Śaṅkara

Key ideas

1. Non-duality. Śaṅkara teaches that what exists is Brahman, the unchanging ground of everything, “one only, without a second” in the words of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. Appearances of plurality do not add a second reality beside it.
2. The self is Brahman. The innermost self, ātman, which is pure consciousness, is numerically identical with Brahman. Liberation is recognising that identity, which the Upaniṣads state in sayings such as tat tvam asi, “that you are”.
3. Ignorance and superimposition. The root of bondage is avidyā, ignorance, which works as adhyāsa, superimposition: we attribute the properties of body and mind to the self and the self’s awareness to body and mind. Thibaut’s translation gives mother-of-pearl taken for silver as the ordinary example, and the tradition’s best-known one is a rope taken for a snake.
4. Two standpoints. Brahman is spoken of at two levels: higher, without attributes, and lower, as Īśvara, the God who is the cause of the world. Correspondingly the world is real in everyday experience yet less real than Brahman, on which it depends as a clay pot depends on clay.
5. Scripture as the means of knowledge. Reasoning can support but not by itself establish the identity of self and Brahman; only the Upaniṣads, read by the proper methods, make it known. Great sayings, mahāvākyas, such as tat tvam asi carry the teaching.
6. Liberation is knowledge. Ritual action cannot free us, because it presupposes the separate agent that is the problem. Liberation is knowledge that removes the ignorance, and since one already is Brahman nothing new is achieved. The liberated person, jīvanmukta, may continue to live in the body.

Śaṅkara (also Shankara, Ādi Śaṅkara or Śaṅkarācārya) was an Indian monk and teacher whose commentaries gave Advaita Vedānta, the school of non-duality, its classic philosophical form. His central claim is that the self, ātman, is identical with brahman, the one reality, and that ignorance of this is what binds us.

What do we know about his life?

Very little, and the dates are disputed. Older scholarship placed him at about 788–820 CE; others date him to about 700–750 CE, and the monasteries that trace themselves to him give a far earlier date. Beyond his writings there is no firm evidence.

The Śaṅkaravijaya biographies, composed centuries after his death, are historically unreliable. By tradition he was born at Kalāḍi in present-day Kerala, became a renouncer young, studied under Govinda Bhagavatpāda, travelled and debated across the subcontinent, and died aged thirty-two. His contemporary Maṇḍana Miśra was better known for some centuries, and the first mentions of him in other sources come in the eleventh. Tradition also credits him with founding four monasteries (maṭhas) and the Daśanāmī order of monks, but some scholars think the system took shape in the fourteenth century.

Which works are his?

The works generally accepted are the commentary on the Brahma Sūtras of Bādarāyaṇa, commentaries on ten principal Upaniṣads and on the Bhagavad Gītā, a commentary on Gauḍapāda’s Kārikā, and the Upadeśasāhasrī, or A Thousand Teachings. Over three hundred texts carry his name; most were probably written by later authors. The popular Vivekacūḍāmaṇi is mostly rejected.

What is non-duality?

The Chāndogya Upaniṣad, in Max Müller’s translation, says that in the beginning there was “that only which is … one only, without a second”. That is the thought on which Śaṅkara builds. Brahman is the unchanging ground of all that exists, and ātman, the self, is identical with it. In the same Upaniṣad a father tells his son: “It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it” (read the passage).

Consciousness, on his view, is not an object known by another act of knowing. It is self-evident and constant through waking, dreaming and deep sleep.

Why do we not see this?

Because of avidyā, ignorance, which works as superimposition (adhyāsa). Thibaut’s translation of the opening of Śaṅkara’s Brahma Sūtra commentary defines it as follows: “The apparent presentation, in the form of remembrance, to consciousness of something previously observed, in some other thing.” The ordinary example he gives is “Mother-of-pearl appears like silver”. We make the same mistake with self and not-self, taking the body or the thinking mind for the self. The rope-and-snake case is the tradition’s best-known picture of this error. The library’s passage on superimposition is difficult but short.

Is the world an illusion?

Not in a simple sense. Māyā is often translated “illusion”, but Śaṅkara treats the world as dependent on Brahman, as a pot depends on clay, and so less real than its source, not as nothing. He distinguishes a higher Brahman without attributes, nirguṇa, from the lower Brahman, Īśvara, who has attributes and is the cause of the world. Later Advaitins disputed what māyā is and where ignorance resides, and these disputes produced sub-schools within the tradition.

How does knowledge free us?

Only the Upaniṣads, Śaṅkara argues, make the identity of self and Brahman known, so scripture is the means of knowledge, śabda, among the pramāṇas; logic helps but cannot establish it alone. He rejects the ritual-centred reading of the Veda in Mīmāṃsā, arguing that action cannot produce liberating knowledge, and he argued against the Buddhist idealism of Yogācāra and against Nyāya. Liberation, mokṣa, is not something achieved. In the analogy of the tenth man, the one thought to be missing was never lost, only overlooked, and so liberation is a recognition and not a new acquisition.

Vaiṣṇava critics later called him a “crypto-Buddhist”; the Advaita tradition rejects the charge. Rāmānuja and Madhva founded rival schools of Vedānta.

What was his influence?

His disciples Padmapāda and Sureśvara carried the teaching on. From the fourteenth century, with the patronage of the Vijayanagara empire for the Sringeri monastery, the hagiographies made him a conquering teacher, and the title Śaṅkarācārya is still used by heads of certain monasteries.

How should you start reading Śaṅkara?

Read the sources first: the Chāndogya passage above and the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, then the Bhagavad Gītā, which the library gives in Edwin Arnold’s verse translation, not Śaṅkara’s commentary. Then try the opening of the Brahma Sūtra commentary in Thibaut’s translation, which is the library’s one text by Śaṅkara himself. For the school as a whole, start from the page on Advaita Vedānta.