Sri Vācaspati Miśra

The man

He is the one great teacher of Advaita who was never a monk. Sri Vācaspati Miśra was a householder of Mithilā, in the north of what is now Bihar, married, learned, and in the service of a king whose name he recorded and whom no historian has since been able to find. He wrote on every school of Indian philosophy that a Brahmin of his day was expected to know — on logic, on ritual exegesis, on Sāṅkhya, on Yoga, on the theory of meaning — and in each of those schools his book became the standard book, so that a student of Nyāya and a student of Yoga today both read him without thinking of him as a Vedāntin at all. Then, last of all, and as an old man, he wrote a commentary on Sri Śaṅkara’s Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya, gave it his wife’s name, and in it founded one of the two lines along which Advaita has read its own master ever since. The Advaita Vedānta Anusandhana Kendra’s survey of the teachers after Sri Śaṅkara puts it plainly: “The name of vAcaspati miSra (9th century CE) stands out among the early post-Sankaran authors in the advaita tradition.” And of his range: “His erudition made him famous as a sarvatantra-svatantra, a title of high respect in India.” A sarvatantra-svatantra is a man who is at home, and free, in every system.

The book is called the Bhāmatī, and the line is called the Bhāmatī school after it. The other line is the Vivaraṇa school, which reads Sri Śaṅkara through Sri Padmapāda’s Pañcapādikā as explained by Sri Prakāśātman; both have their pages on this site, and a reader who has read them will know the shape of the argument already. The two schools agree about the goal — that the Self is Brahman and that knowing this is freedom — and differ about the account one gives of the way there: where ignorance lives, whether there is one ignorance or many, whether the soul is a reflection of Brahman or a portion of it marked off, whether hearing the text is itself the means or only the beginning of a long meditation, and what the rituals do. On every one of those questions Sri Vācaspati gave the minority answer, and gave it first; and because he gave it with such learning, the minority answer has never gone away. The foreword to the 1933 English translation of his book, signed from Andhra University, says that “Vacaspati presents one great section of Advaita Vedanta and his Bhamati is second in importance only to Sankara’s Bhasya.”

He belongs on this site for a further reason. The tradition’s other great commentators were sannyāsins, men who had left the world and whose names were given to them at initiation; he was a Miśra, and the Anusandhana Kendra’s survey explains what the name tells us: “A general rule of thumb is that an author whose last name is miSra, or a variant of upAdhyAya, or dIkshita is a householder, while the names of sannyAsins are indicated by daSanAmI suffixes.” A reader who has a household, a livelihood and obligations, and who wonders whether Advaita is only for those who have left all that behind, may take some comfort from the fact that the most learned of Sri Śaṅkara’s early commentators had all three. The tradition itself took note of it, in its own way, by attaching to him a story about his marriage that has been told for a thousand years and that this page tells in its place.

And this page tries, as its companion pages do, not to pretend to know what nobody knows. There is no portrait of him and none is shown. There is no story of his birth or death. His village is disputed among four; his date is disputed by a hundred and thirty-five years; his king is unidentified; his teacher’s name is given differently by different witnesses; and one of his eight books has vanished so completely that, in the words of the 1933 translators, “not even a manuscript of which has been found so far”. This page gives every one of those uncertainties rather than choosing, and says where each piece of information comes from.

The sources, and how this page uses them

The Bhāmatī is a very long book, and only a part of it has been translated into English: the commentary on Sri Śaṅkara’s preface and on the first four sūtras, the catuḥ-sūtrī, edited and translated by S. S. Suryanarayana Sastri and C. Kunhan Raja of the University of Madras and published in 1933. That volume, with its long introduction on the man, his date, his works and his doctrine, and its notes drawing on the later Bhāmatī literature, is the principal source for this page, and it is linked at the foot of the page. Its introduction is quoted at length, and a reader should know what it is: not the Bhāmatī itself but a careful modern account of it by two scholars who had read the whole book in Sanskrit and its commentaries with it. Where this page says “the translators say,” it means them. The complete Sanskrit text of the Bhāmatī, printed with Sri Śaṅkara’s commentary and with the two great commentaries on the Bhāmatī itself, is also on the Internet Archive and is linked.

The second source is the tradition writing about him. The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭham hosts the chapter on him from Preceptors of Advaita, the volume edited by T. M. P. Mahadevan in 1968; the chapter lists his works and his commentators and sets out the first of the differences between his school and the Vivaraṇa. The version of the chapter on the Pīṭham’s website preserves that first difference in full, and the remaining differences only in its footnotes, so this page uses the 1933 introduction for the rest. The Śaṅkara-digvijaya of Mādhava, in Swami Tapasyananda’s translation, tells the one story the tradition tells about him, a prophecy of his birth, and this page gives it as the poem gives it. The Anusandhana Kendra’s survey of the later teachers places him in the sequence.

The third source is the modern history of Indian thought. Surendranath Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy, volume two (Cambridge, 1932), has a section on him that examines his date, his teachers, his works and his theory of ignorance, and it is quoted here on all four. A quite different modern history is used for his home: Dineshchandra Bhattacharya’s History of Navya-Nyāya in Mithilā, published posthumously by the Mithila Institute at Darbhanga in 1958, whose first chapter treats him as the greatest of the logicians of Mithilā before Udayana and gathers the local traditions about his village, his patron and his date. It is the only source this page has found that argues the case for a tenth-century date in detail, and it is quoted for that argument. A scan of it made by a Government of India cultural institution is on the Internet Archive and is linked.

The fourth source is a critic. Swami Satchidānandendra Saraswatī’s Method of the Vedanta, in A. J. Alston’s English translation, devotes its tenth chapter to the Bhāmatī, summarising its positions with page references before disputing them from the standpoint of a man who held that Sri Vācaspati had read Sri Maṇḍana Miśra’s ideas into Sri Śaṅkara’s text. Because he quotes the book so exactly before disagreeing with it, his chapter is also one of the best guides in English to what the book says beyond the four sūtras, and this page uses it for both purposes, giving his disagreement its own section as one view.

Nothing on this page is invented. Every passage in quotation marks is copied from one of these sources and can be checked through the links at the foot of the page. The sources were read from scanned copies, and where the machine has misread a letter the printed word has been restored in the quotations and the correction recorded. The 1933 translators write Sanskrit in the transliteration of their day, with an apostrophe for the sound ś — “S’ruti,” “Is’vara” — and the Anusandhana Kendra in a keyboard scheme of its own; both have been left as they stand. No modern encyclopaedia has been used, and no picture is shown, for reasons given in the note near the end.

Where the life was lived

The map below has pins on it, which its companion for Sri Prakāśātman does not, but a reader should know how little they rest on. No source records a journey. Sri Vācaspati is not said to have gone anywhere, met anyone, or founded anything; he is a man who stayed at home and wrote. The pins mark the region the evidence points to, and the evidence is of a curious kind: not a biography but a way of speaking, a word for a wooden frame, a remark about cooking oil, and the notes of a nineteenth-century poet. The 1958 history states the conclusion first and the grounds after: “Vacaspati undoubtedly belonged to Mithila. We mention two local traditions. According to some he belonged to the village Makaranda in Mithila.” The second tradition is a note left by Chanda Jha, the poet of Mithilā, placing him in a village whose name the scan of the book has not preserved, in a pargana that was by 1958 in Saharsa district on the eastern edge of Darbhanga; and the history adds that “There is a couplet of Chanda Jha, where eight adjacent villages, including Badagam, are mentioned as the place of Vacaspati”. The 1933 translators, for their part, report that “It has also been said that in what corresponds to ancient Mithila there is a city called Bhama (Bhamati) and a tank of the same name.” So there are four candidate villages — Makaranda, Badagām, Bhāma and the poet’s unnamed one — and none of them is pinned, because none of them can be placed on a modern map with confidence.

What can be placed is the region, and the grounds for it are worth giving because they are the kind of evidence that survives when a man tells us nothing about himself. The translators write: “That our author belonged to somewhere in Behar or Bengal would appear to be evident from the repeated reference to mustard oil.” The 1958 history adds two more marks of the same kind. In one passage of the Bhāmatī he uses an unusual word, which the Kalpataru explains as a wooden frame with holes in which a criminal’s leg is fastened, and the history notes that “In this peculiar sense the word is still used in Mithila.” And it concludes: “There cannot be any doubt that Vacaspati was a native of Eastern India”, suggesting that he “lived somewhere between Pataliputra in Magadha and Silahrada in Bengal”. Mithilā — the country north of the Ganga between the Gaṇḍak and the Kosi, with Darbhanga and Madhubani at its heart — was for a thousand years after him the greatest home of Nyāya learning in India, and the 1958 history is the history of that learning; it treats him as its first great name. The pins, then, mark Mithilā as a region, the Saharsa side of it where the poet’s note places him, and Pāṭaliputra as the western limit the history suggests; and the caption says so.

What the book says about its author: a king, a list, and the gods

Almost everything that can be said about Sri Vācaspati from his own hand comes from the opening and closing verses of the Bhāmatī, and it is worth setting out exactly what they contain. The closing verses name a king. Dasgupta reports: “Vacaspati says at the end of his Bhamati commentary that he wrote that work when the great king Nrga was reigning. This king, so far as the present writer is aware, has not yet been historically traced.” The 1958 history reads the two verses of the panegyric closely and draws a portrait from them: “It appears that this monarch of holy renown has then reached the peak of his glory, his exemplary life providing an unattainable ideal for contemporary kings. There is no direct reference here to his military success, which must have ended long ago.” It records a local tradition — “We heard a tradition in Mithila that Nrga belonged to the Gupta dynasty.” — and speculates that the king may also be the “Ādiśūra” of Bengali genealogies, with the honesty to call that tempting rather than proved. The 1933 translators report a different identification: “While it is held by some that this king has not yet been identified, others believe him to have been a king of Mithila, a predecessor of Nanyadeva, who reigned about 1019 Vikrama Era, i.e., A.D. 962 ; it is said that this predecessor is named in some inscriptions as Kiratadhipati, and Kiratas are well known to be those who had human vehicles.” The point of the last clause is that the name Nṛga can be read as “one who has a human vehicle,” and so as a poetic name for a king of the Kirātas. None of this is settled, and this page does not settle it. What is certain is that Sri Vācaspati wrote under a king and thanked him, which is more than most Advaita writers tell us about their circumstances.

