(788–820?) Shankaracharya - Writer and religious thinker who
is clearly the most important person in the Advaita Vedanta intellectual
school, and possibly the single most important Hindu religious figure.
His life is shrouded in mystery—his dates are unknown—but
popular legends persist.
According to legend, he was the deity Shiva incarnate, who
came to earth to teach the ultimate wisdom.
Shankara is one of Shiva's epithets, while acharya is an
honorific suffix that means "teacher." He is said to have been born
into a Nambudiri brahmin household in Kaladi, Kerala, to have been an ascetic
at an early age and to have traveled far participating in religious debates,
notably with Buddhists, whose religious influence he placed on the decrease.
He is said to have founded the 10 Dashanami Sanyasi orders
and the four maths that serve as their headquarters, to have authored comments
on the three primary scriptures of the Vedanta school—the Upanishads, Vedanta
Sutras, and Bhagavad Gita—and to have died at the age of 32 in the Himalayas.
Many of these assertions are unsubstantiated, yet his work's
importance cannot be questioned.
The Brahmasutra Bhashya, his commentary on the Vedanta
Sutras, provides the traditional Advaita Vedanta formulation, emphasizing that the
Ultimate Reality is the unqualified (nirguna) Brahman, which is everlasting and
unchanging, and to which the human soul is identical.
The changing phenomenal world (the universe we see and feel)
is an illusion, generated by superimposing (adhyasa) erroneous concepts upon
the unqualified Brahman.
Because Shankaracharya thinks that the only way to be free
is to replace one's erroneous understanding with the proper one, he feels that
insight, not action, is the way to go.
This epiphany may be defined as a flash of insight, however
describing Shanka racharya as a mystic seems to be inaccurate.
This is because he places a significant emphasis on the holy
books' legitimacy as a source of precise information about the ultimate truth.
Although Shankara charya felt that obligatory ritual
activities should be undertaken out of a feeling of responsibility, this
emphasis on insight devalues the ultimate usefulness of ritual activity, save
in a preliminary function of clearing defilements.
Shankaracharya's quiet, as much as his speech, has
philosophical significance.
Many philosophical questions remain unanswered, including
whether selves are one or many, whether the seat of ignorance (avidya) was
Brahman or the person, the nature of ignorance, and the actual nature of the
material universe.
Because he refused to take a stand on these matters, those
who followed after him had a lot of options.
Shankaracharya himself focused on epistemological
difficulties, such as how people come to know things and, more importantly, how
to repair the false beliefs that bind people.
His writings conjure up a picture of a genuinely religious
guy whose principal purpose was to assist his listeners in dispelling their
illusions and achieving complete spiritual emancipation (moksha).
Given this underlying objective and his keen intellectual
mind, one might argue that he was aware of such metaphysical issues but decided
to ignore them since they were irrelevant to his main goal.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore (eds. ), A
Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, 1957; and Karl H. Potter (ed. ), Advaita
Vedanta up to Samkara and His Pupils, 1981, for further information on
Shankaracharya's thinking.
