Sri Vidyāraṇya

The India he was born into

He was born, by the account of the Śṛṅgeri tradition that he headed and that keeps his memory, at Ekaśilā Nagarī — "the city of the single rock" — which is Warangal in what is now Telangana, some time around the turn of the fourteenth century, into a Brahmin family of the Bhāradvāja line: his father Māyaṇa, his mother Śrīmatī, and two brothers who each became famous in his own right, Sāyaṇa, whose commentaries on the four Vedas are still the ones every scholar begins from, and Bhoganātha. His own name was Mādhava. The Deccan he was born into was about to be torn open. Warangal was the capital of the Kākatīya kingdom, the last great Hindu power of the eastern Deccan; in 1323 the armies of the Delhi Sultanate under Ulugh Khan — the future Muhammad bin Tughluq — took the city after a siege, ended the dynasty, and carried its king north as a prisoner. In the same decade the Sultanate's forces broke the Hoysalas of Karnataka and the Pāṇḍyas of Madurai, and for the first time in its history the whole of the peninsula, from the Narmadā to the Kāverī, lay open to a single power from the north that had no interest in its temples, its learning or its kings.

That is the fact behind everything he did. He was a scholar of the widest range India produced in his century, and he could have spent his life, as his brother did, on commentaries. Instead he became the counsellor of two brothers who founded a kingdom, and then — after the kingdom was secure — a monk, and then the head of Śṛṅgeri, and in his old age he wrote the book that, more than any other single work, is the way the Advaita tradition teaches itself. The tradition remembers him under the name he took as a monk, Vidyāraṇya: "the forest of learning".

Where the life was lived

His life ran from Warangal in the east, to the Tuṅgabhadrā and the boulder hills of Hampi where Vijayanagara rose, to Kāśī and Badarikāśrama in the far north on pilgrimage, and finally to Śṛṅgeri in the western hills, where he died. The map shows these on present-day coordinates.

Mādhava the scholar

Before he was a monk he was Mādhava, and Mādhava was one of the most productive scholars India has known. The tradition and the colophons of his works together attribute to him the Sarvadarśana Saṃgraha, "the compendium of all systems", which sets out sixteen schools of Indian philosophy — from the materialists to the Buddhists to the grammarians to the Vedāntins — each in its own voice and each more strongly than the last, in an ascending order that ends with Advaita; the Parāśara-Mādhavīya, a vast commentary on the law-book of Parāśara that became the standard authority on Hindu law in the south; the Kālamādhava, on the calendar and the timing of rites; and the Jaiminīya Nyāyamālā Vistara, a systematic handbook of Mīmāṃsā. Some scholars hold that not all of these are by the same Mādhava; there were several learned men of that name at the Vijayanagara court, and the question of which wrote what is not settled. The Śṛṅgeri tradition attributes them to him, and what matters for the reader is the range: law, ritual, the calendar, and every philosophy India had produced, all mastered before he turned to the one he thought was true.

His teachers were Vidyātīrtha, the tenth head of Śṛṅgeri, whom he revered above all others and names at the opening of the Pañcadaśī; Bhāratī Tīrtha, who preceded him as the eleventh head and whom he also calls his guru; and a scholar named Śrīkaṇṭha. He studied at Śṛṅgeri, and it was to Śṛṅgeri that he returned at the end.

The founding of a kingdom

The story that every account of him tells — and that the inscriptions of Vijayanagara, the chronicles of Śṛṅgeri and the traditions of Hampi tell in slightly different forms — is this. Two brothers, Harihara and Bukka, sons of a chieftain named Saṅgama, had served the Kākatīyas or the Hoysalas — the accounts differ — and had been carried off to Delhi after the Sultanate's conquest, where they were made to accept Islam and were sent back south as the Sultan's governors. In the chaos that followed the Sultan's withdrawal, they met a sage meditating on Mataṅga Hill, above the Tuṅgabhadrā at the place the Rāmāyaṇa calls Kiṣkindhā, where Rāma met Hanumān. The sage was Mādhava. Under his guidance the brothers returned to their ancestral faith, gathered the scattered chiefs of the region, and in 1336 — the date the tradition gives — founded a city on the south bank of the river, at Hampi, which they named Vidyānagara, "the city of learning", after him; it became Vijayanagara, "the city of victory", the capital of the empire that for two hundred years held the south of India for its temples and its learning against the sultanates of the Deccan.