The closing verses also list his works, and the list is the foundation of everything later writers say about his range. Dasgupta: “Bhamati was Vacaspati’s last great work; for in the colophon at the end of the Bhamati he says that he had already written his Nyaya-kanika, Tattva-samiksa, Tattva-bindu and other works on Nyaya, Samkhya and Yoga.” The full list is given in the next section but one.

The opening verses name gods, and one of those names has been mistaken for a teacher. The fourth verse, in the 1933 translation, reads: “We render obeisance to Martanda, to Tilakasvamin, and to Mahaganapati, who are worthy of universal adoration and are the dispensers of all fulfilment.” Dasgupta explains the difficulty: “In his commentary called Bhamati he offers salutation to Martanda-tilaka-svamin, which has been understood to refer to his teacher. But Amalananda in commenting thereon rightly points out that this word is a compound of the two names Martanda and Tilakasvamin, belonging to gods adored with a view to the fruition of one’s actions.” Mārtaṇḍa is the sun; Tilakasvāmin, Dasgupta says, is explained in the law-books as a name of Kārttikeya, the war-god. So the verse salutes the sun, Skanda and Gaṇapati, and a reader who meets the claim that Sri Vācaspati’s teacher was “Mārtaṇḍa-tilaka-svāmin” should know that the tradition’s own commentator rejected it seven centuries ago.

His actual teachers are named elsewhere, and the witnesses do not agree. Dasgupta: “Udayana, however, in his Nyaya-varttika-tatparya-parisuddhi (p. 9), a commentary on Vacaspati’s Tatparya-tika, refers to one Trilocana as being the teacher of Vacaspati”, and Sri Vācaspati himself, Dasgupta adds, refers to “Trilocana-guru” in his Nyāya commentary and follows him on a point of interpretation. But “It is however interesting to note that in the Nyaya-kanika (verse 3) he refers to the author of the Nyaya-manjari (in all probability Jayanta) as his teacher”. So two logicians, Trilocana and Jayanta, are named as his teachers in logic, and no teacher at all is named for his Vedānta. The 1958 history, which knows the Nyāya sources best, calls him Trilocana’s pupil throughout. This page reports both names and does not choose.

The verses at the head of the Bhāmatī are eight in number in the 1933 translation. The first salutes Brahman, and is quoted in the section on his teaching about ignorance; the second says of the Lord that “The Vedas are His breath, His glance the five elements, the (universe) movable and immovable is His smile, His sleep is the final deluge.” The sixth turns to the master: “Having rendered obeisance to S’ankara, of wisdom pure, of grace the ocean, we (proceed to) analyse the clear (yet) deep commentary written by him.” And the seventh is the one verse in which he speaks of himself, and it is a verse of humility: “As the waters of a highway are purified by falling into the current of the Ganges, even so are the lowly words of those like us, by their conjunction with the work of the Master.”

When he lived: one date, two readings

Sri Vācaspati is one of the few early Advaita writers who gives a date, and the date has been read two ways a hundred and thirty-five years apart. Dasgupta states the common reading: “In his Nyaya-suci-nibandha he gives his date as 898 (vasv-anka-vasu-vatsare), which in all probability has to be understood as of the Vikrama-samvat, and consequently he can safely be placed in a.d. 842.” The 1933 translators concur: “On the strength of a reference in the Nyayasucinibandha, it is now generally admitted that Acarya Vacaspati Misra belongs to the period round about A.D. 841-842 (898 Vikrama Era).” And the Kanchi chapter follows Dasgupta in placing him in the first half of the ninth century, as does the Anusandhana Kendra with its “9th century CE.” The card for this teacher on this site has long said “ninth to tenth century,” and a reader may now see why.

The other reading takes the same number, 898, as a year of the Śaka era, which begins seventy-eight years after the Christian one where the Vikrama era begins fifty-seven years before it. The difference is a hundred and thirty-five years. The 1958 history argues this case at length and, so far as this page has found, alone; its argument is worth summarising because it is the only detailed one on either side. It observes that Sri Maṇḍana Miśra, whom Sri Vācaspati follows so closely, cannot be placed before about 800, since the Tibetan historians of the Pāla dynasty date the death of Kumārila, whom Sri Maṇḍana followed, to the early eighth century; that Sri Vācaspati distinguishes an “old” from a “new” school of Prabhākara, the new school being that of Śālikanātha, who came long after Sri Maṇḍana and must have preceded Sri Vācaspati; that he refutes Sri Bhāskara, Sri Śaṅkara’s opponent; that the logician Śrīdhara, whom the history places in the late tenth century and who knew Sri Maṇḍana’s work well, shows no knowledge of his; that he answers arguments of Bhāsarvajña and Vyomaśiva, the latter dated about 950; and that the earliest writers to quote or attack him, the Buddhist Jñānaśrī and Udayana’s teacher Śrīvatsa, belong to the first half of the eleventh century. From all this it concludes: “The earliest date that can be assigned to Vacaspati is 900 A.D. about a century after Mandana.” It reads the small Nyāya tract in which the date occurs as a supplement to his great Nyāya commentary, composed with it “in 898 Saka i.e. 976-77” of our era. And it puts the objection to the earlier date in one sentence: on that reading “we must huddle together all the host of brilliant scholars that preceded Vacaspati just within half a century — Mandana, Sankara, Bhasarvajna, Trilocana, Salikanatha, Vyomasiva &c. &c. On the face of it is an absurdity.”

This page cannot judge between the two readings, and should say why. The argument turns on the dates of a dozen other writers, each of them disputed, and on whether a Brahmin of Mithilā in the ninth or tenth century would have dated a book by the Vikrama or the Śaka era; the sources this page has used do not settle either question, and a page that cannot examine the evidence should not pretend to. What can be said is this. The earlier date, 841–42, is the one the tradition’s own scholars and the standard histories have generally given, and it is the one on the card for this teacher; the later date, 976–77, is argued in detail by the one modern historian of his own region who examined the whole Nyāya literature around him, and the timeline below marks it as the alternative. On either date he wrote a century or more after Sri Śaṅkara, and before Sri Prakāśātman on the tradition’s dating of the latter; and on either date he is the first writer after Sri Śaṅkara to comment on the whole of the Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya whose commentary survives complete.

One consequence of the dispute should be noticed, because it bears on how the two schools of Advaita are pictured. If the earlier date is right, the Bhāmatī had the field to itself for a century before Sri Prakāśātman’s Vivaraṇa answered it, and the Vivaraṇa school is a response to the Bhāmatī. If the later date is right, the two men wrote within a generation of each other, and the two schools took shape together. The Kanchi chapter’s description — “The views of Padmapada as interpreted by Prakasatman in his Vivarana are known as the tenets of the Vivaranaprasthana” — is true on either date; the picture of two rivals face to face is not.

The story of the name Bhāmatī

The tradition tells one story about Sri Vācaspati, and it is a story about his marriage. The 1933 translators set it down as they heard it: “It may be interesting to note a story current in pandit-tradition about the name ‘Bhamati’.” Here it is in their words.

“In those days (as even today in parts of Upper India), it would appear to have been customary to hold learned discussions on such occasions as marriages. Vacaspati, who listened to such a discussion on the occasion of his own marriage, was so struck by the vagaries of dialecticians that he resolved straightaway to devote himself to the task of setting forth authoritative expositions of all the dars’anas. So great was his zeal, so mighty the task and such the patient and tireless devotion of his wife that the couple had grown old before Vacaspati could write finis to his labours. Then alone did Vacaspati realise the magnitude both of his neglect of his wife and of his wife’s self-sacrifice ; and as a tardy measure of reparation, he gave her name to the last and greatest of his works, so that she could live on perpetually in the Bhamati, though not in the bodies of children born of her.”

And then, with a scholar’s honesty about a scholar’s story: “The story is so picturesque, so typical of the scholar’s neglect and the true scholarly recompense, that it deserves to be true.” That is exactly the right weight to give it, and this page gives it no more. There is no early source for the story; the translators call it pandit-tradition, and the 1958 history, which also knows it, cites for it a Bengali journal article of 1904. Against it stands the other explanation the translators record in the same breath, that there is a town and a tank called Bhāma in Mithilā, so that the name may be a place-name and not a wife’s at all; and the plain fact that bhāmatī is a Sanskrit word meaning “the radiant one,” which is a fine name for a commentary whether or not it was also a woman’s. The card for this teacher on this site says that “the tradition says it carries his wife’s name,” and that is the most that can be said.

But the story has lasted for a reason, and the reason is not sentimental. It is the tradition’s own way of saying two true things about the man. The first is that he set out, deliberately and young, to write the authoritative account of every system — “all the dars’anas” — and did it, which no one else in the history of Indian philosophy has done. The second is that the Bhāmatī came last, at the end of a long life, as the crown of the rest; the colophon confirms this, and Swami Satchidānandendra, no friend of the book, confirms it from the internal evidence: “It is surmised that the works were written in this order, and that the gloss on Sri Sankara’s Brahma Sutra Commentary called the Bhamati was written last. The reason is that, if the books are placed in this order, the later ones are nowhere mentioned in the earlier ones.” A man who wrote the standard book on logic, the standard book on Sāṅkhya and the standard book on Yoga before he turned to Vedānta was a man who thought Vedānta should be approached with everything else already understood. The story of the wife who waited is the tradition’s way of honouring that, and of counting its cost.

A prophecy in the Digvijaya

The Śaṅkara-digvijaya of Mādhava, the fourteenth-century poem that is the tradition’s best-loved life of Sri Śaṅkara, does not tell Sri Vācaspati’s life; he was born too late for that. But it brings him into the master’s story by a prophecy, and the passage is the one place where the tradition has said anything about him in the form of a story. In the thirteenth canto Sri Sureśvara, the former Sri Maṇḍana Miśra, has asked leave to write the commentary on the master’s Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya; the other disciples have objected that a former ritualist would turn the commentary into a book about ritual; the permission has been withdrawn, and Sri Sureśvara has been consoled with the two Upaniṣad commentaries instead; Sri Padmapāda has written the Pañcapādikā. Then, the poem says, the master looked at the planets and spoke privately to Sri Sureśvara:

“Owing to your Prarabdha you will have another birth as Vachaspati, when you will write an extensive exposition of the commentaries on the Sutras. That work will be the guide for men to understand the meaning of the commentary for all time.”

