S Śaṅkara (Śamkara) ˙ Śaṅkara’s Date Aleksandar Uskokov Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Like most dates in Indian history, the precise dates of Śaṅkara are uncertain, and scholars have relied on several different methods to establish them. One is the explicit attribution of dates to Śaṅkara in later works: in fact, the most common dates of Śaṅkara’s birth and death that we find in scholarly literature were proposed based on a short manuscript of an unknown title, which says that Śaṅkara was born in the year 710 of the Śaka era and died in 742, which is equivalent to 788 and 820 AD. Several other works repeat these dates, none of which, however, is earlier than the sixteenth century ([20], pp. 48–52; [23], pp. 45; [8], pp. 93–99). There have been other attempts to come with the precise dates from mentions in other works, all of which turn out to be late and, therefore, unreliable ([20], pp. 52–57). Another dating method is based on pursuing what is known from other sources about the flourishing of cities that Śaṅkara mentions in his works. Hajime Nakamura, however, had shown that in referring to names of specific cities, Śaṅkara was just following a customary practice and that his referring to such places was not related to their contemporary significance ([20], pp. 59–62). Yet another dating approach is through the attempt to locate historically three kings that Śaṅkara mentions in his commentary on the Brahma-Sūtra 4.3.5 – Balavarman, Jayasiṁha, and Kṛṣṇagupta – under the assumption that they were his contemporaries. From these Introduction Śaṅkara Bhagavatpāda (ca. 650–800 AD) was a Vedāntic theologian and a philosopher, belonging to the school of monistic or Advaita Vedānta and often identified as its systematic founder. He is arguably the most important Indian philosopher in terms of public recognition – indeed, no Indian philosopher has been studied more thoroughly than Śaṅkara, both in India and in the West – and without a doubt, he is one of the most important cultural heroes of modern Hinduism. His commentaries on the Upaniṣads, the BrahmaSūtra, and the Bhagavad-Gī tā have often been taken as the golden standard of interpretation of these canonical works of Vedānta. Consequently, he has always had a rich public persona and enjoyed a place of pride in the imaginations of Vedānta, Hinduism, the study of Indian philosophy, and all things Sanskrit and Indian. # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2018 P. Jain et al. (eds.), Hinduism and Tribal Religions, Encyclopedia of Indian Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1036-5_224-1 2 names, and based on South Indian political history, Kengo Harimoto had argued that Śaṅkara likely wrote his Brahma-Sūtra commentary sometime between 756 and 772 AD [8]. Another method used for dating Śaṅkara is that of relative chronology, that is, the method that places him between philosophers and theologians whose dates are better known and who were roughly contemporaneous with him. While the dates produced in this way still vary widely, such that he can be placed anywhere from 650 to 800 AD ([20], pp. 65–89; [8], pp. 87–93), this relative chronology is, nevertheless, the most important issue from the perspective of intellectual history. That is, it does not matter that much just when he was born and when he died, as much as it matters which philosophers and theologians were a significant part of his intellectual context and which were positively and negatively influenced by him. What is known from the perspective of relative chronology, thus, is that Śaṅkara lived sometime between 650 and 800 AD, but after the likes of Śabara, Bhartṛhari, Bhartṛprapañca, Gauḍapāda, Kumārila, Prabhākara, and Dharmakīrti and before his own students Sureśvara and Padmapāda, as well as Bhāskara. The only unclear detail relevant for intellectual history is Śaṅkara’s precise relationship with the other great Advaitin of his time, Maṇḍana Miśra, and the best available evidence points that the two seem to have been contemporaries but that Maṇḍana’s Brahma-Siddhi presupposes Śaṅkara’s Brahma-Sūtra commentary [33]. Śaṅkara’s Life Unfortunately, we are not able to tell much more about Śaṅkara’s life with any degree of certainty either, except for a few details. Śaṅkara’s full name was Śaṅkara Bhagavatpāda or Bhagavatpūjyapāda: that is how his student Sureśvara calls him ([7], p. 43). He was from the south of India, which is again known from Sureśvara, who says in his Naiṣkarmya-Siddhi 4.44 that both the reverend “Gauḍas” and “Draviḍas,” that is, northerners and southerners, have taught that the Supreme Self becomes the Śaṅkara (Śamkara) ˙ witness of the sense of self when it assumes ignorance as its adjunct. The plurals are likely honorifics, and the reference is to Gauḍapāda from the north and Śaṅkara from the south. He must have been a renunciant: nothing different is imaginable from his works. As for religious affiliation, though he is often represented as a Śaiva and an incarnation of Śiva himself, from his works and the invocatory verses in the works of early Advaitins, it appears that he was a Vaiṣṇava ([7], pp. 33–39). Śaṅkara, in fact, in his commentary on the BṛhadĀraṇyaka Upaniṣad (3.7.3 [13]) explicitly identifies Īśvara, the Lord and supreme Brahman, with Nārāyaṇa. There are some twenty hagiographies written about Śaṅkara, but since none of them predates the fourteenth century, it is questionable if they contain a kernel of historically reliable representation. Most famous among these hagiographies are Śaṅkara-Vijaya of Anantānandagiri, ŚaṅkaraVijaya of Vyāsācala, and Śaṅkara-Digvijaya of Mādhava. The last was written between 1650 and 1800 AD, and neither Anantānandagiri nor Mādhava can be, respectively, identified with Ānandagiri, the famous commentator on Śaṅkara’s works, and with MādhavaVidyāraṇya [1]. The following rough outline of important details about the public or received Śaṅkara can be drawn from the hagiographies (good summaries are available in [1, 12, 14]). Śaṅkara was born as an incarnation of Śiva in the village Kālaṭi in Kerala, to his father Śivaguru and his mother Āryāmbā. Śivaguru died when the boy was five, and Śaṅkara soon felt the need to seek liberation through formal renunciation. His bond with his mother was strong, however, and fate had to intervene to break it, in a form of a crocodile that had seized Śaṅkara while he was bathing in the river. The boy implored his mother’s permission to take renunciation, since liberation was not possible for non-renunciants, and in the circumstances, the mother had little choice but to agree. Just as he formally announced his renunciation, he was miraculously released by the crocodile. He promised his mother to come back at her deathbed and perform her funerary rites, a promise which he kept, and set out in search of his guru. Śaṅkara (Śamkara) ˙ In the Himalayan Badarikāśrama or somewhere on the bank of the Narmadā river, he found a guru in Govinda Bhagavatpāda the disciple of Gauḍapāda, the famed commentator on the Māṇḍukya Upaniṣad. Initiated by Govinda, Śaṅkara himself began taking disciples and started writing commentaries on the BrahmaSūtra, the Bhagavad-Gī tā, and the Upaniṣads. Next, he set on debating the most important intellectual figures of his time. First, he intended to debate the celebrated Mīmāṁsaka Kumārila Bhaṭṭa to persuade him to write a commentary on his Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāṣya, but having come to Prayāga, he found the aging Kumārila immolating himself for the sins he had committed by cheating his Buddhist guru. The young Kumārila allegedly studied in a Buddhist monastery, posing as a Buddhist, to become so intimately acquainted with Buddhist philosophy as to be able to defeat it: he is credited with expunging Buddhism from India, but in the process, he committed the sin of lying to his teacher, which he was expiating at the end of his life. Kumārila, thus, declined the debate, but from the burning pyre, he sent Śaṅkara to his student Maṇḍana Miśra. Śaṅkara went to Maṇḍana’s home in Māhiṣmatī and won the debate with Kumārila’s student, who took sannyāsa from him and became Sureśvara, the famous interpreter of Śaṅkara’s commentaries on the Upaniṣads Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka and Taittirīya and the author of NaiṣkarmyaSiddhi. Śaṅkara next debated Maṇḍana’s wife, who was an incarnation of the goddess of learning Sarasvatī, during which debate he had to learn the science of carnal love by occupying the body of a dead king by the name of Amaruka: only after he understood this science did Sarasvatī acknowledge his mastery of all branches of learning. During his digvijayas or “victory tours,” in which he visited important places of pilgrimage, he continued debating Śaivas, Vaiṣṇavas, Śāktas, Buddhists, Jains, and other religious groups. Śaṅkara established four or five monastic orders at the cardinal points – in Śṛṅgerī in the south, Dvārakā in the west, Badarikāśrama in the 3 north, Purī in the east, and Kāñcī as the fifth, which remains a point of internal contention to this day – which he entrusted to his four principal students: Sureśvara, Padmapāda, Hastāmalaka, and Toṭaka. He passed away young, at 32, in Badarikāśrama, Kāñcī, or somewhere in Kerala. Śaṅkara’s Works Unlike his life, much more is known about Śaṅkara’s works. This is thanks to the good work of Paul Hacker ([7], pp. 41–56), Daniel Ingalls [9], and Sengaku Mayeda [16–18], who have formulated and applied several reliable criteria by which to adjudicate the authenticity of the works attributed to Śaṅkara. Although the number of such works is over four hundred ([2], p. 104), it is now known that Śaṅkara wrote commentaries on the Brahma-Sūtra and the Bhagavad-Gī tā (Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāṣya and Bhagavad-Gī tā-Bhāṣya) [13, 30–32], on the principal Upaniṣads (the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka, Taittirī ya, Chāndogya, Aitareya, I¯śā, Kaṭha, Muṇḍaka, Praś na, and two on Kena) [28, 29]. He also wrote the independent treatise Upadeśa-Sāhasrī [19], consisting of a verse and a prose portion. The commentary on the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad attributed to him is not authentic. The authenticity of two commentaries is still uncertain, on the Pātañjala-Yoga-Śāstra (the Yoga-Sūtra with the commentary which is commonly attributed to Vyāsa) and on the ĀgamaŚāstra of Gauḍapāda that includes the Māṇḍukya Upaniṣad. Although relatively recent arguments have been made in favor of the authenticity of the treatises Viveka-Cūḍamaṇi and Pañcī karaṇa [5, 25], the two contain common Advaita concepts and expressions that are absent in Śaṅkara’s authentic works and, eo ipso, later. Many hymns have also been attributed to Śaṅkara, some of which are quite popular, but Robert E. Gussner’s stylometric analysis of 17 such hymns concluded that only the Dakṣiṇāmūrti-Stotra could have been written by Śaṅkara the Vedāntin [6]. 