Adi Shankaracharya lived, by the traditional account, for thirty-two years in the eighth century, and the volume attributed to that span is difficult to credit. He wrote commentaries on the principal Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras, the three foundations that any Vedantic school must address. He composed independent treatises and a large body of devotional hymns. He travelled the length of the subcontinent on foot, debating the leading representatives of rival schools in public.
His philosophical achievement was to give Advaita a rigorous and defensible form. The core is the analysis of adhyasa, superimposition, which opens his commentary on the Brahma Sutras: the confusion of the seer with the seen, of the self with the not-self, from which every other error follows. From that single diagnosis he derived a complete account of bondage, of the status of the world, and of what knowledge does when it corrects the error. Later Vedanta, including the schools that rejected him, argued on the ground he had defined.
The institutional work may matter as much. He established mathas at four corners of the subcontinent, at Sringeri, Dwarka, Puri and Jyotirmath, and organised the monastic order into ten lineages, giving the tradition a structure that could outlast individuals. Those centres still function and still transmit. His devotional hymns also complicate the caricature of him as a dry non-dualist, since the man who argued that attributes are finally unreal also wrote some of the most affecting hymns in the language, drawn directly from the Upanishads he spent his life expounding.
Shankara is what a civilisation’s thought looks like when one person reorganises it and then builds somewhere to keep it. To see the texts he was working from, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 41 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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