And the translator adds, in his own voice: “This work of Vachaspati is the famous text the Bhamati, which is to this day studied by all serious students of Sankara’s Sutra-bhashya.” On this telling, Sri Vācaspati is Sri Sureśvara reborn, and the Bhāmatī is the commentary Sri Sureśvara was not allowed to write, completed in another body. It is a beautiful idea. It explains why the greatest of Sri Śaṅkara’s direct disciples left no commentary on the master’s greatest book; it explains why the Pañcapādikā breaks off after four sūtras while the Bhāmatī runs to the end; and it gives the householder from Mithilā a place in the master’s own circle.

This page reports it as what it is, a poem’s explanation, and gives the tradition’s own sharpest critic his say. Swami Satchidānandendra, who quotes the whole episode with the canto and verse numbers, writes: “It is surely obvious that all we have here in the Sankara Vijaya is a bit of poetic sleight-of-hand intended to excite wonder in the reader’s mind and supply some kind of reason why the Pancapadika in its current form should be limited to only four Sutras, whereas Vacaspati’s gloss on the Brahma Sutra Commentary is complete”. His decisive argument is not about miracles but about doctrine: “Nor is there any particular similarity between the systems of Suresvara and Vacaspati in the way they handle problems, even on the most important topics.” A reader who has looked at Sri Sureśvara’s page on this site will see the force of that; Sri Sureśvara held that hearing the sentence is itself the means and that ignorance rests in the Self, and Sri Vācaspati held neither. Whether a soul can carry a curse across a birth is not a question this page can answer. Whether the Bhāmatī is the book Sri Sureśvara would have written is a question the two books answer for themselves, and the answer is no. The tradition may hold both things, that the poem is true and that the two men taught differently; this page says only that the story is the poem’s, and that the histories know nothing of it.

The works: a master of every school

The colophon of the Bhāmatī lists the works Sri Vācaspati had written before it, and every account of him begins from the list. The Kanchi chapter gives it in full: “the Nyayakanika (a commentary on Mandana’s Vidhiviveka), the Brahmatattvasamiksha (a commentary on Mandana’s Brahmasiddhi), the Tattvabindu (a discussion of language in its relation to meaning), the Nyayavartikatatparyatika (a commentary on Udyotakara’s Nyayavartika), the Nyayasuchinibandha (perhaps written as a supplement to the Tatparyatika), the Sankhyatattva-kaumudi (a commentary on Isvarakrishna’s Sankhyakarika), the Tattvavaisaradi (a commentary on Vyasa’s Yogabhashya), and the Bhamati (a commentary on Sankara’s Sarirakamimamsabhashya).” Eight books, then, on five systems, and it is worth going through them, because their range is the fact about him that everything else depends on.

• Nyāya-kaṇikā, “A Grain of Reasoning,” a commentary on Sri Maṇḍana Miśra’s Vidhi-viveka, a Mīmāṁsā treatise on the nature of a Vedic injunction. The 1958 history calls it his first work, and it is the book in which he names the author of the Nyāya-mañjarī as his teacher.
• Brahma-tattva-samīkṣā (also called Tattva-samīkṣā), “An Examination of the Truth about Brahman,” his commentary on Sri Maṇḍana’s Brahma-siddhi. This is the book that is lost. The Kanchi chapter says that “All the works have been published with the exception of the Brahmatattvasamiksha.” and the 1933 translators add that “not even a manuscript of which has been found so far”; Swami Satchidānandendra notes that “fragments of it are quoted in the Bhamati”. Its loss matters, because it was his one independent statement of Vedānta doctrine before the Bhāmatī, and Dasgupta says its absence makes “it is difficult to give an entirely satisfactory account of the special features of Vacaspati’s view of Vedanta”.
• Tattva-bindu, “A Drop of Truth,” an independent treatise on how a sentence conveys its meaning. Dasgupta corrects an old error about it: “Aufrecht, referring to his work, Tattva-bindu, says that it is a Vedanta work. This is however a mistake, as the work deals with the sphota doctrines of sound, and has nothing to do with Vedanta.”
• Nyāya-vārttika-tātparya-ṭīkā, “A Gloss on the Purport of the Nyāya-vārttika,” his commentary on Uddyotakara’s commentary on the Nyāya-sūtra. This is his masterpiece in logic. The 1958 history says it earned him, in the field of Indian logic, the titles Ṭīkākāra and Tātparyācārya, both used by Udayana, and that its success drove every earlier commentary on the same texts out of existence. It is printed in the Vizianagram Sanskrit Series (Benares, 1898), and that edition is linked below.
• Nyāya-sūcī-nibandha, “An Index-Composition on the Nyāya,” a short tract fixing the order and number of the sūtras, which the Kanchi chapter and the translators take to be a supplement to the Tātparya-ṭīkā. It is the book that carries his date.
• Sāṅkhya-tattva-kaumudī, “Moonlight on the Truths of Sāṅkhya,” his commentary on Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṅkhya-kārikā. It is still the commentary through which the Kārikā is read; Gaṅgānātha Jhā’s English translation (1896) is linked below.
• Tattva-vaiśāradī, “Clarity on the Truth,” his commentary on the Yoga-bhāṣya attributed to Vyāsa on Patañjali’s Yoga-sūtra. It is translated in full in J. H. Woods’s Yoga-System of Patañjali (Harvard Oriental Series, 1914), linked below.
• Bhāmatī, his commentary on the whole of Sri Śaṅkara’s Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya, which the colophon says came last.

The 1958 history puts the significance of the list in one sentence: the work as a whole “raises Vacaspati to a position of supreme authority in all the five systems of Indian philosophy (omitting the Vaisesika which was ignored by him) — a position quite unique in the whole history of Indian culture.” Swami Satchidānandendra, from the other side of every argument, agrees about the fact: “This shows that the highly respected figure, Sri Vacaspati Misra, was thoroughly conversant with a number of different systems and inspired by a longing to explain them to others.” The Anusandhana Kendra lists the same works by system: “He is also well-known as a scholar who wrote authoritative treatises in various Indian philosophical traditions, including nyAya-vaiSeshika (nyAyasUcInibandha and tAtparyaTIkA), yoga (tattvavaiSAradI), mImAm.sA (nyAyakaNikA) and sAm.khya (tattvakaumudI), in addition to advaita vedAnta.”

Two things about the list deserve a reader’s attention. The first is that two of the eight books are commentaries on Sri Maṇḍana Miśra, and that both of them come first. Sri Maṇḍana was the great Mīmāṁsaka who, the tradition says, debated Sri Śaṅkara and became Sri Sureśvara; but he also wrote, apparently before or apart from that conversion, an independent Advaita treatise, the Brahma-siddhi, whose account of ignorance and of the means to knowledge differs from Sri Śaṅkara’s at several points. Sri Vācaspati commented on both of Sri Maṇḍana’s major works before he wrote a line on Sri Śaṅkara, and the 1933 translators state the consequence flatly: “Vacaspati owes the major part of what is distinctive in his teaching to Mandana’s Brahmasiddhi. But as the views starting with Padmapada are known as the tenets of the Vivarana-prasthana, the views that started with Mandana passed current as the tenets of the Bhamati-prasthana.” That is the key to the whole school, and the sections on his teaching will return to it again and again. The second thing is what the list leaves out. There is no Vaiśeṣika, as the history notes; there is no grammar; there is no Buddhist text, though he argued with the Buddhists in every book; and there is nothing on any Upaniṣad or on the Gītā. He commented on systems, not on scriptures, and when he came to Vedānta he commented on Sri Śaṅkara’s system rather than on the texts Sri Śaṅkara had commented on.

The book: what the Bhāmatī is, and how it works

The Bhāmatī is a commentary on Sri Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Brahma-sūtra: all four chapters, all five hundred and fifty-five sūtras, from the first word of the master’s preface on superimposition to the last sūtra on the non-return of the liberated. That completeness is its first distinction. Sri Padmapāda’s Pañcapādikā survives on the preface and four sūtras; Sri Sureśvara wrote no commentary on the bhāṣya at all; and no other complete commentary on it from the first centuries after Sri Śaṅkara has come down. When the tradition wanted to know what the master meant by a sentence in the third or fourth chapter, the Bhāmatī was for a long time the only place to look, and it has never ceased to be the first.

Its method is the second distinction, and Dasgupta describes it in a way that anyone who has read it will recognise: “As to the method of Vacaspati’s commentary, he always tries to explain the text as faithfully as he can, keeping himself in the background and directing his great knowledge of the subject to the elucidation of the problems which directly arise from the texts and to explaining the allusions and contexts of thoughts, objections and ideas of other schools of thought referred to in the text.” That is what a man who had already written the standard books on Nyāya, Sāṅkhya, Yoga and Mīmāṁsā could do that no one else could: when Sri Śaṅkara alludes in a phrase to a Sāṅkhya argument or a Naiyāyika objection, the Bhāmatī knows exactly which argument and which objection, states it fairly and in its own terms, and then shows what the master’s reply comes to. The reader is given the whole conversation of Indian philosophy in the margins of one book.

The third distinction is the one the critics fasten on, and it is fairly stated by the sharpest of them. Swami Satchidānandendra writes: “Another point is that, at many places in the Bhamati, on the pretext of giving a gloss on Sri Sankara’s Commentary, the author actually introduces the ideas of Mandana as though they were those of the revered Commentator.” And then, in an image that has become famous: “Here the current of Mandana’s thought is made to flow into that of Sri Sankara like the Jumna flowing into the Ganges. And the two ways of thinking are blended together to issue in a new system, given out in the world for the first time in the Bhamati, in a form attractive to spiritual enquirers.” A follower of the Bhāmatī school would put the same fact differently: that Sri Vācaspati brought to the reading of Sri Śaṅkara the most rigorous Advaita treatise written outside Sri Śaṅkara’s own circle, and used it to answer questions the master had left open. But the fact itself is agreed on all sides, and the translators’ verdict — that he owes the major part of what is distinctive in him to the Brahma-siddhi — is not in dispute. Even the critic ends by saying that “So those who want to be sure about the method of the Vedanta through a study of the Brahma Sutra Commentary must certainly enquire into the Bhamati.”