4 Theology, Cosmology, and Psychology Introduction To appreciate the nuts and bolts of Śaṅkara’s Vedāntic theology, it is apposite to begin with some conceptual clarifications. Śaṅkara was, above all, an interpreter of the Upaniṣads, whose specific domain was Brahman the great ground of Being. For Śaṅkara, however, Brahman as presented in the Upaniṣads was not a straightforward matter: at the very least, there were two kinds of Brahman, one called the supreme Brahman, the causal Brahman, or Brahman without qualities (para-brahman, kāraṇa-brahman, nirguṇabrahman), as well as the Lord or the supreme Lord (ī śvara, parameśvara), and another one called lower Brahman, Brahman the effect, and Brahman with qualities (apara-brahman, kāryabrahman, saguṇa-brahman). The differences between the two were more a matter of concept, language, and perspective with regard to the human good: ultimately there is just one single Brahman that may be described differently dependent on whether one intends to affirm or negate something. What one may want to affirm or negate was Brahman’s causal role with respect to creation and with that ontological pluralism; arguably different from both forms of Brahman is what we may call the pure, śuddha-brahman, the noncausal Brahman that is both everything and is one’s own inner Self. While Śaṅkara does not always distinguish this pure Brahman from the causal Brahman and habitually calls both “supreme,” he does distinguish them occasionally (for instance, in his Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka-UpaniṣadBhāṣya [BĀUBh] 3.8.12). The general definition of Brahman given in the Brahma-Sūtra 1.1.2 (and referring to the Taittirī ya Upaniṣad 2.1.1 [22]) was that Brahman is the cause from which proceed all creatures, everything that is. Further, the general Vedāntic account of causality, known as the doctrine of satkārya-vāda, was that these creatures being the effect of Brahman were preexistent in Brahman the cause. Such causal relation that posits a continuum between Brahman and its creation and affirms that the creation is Brahman presents Brahman as an entity that involves some Śaṅkara (Śamkara) ˙ diversification, an entity with “distinguishing characteristics.” We may illustrate this through Chāndogya Upaniṣad 3.14 [22], which opens with the famous statement sarvaṁ khalv idaṁ brahma, “this whole world is Brahman,” calls such Brahman “the inner Self,” and says eventually that this inner Self “contains all actions, all desires, all tastes, and all smells.” Brahman, thus, has distinguishing characteristics, whatever their ontological relation to Brahman may be, because if Brahman’s creation possesses attributes such as taste and smell and it is not different from the cause, then such attributes must somehow be derived from the cause. Since Brahman the cause is the creator of everything and is everything, then, insofar as creation is taken as real, it is required to see Brahman as having distinguishing characteristics. The Upaniṣads, however, while indulging in Brahman’s creation, may intend to affirm the reality of such creation, or not, and, with that, to affirm Brahman’s distinguishing characteristics, or not. In other words, either they may intend to present the world as an effect of Brahman and, thus, as Brahman in kind, or they may intend to present Brahman the cause as the sole reality, in which case they must acknowledge the world that is empirically knowable, but do not need to affirm that it is real (Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāṣya [BSBh] 1.1.11). This, in fact, is the difference between dualism and true monism. When the Upaniṣads do intend to affirm the reality of the world as an effect of Brahman, then creation in its totality becomes what is called kārya-brahman or Brahman the effect or apara-brahman or the lower Brahman. Such Brahman is presented in the Upaniṣads so as to serve the human good of “promotion” or “prosperity,” abhyudaya: by meditation on such Brahman, one rises to the highest sphere in the world, brahma-loka. Or, by presenting Brahman as the cause and by describing its creation, the Upaniṣads may not intend to affirm the reality of Brahman’s creation but rather bring home the point that Brahman is the sole reality. When the Upaniṣads do that, they serve the human good of niḥśreyasa, liberation or the highest good. Śaṅkara (Śamkara) ˙ Cosmology Here it is required to introduce briefly Śaṅkara’s cosmology and psychology. The Brahman that Śaṅkara has in mind in terms of causality and world creation is what he otherwise describes as Īśvara, the creator God (as we mentioned above, explicitly identified with Nārāyaṇa), whose