rāmeśvaram in the deep south. Read those four arrangements together and the intent is unmistakable: a country that had been arguing itself into fragments was to be stitched together by making each region's worship depend on another region's people.

The travels, as the tradition orders them

There is no eighth-century itinerary, and the traditional biographies — the Śaṅkara Digvijaya attributed to Mādhava, which Sringeri follows, and the others — differ in order and in detail. What follows is the shape most of them share. From Kaladi north, on foot, to the Narmadā and Sri Govinda at Oṃkāreśvara. From there to Kāśī, and up into the Himalaya to Badarī, for the writing. Down to Prayāg for Kumārila, and to Māhiṣmatī for Maṇḍana. Then south with his disciples to the Tuṅgā river in the hills of what is today Karnataka's Chikkamagaluru district, where, the tradition says, he saw a cobra spreading its hood to shade a frog in labour from the noon sun, judged that a place where natural enemies behaved so must be fit for a seat of learning, and founded Śṛṅgeri, installing an image of Śāradā, the goddess of learning, and leaving Sri Sureśvara in charge. Back to Kaladi, when he knew by inner sense that his mother was dying, to perform her rites as he had promised, and to be refused help by his own community for doing so; the tradition says he cremated her alone, with plantain stems for firewood, in the yard of her house. Then the great circuit: south to Rāmeśvaram; to Kāñcī, where the tradition credits him with installing the Śrīcakra before the goddess Kāmākṣī and softening the fierce form of her worship; to Purī on the east coast and Dvārakā on the west, where the second and third seats were set — the biographies differ on which came first; and, in most accounts, to Kashmir, to the temple of Śāradā, where he ascended the seat reserved for the all-knowing after answering the questions put to him from every school. Finally to Badarī again, to found the northern seat and to arrange that Nambūdiri priests from his own Kerala should serve the shrine there — which they do to this day, and which Sringeri records as his doing — and on to Kedārnāth, where, at thirty-two, he is said to have walked up beyond the temple into the snow and not come back. The Kāñcī tradition places his end at Kāñcī, and a Kerala tradition at Thrissur; this page follows Sringeri, as it does throughout, and notes that the question is open.

Read as geography, the circuit is the shape of India: the four cardinal shrines, the two great rivers, the Himalaya and the southern sea, tied together by one man's feet. That is exactly how the tradition means it to be read. Whatever the eighth-century facts, the eleventh-century and every later century understood that he had drawn a line around the country and called what was inside it one thing.

What he was up against

Three kinds of resistance, and none of them trivial.

Outside the Vedic fold there were the Buddhist and Jain schools, at that point intellectually dominant in much of the country, with centuries of refined logic behind them. He engaged them directly and in detail.

Inside it there were the ritualists, who held that scripture exists to prescribe action, and that the knowledge sections at the end of the Veda were subordinate to it. This was the argument closest to home, and the tradition records it as personal as well as philosophical: he is said to have debated Sri Maṇḍana Miśra, the most formidable exponent of that view, at length, and to have made a disciple of him. That disciple became Sri Sureśvara and went to Śṛṅgeri.

And there was the ordinary human resistance of institutions to a young man in his twenties telling them they had missed the point. Consider also what a strictly non-dual teaching sounds like to anyone whose devotional life is the best thing in it — which brings us to the part of his output that is usually left out of the summaries.

The hymns

The same author wrote Bhaja Govindam, whose refrain is a plain instruction to worship; the Dakṣiṇāmūrti Stotram, addressed to Śiva as the teacher who teaches without speaking; and hymns to the Goddess, to the river Ganges, and to Annapūrṇā, the one who gives food. There is no inconsistency to resolve here, and the tradition never treated it as one. The arguments do a job that hymns cannot do: they close off wrong readings. The hymns do a job the arguments cannot do: they keep the enquiry warm, and they carry the teaching to people who will never read a commentary. Anyone who presents Advaita as cold has not read its founder's poetry.

The sayings, and what they were for

Notice the register. The commentaries argue; the sayings are songs, and most of them are meant to be sung walking, which is how the tradition remembers them being composed. They were made for people who would never read the Brahma Sūtra bhāṣya, and they say in a line what it says in a thousand pages: that what you are is not what you have been taking yourself to be, that nothing you obtain will settle the matter, and that the knowledge which does settle it is available to anyone, of any birth, who wants it more than the alternatives. He wrote the arguments so that the songs could not be misread. He wrote the songs so that the arguments would be sung.