One more circumstance shaped the book, and Swami Satchidānandendra is again the one who names it: “We have to infer that at the time the Bhamati was composed the school of Bhaskara had acquired wide currency at the expense of the school of pure Advaita.” Sri Bhāskara, who wrote his own commentary on the Brahma-sūtra not long after Sri Śaṅkara, taught that the soul and the world are both different from Brahman and identical with it, and argued at length against the doctrine that the world is the product of ignorance. Much of the Bhāmatī is an answer to him, and the answer is why the book’s treatment of difference and of the seat of ignorance is so elaborate. The critic grants the result: “The effect of the appearance of Vacaspati’s Bhamati sub-commentary was to undermine the authority of Bhaskara’s doctrine of Difference in Identity.” Sri Bhāskara’s school has its place on this site’s page on the other schools, and the reader is asked to hold it in respect; the point here is only that the Bhāmatī was written with a living opponent in view, and that this explains its shape.

The 1933 translators note a few verbal borrowings from Sri Padmapāda too: “Vacaspati draws largely on the Brahmasiddhi, and sometimes on the Pancapadika, wherever necessary or possible.” The two books were not yet two schools when he wrote; the schools were made by the commentators who came after both.

What he taught: scripture with a purport, and the place of reason

The Bhāmatī begins, as Sri Śaṅkara begins, with the question of what can be known and how, and its first teaching concerns the authority of the Upaniṣads. The 1933 translators put its foundation in a paragraph that is worth reading slowly: “For Vacaspati, as for all adherents of any orthodox school of Indian Philosophy, Revealed Scripture (S’ruti) is the final authority in matters of the Spirit. The Spirit (or Intelligence, Consciousness, the Universal Self, Brahman) is that whereby knowledge is possible ; it is itself knowledge. It cannot, without losing its self-hood, become an object of knowledge. It is manifest, since but for its manifestation the whole world would be blind. But it is not manifested by another, since that would lead only to an infinite series of the blind leading the blind. It is self-luminous and self-manifest.” Perception, which lives by the light of consciousness, cannot make consciousness its object; inference, which depends on perceived regularities, still less. So Brahman can be known only from the scripture that speaks of it, and then only in an intuition for which the scripture prepares. “The supreme pramana is Scripture, though it may and indeed has to be helped by reasoning, as an auxiliary, in order to remove the doubts that assail the mind.”

But the authority is not claimed for every sentence of the Veda. This is the first point that is distinctively his, and the translators state it: “Authority is claimed by Vacaspati not for all Scripture as such, but only for purportful Scripture.” The Veda contains restatements, explanations and praises that have no authority of their own, and the question of what a passage is for — its tātparya, its purport — is decided by the six marks the Mīmāṁsakas had worked out: the harmony of the beginning and the end, repetition, novelty, fruitfulness, praise and blame, and intelligibility in the light of reason. Sri Vācaspati, who had written the standard commentary on a Mīmāṁsā treatise, applied the six marks to the Upaniṣads and found that their purport is non-duality. The translators give his reading of the Chāndogya: it begins by premising a single reality without a second, identifies that reality with the pupil in the words “That thou art,” repeats the teaching nine times, states something that could not be known otherwise, promises the fruit of release, praises the knowledge and blames its opposite, and can be shown to stand to reason. The Sanskrit tag the translators cite is his own: purportful scripture, not scripture as such, is stronger than perception.

The place of reason follows, and it is larger than the doctrine of scriptural authority might suggest. The translators, who were philosophers, noticed this: “Though the application of reason figures but as one of the marks of purport, it will be seen on closer examination that reason really plays a much more important part.” Which passage is the beginning and which the end, what counts as purportful repetition, what is really novel, what is praised and by which passage — all of these are decided by reasoning, so that “the authoritarianism of the advaitin is unphilosophical only on the face of it, involving as it does the abundant exercise of reason. True, he says reason finds a place only in so far as it does not conflict with Scripture ; but in the end, reason itself has to judge when it conflicts with Scripture and when it does not.” That is the working method of the whole Bhāmatī, and it is why a book that declares scripture supreme is from beginning to end a book of arguments.

Two objections are met at the outset, and a reader today may find them the most useful part. First: how can scripture override perception, which shows a world of many things and is our earliest and most basic instrument? The answer is that perception is earlier but not basic, and that in every case of correction it is the earlier cognition that yields: “Where a subsequent cognition arises validly, and it cannot arise except as sublating what goes before, the earlier cognition should necessarily be taken to be sublated ; for example, the cognition of nacre could not arise, if the original cognition as silver persisted ; hence, the nacre-cognition is admitted to sublate the earlier silver-cognition.” Scripture’s knowledge arises later and does not depend on perception’s being true; so, as the translators put it, “the priority of perception would of itself be an argument for its sublation by the subsequently resulting Scriptural knowledge”. Second: does not scripture itself depend on perception, since words and their meanings must first be perceived? The answer is that words need only empirical, not absolute, reality to do their work: “Sounds and their senses are but manifesters of knowledge which is eternal. The former need not and indeed cannot be co-eternal with the latter ; so long as they exist and manifest knowledge, their function is fulfilled ; an insistence on their absolute reality is vain and unreasonable.” The ladder need not be made of the same stuff as the roof.

What he taught: why difference cannot be real

The heart of the Bhāmatī’s argument for non-duality is not an appeal to scripture but a piece of reasoning about the notion of difference, and the translators are clear about where it came from: “For the dialectic on difference, Vacaspati is indebted to Mandana, most of whose arguments are found briefly summarised in the Bhamati.” The argument deserves to be given in full, because it is the tool with which the Bhāmatī school met every opponent, and because it is unusually clear.

“The principal argument, which will bear repetition here, is that difference cannot be real, since it can be neither of the nature of things nor an attribute of them. If difference were of the very nature of things, there would be no things to be different ; for, whatever you may say is one thing will immediately break up, because difference is of its nature ; similarly of each of its parts ; you cannot rest even in the primal atom ; there is nothing which can be treated as a unit and in” “the absence of any unit there can be no difference either. If, then, difference be said to be an attribute, is this attribute different from its substrate ? If not, it is of its very nature, and we have really the former alternative alone. If the attribute is different, then we have three units on our hands, the substrate, the difference which is its attribute and the difference of the attribute from the substrate. And the moment we start inquiring into the relation of this difference to the substrate on the one hand and the attribute on the other, we are launched on an infinite regress. The notion of difference then is unintelligible, and since it pre-supposes the identity at least of a unit that is different, it is reasonable to hold that difference is superimposed on a basis of identity.”

The argument is aimed at every philosophy that takes plurality as the last word, but its sharpest edge is turned toward Sri Bhāskara’s view that identity and difference are both real, the view the translators call bheda-abheda. Their summary of Sri Vācaspati’s reply uses the old example of the goldsmith: “A crown and a bracelet, it is said, are different and yet non-different, different as products, but non-different in respect of their cause, gold. But if they are really non-different, he who wants a crown must be satisfied with the bracelet ; if you say that there is difference too between crown and bracelet, then there must be difference between bracelet and gold also, since crown and gold are non-different.” The conclusion is not that difference is never experienced — plainly it is — but that experience of it is no proof of its reality: “Identity may be found only with difference, but philosophy cannot stop with juxtaposing them ; either should be taken to be more fundamental than the other, and the advaitin has shown sufficient cause for not treating difference as fundamental.”

Does perception itself, then, show difference? Sri Vācaspati’s answer is a theory of perception, and a subtle one. Determinate perception, the perception that says “this is a pot, that is a cloth,” does appear to grasp difference; but it is preceded by an indeterminate perception that does not, and the distinctions are introduced afterwards into “the single positive undifferentiated continuum presented by indeterminate perception”. What is first given is one; the many is what the mind does to it. The translators, writing in 1933, compared this to the pre-relational “feeling” of the English philosopher F. H. Bradley, and printed some lines of Tennyson about the infant who has not yet learned to say “I”; the comparisons are theirs, not the Bhāmatī’s, and this page mentions them only to show how the book struck two able readers of its first English translation. What matters is the conclusion they draw for him: the goal of knowledge is not a return to the infant’s undifferentiated feeling, which is unstable and gives way to the world of distinctions, but a final cognition that shares with it only two things, “the immediacy of cognition and its non-attributive nature”, and from which there is no return.

Dasgupta adds the definition of reality that underlies all this: “Vacaspati defines truth and reality as immediate self-revelation (sva-prakasata) which is never contradicted (abadhita). Only the pure self can be said to be in this sense ultimately real.” The world is not unreal like a hare’s horn, which is never experienced at all; it is experienced, and then contradicted, and what is contradicted cannot be the last reality. Dasgupta also records, against a common misreading of Advaita, that Sri Vācaspati was no idealist about the objects of ordinary life: “The external objects therefore are already existent outside of the perceiver, only their nature and stuff are indescribable and irrational (anirvacya).” The blue of the sky is not an idea in the mind; it is out there, and it is indeterminable.

What he taught: two ignorances, and where they live

The first verse of the Bhāmatī states the doctrine by which the school is best known, and it states it in the form of a salutation: “We render obeisance to that immortal Brahman, the immeasurable bliss and knowledge, from whom as Lord with the two kinds of indeterminable Nescience as ministers, there are the illusory manifestations of ether, air, fire, water and the earth — and from whom came forth this universe, movable and immovable, high and low.” Two kinds of nescience, then, and both indeterminable — neither real nor unreal nor both — and Brahman the source of the world through them as a king acts through ministers. Swami Satchidānandendra notes that “Again and again in the Bhamati there are references to the twofold Ignorance as cause and effect.”