two essential characteristics are omniscience and omnipotence (BSBh 1.1.1, Kena-Vākya-Bhāṣya 3.1). These two characteristics are sort of an adjunct that conditions Brahman to assume a causal role (BĀUBh 3.8.12), in which causal role Brahman further subjects himself to what Śaṅkara, following the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, calls nāma-rūpe, name-and-form, a category that may be likened to the Sāṅkhyan prakṛti or to Aristotle’s prime matter, that is, pure potentiality. This nāma-rūpe is described as neither Brahman nor not Brahman, insofar as Brahman is different from it, but without Brahman, its existence would be impossible (although Śaṅkara gives other instances of this nonsymmetrical relation, one may think of the relation of the shadow to the substance on which the shadow is dependent; BSBh 1.1.5). When Brahman subjects itself to this nāma-rūpe in its nondiversified state of pure potentiality (avyākṛte nāma-rūpe, unevolved name-and-form), assuming it as its adjunct, from the causal Brahman (kāraṇa-brahman) that is Īśvara, he becomes Brahman that is the effect (kārya-brahman). To elaborate, the nāma-rūpe becomes diversified in the elements of creation as the physical world that we know (vyākṛte nāma-rūpe, evolved name-and-form), including the five common elements, the accommodating features of psychic life such as the intellect, cognitive faculties and sense objects, etc. Brahman himself on the one hand becomes the world-soul known as Hiraṇyagarbha, identical with the Purāṇic demiurge Brahmā and with prāṇa or life-breath that pulsates in the world and keeps it alive, and on the other, he becomes the universal form or the universe as an organism, virāṭ, that the world-soul embodies and that contains the divinities of the Vedic pantheon as its sense organs, as well as all other living creatures – men, animals, etc. – as classes and individuals. The totality of this is kārya-brahman, but the term 5 is also used specifically for Hiraṇyagarbha as the world-soul (Muṇḍana-Upaniṣad-Bhāṣya 1.1.8-9, 2.1.4; Aitareya-Upaniṣad-Bhāsya 3.3; PraśnaUpaniṣad-Bhāṣya 5.5; BĀUBh 1.4.1, 1.4.6, 2.1.1, 3.7.1-2, 3.8.12). In this way, Brahman through the nāma-rūpe that is not different from him becomes the material cause of the world (upādāna-kāraṇa), while as Īśvara he becomes the efficient cause (nimitta-kāṛaṇa) and the Self that controls the world from within (antaryāmin); as the totality of creation, he becomes the world. Psychology This perspective looks at Brahman top-down. However, because Brahman is also one’s own inner Self, that is, the Self of every individual from Hiraṇyagarbha to men and animals, he can be looked at bottom-up as well, as the individual Self. This individual Self in Śaṅkara’s system is a complex that is built on an initial interaction between Brahman the real Self, one and only for everyone, and the so-called intellect or the internal organ (buddhi, antaḥ-karaṇa) that is a product in the evolution of nāma-rūpe. Brahman as the real Self is, essentially, nothing more than what makes phenomenal consciousness of any kind possible. Śaṅkara quite often compares this Self to sunlight, the necessary factor of any perceptual awareness that is formless, but assumes various forms contingent on the shapes that it illuminates. This pure Self is not the subject of conscious experiences, because any cognitive act involves a distinction between a subject, an object, an instrument, and cognitive content and cancels monism. The Self is, rather, what makes subjectivity possible. The pure Self, thus, is the consciousness that ever obtains but is never transitive (BĀUBh 1.4.10). The subject properly speaking is a reflection of the pure Self in a set of adjuncts, upādhis, the crucial among which is the intellect (BĀUBh 1.4.7). The intellect is the specific product of nāma-rūpe in which cognition (vijñāna) in general takes place. Owing to its proximity to the pure Self in the evolution process, the intellect becomes the locus in which an empirical sense of Self can obtain. Śaṅkara illustrates the relationship between the Self, the intellect, and the sense of Self with the reflection that appears when a face 6 is placed in front of a mirror (Upadeśa-Sāhasri [US] 1.18.43). The Self is not its reflection, just as the image is not the face, but it does become identified with this reflection. The reflection is neither a property of the face nor of the mirror, but it is dependent on both, insofar as it can obtain only if both are present. It does not, however, obtain necessarily: it is accidental because the face must be in front of the mirror for one to think, “this is me.” In a different sense, the face-mirror or Selfintellect is a necessary relationship for cognitive subjectivity, because the intellect is not a conscious principle – it is the locus of cognition but is itself not conscious of anything – whereas the pure Self is not an agent. So, the properties of the one are placed over the other: the consciousness of the Self is superimposed over the intellect so that there can be a conscious experience, whereas cognitive agency that involves the distinction of subject, object, instrument, and cognition that belong to the intellect is