Ādi Śaṅkara

What is Ādi Śaṅkara?

Ādi Śaṅkara was an 8th–9th century Indian philosopher and theologian who systematised Advaita Vedānta§: the teaching that only Brahman is ultimately real and that the individual self is not other than Brahman. His commentaries on the Upaniṣads, the Brahma Sūtras and the Bhagavad Gītā shaped Hindu philosophical thought for more than a millennium. He also founded four monasteries across India, giving the doctrine an institutional home that has endured for twelve centuries.

Life and dating

Born in Kalady in present-day Kerala, Śaṅkara took renunciation as a boy. He then travelled the length of the subcontinent, a remarkable feat in itself. Most accounts give him only thirty-two years of life. He held public debates with philosophers from competing schools, including Sāṁkhya, Mīmāṁsā, and the Buddhists. Those exchanges formed the backbone of the early Advaita commentarial tradition, as his positions were sharpened and refined in dialogue with opponents.

His core argument

Śaṅkara's reading of the Upaniṣads holds that only Brahman is ultimately real. The world of plurality is māyā: not nothing, but not what it appears to be. The apparent jīva (individual soul) is in essence Ātman, which is not other than Brahman. Liberation (mokṣa) is therefore not an attainment. It is a recognition of what was always the case. The bhāṣyas, his Sanskrit commentaries, work this argument out across thousands of pages. He commented on the Brahma Sūtras, on eleven principal Upaniṣads, and on the Bhagavad Gītā, building a unified exegetical system across all three canonical texts of the prasthānatraya.

Śaṅkara and his critics

Three rival positions defined themselves partly against Śaṅkara. Rāmānuja§ (11th–12th century) rejected strict non-dualism with Viśiṣṭādvaita: reality is one, but individual souls and matter are genuine attributes of Brahman, not illusions. Madhva (13th century) went further with Dvaita, insisting on a real and permanent distinction between the soul, God, and the world. Within Buddhist philosophy, Nāgārjuna's§ Madhyamaka offered a structurally similar deconstruction of fixed essences but without Brahman as the underlying ground. Śaṅkara's response to Buddhist arguments shaped his account of avidyā (ignorance) and drove much of the polemical energy in his commentaries.

Legacy

Through the matha system and centuries of commentary, Śaṅkara's reading became the default frame for Hindu philosophical Advaita§. The doctrine resurfaces almost intact in the twentieth century in the silent teaching of Ramana Maharshi§ and the dialogues of Nisargadatta Maharaj§. Contemporary Western non-dual teachers, among them Rupert Spira, Mooji, and Francis Lucille, work in his lineage even when they do not name him.