The translators explain the two. There is a primal nescience, the ignorance that is the cause, which they call an original sin: “This original sin is primal nescience, the ignorance that is the cause (mula-’vidya or karana-’vidya).” And there are derivative ignorances, the ignorances that are effects, which are the particular delusions of particular souls about particular things. The difference between the two is in what removes them: “Derivative ignorances are sublatable by cognition of the objects to which they relate ; ignorance about nacre is removable by knowledge of nacre ; primal nescience is removable by knowledge of the supreme reality alone ; hence it persists up to the realisation of Brahman.” On this the translators mark the first difference from the other school: “In this Vacaspati differs from Padmapada, who would go straightaway to primal nescience as the cause of all superimpositions.” Where the Vivaraṇa school traces every error to the one root ignorance, the Bhāmatī has a layer between: a root ignorance that is the material of the world, and a crop of individual ignorances that grow from it and are cleared one by one.

Dasgupta describes what the root ignorance does at the end of a world-age, and the passage shows how concretely Sri Vācaspati thought of it: “at the time of the great dissolution (maha-pralaya) all products of avidya, such as the psychical frame (antahkarana), cease to have any functions of their own, but are not on account of that destroyed ; they are at that time merged in the indescribable avidya, their root cause, and abide there as potential capacities (suksmena sakti-rupena) together with the wrong impressions and psychological tendencies of illusion.” “When the state of maha-pralaya is at an end, moved by the will of God, they come out like the limbs of a tortoise or like the rejuvenation during rains of the bodies of frogs which have remained inert and lifeless all the year round, and then, being associated with their proper tendencies and impressions, they assume their particular names and forms as of old before the maha-pralaya.” Dasgupta remarks that ignorance so described “resembles very much the prakrti of Yoga”, and Swami Satchidānandendra makes the same observation from the other side. Gathering the places where the Bhāmatī uses the phrase “power of Ignorance,” a term he says it took over from the Pañcapādikā, he concludes that “It is quite clear that the phrase ‘power of Ignorance’ is being used to designate the primary material cause of the world (jagat-prakrti), also here called ‘the Unmanifest’”. The man who had written the standard commentary on Sāṅkhya did not forget it when he wrote on Vedānta, though the Bhāmatī itself, in a passage the Swami quotes, insists on the difference: “This is the difference between our doctrine which speaks of ‘the Unmanifest’ and that of the Sankhyas who speak of ‘Nature’.” The Unmanifest of the Bhāmatī is indeterminable and depends on Brahman; the Nature of the Sāṅkhya is real and independent.

Then comes the question on which the two schools divide most sharply: where does ignorance live, and whom does it belong to? The Vivaraṇa answer is that it rests in Brahman, the one consciousness, since there is nothing else for it to rest in. Sri Vācaspati’s answer, in Swami Satchidānandendra’s translation of the Bhāmatī on the fourth sūtra, is the opposite: “Ignorance does not have its seat in the Absolute, but in the individual soul. And it is indeterminable, as we have said. The purity of the Absolute is thus safeguarded.” The 1933 translators give the reasoning: “The ignorances thus assumed must be located in the jivas. Brahman who is pure and perfect cannot obviously be the locus of defect ; and avidya, the material cause of all defects, is itself the greatest defect. Apart from this, it is the jiva that is instructed, that strives and acquires the knowledge which destroys nescience. But there can be no relation of destroyer and destroyed except as between what occupy the same locus. The poison drunk by Caitra will not remove the life of Maitra. Hence, nescience must have the same locus as the knowledge which destroys it, i.e., the jiva.”

The obvious objection is circularity, and every opponent raised it. The individual soul is itself a product of ignorance — there would be no separate soul if there were no nescience — so how can nescience reside in the soul? The Bhāmatī’s reply, following Sri Maṇḍana, is that the two are beginningless together, like seed and sprout: “We do not say at any time that ignorance was and the jiva was not, or that the jiva was and ignorance was not.” And if the objector presses that such mutual dependence is finally unintelligible, the reply is the most quoted sentence of the school: “It is of the very essence of nescience to be unintelligible in the last resort : tad eva ’vidyanam avidyatvam.” That is what it is for ignorance to be ignorance. Dasgupta states the resulting picture: “Thus on the one hand the avidya operates in the individual person, the jiva, as its locus or support (asraya), and on the other hand it has the Brahman or pure self-revealing intelligence as its object (visaya), which it obscures”. And he contrasts it with the view of Sri Sarvajñātman’s Saṁkṣepa-śārīraka, for which Brahman is both the support and the object; in Sri Vācaspati’s view, “the illusion is a psychological one for which the individual person is responsible, and it is caused through a beginningless chain of illusions or confusions”.

One consequence follows that a reader should not miss: if ignorance lives in the souls, and the souls are many, then the ignorances are many, one to each soul, and the worlds they project are many too. The translators do not flinch from this: “There being a plurality of nesciences, granted that nescience is the material cause of the world, there” are bound to be a plurality of worlds; and the common world of experience is saved only as “the measure of agreement that exists among the different spectators of an illusion”, as when many people take one rope for a snake without there being one snake. The Bhāmatī itself, in a passage Swami Satchidānandendra translates, turns the plurality into an advantage when an opponent asks how one man’s liberation leaves the world standing for the rest: “You cannot raise this objection against us, as we do not say that Ignorance is one and the same in all souls, like the Nature of the Sankhyas. We say that Ignorance is different in each individual soul. Therefore, it is only the Ignorance of the soul in whom metaphysical knowledge has arisen that is removed, not the Ignorance of other souls.” The Vivaraṇa school thought the price of this heavy, and said so; the Bhāmatī school thought the alternative — defect in the undefiled — heavier. The next section shows how Sri Vācaspati kept the Lord in a world so conceived.

What he taught: Īśvara, the soul, and the pot of space

If ignorance lives in the souls and not in Brahman, a hard question follows about God. Sri Śaṅkara’s Īśvara, the Lord who creates and governs the world, is Brahman as seen through ignorance; but whose ignorance? On the Vivaraṇa view the answer is easy, since ignorance rests in Brahman itself and Brahman associated with it is the Lord. On Sri Vācaspati’s view the answer has to be worked for, and his critics have said he never found it. The 1933 translators state the charge and then the reply. The charge is that his system has no room for God at all, and they note the irony of it against a man “who begins his work with due invocation to Bhava, Kartikeya and Ganapati, and throughout his work betrays little trace of the atheism that is his apparent conclusion.” The reply, in the tradition, was made by his greatest commentator: “the author of the Kalpataru is anxious to make out repeatedly that Vacaspati does recognise Is’vara and that they are fools who say there is no place for Is’vara in his system.”

The reply turns on a distinction that the translators draw out with unusual clarity. Ignorance has two poles: “Ignorance is bi-polar. It is located somewhere, i.e., it belongs to some one ; and it has a content. Though the jiva is the locus, the content is Is’vara.” The illustration is homely. When I say “my ignorance,” I do not mean an ignorance I own or command; “I mean by ‘my ignorance’ the ignorance that is in me, not the ignorance that I can control.” In the same way the ignorance that is located in each soul has for its content, for what it is about and what it conceals, the one Brahman; and Brahman as the content of all these ignorances, the reality they all misread, is Īśvara. Dasgupta says the same thing in his own terms, that ignorance has “the Brahman or pure self-revealing intelligence as its object (visaya), which it obscures”. So Īśvara is not the product of any one soul’s ignorance, nor a fiction of the collective; he is what all ignorance is ignorance of. And since souls and ignorance are beginningless together, so is the Lord: “At no time then do we have Is’vara without the jivas or the jivas without Is’vara.” And they draw the picture out: “When, therefore, it is said that my ignorance creates the universe, it does not follow that I create the universe ; rather does it mean that Is’vara, the content of my ignorance, uses the ignorance that is in me and out of that as material cause, evolves the world ; the ignorance in me, the maya, the prakrti is the primal material cause ; he who wields it for fashioning the world, the mayin, the arch-juggler, is Is’vara.” They acknowledge in a note the help of the great Madras pandit S. Kuppuswami Sastri in understanding this part of the doctrine, which is a fair warning of its difficulty.

Whether this saves the Lord is a question the schools have debated for centuries, and this page does not pretend to close it. What can be said is that Sri Vācaspati’s own practice was devout: his opening verses invoke Brahman as Lord “with the two kinds of indeterminable Nescience as ministers”, then the Vedas and Bhava, then the sun, Skanda and Gaṇapati, then Vyāsa, then his master; Dasgupta records that in his account of creation the dissolved world comes forth again “moved by the will of God”; and the translators’ own verdict is that the atheism is apparent and not real.

The other question is the nature of the individual soul itself, and here Sri Vācaspati chose, again, the road the Vivaraṇa did not take. Sri Padmapāda and Sri Prakāśātman taught that the soul is a reflection of Brahman in ignorance, as the sun is reflected in water; this is pratibimba-vāda, the reflection theory. Sri Vācaspati taught what the tradition calls avaccheda-vāda, the theory of limitation, and the translators give his image in full:

“Ether is infinite and all-pervasive ; but it seems to be confined in a pot as it were ; and when the pot is moved, though the pot alone is moved, there seems to be a motion of the ether in it as well. In the same way Universal Spirit defined by the internal organ etc., is the jiva ; when the defining adjuncts are got rid of, there is no longer any difference between the jiva and Brahman.”

Nothing is divided when a pot is set down in a room; the space in the pot is the space of the room, and when the pot is carried across the room the space seems to travel and does not. In the same way the soul is Brahman seemingly bounded by the mind and its instruments, and when the boundary is seen through there was never anything to unite. The translators note that the Bhāmatī does also use the language of reflection, but explain that “Vacaspati does not hold that the jivas are literally reflections”; and they add in a note that the question of which theory he held was examined by the greatest of the later commentators: “Vacaspati’s position in this question of whether the jiva is an avaccheda or a pratibimba is discussed fully by Appayya Diksita in the Parimala at the close of I, i, 4, where he shows that Vacaspati favours the avaccheda-vada.” The card for this teacher on this site, which says that he “declined the mirror model of the individual soul, preferring to speak of consciousness as space is spoken of when a jar seems to enclose a portion of it”, rests on this.