superimposed over the Self (US 1.18.65). Because the intellect is the place where the reflection of the Self obtains, the individual Self is commonly called the vijñānātman, the Self of cognition, and is typically distinguished from the pure, inner Self – Brahman – called the pratyag-ātman or paramātman. Now, agency in general and cognitive agency in particular have the intellect as its location – it is there that cognition happens – but cognition is dependent on a set of other factors: it is dependent on the so-called manas, the faculty of attention; on the cognitive faculties that function in their respective sphere, commonly called senses, indriya; and finally, on the body, which houses these senses. The light of consciousness is, thus, further reflected in the rest of one’s personality, but it is also progressively restricted or dimmed because it is modulated by each previous reflection (BĀUBh 4.3.7). These are like nested mirrors, and the Self could potentially identify – have the notion “this is who I am” – with regard to any of them. This principle can be extended even to things that are merely related to oneself, considered “mine,” and Śaṅkara calls the whole field of potential items of identification ahaṁ-mama- Śaṅkara (Śamkara) ˙ gocara, “the sphere of ‘I’ and ‘mine’” (US 1.18.27). We can now appreciate one of the most striking passages written in the history of Indian philosophy: As we said, superimposition, to define it, is the notion of something in regard to something else. It is like when one superimposes external properties over the Self, thinking, ‘I myself am injured’ or ‘I myself am whole’ when one’s son or wife are injured or whole; or when one superimposes properties of the body and thinks, ‘I am fat,’ ‘I am lean,’ ‘I am fair,’ ‘I stand,’ ‘I go,’ or ‘I leap;’ or when one superimposes properties of the senses, as in ‘I am dumb,’ ‘I am blind on one eye,’ ‘I am emasculated,’ or ‘I am blind;’ or when one superimposes properties of the internal organ, such as desire, resolve, doubt and certainty. (BSBh 1.1.1) This superimposition (adhyāsa) whose cause is false awareness is, Śaṅkara claims, called ignorance or avidyā by the learned. We should note here that ignorance assumed an all-important role in post-Śaṅkara Advaita Vedānta: it subsumed not only the psychological ignorance but also nāmarūpe, the “cosmic” ignorance that conditions Brahman to create and becomes the stuff of creation. As Hacker and Mayeda have shown, ignorance was not a cosmological item in Śaṅkara’s thought ([7], pp. 57–100; [19], pp. 22–26, 76–84; also, [10]). In the Bhagavad-Gī tā-Bhāṣya (13.2), this psychological ignorance is said to be potentially of three kinds: (1) failure to grasp an object, as in the case of darkness; (2) seeing one thing as another, such as seeing a snake in a rope, silver in the mother-of-pearl, or when the simpleminded see dirt and a flat surface in the sky; and (3) doubt, such as the uncertainty whether a silhouette in the distance is a man or a post. These are all cases of cognitive errors, and Śaṅkara’s object in using them as examples is to show that they do not constitute an error on the part of the knower but a flaw in the causal conditions of perception: the Self is not in illusion in essentia, but in actu. They must be taken as no more than illustrations, however, because the superimposition that Śaṅkara talks about is evidently of a very different kind: it is the mistake that makes all other mistakes possible – as well as all truths. This form of Śaṅkara (Śamkara) ˙ ignorance is not just the common mistake of false recognition that brings embarrassment: ignorance is the false awareness and the superimposition that is natural (naisargika) and without a beginning (anādi), that is, it obtains as a normal state and not as a cognitive oddity. We may take Mahadevan’s lead, therefore, and distinguish this from of ignorance from the common as metaphysical [15]. However, the mere formation of the reflection of the Self, the consequent superimposition of agency, and the potential of identification with anything that constitutes the field of “I and mine” fashion the category of the individual Self, the universal to which the word “Self” can be applied: this is not what makes the Self of any John Doe. Ignorance is the immediate factor of distinguishing the category of vijñānātman or jī va from the Supreme Self, but it is not the immediate factor of individuation. Two additional factors are required for there to be an individual Self. We may put this another way. How the image of the Self will look like is contingent on the mirror: the image of the face conforms the mirror, and the mirror can be variously inflected. There are some contour points that need to be invariantly present in all images so that we could identify what kind of thing the image represents, and these are the sense of Self – “I am this” – and agency. What range of values “this” will take depends on two other factors: impressions that have the nature of habitual desire that prompts action (vāsanā, bhāvanā, saṁskāra, kāma) and the results of previous action or karma. The three, really, form a circle that reinforces itself. The impressions are impressions of ignorance, results