Vidyāraṇya

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

The life

He was born Mādhava at Ekaśilā Nagarī — present-day Warangal, in Telangana — and the century he lived in was one of the most violent in the Deccan's history. Kingdoms were collapsing, temples were being destroyed, and the institutions that carried this tradition were losing their ground. The outline is unusually well dated for this lineage. Monastic initiation at Śṛṅgeri in 1331; travels to Kāśī on the Ganges and to Badrikāśrama in the Himalaya; the founding of the Vijayanagara empire in 1336, which the tradition attributes to his guidance; the empire's rulers brought to Śṛṅgeri in 1346; and the twelfth Jagadguru of that seat from 1380 to 1386. Vijayanagara — the city of victory on the Tuṅgabhadrā, whose granite ruins still stand at Hampi — became for two centuries the shelter under which South Indian learning, music and temple life survived. And in the middle of all that he wrote a textbook. The Pañcadaśī, fifteen chapters, is the manual by which Advaita has been taught for five hundred years: the argument laid out in order, in verse, for students rather than for opponents. His Jīvanmukti Viveka asks the question that outlives every debate — what does freedom actually look like in someone who is still alive, still eating, still working, still governing? He is the answer, on this site, to anyone who thinks non-duality is a retreat from the world. He built states and curricula with the same hands.

The turn it rests on

He took the teaching out of debate and turned it into a curriculum.

What was taught

Wrote the Pañcadaśī, a comprehensive Advaita manual, and guided the founding of the Vijayanagara empire.