Śaṅkara

Śaṅkara is the most influential teacher of Advaita Vedānta, and his commentaries remain the reference point for the school. Almost nothing about his life is certain. The traditional dates, 788–820 CE, are now often placed earlier, in the first half of the eighth century. The hagiographies, written centuries after his death, tell of a Brahmin boy from Kālaṭi in present-day Kerala who renounced the world while still young, studied with the teacher Govinda, a disciple of Gauḍapāda, wrote his commentaries in his teens, travelled across India debating rival schools, founded monasteries at Śṛṅgeri, Dvārakā, Purī and Jyotirmaṭh, and died at thirty-two in the Himalaya.

What is secure is the work. His commentary on the Brahma Sūtras is the foundational text of Advaita; he also commented on the principal Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad Gītā, and wrote the Upadeśasāhasrī, “A Thousand Teachings”, a work of instruction for pupils. Hundreds of hymns and short treatises are attributed to him by tradition; most scholars accept only a small number as genuine, following criteria developed by Paul Hacker and Sengaku Mayeda.

Śaṅkara wrote as an exegete, not as an independent philosopher: his task was to show what the Upaniṣads teach when read consistently. His opponents were the ritualist Mīmāṃsakas, the dualist Sāṃkhya, and the Buddhists, whose arguments he engaged closely, so closely that some later critics called Advaita a disguised Buddhism.