of past identifications involving agency – past actions – that color, or rather perfume, one’s awareness. They are in the form of volitional tendencies for something specific. Desires that are formed through impression are the medium that otherwise unproductive ignorance must take to become an instigator to action (bhāvanā). Action and its resultant karma on their part produce one’s future embodiment that is an instantiation of ignorance, as it involves a wrong identification in which one becomes naturally prone to specific desires and fit for the attaining of specific goals, requiring specific 7 action. Because the superimposition that is ignorance is natural and without a beginning, this circle of avidyā -> vāsanā -> kāma -> karma > avidyā is a true circle: everything is logically predicated on ignorance, but ignorance historically or temporally requires an existing embodiment (US 1.10.9; BSBh 3.1.1; BĀUBh 1.4.16). Let us note, then, that the individual Self is just Brahman the light of consciousness, which owing to ignorance and its results can identify with any point in its immediate sphere that it illuminates. Theology Now, the pure Brahman, to Śaṅkara’s mind, was that Brahman that is expressed in the identity statements of the Upaniṣads, that is, those statements that identify Brahman with the individual Self understood as the cognitive agent, the paradigmatic among which are ahaṁ brahmāsmi of the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka (1.4.10) and tat tvam asi of the Chāndogya (6.8.7) (BSBh 4.1.2). This was so because the identity statements expressed something about Brahman that could not be expressed otherwise. Let us present this briefly. I said above that, for Śaṅkara, the Upaniṣads, while indulging in the discourse of ontological pluralism, may intend not to affirm such pluralism but to negate it. What some Upaniṣadic texts do, in other words, is take a stock of empirical reality and then use the discourse of creation on the side of the cosmic Brahman and the discourse of identification on the side the personal Brahman to negate the reality both of the world and of the individual, empiric Self, such that in the end only Brahman would remain as real. They present, in other words, the processes of creation and individuation so as to introduce schemes by means of which the world and the individual Self can be reduced to Brahman. The identity statements of the Upaniṣads are the Upaniṣadic core because they juxtapose the two categories on which such reduction must be performed. Śaṅkara calls these two sides the categories of tat, “that,” and tvam, “you,” following the paradigmatic identity statement tat tvam asi. The reduction on the side of Brahman goes roughly like this. The Upaniṣads (such as the Taittirī ya) define Brahman as satyaṁ jñānam 8 anantam ānandam, “being, consciousness, limitless, bliss.” Śaṅkara takes this as the essential definition of Brahman, in which the individual characteristics are not attributes of Brahman, but mutually denotative of its essence (Taittirī yaUpaniṣad-Bhāṣya 2.1.1). Brahman as Being is the sole fact that something is, and as such Brahman is coordinated with everything, insofar as about anything that really exists one must say that it is. The requirement of something to be, however, does not allow that it is anything specific, because the being of something specific changes (BGBh 2.16, BĀUBh 1.2.1). To illustrate, things like pots and pitchers are real, positive entities, not as pots or pitchers, however, but solely as clay: their pot shape and pitcher shape are in time destroyed and reshaped, but clay remains real throughout all changes. Clay, however, can also be reduced to something more basic, such as the element of earth, which is further reducible to Being through the Upaniṣadic accounts of creation that state how earth comes forth from Being. In the ultimate analysis, the final point of reduction is Being. In terms of Upaniṣadic scriptural theology, this reduction takes place because of the juxtaposition of “Being,” satyam, with “unlimited,” anantam. A similar analysis is performed with Brahman’s characteristic of jñānam, consciousness. Brahman as consciousness can neither be the subject of knowing nor the cognitive content, but simply the light of consciousness that makes cognition possible. This is so, again, because of the juxtaposition of “consciousness,” jñānam, with “unlimited,” anantam. Likewise, with bliss, ānandam: Brahman is not experiential bliss, but bliss solid – bliss as substance – and in the ultimate analysis, it comes to mean that Brahman is not liable to suffering, transmigration. What this means for the initial definition of Brahman as the cause from which all creatures proceed is that the causal Brahman is not the kind of cause that we are generally acquainted with: things proceed from Brahman just “in a manner of speaking,” as there are no things to begin with: everything except the permanently unchanging Brahman is just inconstant, changing name-and-form, appearance which in substance is just Brahman, and the Śaṅkara (Śamkara) ˙ discourse of causality is no more than a verbal handle whose purpose is to bring home the point that Brahman is the sole reality. That