Gauḍapāda

Gauḍapāda is the author of the Māṇḍūkya Kārikā, a work of 215 verses in four chapters attached to the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, and the earliest surviving systematic statement of Advaita Vedānta. Nothing is known of his life. Advaita tradition makes him the teacher of Govinda, who taught Śaṅkara, which would place him two generations before Śaṅkara; most scholars date the Kārikā to around the sixth century CE.

The four chapters move from scripture to argument. The first comments on the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad’s analysis of the syllable oṃ and the three states of waking, dream and deep sleep, and the fourth, the self that underlies all three. The second argues that the waking world is as unreal as a dream. The third sets out non-duality, using the image of the space in jars, which is not other than space. The fourth, the longest, is a sustained argument that nothing is ever really born.

The fourth chapter uses Buddhist vocabulary freely, and some of its verses closely echo the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra schools. Whether Gauḍapāda borrowed from Buddhism, answered it in its own terms, or wrote in a shared philosophical language, is one of the oldest debates in the study of Advaita. Śaṅkara, or an author in his school, wrote the commentary that made the Kārikā canonical.