Adi Shankaracharya -- The Teacher of Advaita

Shankara was born in Kalady, a village on the Periyar river in Kerala, to a brahmin family; most historians place his life in the eighth century CE, though some monastic traditions give much earlier dates. His father died when he was young. The boy learnt the Vedas with astonishing speed and longed to become a sannyasi, but his mother would not allow it. The story goes that one day, while he was bathing in the river, a crocodile seized his leg; he called to his mother that he would die unless she let him take sannyasa, and she agreed -- and the crocodile let go. He promised her that he would come back to be with her at her death, and tradition says he did.

He went north in search of a teacher, and found him on the bank of the Narmada at Omkareshwar: Govinda Bhagavatpada, a disciple of Gaudapada, the author of the earliest surviving systematic work of Advaita, the Mandukya Karika. Under Govinda he was initiated and studied, and then, the biographies say, was sent to Varanasi to teach.

What he taught is Advaita, "non-duality". Brahman, the one reality, is pure existence, consciousness and bliss; the individual self, the Atman, is not other than Brahman; and the world of many separate things is not a second reality alongside it but an appearance, real for practical purposes yet not ultimately so -- like the snake seen in a rope in dim light. The cause of bondage is ignorance, avidya, which superimposes the limitations of body and mind on the Self. Liberation is not something produced by action or reached somewhere else; it is the removal of that ignorance through knowledge, gained by hearing the teaching of the Upanishads, reflecting on it and contemplating it.

Shankara set this out above all in his commentaries: on the Brahma Sutras, on the principal Upanishads and on the Bhagavad Gita -- the prasthana-traya. His commentary on the Brahma Sutras, with its famous introduction on superimposition, is one of the masterpieces of Indian philosophy. Many independent treatises, such as the Upadeshasahasri, and many hymns are attributed to him, though scholars debate which of these are his own.

The traditional biographies, the Shankara Digvijayas, describe his life as a journey of debate across India. The most famous is his debate with Mandana Mishra, a great scholar of ritual, judged by Mandana's learned wife Ubhaya Bharati; Mandana lost, became Shankara's disciple and is remembered as Sureshvara. Shankara organised the monks of his tradition into ten orders, the Dashanami Sampradaya, whose names -- Giri, Puri, Bharati, Sarasvati and others -- sannyasis still take. By tradition he died at the age of thirty-two at Kedarnath, where a memorial stands behind the temple.

His influence is hard to overstate. Advaita became the most widely known school of Indian philosophy, and in modern times, through Swami Vivekananda, Ramana Maharshi and others, it became much of what the world knows of Hindu thought. Yet Shankara was not only a philosopher. The hymns associated with him -- the Bhaja Govindam, the Nirvana Shatakam, the Kanakadhara Stotram, hymns to Shiva, Vishnu and the Goddess -- are still sung everywhere, and show a teacher for whom non-dual knowledge and heartfelt devotion were not opposed.