Toṭakāchārya

The full-length study of this teacher is still being written. What is below is the complete short life, and it is accurate as far as it goes.

The life

He was Giri, son of Viśvanātha Adhvarī, and for a long time he was the disciple nobody rated. While the others sat in the lecture, he was fetching, carrying and washing; the accounts say Padmapāda and the rest took him for slow. It is a completely recognisable situation in any place where people are ranked by how well they talk. The scene the tradition fixes on is at Śṛṅgeri, in the Karnataka hills, at the water's edge where he had taken his teacher's clothes to wash. Śaṅkara, waiting for him, gave him the whole of the scriptures — silently, as the maṭha's own account puts it, through yogic power. He came back from the river and spoke, on the spot, eight verses in the difficult toṭaka metre, each ending in an appeal to his teacher's grace. Hence the name he has carried ever since: the man of the toṭaka verses. He also left the Śruti Sāra Samuddharaṇam, some 179 verses drawing out the essential teaching of the Upaniṣads — not the work of someone who had understood nothing. And he was made head of the seat founded at Badari, in the Himalaya on the pilgrim road to Badrīnāth, at the opposite end of India from the river where he had been washing clothes. The tradition keeps this story deliberately. It is the counter-example to the assumption that the fastest student is the one who arrives.

The turn it rests on

Service, not scholarship, turned out to be the qualification.

What was taught

Remembered for the Toṭakāṣṭakam, eight verses in praise of his teacher, composed spontaneously.