great ground of Being that is Brahman is the only thing that exists. A similar reduction is performed on the side of the individual Self, which is gradually stripped of all identification points in a manner of removing layers of skin from a vegetable, until all that remains is the pure vijñānātman, the Self that is not properly individuated. Ultimately, however, the two categories, tat and tvam, the causal Brahman and the Self, are still somewhat irreconcilable, because Brahman is still that great ground of Being that is external, whereas the individual Self even as no more than a category retains the sense of being inner, and therefore different from Brahman. The pure Brahman, therefore, expressed in the identity statements, must cease its being the cause, and the Self must cease understanding itself as different from Brahman: “When non-difference has dawned on one through statements such as ‘You are that,’ the individual Self’s being liable to transmigration is lost, and so is Brahman’s being a creator, because full knowledge defeats the practical reality of difference that extends through false awareness” (BSBh 2.1.22). Īśvara or the Supreme Lord, omniscient and omnipotent under the requirements of causality, in the ultimate analysis ceases being that, because he is, really, just the light of consciousness that does not admit the discourse of causality at all. Brahman the great ground of Being is, really, just the inner Self. (The above account was presented solely from Śaṅkara’s own works. Important discussions in the secondary literature include [3], pp. 215–283; [7], pp. 57–100; [10, 11, 19], pp. 18–68; [24], pp. 25–92; [26], pp. 89–160; [27].) Practice and the Human Good Śaṅkara’s purpose in presenting his monistic theology was not per se to deny the reality of the world, or rather, not necessarily so. He was in a sense a realist, but with a twist. Along with his Buddhist peers, he subscribed to a worldview in Śaṅkara (Śamkara) ˙ which things can be looked at from two incommensurable perspectives. One was that of realism, from which perspective things were just as they appear to be, in the empiric world (loke) and in Vedic world that is predicated on pluralism (vede). The other perspective was that of ontological monism, indeed, illusionism, in which there was no world, no creation, and no multiplicity of Selves, but just Brahman the light of consciousness. The two perspectives are known as vyavahāra, the worldview of ordinary or conventional reality, and paramārtha, the absolute perspective or how things really are. The first is the perspective of embodiment and transmigration, the second of liberation. As indicated above, even the Veda was concerned with the perspective of conventional reality. The Upaniṣads as the concluding part of the Veda, on the other hand, were split, insofar as some Upaniṣadic texts were predicated on pluralism and intended to affirm it, while other Upaniṣadic texts had to indulge in pluralism, with no intention to affirm it, but rather use it as the subject of which something true can be predicated, namely, which can be denied as real. The first kind of Upaniṣadic texts were concerned with meditation on Brahman, a process dependent on a distinction between Brahman and the meditator and leading to prosperity but remaining in transmigration, while the second were concerned with knowledge qua knowledge (ChāndogyaUpaniṣad-Bhāṣya, Introduction). Let us focus on the second. We saw that ignorance consisting in false identification was the cause of individuation and embodiment. The solution to embodiment and the means to liberation had to be, consequently, simply knowing one’s true nature as Brahman the light of consciousness. When such knowledge had arisen, one would achieve liberation, defined as remaining in the state of the Self or simply as being Brahman, without anything further to do: no rituals to perform or meditation to engage in. But, perfect knowledge was not easy to achieve. First of all, it was predicated on the agent being sufficiently pure and qualified to inquire into Brahman, which purity, to Śaṅkara’s 9 mind, was evident in the aspirant manifesting the following four characteristics: 1. The ability to discern things transient and eternal (nityānitya-vastu-viveka), more specifically, to understand that the attainment of Vedic ritual and meditation is not eternal; consequent on this 2. Dispassion toward the enjoyments of the here and the hereafter (ihāmutrārtha-bhogavirāga); consequent on this 3. The acquisition of certain personal virtues (śama-damādi-sādhana-sampat), the classical list of which consists of control of the mind and senses, tranquility, tolerance, concentration, and faith; and, consequent on these 4. Desire after liberation (mumukṣutva) (BSBh 1.1.1. When one had acquired these characteristics and was intent on inquiring into Brahman, one had to take formal renunciation; indeed, we will notice that the four characteristics inherently involve renunciation and dispassion. In fact, Śaṅkara and his followers were adamant that the inquiry into Brahman would be unsuccessful in one who had not acquired these characteristics first, and the reason for this was simple: knowing as a category was