Adi Shankara Wrote the Earliest Complete Commentaries That Survive on the Brahma Sutras, the Gita and Ten Upanishads, and Four Monasteries Tradition Credits to Him Teach His Advaita Today

Adi Shankara’s commentaries on the Brahma Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita and ten Upanishads are the earliest complete commentaries on those texts that survive, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Four monasteries that tradition credits to him stand in the four directions of India: Sringeri in Karnataka, Dwarka in Gujarat, Puri in Odisha and Jyotirmath in Uttarakhand. The first of them, the Sringeri Sharada Peetham, names its present head as the 36th Acharya in an unbroken line that begins with Shankara’s disciple Sureshwaracharya.

The Peetham’s own account places his birth at Kalady in Kerala in 788 CE, and says he was in the thirty-second year of his life when he went to Kedarnath and disappeared from sight. Early scholars worked with the same span, 788 to 820 CE. Later scholars argue for earlier years, and the names are given further down.

What survives in his own works

The Stanford entry says that, historically, Shankara’s written works define who he was. They are his commentaries on the Brahma Sutras (short aphorisms on Brahman, which Advaita teachers trace to Badarayana, around the first century BCE), on the Gita, and on ten principal Upanishads: the Isha, Kena, Katha, Prashna, Mundaka, Mandukya, Aitareya, Taittiriya, Chandogya and Brihadaranyaka. His comment on the Mandukya sits inside his commentary on the Karika of Gaudapada, a set of verses on that Upanishad. He also composed one independent work, the Upadeshasahasri, which is called “A Thousand Teachings.” The Upanishads, the Gita and the Brahma Sutras together are the triple canon of Advaita Vedanta, the Stanford entry adds.

Sringeri’s pages list more. Under the heading Prakarana Granthas, books that explain the terms of the shastras, they name the Vivekachudamani, the Atma-Bodha and the Aparokshanubhuti, and they speak of the Brahma Sutras as the Sutras of Vyasa. Hundreds of texts carry Shankara’s name, the Stanford entry says, but their authorship is questionable, and most were probably composed in later centuries by monastic heads who held the title Shankaracharya. Only some of them are established as his, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy agrees. Scholars sort the works with criteria set out by Paul Hacker, which Vidyasankar Sundaresan later criticised and expanded.

The teaching in plain words

Advaita means non-dual. One verse, which the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls anonymous, sums the position up: “Brahman is alone True, and this world of plurality is an error; the individual self is not different from Brahman.” Brahman, in this reading, is pure consciousness, one without a second. According to the encyclopedia, the individual self and the universal self are in reality identical, as the space inside a container is the same space as the space outside it, and the difference is experienced because of ignorance, avidya.

Shankara takes up this problem in the first lines of his commentary on the Brahma Sutras. In George Thibaut’s English translation, which appeared in 1890 in the Sacred Books of the East, he writes that the “I” and the “you” are as opposed as darkness and light, yet people habitually lay the qualities of one on the other. He calls this superimposition and defines it as the apparent presentation, in some other thing, of something seen before. For examples he takes mother-of-pearl that looks like silver and the fact that “The moon although one only appears as if she were double.” He says learned men call this mutual superimposition of the Self and the not-Self avidya, which Thibaut renders as nescience, and call the discerning of the Self from what is laid over it vidya, knowledge. Advaita teachers use a rope seen as a snake from a distance as the stock example, the Internet Encyclopedia notes.

The way out is knowledge. For Shankara knowledge is the one and only means to moksha, the end of the cycle of birth and death, the encyclopedia says, and he lists four qualifications before the inquiry begins: telling the permanent from the impermanent, dispassion toward the fruits of action in this world and in heaven, disciplines such as calmness and control of the mind, and a longing for liberation.

Shankara did not present himself as the founder of a new school. He was a systematizer of Advaita, the Stanford entry says, and saw himself as part of a long lineage. Govinda was his teacher, and by tradition Govinda’s teacher was Gaudapada, whom the entry dates to the sixth century CE. Gaudapada’s Mandukya Karika is considered the first complete Advaita work, according to the Internet Encyclopedia.

Why he wrote on the Gita

In the introduction to his Gita commentary, in Alladi Mahadeva Sastri’s 1897 English translation, Shankara says earlier commentators had explained the text word by word, but “to the laity it appears to teach diverse and quite contradictory doctrines.” He writes that the Gita’s seven hundred verses were set down by Vyasa and that its aim is the Supreme Bliss, the complete end of samsara, the round of rebirth. That end comes, he says, from steady devotion to the knowledge of the Self, preceded by the giving up of works.

Works keep a place in his scheme. Done in devotion to the Lord and without regard to results, he writes, they purify the mind, and a mind made pure is fit to take the path of knowledge. How Ramanuja, Madhva, Tilak, Gandhi and others read the same eighteen chapters is laid out in the tuput piece on the Gita’s structure and commentaries.

The life as Sringeri tells it

The best-known biography is the Madhaviya Shankara Vijayam. Sringeri’s site carries an abridged version and says its author, Madhava, later became the 12th Acharya of the Peetham under the name Vidyaranya.

In that account Shankara was born at Kalady, on the bank of the Poorna river, to Aryamba and Shivaguru, on the fifth day of the waxing moon in the month of Vaishakha, 788 CE. Shivaguru died while the boy was young, and Aryamba brought him up and held his sacred-thread ceremony. Shankara left Kalady to look for a teacher and found Govinda Bhagavatpada, a disciple of Gaudapada, on the banks of the Narmada.

