Vācaspati Miśra

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

The life

Two men, a century or so apart, set the terms in which Advaita has argued with itself ever since, and he is the first of them. He was a commentator of extraordinary breadth before he was an Advaitin — the sort of scholar who could write on several rival systems in their own idioms — and when he turned to Śaṅkara's commentary on the Brahma-sūtras he produced the Bhāmatī, a commentary on a commentary, dense, patient and decisive. The question he settled for his followers sounds technical and is not. Granted that the Upaniṣadic sentence is what reveals the Self, what actually does the work in a person: the hearing of it, or the long meditation afterwards? He gave the weight to nididhyāsana, sustained meditation, treating hearing and reasoning as its supports. He also 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 — nothing is divided; a boundary is imagined. The tradition places him in Mithilā, in the northern plain of what is now Bihar, and says the commentary carries his wife's name. His dates are given only as a century or two, and nothing like a life story survives. What survives is a school named after a book, and a question every serious student of the tradition still has to answer.

The turn it rests on

He named the commentary Bhāmatī; the tradition says it carries his wife's name, and the whole later school is called after it.

What was taught

Commented on Śaṅkara's Brahma-sūtra commentary in the Bhāmatī, and held that sustained meditation — nididhyāsana — is the principal means, with hearing and reasoning as its supports.