The two images are not idle. A reflection has a source it is other than, and can be truer or falser to it; a bounded space is simply the one space, with a wall in the way. The reflection theory makes it natural to say that ignorance rests in the one that is reflected; the limitation theory makes it natural to say that ignorance is the wall, and that the wall is on the side of the soul. The two choices Sri Vācaspati made — ignorance in the soul, the soul a limitation — are one choice seen twice.

What he taught: ritual, hearing, and long meditation

The most practical of the questions the two schools dispute is what a seeker is to do, and here Sri Vācaspati’s answer is the one the Kanchi chapter chose to set out first. The question is what the Vedic rituals and duties do for a man who wants liberation. The chapter states his position: “Vachaspatimisra holds that performance of rituals and other duties relating to one’s stage and order of life generate in the mind of the aspirant the desire to know Brahman.” And the other: “Prakasatman, on the other hand, maintains that the performances of rituals, etc., are responsible for giving rise to the knowledge of Brahman.” “The former view is known as vividishapaksha; and the latter one, as vedanapaksha.” Vividiṣā is the wish to know; vedana is the knowing. For Sri Vācaspati the rituals bring a man to the door of the teaching by making him want to enter; they do not open it.

The 1933 translators fill this out. “The ground must be prepared, the mind cleared and the heart made pure for the reception of the truth. Herein lies the use of ritual, the due performance of which purifies the intellect and brings about the desire to know.” And they draw the consequence for a question the tradition has always pressed, whether a man who has the desire may stop the rituals: “It is then as little true that karma has nothing to do with release as that it can of itself bring about release. It is a remote auxiliary (aradupakaraka) and as such requires to be duly observed in season”. In a footnote they mark the other school’s stronger claim: “The Vivaranakara holds that rituals are contributory to knowledge itself and not merely to the desire to know.” A reader may feel that the difference is fine. It is not, in practice: on Sri Vācaspati’s view a householder who has come to want the truth has already had from the rituals what they can give, while on the Vivaraṇa view they go on working for him until the truth is known.

Once the desire is awake, the path is the one Sri Śaṅkara laid down, and the translators state it in a sentence that is a fair summary of the whole discipline: “When the desire to know has been awakened, one hears the highest truths from the Vedanta, reflects on them, reasons about them, refutes all objections to them, and, being finally satisfied about them, begins to contemplate the supreme Brahman that they teach. By uninterrupted meditation practised with devotion for a long time, the seeker of Brahman attains Brahman”. Hearing, reflection, meditation: śravaṇa, manana, nididhyāsana. Every Advaitin says the three words. The dispute is about the weight each carries, and here Sri Vācaspati’s position is the one by which his school is defined.

For Sri Sureśvara and for the Vivaraṇa school, the Upaniṣadic sentence, rightly heard by a prepared mind, is itself the means: when “That thou art” is understood, the Self is known, and reflection and meditation serve only to remove the obstacles to understanding. For Sri Vācaspati, following Sri Maṇḍana, the sentence cannot do this: “For him, as for Mandana, verbal testimony is not of itself the cause of immediate knowledge. The cognition resulting from such testimony has to be contemplated with faith, unintermittently and for a long time before the final intuition results. From the sentence there results but a mediate cognition which starts the indispensable process of prasankhyana”. The reason is a point of epistemology: “Immediate cognition requires the functioning of a sense-organ, here the mind, the organ of internal sense. And this mental perception is made possible only by long-continued contemplation (prasankhyana) as in the lover’s perception of the long-lost damsel, whom he constantly contemplates.” Words give knowledge at second hand, as a description gives the face of someone we have not met. Only the mind, turned on its object long enough, gives the thing itself; and the mind is turned on Brahman by prasaṅkhyāna, repeated and sustained meditation on what the sentence has taught. This is why the card for this teacher on this site says that he “held that sustained meditation — nididhyāsana — is the principal means, with hearing and reasoning as its supports”, and why its nugget reads: “Hearing a truth once is not the same as living in it.”

What does the meditation end in? The translators are careful here, and a reader should be too. “The final intuition is of the conditioned Brahman, not of the Absolute ; for there is still the distinction of subject and object.” The mind perceives Brahman, and so the perception is still a perception, with a perceiver in it. But it is a perception that undoes perceiving: “It destroys the entire world of duality and destroys itself with it. When the powder of the clearing nut is mixed with muddy water to precipitate the mud, that powder itself does not require another precipitant.” The clearing-nut settles the mud and goes down with it; the final intuition removes duality and, being itself a mode of duality, removes itself. What remains is not a knowledge of anything but Brahman, which was never absent. The translators add a modern comparison of their own — “It is analogous to the absolute truth of Bradley, which, he says, is absolute, only because it is intellectually incorrigible.” — and it is given here as theirs.

A last question follows, and Sri Vācaspati answered it as the tradition generally has. If knowledge destroys ignorance, and ignorance is the cause of the body, why does the knower not die at once? Because the karma that made this body has already been set in motion: “Prarabdha karma is like a missile that has begun to take flight ; it will drop only when its force is fully spent”. And the translators give the argument of the Bhāmatī that has always seemed to Advaitins the decisive one: “None who is yet short of perfect knowledge can be a preceptor of non-dualism ; and if he who has attained such knowledge should be disembodied at the same time, there would be no preceptors at all.” If there are teachers, there is liberation in life; and there are teachers. The translators admit the residue of paradox in “this unsolved contradiction of the co-existence of bondage and release in the Jivan-mukta. And this is the position of most advaitins.”

Bhāmatī and Vivaraṇa: what the two lines disagree about

The tradition speaks of two prasthānas, two lines of departure, in the reading of Sri Śaṅkara, and a reader who has followed this page so far has met every one of the differences between them. It may help to set them side by side. The Kanchi chapter describes the two: “The views of Padmapada as interpreted by Prakasatman in his Vivarana are known as the tenets of the Vivaranaprasthana”, and those that began with Sri Maṇḍana Miśra and were built into the reading of Sri Śaṅkara by Sri Vācaspati as the Bhāmatī-prasthāna. Here are the points on which they differ, as the sources used on this page state them.

• Where ignorance lives. Bhāmatī: in the individual soul, “For Ignorance has its seat in the individual soul.” Vivaraṇa: in Brahman, the one consciousness, there being nothing else for it to rest in.
• How many ignorances there are. Bhāmatī: a root ignorance and many derived ignorances, and in a sense an ignorance for each soul, so that “There being a plurality of nesciences, granted that nescience is the material cause of the world, there” must be many worlds, held in common only by agreement. Vivaraṇa: one ignorance, the ground of all error, “as the cause of all superimpositions”.
• What the soul is. Bhāmatī: Brahman limited, as space is limited by a pot — avaccheda. Vivaraṇa: Brahman reflected, as the sun is in water — pratibimba.
• Whose ignorance makes the Lord. Bhāmatī: the Lord is Brahman as the content of the souls’ ignorance, “Though the jiva is the locus, the content is Is’vara.” Vivaraṇa: the Lord is Brahman as the locus of the one ignorance.
• What the rituals do. Bhāmatī: they produce the desire to know — vividiṣā. Vivaraṇa: they contribute to knowledge itself — vedana. This is the difference the Kanchi chapter puts first.
• What the sentence does. Bhāmatī: hearing gives a mediate knowledge that must be made immediate by long meditation, prasaṅkhyāna; the mind is the organ of the final intuition. Vivaraṇa: the sentence itself, rightly heard, gives immediate knowledge, and meditation removes what obstructs the hearing.
• Where the emphasis falls in argument. Bhāmatī: on the indeterminability of difference, argued from Sri Maṇḍana’s dialectic. Vivaraṇa: on the self-luminosity of consciousness and the analysis of error, argued from Sri Padmapāda.

The list should not mislead a reader into thinking of two hostile camps. The two schools have read each other, borrowed from each other and been reconciled with each other over and over; the greatest of the Bhāmatī commentators, Sri Appayya Dīkṣita, also wrote the handbook that sets out the views of every Advaita school side by side, and the tradition’s later handbooks give both views on each point. The Kanchi chapter ends with an image that this site has quoted on Sri Prakāśātman’s page too, because it says what needs saying: “Just as alphabets are useful in understanding the sounds, though they are less true than sounds being mere lines, the theories that are set forth by Vachaspatimisra, Prakasatman and others are helpful in leading the aspirant to liberation, though they are less true than the latter. These theories, though different, lead one to the same goal, that is, liberation.” The letters are not the sounds; both schools are letters.

A dissenting reading

Every page on this site that treats a commentator has given room to Swami Satchidānandendra Saraswatī, and this one owes him more than most, because the tenth chapter of his Method of the Vedanta is the fullest examination of the Bhāmatī in English. His view should be stated in his own words and marked as one view. He held that Sri Śaṅkara taught a single method — the deliberate attribution to the Self of what is not the Self, followed by its deliberate withdrawal, until the Self stands alone — and that the later commentators, beginning with the Bhāmatī, replaced it with theories about ignorance that the master had never held. His summary of the book’s effect is this:

“While the expositions in the Bhamati sometimes partly resemble those of the Pahcapadika, it very much more often sets forth minor points from the system of Mandana as if they were the teaching of Sri Sankara. Mandana’s doctrine of immediate intuition (saksat-kara) is often resolutely intermixed with and supported by teachings from the Yoga school. And on account of this teaching the idea has taken firm root amongst students of Vedanta that immediate experience of the Self can never arise from mere reflection on the meaning of the texts, even if supported by logical reasoning.”

And of its method: “As far as reasoning goes, the great means for the defence of Non-Duality in the Bhamati is the argument that duality is indeterminable. Reasoning about the nature of Ignorance, the seat that it occupies and the object that it conceals takes a prominent place. With reason thus employed, the original Vedanta method of false superimposition followed by later retraction fell almost into eclipse.” He also catches the author out on a point of consistency, observing that Sri Vācaspati, who in his Yoga commentary had called Nature “perfectly real,” interpreted the same Yoga authority in the Bhāmatī as teaching that the constituents of Nature are unreal, and calls this “a source of astonishment to the reader”. His conclusion is that the book made Sri Maṇḍana’s system pass for Sri Śaṅkara’s, and that most of what later Advaita disputed about was a dispute about the Bhāmatī rather than about the master. The very next chapter of his book he gives to Sri Vimuktātman’s Iṣṭa-siddhi, under the heading “REFUTATION OF THE BHAMATI SCHOOL ALONG WITH REVIVAL OF THE DOCTRINE OF ROOT-IGNORANCE”, and he reads the whole later tradition as a reaction to the book.