The books, and how to read them

Do not start with the Brahma Sūtra commentary. Start with Tattvabodha, the short catechism of terms attributed to him, which every teacher in this lineage puts first because it gives you the vocabulary — the three bodies, the five sheaths, the three states, the definition of the seeker — in a dozen pages; then Ātmabodha, sixty-eight verses, which uses the vocabulary. Then the Upadeśasāhasrī, especially the prose chapters, where a student comes to a teacher and is talked, question by question, out of the belief that he is the body; this is the only place you will see the method rather than its results, and it is his own. Then the Gītā commentary — chapters two, thirteen and eighteen first — where he argues with the text's other readers in the margins. Then the Māṇḍūkya with Sri Gauḍapāda's Kārikā, the shortest Upaniṣad and the hardest, with the commentary that ties him to the line before him. And only then the Brahma Sūtra bhāṣya, beginning with the preamble on superimposition — four pages that the whole tradition has spent twelve centuries reading — and the first four sūtras, which are a course in themselves. Swami Gambhirananda's English translations of the Brahma Sūtra bhāṣya and of the eight Upaniṣads with commentary (Advaita Ashrama) are the standard; Swami Madhavananda's Vivekacūḍāmaṇi and Swami Jagadananda's Upadeśasāhasrī are the same publisher's. For the Sanskrit, with the sub-commentaries, Sringeri's Advaita Sharada portal, linked below, is now the primary source anywhere in the world, and it is free. For the life, Sringeri's own page, also linked, is the account this page follows; read it before any modern biography, because every modern biography is an argument with it.

The timeline, plainly

• Born at Kaladi, on the Periyar in present-day Kerala; the Sringeri tradition dates his life 788 to 820.
• Loses his father young; takes renunciation as a boy, against his mother's first refusal.
• Travels north and accepts Sri Govinda Bhagavatpāda on the Narmadā as his teacher, in the line from Sri Gauḍapāda.
• At Kāśī: the first disciples, among them Sanandana, later Sri Padmapāda; the meeting with the outcaste in the road and the Manīṣā Pañcakam.
• Writes the commentaries on the Upaniṣads, the Gītā and the Brahma Sūtras, together with the shorter manuals and the hymns.
• At Badarī, in the tradition's account, the Brahma Sūtra commentary is completed and approved by Vyāsa.
• At Prayāg, meets Kumārila Bhaṭṭa; at Māhiṣmatī, debates Sri Maṇḍana Miśra with Ubhaya Bhāratī as judge; Maṇḍana becomes Sri Sureśvara.
• Debates across the country on foot, including the ritualist school on its own ground.
• Establishes four monastic seats at the four corners of India and installs his principal disciples across regions.
• Founds Śṛṅgeri on the Tuṅgā and leaves Sri Sureśvara there; returns to Kaladi to cremate his mother; the circuit through Rāmeśvaram, Kāñcī, Dvārakā, Purī, Kashmir and Badarī; Sri Toṭaka installed in the north.
• Completes the work by about the age of thirty-two; the Sringeri account, followed here, places his departure at Kedārnāth. Other traditions name Kāñcī or Thrissur.

Why he still matters on an ordinary Tuesday

Two things, and neither of them requires any belief.

First, the method. He will not let you accept a conclusion you have not tested, and he will not let a technical term stand in for an experience. Every key move in his writing is put as an argument you are invited to attack. That is unusual in religious literature in any language, and it is the reason a sceptical reader can get further with Sri Śaṅkara than with almost any devotional author.

Second, the diagnosis. His claim is that the trouble is not a shortage of achievements, health, money or approval, but a case of mistaken identity that no amount of those things can touch — which is why the next thing you get never settles it. You can check that against your own week. Notice how fast the relief from the last good thing wore off, and whether anything you have ever obtained stayed decisive. That observation is where his enquiry starts, and it does not ask you to take his word for anything.

A note on the pictures

No portrait of Sri Śaṅkara from his own time exists, or could. The face the world knows — the young monk with the shaven head, the staff and the water-pot, seated with four disciples under a tree — is a convention settled in the paintings and sculptures of the maṭhas over many centuries, and made universal by the popular prints of the last hundred years. Sringeri's site shows the images its own tradition venerates, and they are linked below. The picture at the head of this page is that convention as the painter Raja Ravi Varma rendered it more than a century ago — the young ācārya with four disciples by the water, public domain and credited on the credits page — and it is offered as the tradition's image of him, not as a likeness. Nobody knows what he looked like, and this site does not manufacture a face for him: a machine-made portrait of a man of whom no likeness survives would be an invention presented as a record, and this site does not do that. The map above is drawn programmatically from the places the traditional biographies name, on today's India, and it is labelled as the tradition's map rather than as history.