How much of this is history is argued about. That Harihara I was crowned in 1336, that the city was founded under him and Bukka, that Śṛṅgeri received extraordinary royal patronage from the first years of the kingdom, and that Harihara II's inscriptions honour Vidyāraṇya as the kingdom's guru and record grants made on his instruction — these are documented. That the brothers had been converted and reconverted, that the meeting on Mataṅga Hill happened as the tradition says, and that the city's first name was his — these are tradition. The tradition is old and consistent, and it is the tradition's own account of him that this page follows; the reader should know which is which. What is not in doubt is that the greatest Advaita scholar of the century put his learning at the service of a kingdom whose reason for being was to keep the tradition alive, and that he saw no contradiction in doing so.

The monk

The Śṛṅgeri tradition places his sannyāsa in 1331, a few years before the founding of the city, from the hands of Vidyātīrtha, and his brother Bhāratī Tīrtha's three years earlier, in 1328. He took the name Vidyāraṇya. He went north on pilgrimage — to Kāśī, and beyond it to Badarikāśrama in the Himalaya — and he came back to the Deccan and to the work of the kingdom, which a monk could do in that world as well as a householder. It was after this, in the years when Vijayanagara was securing itself, that he is remembered on Mataṅga Hill in meditation, and it is as a monk that the inscriptions honour him.

The tradition tells one story of that meditation that is worth recording. He is said to have sat on the hill for many years, seeking the vision of the goddess Bhuvaneśvarī, and to have been granted it only at the very end — and to have asked her, when she came, why she had made him wait so long. Because, she told him, you had earned nothing in your past lives to make it sooner; what you have now is by grace alone. Then, it is said, he asked her for the wealth to build a kingdom, and she told him that wealth would come only in his next life — whereupon he tore off his sacred thread and became a sannyāsin, so that there would be no next life, and she showered him with gold anyway, and he gave it to the brothers to build the city. The story is a story. But it says exactly what the Jīvanmukti Viveka says in prose: that what a knower does with the world after he has known is a matter of compassion, not of desire, and that a monk may build a city if the city is for others.

The head of Śṛṅgeri

In 1380, when Bhāratī Tīrtha died, Vidyāraṇya became the twelfth Jagadguru of the Śāradā Pīṭham at Śṛṅgeri, and he held the seat for six years until his own death in 1386. He was by then very old — the tradition puts him in his eighties. In those six years he consolidated the relationship between the pīṭham and the kingdom that has lasted, in one form or another, to this day: Harihara II's grants of villages and revenues to Śṛṅgeri, recorded in inscriptions that name Vidyāraṇya, made the maṭha one of the wealthiest religious institutions in the south and, more importantly, a place where a scholar could be fed and housed for a lifetime of study. The Śṛṅgeri tradition credits him with the maṭha's tradition of the royal umbrella and the other insignia that mark its heads as the spiritual counterpart of kings, and with the Vidyāśaṅkara temple, built in memory of his teacher Vidyātīrtha, whose twelve zodiacal pillars catch the sun in the order of the months. His own samādhi is at Hampi, on the bank of the river below the hill where he sat.

The Pañcadaśī

The book he is remembered for was written in these last years, and it is unlike anything before it in the tradition. The Pañcadaśī — "the fifteen", for its fifteen chapters — is not a commentary and not a debate. It is a course. Its fifteen chapters are arranged in three groups of five, named for the three words the tradition uses of Brahman: the first five on viveka, discrimination — on existence, on the five elements, the five sheaths, the two kinds of duality and the great sentences; the next five on dīpa, light — on consciousness as the light in which everything appears: the picture on the canvas, the satisfaction of the knower, the unmoving witness, meditation, and the theatre of the world; and the last five on ānanda, bliss — on the bliss of yoga, of the Self, of non-duality, of knowledge and of objects, each traced back to the one bliss that is Brahman. The whole runs to about fifteen hundred verses, and the tradition holds that the work was completed by his teacher and predecessor Bhāratī Tīrtha — the division of chapters between the two is given differently in different manuscripts — which is why some editions carry both names.