Two things should be said in reply, and both come from the Swami himself. The first is that he grants the historical facts on which the Bhāmatī school’s own account of itself rests: that the book restored pure Advaita against Sri Bhāskara, that it is complete where the Pañcapādikā is not, that it is learned beyond any rival, and that “those who want to be sure about the method of the Vedanta through a study of the Brahma Sutra Commentary must certainly enquire into the Bhamati”. The second is that the point at issue between him and the Bhāmatī — whether the sentence alone can give immediate knowledge, or whether long meditation must follow — is exactly the point the 1933 translators identified as the heart of the book, and on which the Vivaraṇa school also differed from it. The Swami’s reading is not eccentric; it is one side of the oldest argument in the school, stated with unusual force. A reader who wants to see how the other side answers it should read the Bhāmatī on the first four sūtras in the 1933 translation, where the question is argued, and then decide.

The other schools, seen from this life

No teacher on this site had a closer relation to the other schools of Indian thought than Sri Vācaspati, because for most of his life he was their expositor. He wrote the commentary through which the Nyāya of Gautama, Vātsyāyana and Uddyotakara has been read for a thousand years; the commentary through which the Sāṅkhya of Īśvarakṛṣṇa is still read; the commentary that was translated in full beside Patañjali’s sūtras and Vyāsa’s Bhāṣya in the Harvard Oriental Series in 1914; and the commentary through which Sri Maṇḍana’s Mīmāṁsā is read. In none of these books does he write as an Advaitin correcting the school; he writes as the school’s own best mind, and each school has honoured him as such. Udayana, the greatest of the later logicians of Mithilā, called him simply the Ṭīkākāra, the Commentator, and Tātparyācārya, the master of the purport, as if there were no other; a school of Nyāya is not likely to have so honoured a man who patronised it. This page has already quoted the history’s judgment that his work “raises Vacaspati to a position of supreme authority in all the five systems of Indian philosophy”; the sentence should be read again with its force felt. The Nyāya, the Sāṅkhya, the Yoga and the Mīmāṁsā are, in Advaita’s eyes, partial views; but their greatest commentator in each case was an Advaitin who took them seriously enough to master them completely. There is no better answer to the charge that Advaita despises the other schools than the shelf of his books.

The Bhāmatī itself, when it comes to argue with these schools, argues with the knowledge of an insider. Dasgupta’s description — that Sri Vācaspati directs “his great knowledge of the subject to the elucidation of the problems which directly arise from the texts and to explaining the allusions and contexts of thoughts, objections and ideas of other schools of thought referred to in the text” — is a description of fairness as much as of learning. When Sri Śaṅkara refutes the Sāṅkhya doctrine of a Nature that evolves the world without a conscious cause, the Bhāmatī first sets out the Sāṅkhya case as its own commentator would, and the passage Swami Satchidānandendra quotes on the “power of Ignorance” is exactly such a passage, the Sāṅkhya objection given in full before the reply. When it refutes Sri Bhāskara’s difference-in-identity, it does so by the argument about difference, without abuse. The Buddhists, whom he had answered in every one of his logical works, answered him in turn: the 1958 history records that the Buddhist scholar Jñānaśrī, in the eleventh century, made Sri Vācaspati “the last, and the greatest target of his attack”, and that Udayana’s own career as a philosopher sprang from the wish to answer Jñānaśrī. To be attacked by the best mind of the opposing school a century after one’s death is a form of respect, and the histories of both schools record it as such.

One further thing may be said from Advaita’s side, and the Kanchi chapter’s image of the letters says it. Sri Vācaspati’s Nyāya, Sāṅkhya and Yoga are not, in his own final view, the last truth; but neither is the Bhāmatī. All of them are letters, less true than the sound they point to, and all of them are useful. A man who had written the letters of five alphabets knew what letters were for. The other schools have their own pages on this site, written in the same spirit, and a reader who wants Sri Vācaspati’s Sāṅkhya or his Yoga can find the books themselves linked below, in the translations that made them available in English more than a century ago.

The school that grew from the book

The Bhāmatī became a school because other men commented on it, and the chain of those commentaries is the history of the school. The 1933 translators give it: “The most notable of these is the Vedantakalpataru by Amalananda (13th Century A.D.). This work in turn formed the subject of two commentaries, the Parimala of Appayya Diksita (16th Century A.D.) and Abhoga of Laksminrsimha (17th Century A.D.). The Abhoga is written in the light of the Parimala and sometimes criticises it.” Dasgupta gives the same chain with dates: “The most important and earliest of these is the Vedanta-kalpa-taru of Amalananda (a.d. 1247-1260), on which Appaya Diksita (about A.D. 1600) wrote another commentary called Vedanta-kalpa-taru-parimala”, and names the author of the Ābhoga as “son of Kondabhatta and grandson of Rangoji Bhatta, towards the end of the seventeenth century”. He adds the lesser ones: “the Bhamati-tilaka, the Bhamati-vilasa, the Bhamati-vyakhya by Sriranganatha and another commentary on the Vedanta-kalpa-taru, by Vaidyanatha Payagunda, called the Vedanta-kalpa-taru-manjari”. So a commentary on a commentary was itself commented on, and the commentary on that commented on again, and the four texts — Bhāṣya, Bhāmatī, Kalpataru, Parimala — are printed together in the Nirnaya Sagar Press edition edited by Anantakṛṣṇa Śāstrī (Bombay, 1938) that is linked below, four voices on one page across nine hundred years.

Two of these commentators deserve a word, because they made the school what it is. Sri Amalānanda, in the middle of the thirteenth century, wrote the Kalpataru, “The Wishing-Tree,” and it is he who defended Sri Vācaspati’s theism against the charge of atheism, who explained that Mārtaṇḍa and Tilakasvāmin are gods and not a teacher, and who fixed the meaning of the school on the disputed points; Dasgupta notes that he also wrote an independent work, the Śāstra-darpaṇa, whose views “were but reflections of his views, as Amalananda himself admits” — the views, that is, of Sri Vācaspati. Sri Appayya Dīkṣita, around 1600, wrote the Parimala, “The Fragrance,” on the Kalpataru, and it is he who settled that Sri Vācaspati held the limitation theory of the soul; he was also, as this site’s page on the schools records, the author of the Siddhānta-leśa-saṅgraha, the handbook that lays out the differences among all the Advaita schools point by point, so that the man who was the Bhāmatī school’s greatest commentator was also its fairest judge.

The school has never been the majority. In the centuries after Sri Vācaspati the Vivaraṇa reading, sharpened by Sri Prakāśātman and followed in the main by the later handbooks such as Sri Dharmarāja’s Vedānta-paribhāṣā, became the common teaching, and its doctrine of the one ignorance resting in Brahman is what most students of Advaita learn first. But the Bhāmatī has never been displaced as the first thing a student of the Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya reads beside the text, and the Digvijaya’s translator can still write, as a plain fact, that it “is to this day studied by all serious students of Sankara’s Sutra-bhashya”. A minority that everyone reads is a minority of a very particular kind.

Legacy

Sri Vācaspati’s legacy is of two kinds, and only one of them belongs to Advaita. The first is the one the 1958 history measures: that a student of Nyāya, of Sāṅkhya or of Yoga anywhere in India for a thousand years has read the founding text of his school through Sri Vācaspati’s eyes, so that his account of what those schools teach has in large part become what they teach. No other writer has done this for more than one system. The second is the one this site measures: that he wrote the first complete commentary on Sri Śaṅkara’s greatest work that survives, that in writing it he fixed one of the two readings of the master, and that the reading has never lacked defenders since. The Digvijaya’s prophecy, whatever one makes of its history, states the legacy exactly: “That work will be the guide for men to understand the meaning of the commentary for all time.”

Three things in particular are his. The first is a habit of mind: the conviction, shown on every page, that Vedānta is to be approached with the whole of Indian philosophy already understood, its opponents stated in their own words and its allies borrowed from without embarrassment. The Bhāmatī is the model of the learned commentary in Advaita, and every later commentator who explains the Sāṅkhya before refuting it, or cites the Mīmāṁsā rules of interpretation, or meets a Naiyāyika objection on its own ground, is doing what he did first. The second is a set of positions — ignorance in the soul, the soul as a limitation, the Lord as content, meditation as the means — which together make a coherent alternative to the Vivaraṇa reading and have kept Advaita from settling into a single orthodoxy. Whatever a reader thinks of them, the tradition is richer for having two answers to its hardest questions rather than one, and it has two because of him. The third is the argument about difference, which he took from Sri Maṇḍana and gave to everyone after him. When later Advaitins such as Śrīharṣa and Sri Citsukha turned the dialectic of indeterminability against every category of the realist schools, they may fairly be said to have been using tools the Bhāmatī had put into the school’s hands.

There is also a legacy of a more human kind, which the story of the name preserves. He was a householder who did the greatest scholarly work of his age while married and in a king’s service, and the tradition has never held this against him; the Digvijaya makes him the rebirth of a sannyāsin, but the histories make him a Miśra of Mithilā to the end, and honour him as such. In a tradition whose teachers were nearly all monks, he is the standing proof that the life of the mind and the life of the house are not enemies, and that a man can master the whole of philosophy without leaving home. That the book at the end of it is called by a woman’s name, whether or not the story is true, is the tradition’s way of saying that it knew what such a life cost, and whom.

For the seeker

A reader who has followed this page may wonder what use a tenth-century commentary on a commentary can be to someone who wants not to understand Advaita but to live it. Four things, at least.