At Varanasi the first to join him was Sanandana, later known as Padmapada. On his way to the Ganges, the account says, Shankara met an outcaste walking with four dogs and asked him to step aside. The outcaste answered by asking whether the same Atman was not present in a Brahmana and in an outcaste. Shankara recognised the answer as the speech of a knower of non-duality, called him a guru whatever his birth, and set the exchange down in the Manisha Panchakam. Later, at Badri, he wrote his commentaries on the Brahma Sutras, the Gita and the Upanishads.

His travels then took him to Prayag, to meet Kumarila Bhatta, a staunch upholder of the ritual reading of the Vedas, who advised him to take on Mandana Mishra at Mahishmati, placed by Sringeri’s page in present-day Bihar. Ubhaya Bharati judged the contest between the two. Shankara held that Brahman alone is the final truth and that the world appears through ignorance, while Mandana held that Vedic action is the real authority. Mandana accepted defeat, took sannyasa, and received the name Sureshwara. Sureshwaracharya is the Peetham’s first Acharya. A Sureshwara is credited with the Naishkarmya Siddhi, an independent Advaita treatise, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which also describes Mandana Mishra as an eighth-century thinker whose Brahmasiddhi gives works a larger role beside knowledge than Shankara allowed.

In Kashmir, the account says, the Sharada temple had four gates and a Throne of Omniscience that only an all-knowing person could sit on. Scholars from the west, east and north had opened their gates. Adherents of Kanada’s school, Sankhyas, Buddhists, Digambara Jains and followers of Jaimini tested Shankara in their own systems at the southern entrance, and the gate was opened for him. He taught until the thirty-second year of his life, the page says, then went to Kedara and disappeared from sight there.

Four directions, four monasteries

Sringeri’s Peetham says Shankara founded four monastic centres in the cardinal directions of India and installed his four principal disciples as their first heads. Its list reads:

• South: the Sringeri Sharada Math in Karnataka, under Sureshwaracharya.
• West: the Dwarka Math in Gujarat, under Padmapadacharya.
• East: the Govardhana Math at Puri in Odisha, under Hastamalakacharya.
• North: the Jyotir Math at Jyotirdhama near Badrinath in Uttarakhand, under Totakacharya.

For the south, the Peetham says, Shankara chose the bank of the Tunga river after seeing a cobra spread its hood to shade a frog in labour, and a shrine called Kappe Shankara marks the spot. He consecrated an icon of the goddess Sharada there. Sringeri dates its founding to more than twelve centuries ago. In the 14th century, it adds, the rulers of the new Vijayanagar empire, guided by the 12th Acharya, Vidyaranya, began a royal patronage that gave it rights over the secular administration of land.

The Stanford entry says Shankara purportedly established the earliest monastic system in Brahmanical religion, including the Dashanami, or Ten Names, orders of renouncers, along with four or five principal monasteries. Many lineages and monasteries that identify with him continue today. Several of these towns also lie on pilgrim circuits, and the tuput article on the Char Dham and the Himalayan pilgrim routes sets the monasteries beside them.

What scholars date and question

Several dates are in use, the Stanford entry says. Early scholars placed Shankara from 788 to 820 CE. Nakamura, in 1983, argued for 700 to 750 CE. Potter, in 1981, placed him from the late seventh to the early eighth century, using the date of the Advaitin Mandana. Many scholars put him in the eighth century, according to the Internet Encyclopedia. No dependable historical records of his life exist beyond his works, the Stanford entry adds, and the Shankaravijayas, the accounts of his life, were composed several centuries after his death.

Religious identity is also discussed. By the Advaita tradition’s own account he was a Shaiva, a devotee of Shiva, while several scholars think he was a Vaishnava, a devotee of Vishnu, the Stanford entry reports.

One passage in his own commentary is read in different ways. On Brahma Sutra I.3.34 to 38, Shankara concludes in Thibaut’s translation that Shudras are not qualified to study the Veda, citing smriti texts that forbid them to hear or study it. Within it he also says that a person such as Vidura, who gains knowledge through the results of earlier deeds, cannot be denied its fruit, and that all four castes may learn the itihasas and puranas. Sringeri’s account of the outcaste at Varanasi is another reading of his attitude, and on 5 November 2021 India’s Culture Minister, G. Kishan Reddy, spoke at Kalady of Shankara as one of the country’s earliest social reformers against caste discrimination, according to a Press Information Bureau release.

Kalady to Kedarnath in 2021

At Kedarnath, Shankara’s samadhi was destroyed in the floods of 2013, and reconstruction there began in 2014, the Ministry of Culture said on 3 November 2021. On 5 November 2021 Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the rebuilt Adi Shankaracharya Samadhi and unveiled his statue, and prayers and celebrations at the 12 Jyotirlingas, the four dhams and other places of faith were linked to the Kedarnath event, the Press Information Bureau reported.

In his address the same day the Prime Minister said Shankara left home as a young man and travelled from Kaladi in Kerala to Kedar. At Kalady itself, the ministry said, the programme included a recitation of Shankara’s compositions by the music department of the Sanskrit university there, and Bharatanatyam and Mohiniyattam performances set to his works.