What makes it the book it is, is that each chapter is a complete teaching from a different angle, and that each begins from something the student can check. The first chapter starts from the three states — waking, dream, sleep — and shows what is constant through them. The second starts from the five elements and shows that "existence" is what they share and what none of them adds. The third starts from the five sheaths and peels them. The sixth, the Citradīpa, "the lamp of the picture", is the one the tradition loves most: a painting on a cloth has four stages — the clean cloth, the stiffened cloth, the outlined figures, the coloured figures — and consciousness likewise appears as pure, as the witness, as the individual, as the world of objects; the picture is painted on the cloth and the cloth is untouched. The tenth, the Nāṭakadīpa, "the lamp of the theatre", compares the witness to the lamp in a theatre that lights the dancer, the audience and the empty hall alike, whether or not there is a performance. These are not decorations. They are ways of arriving at the same conclusion from wherever the student happens to be standing.

The book's method is what the tradition calls prakaraṇa — an introductory treatise that states the conclusion of the Upaniṣads without requiring the student to have read them — and it did for Advaita what a good textbook does for any subject: it made the whole of it available to a student with a teacher and a year. For six hundred years it has been the book that students in the traditional schools read after the short works of Śaṅkara and before the Upaniṣad commentaries, and it is still that.

The Jīvanmukti Viveka

His other great work answers the question the Pañcadaśī raises and leaves open: what does a person who has understood all this do with the rest of their life? The Jīvanmukti Viveka — "the discrimination of liberation while living" — is a prose treatise in five chapters, stitched together from quotations from the Upaniṣads, the Gītā, the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha, the Yoga Sūtra and the law-books, on the person who is free while still in the body. Its thesis is that knowledge alone liberates, as Śaṅkara taught — but that the liberated person may still have a mind with habits, and that the habits do not dissolve of themselves on the day of understanding. So there is work after knowledge: not to gain liberation, which is already the case, but to secure the three things that make it stable and visible — the guarding of knowledge, the practice of austerity, and the absence of dispute. The means are three as well, and they reinforce one another: the destruction of latent tendencies, the dissolution of the mind, and the knowledge of the truth. Vidyāraṇya's contribution was to say, plainly and with authority, that the knower of the Self may still need yoga — not as a means to knowledge but as its housekeeping — and the book has been the tradition's standard answer ever since to the objection that Advaita has no place for practice after understanding. It is also the book in which he defends the renunciation of the knower — the sannyāsa of the paramahaṃsa, who has given up even the outward signs of the monk — as the natural expression of a life in which nothing remains to be done.

Other works survive under his name: the Anubhūti Prakāśa, a verse summary of twelve Upaniṣads; the Vivaraṇa Prameya Saṃgraha, a digest of the Vivaraṇa school's doctrine; the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Vārtika Sāra, a summary of Sureśvara's enormous Vārtika; and the Dṛg-Dṛśya Viveka, "the discrimination of the seer and the seen", a short manual of forty-six verses that some attribute to Bhāratī Tīrtha and some to him, and that is among the most useful short texts in the whole tradition. The Mādhavīya Śaṅkara Digvijaya, the life of Śaṅkara that the Śṛṅgeri tradition follows, is attributed to a Mādhava, and the tradition has generally taken that Mādhava to be him.

The difficulties, which he did not hide

He lived through the destruction of the world he was born into, and he did something about it, and the tradition has never been entirely comfortable with what that means. A monk who counsels kings and arranges the finances of a kingdom is not the renunciant of the Upaniṣads, and the Jīvanmukti Viveka is, among other things, a long and careful answer to the question of how such a life can be squared with the teaching that nothing remains to be done. His answer was that it can — that the knower acts for the world with no stake in the outcome, as the Gītā's Kṛṣṇa says he himself does — and that a kingdom that keeps the Veda alive is worth a scholar's evenings. But he did not pretend the question away, and neither should a reader.

The other difficulty is his own doing. He tried to make the tradition teachable — to put the whole of Advaita in fifteen chapters that a student could work through in a year — and the risk of that is the risk of any textbook: that the student mistakes the summary for the thing, and having read the Pañcadaśī thinks the Upaniṣads unnecessary. The tradition's answer, which is his own, is that the Pañcadaśī ends where the Upaniṣads begin, and that its last verses send the student back to the source. Read it as a door, not a room.

The sayings, and what they were for

What follows are close renderings of the Pañcadaśī and the Jīvanmukti Viveka at the places named, not any single translator's wording.