essentially different from doing something, and unless one was accustomed solely to knowing, that is, to dispassion, one’s knowing would be constantly disturbed by false identification with some form of personal agency. The process of inquiry into Brahman as the process of liberation consists in the successive application of three methods: śravaṇa, manana, and nididhyāsana. These three methods were based on a statement by Yājñavalkya to his wife Maitreyī in the Bṛhad-Āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.4.5: ātmā vā are draṣṭavyaḥ śrotavyo mantavyo nididhyāsitavyaḥ, “The Self should be seen: it should be heard about, pondered over, meditated on.” For Śaṅkara, śravaṇa and manana were a theological and a philosophical inquiry with a teacher, focused on the identity statements of the Upaniṣads, whose respective purpose was to bring home the understanding that the Upaniṣads intend to affirm full ontological identity of the Self with Śaṅkara (Śamkara) ˙ 10 Brahman by fixing the reference of the two individual categories through removing identification points and to facilitate through analogical reasoning the understanding of how such full ontological identity was possible. From the end of the second prose chapter of the Upadeśa-Sāhasrī, it is evident that one could attain full understanding and, consequently, liberation at the completion of the manana process. The third process, nididhyāsana or meditation, was not Yogic meditation as a form of mental absorption on a single notion, but a personal reflection of the Sāṅkhyan kind whose idea was to analyze all possible identification points for the Self such that in the end only the Self as the light of consciousness would remain as the residue without which no cognition and no identification would be possible. The purpose of this meditation was on the one hand to supplement the first two processes if full understanding had not already arisen and on the other to serve as an instrument of guarding the arisen understanding of one’s being Brahman. The reason such guarding was required was that in life one could achieve liberation from the past karma that had not started bearing results, but not of the karma one was already experiencing, that is, the karma of present embodiment. Such karma overpowers the knowledge of Brahman until it is exhausted, and thus knowledge is at risk from potential identification with the products of ignorance. This liberation while living, jī vanmukti, that ensues upon the full understanding of the identity statements and, consequently, the removal of ignorance, is followed by the attaining of Brahman at death, called videha-mukti in later Advaita Vedānta (BĀUBh 1.4.7; [4, 21]). The Public Śaṅkara In this overview we were focused on the private or historical Śaṅkara, the theologian and philosopher whose thought can be reconstructed from his own books and his context. It is fair to say, nevertheless, that no cultural hero had engaged Indian imagination as much as Śaṅkara did. We can in that sense talk about the “public” or “received” Śaṅkara, the Śaṅkara of the hagiographies; of the monasteries; of the first feature film ever shot in Sanskrit, G.V. Iyer’s (1983) Adi Shankaracharya; or of the more recent Telugu Jagadguru Adi Sankara, the Śaṅkara who was Śiva born to banish Buddhism from India, the royal Śaṅkara who rules India from his seat at the four cardinal points. This public Śaṅkara, constructed as a paradigmatic Advaitin, and indeed Hindu, to whom everything of the Advaita or Hindu kind can be ascribed, was particularly important in the Indian encounter with modernity and with the challenge of the West: he had provided the doctrinal foundation for many of the builders of modern, universalist Hinduism, such as Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda, and Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Today more than ever, he continues to furnish doctrinal justification, but has also assumed the role as one of the few, select venues for various battles concerning things Sanskrit and Hindu in the public and digital spaces, in the West no less so than in India. Cross-References ▶ Adhikāra ▶ Advaita Vedānta ▶ Ānanda ▶ Ātman, Hinduism ▶ Avidyā ▶ Bhagavad Gītā ▶ Bhāskara ▶ Brahmā ▶ Brahma Sūtras (Vedānta Sūtras) ▶ Brahman ▶ Dvārakā ▶ Hagiography ▶ Jīvanmukti ▶ Kāñcī (Kāñcīpuram) ▶ Loka ▶ Mahāvākya ▶ Māyā ▶ Mokṣa ▶ Monism (Hinduism) ▶ Nambudiri ▶ Nārāyaṇa Śaṅkara (Śamkara) ˙ ▶ Neo Vedānta ▶ Purī ▶ Realism (Hinduism) ▶ Sāṁkhya ▶ Saṁnyāsa ▶ Saṁsāra ▶ Śaṅkarācāryas ▶ Scripture (Hinduism) ▶ Śiva ▶ Stotra ▶ Swami Vivekananda ▶ Upaniṣads ▶ Vedānta, Overview ▶ Vedas, Overview References 1. Bader J (2000) Conquest of the four quarters: traditional accounts of the life of Śaṅkara. Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi 2. Clark M (2006) The Daśanāmī-Saṁnyāsis: the integration of ascetic lineages into an order. Brill, Leiden/ Boston 3. Comans M (2000) The method of early Advaita Vedānta: a study of Gauḍapāda, Śaṅkara, Sureśvara and Padmapāda. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 4. Fort AO (1998) Jīvanmukti in transformation: embodied liberation in Advaita and Neo-Vedanta. 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