The first is his insistence that hearing is not enough. Whatever one thinks of the dispute with the Vivaraṇa about the theory of it, the practice Sri Vācaspati prescribes is the one every teacher of the tradition has in fact taught: “one hears the highest truths from the Vedanta, reflects on them, reasons about them, refutes all objections to them, and, being finally satisfied about them, begins to contemplate the supreme Brahman that they teach. By uninterrupted meditation practised with devotion for a long time, the seeker of Brahman attains Brahman”. A seeker who has read that the Self is Brahman and wonders why nothing has changed has Sri Vācaspati’s answer: the reading has given a knowledge at second hand, and what is at second hand must be made one’s own by long attention, “as in the lover’s perception of the long-lost damsel, whom he constantly contemplates”. The card’s nugget puts it in six words: hearing a truth once is not the same as living in it.

The second is his account of what the duties of ordinary life are for. The rituals of his day are not the duties of ours, but the principle is the same: “The ground must be prepared, the mind cleared and the heart made pure for the reception of the truth.” Work done as duty, without grasping at its fruit, does not itself free anyone; it makes a person the kind of person who wants to be free, and that wanting is, on his account, the whole of what it can give and all that is needed from it. A seeker who feels that their obligations are an obstacle to the search may take from him the opposite view: that the obligations, rightly done, are what produce the search.

The third is his image of the soul. The reflection image, which the other school prefers, can make a seeker feel that they are a copy of something, and a poor one; Sri Vācaspati’s image says that they are the thing itself, with a pot around it. “when the defining adjuncts are got rid of, there is no longer any difference between the jiva and Brahman” — and the adjuncts are got rid of not by destroying anything but by seeing that the space was never divided. There is a great deal of practical comfort in this. Nothing has to be joined to anything. A boundary has to be seen for what it is.

The fourth is the honesty about ignorance. Every seeker who thinks hard about Advaita meets the question of why there is ignorance at all, and whose it is, and how it began; and Sri Vācaspati’s answer is the one that has satisfied most of the tradition: that the question has no answer of the kind it wants, because “It is of the very essence of nescience to be unintelligible in the last resort”. This is not an evasion. It is the observation that an explanation of ignorance would be a piece of knowledge, and that ignorance, if it could be known through in that way, would already be gone. What can be done with ignorance is not to explain it but to end it; and the ending, on his account, is a long and patient work that the ordinary means of the tradition — a teacher, the texts, reflection, meditation — are fully sufficient for.

Those who want to go to him directly should begin with the 1933 translation of the Bhāmatī on the first four sūtras, reading its introduction first; it is not easy, but it is complete, and it is the only part of the book in English. Those who want to see the man of five systems should read the opening pages of his Sāṅkhya commentary in Jhā’s translation, where the same mind explains a rival school as lucidly as its own followers ever did.

A note on pictures, names and dates

There is no portrait of Sri Vācaspati Miśra. No likeness of him was made in his lifetime, and none is described in any source used on this page; the pictures that circulate online are modern imaginings. This site shows a lamp in place of a face rather than a face that is not his.

His name is given variously. He is Vācaspati, “lord of speech,” a name of the god Bṛhaspati; Miśra is the Maithil Brahmin family title. Scholars sometimes call him Vācaspati Miśra I, to distinguish him from a much later Maithil logician of the same name whom the 1958 history treats in its fourth chapter as Vācaspati II; nothing on this page concerns the later man. The logicians call him Ṭīkākāra and Tātparyācārya; the Anusandhana Kendra records the title sarvatantra-svatantra. His book is Bhāmatī, “the radiant one,” with the story of the wife’s name told and weighed above. This site follows its rule of placing “Sri” before his name as a mark of respect.

His date is given on this page as it is given in the sources, in two readings. The year 898 in his own Nyāya tract is taken as Vikrama, giving 841–42 CE, by the 1933 translators, by Dasgupta, by the Kanchi chapter and by the Anusandhana Kendra; it is taken as Śaka, giving 976–77 CE, by the 1958 history of Mithilā, which argues the case at length. This page has given the argument and has not judged it. His king is unidentified; his teacher is named as Trilocana by Udayana and as the author of the Nyāya-mañjarī by himself; his village is one of four. Where this page has said “the tradition says,” it means the Digvijaya or the pandit-tradition reported by the 1933 translators, and not history.

The sources were read from scans, and in a few places the machine reading has garbled a letter; the printed word has been restored in those quotations and each restoration recorded. Where a source’s own text is uncertain in the scan — the name of the village in Chanda Jha’s note, which is printed in Devanagari and has not survived the scanning — this page has left the name out rather than supply it from elsewhere. The chapter from Preceptors of Advaita as it stands on the Kanchi Pīṭham’s website preserves the first of the differences between the two schools in full and the rest only in its notes; this page has used it for what it preserves and the 1933 introduction for the remainder. The 1933 translators’ comparisons with Bradley, Berkeley and Tennyson are theirs and are marked as such. No encyclopaedia has been used.

Timeline

Every date below is either Sri Vācaspati’s own, read in two ways, or a modern scholar’s estimate. The dates for other teachers are those given in the sources used on this page and are stated so that a reader can see where the Bhāmatī falls among them.

• 8th century CE (the traditional and scholarly estimates differ) — Sri Śaṅkara writes the Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya; Sri Padmapāda writes the Pañcapādikā on its opening; Sri Sureśvara writes the Naiṣkarmya-siddhi and the two Vārttikas. Sri Maṇḍana Miśra, whom the 1958 history calls “an earlier contemporary of Sankaracarya”, writes the Brahma-siddhi and the Vidhi-viveka. Sri Bhāskara writes his commentary on the Brahma-sūtra, teaching difference in identity.
• 841–42 CE (898 Vikrama) — the date of the Nyāya-sūcī-nibandha on the common reading, followed by Dasgupta, the 1933 translators, the Kanchi chapter and the Anusandhana Kendra. The Bhāmatī, his last work, follows it.
• c. 900–977 CE — the alternative: the 1958 history places his birth not before 900 and dates the Nyāya-sūcī-nibandha to 898 Śaka, 976–77 CE, with the Bhāmatī after it, and makes him a contemporary of the logician Śrīdhara.
• c. 962 CE — the reign of the Mithilā king whom some identify with the Nṛga of the colophon, according to the 1933 translators; Dasgupta and the 1958 history hold the king untraced.
• 10th century CE (tradition) or c. 1200 CE (Dasgupta) — Sri Prakāśātman writes the Pañcapādikā-vivaraṇa, from which the Vivaraṇa school takes its name; the dating is discussed on his page.
• c. 1000–1050 CE — the Buddhist Jñānaśrī attacks him; Udayana’s teacher Śrīvatsa quotes him; Udayana writes the Pariśuddhi on his Nyāya commentary and calls him Ṭīkākāra (1958 history).
• c. 1247–1260 CE — Sri Amalānanda writes the Vedānta-kalpataru on the Bhāmatī (Dasgupta’s dates).
• 14th century CE — the Śaṅkara-digvijaya of Mādhava makes him Sri Sureśvara reborn.
• c. 1600 CE — Sri Appayya Dīkṣita writes the Parimala on the Kalpataru and settles that Sri Vācaspati held the limitation theory of the soul.
• Late 17th century CE — Sri Lakṣmīnṛsiṁha writes the Ābhoga on the Kalpataru (Dasgupta).
• 1933 — Suryanarayana Sastri and Kunhan Raja publish the English translation of the Bhāmatī on the first four sūtras at Madras.
• 1938 — the Nirnaya Sagar Press, Bombay, prints the Bhāṣya, Bhāmatī, Kalpataru and Parimala together in one volume, edited by Anantakṛṣṇa Śāstrī (the copy linked below).
• 1958 — Dineshchandra Bhattacharya’s History of Navya-Nyāya in Mithilā is published at Darbhanga, arguing the tenth-century date.

Questions a reader may ask

Was he a monk? No. He was a married householder of Mithilā, as his family name Miśra shows and as the tradition’s story of the Bhāmatī assumes. The Anusandhana Kendra’s rule of thumb is quoted in the first section. He is the one great early commentator of Advaita who never took sannyāsa, so far as the sources know.

Did he found the Bhāmatī school? He wrote the book it is named after, and the positions it holds are his; but the school as a school was made by his commentators, Sri Amalānanda and Sri Appayya Dīkṣita above all, and the positions themselves, by the translators’ account, “started with Mandana”. The 1933 translators’ formula is the fairest: the views that started with Sri Maṇḍana passed current as the tenets of the Bhāmatī-prasthāna.

Is the Bhāmatī school “less orthodox” than the Vivaraṇa? Not in the tradition’s own reckoning. Both are readings of Sri Śaṅkara by his followers; the Vivaraṇa has been the more widely taught, and Swami Satchidānandendra held that both departed from the master. The Kanchi chapter’s image of the letters and the sounds is the tradition’s own verdict: both are letters, both useful, neither the sound.

Why does he say ignorance is in the soul, when the soul is itself a product of ignorance? Because, on his account, the two are beginningless together, like seed and sprout, and neither is prior; and because the alternative is to place a defect in Brahman. His reply to the charge of circularity is that the circularity is exactly what ignorance is: “tad eva ’vidyanam avidyatvam”. The section on the two ignorances gives the argument in full.

Does his system have a God? His critics said no and his commentator said that they were fools; the 1933 translators explain how the Lord is the content of every soul’s ignorance, and record that his own book opens with prayers to Brahman as Lord, to Śiva, to the sun, to Skanda, to Gaṇapati and to Vyāsa. The question is argued in the section on Īśvara, and this page leaves the reader to weigh it.

When did he live? Either about 841 or about 977, depending on how the year 898 in his own hand is read. The common reading is the first; the fullest argument this page has found is for the second. The section on his date gives both.

Where can I read him? The Bhāmatī on the first four sūtras is in English in the 1933 Madras translation, linked below; the whole Sanskrit text is in the 1938 Nirnaya Sagar edition, also linked. His Sāṅkhya commentary and his Yoga commentary are both in English translations that are more than a century old and free to read, and are linked. His Nyāya commentary is in Sanskrit only.

What should I take from him if I take one thing? That the truth heard has still to be lived, and that the living of it is a long, patient attention which the duties of an ordinary life prepare a person for rather than prevent. He was the tradition’s great householder, and he taught what a householder needed to hear.