The sayings are for the student who has understood the conclusion and does not know what to do next. The first three are ways of seeing it again from a new place. The last two are the answer to "and now?" — the tradition's most complete statement that understanding is the end of seeking and the beginning of a different kind of work.

The books, and how to read them

The Pañcadaśī is the book, and Swami Swāhānanda's translation from the Ramakrishna Math in Madras — Sanskrit text, English rendering, and brief notes, chapter by chapter — is the edition to use; it is linked below in the online edition that follows it. Read the first chapter three times before going on. Then read the sixth and the tenth, which are the two great images, and then go back to the second and work through in order. Do not read it fast; each verse is meant to be sat with, and the traditional schools take a year over it. Swami Chinmayānanda's and Swami Paramārthānanda's classes on the Pañcadaśī, listed under Videos, are the oral commentary. The Jīvanmukti Viveka, in the Adyar Library edition by S. Subrahmanya Sastri and T. R. Srinivasa Ayyangar, with Sanskrit text and translation, is the second book; read it after the Pañcadaśī, when the question it answers has become your own. The Dṛg-Dṛśya Viveka, in Swami Nikhilānanda's short edition, can be read in an afternoon and returned to for a lifetime. Śṛṅgeri's own life of him, linked below, is the source for the dates and the traditions on this page.

The timeline, plainly

• c. 1300 (approximate) — born Mādhava at Ekaśilā Nagarī, Warangal, son of Māyaṇa and Śrīmatī; brothers Sāyaṇa and Bhoganātha.
• 1323 — the Delhi Sultanate takes Warangal and ends the Kākatīya kingdom; the Hoysalas and Pāṇḍyas fall in the same decade.
• Early 14th century — studies under Vidyātīrtha and Bhāratī Tīrtha at Śṛṅgeri and under Śrīkaṇṭha; the works of "Mādhava" — Sarvadarśana Saṃgraha, Parāśara-Mādhavīya, Kālamādhava, Jaiminīya Nyāyamālā Vistara — belong by tradition to these years.
• 1328 — his brother Bhāratī Tīrtha takes sannyāsa (Śṛṅgeri tradition).
• 1331 — Mādhava takes sannyāsa from Vidyātīrtha and becomes Vidyāraṇya (Śṛṅgeri tradition); pilgrimage to Kāśī and Badarikāśrama.
• 1336 — Harihara I crowned; Vijayanagara founded at Hampi on the Tuṅgabhadrā under his guidance, the tradition says, and named Vidyānagara after him.
• 1336–1380 — counsellor to Harihara I, Bukka I and Harihara II; meditation on Mataṅga Hill; the Vidyāśaṅkara temple at Śṛṅgeri built in memory of Vidyātīrtha.
• 1380 — becomes the twelfth Jagadguru of Śṛṅgeri on the death of Bhāratī Tīrtha.
• 1380–1386 — the Pañcadaśī, completed by tradition with Bhāratī Tīrtha's chapters; the Jīvanmukti Viveka; the Anubhūti Prakāśa and other works; Harihara II's grants to Śṛṅgeri recorded in inscriptions naming him.
• 1386 — dies; samādhi at Hampi, below Mataṅga Hill.

For the seeker now

He is the teacher on this site for people who want a course. If the commentaries seem impassable and the sayings of the modern teachers too brief, the Pañcadaśī is the middle road: the whole of the teaching, from fifteen angles, each beginning from something you already know, arranged so that each chapter makes the next one easier. It was written for exactly that reader, by a man who had read everything and wanted to save others the trouble.

He is also the teacher for people who have understood something and do not know what it means for the rest of their lives. The Jīvanmukti Viveka is the tradition's fullest answer, and it comes from a man who founded a kingdom, ran a monastery and wrote a library after he had taken the vows that were supposed to end all doing. Whatever else it teaches, his life teaches that knowledge of the Self does not empty the days. It changes who the days are for.

A note on the pictures and the dates

No portrait of Vidyāraṇya is attempted here. Dates follow the Śṛṅgeri tradition's account of him — his sannyāsa in 1331, his headship from 1380 to 1386 — and the accepted date of 1336 for the founding of Vijayanagara; his birth year is not recorded and is estimated. The story of his role in the kingdom's founding is told as the tradition tells it, and this page has said where history and tradition part. The passages given as sayings are close renderings of the sense of the texts at the places named, not quotations from any single translator. The map is drawn on present-day coordinates.