Adi Shankaracharya: Hinduism's Greatest Thinker

by Pavan K. Varma

Hinduism, for most within its fold, is a way of life. It has no one Pope, no one text, no inflexibly prescriptive ritual, no mandatory congregation, and no one presiding temple. It is precisely for this reason that it has continued to flourish from time immemorial, sanatan and anant, because what is ubiquitous but not constrained by the brittleness of form, is by definition imperishable.

Hinduism, as a religion, is inseparable from Hinduism as a philosophy.

When religions are largely reduced to rituals, there is always the danger that the form will become more important than the substance.

The amazing thing, though, is that the people of Varanasi take all this in their stride, either because they are born stoics, or congenitally oblivious to the travails of the material world, beyond too much worry about what is wrong today, because, after all, the measure of time is eternal, and much like the millennia-old Ganga, only a speck against the infinite canvas of time.

Here, in this non-descript room of a university that is visibly in physical neglect, were a handful of people arguing as if their life depended on it, on matters about which the overwhelming bulk of Hindus have no clue!

There is something incongruous in how frenetically alive the venue to cremate the dead can be.

a testimony both to our traditional disdain of historiography and, in recent times, to academic research and curiosity.

for Shankara, consistent with his own philosophical logic, there was, in his meeting with the chandala, the express rejection of social exclusion created by man-made institutions.

Kumarila Bhatta, an Assamese Brahmin,

Purva Mimamsa school of Hindu philosophy. Those of this school of thought believed that the chief aim of life was karmakanda.

assert the primacy of thought over ritual, at a time when precisely the opposite seemed to have become the accepted way of life for Hindus.

In the pursuit of how exactly to perform a ritual as per precise Vedic injunctions, the glorious mystical insights of the Upanishads had been overwhelmed.

Temples were flourishing, but there was a disconnect between the motions of worship and the philosophical foundations underlying it.

significant work on the philosophy of language, the Sphotasiddhi, and a book on the theories of error, the Vibhramaviveka.

four purusharthas or goals in the Hindu worldview: dharma (right conduct), artha (pursuit of material well being), kama (the pursuit of the sensual) and moksha or salvation.

As Vatsyayana, the author of the Kama Sutra had explained centuries before Shankara, each of the first three goals pursued in proportion, and none in exclusion, leads automatically to the fourth, salvation.

traditional Nambudiri families touch a knife to the joints of their dead, as a symbolic act of cutting the body, and cremate them in the compounds of their home.

Vasugupta (800–850 CE), who was the author of Sivasutras, a collection of seventy-seven aphorisms also known as Trika or Trika Yoga, which essayed a specifically Kashmir Advaita tradition.

Shankara’s Advaita, and Kashmir Shaivism, have more similarities than differences. Both are non-dualistic; both believe that Brahman is the only ontological reality; both accept that the world is real at one level but illusory and impermanent at the real level; and, both argue that ignorance is the cause for our mistaking the ephemeral for the

the rituals of worship, including the pageantry and paraphernalia associated with each of the current pontiffs, have, in some measure, overwhelmed Shankara’s original idea to make these mathas vigorous centres of Hindu philosophy and Sanskrit studies, particularly with regard to the Advaita doctrine.

Satyam jnanam, anantam Brahma: Knowledge is truth and Brahman is eternal, was what he proclaimed, and the Upanishads were the source of his jnana.

Tat tvam asi—That thou art. The self is the same as Brahman—Ayam atma brahma—the self is Brahman.

Along with the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita (to which we shall refer later), the Brahma Sutra makes up the triad of the three foundational texts of Hinduism.

Brahma Sutra, which is divided into four chapters (adhyayas); each chapter, in turn, has four parts (padas), and each part has several sections (adhikaranas).

The first chapter is on samanvaya or harmony.

The second chapter illustrates the great scope of both dissent and dialogue in the Hindu methodology of discourse. It is titled Avirodha (or non-conflict),

The third chapter deals with the means to salvation, sadhana.

The last chapter dwells on the fruits of salvation, phala.

The greatness of the Gita lies not in its philosophical chastity to any one school of thought, but to the solace it provides to the existential dilemma that often confronts human beings: one is born, one lives and one dies, and in between there could be joy, but there is also sorrow and grief. There is no redemption from the starkness of this sterile, predictable charade, and all of a sudden the purport of ambition and achievement, of causes and goals, becomes opaque.

The most important concept that the Gita enunciated was that of nishkama karma, of action, without attachment or thought of reward, done without selfish desire in a spirit of surrender.

For there is no man on earth who can fully renounce living work, but he who renounces the reward of his work, is in truth a man of renunciation.

Nishkama karma is thus the Gita’s practical formula for a person to maintain equipoise and equanimity in interfacing with the actions and choices the mundane world demands.

In this one act of divine revelation, the Gita executes a remarkable sleight-of-hand by transmuting the indefinable Brahman-Atman of the Upanishads into a personal god.

In counselling Arjuna, Krishna synthesised several paths to moksha, all sanctioned by Hindu tradition: jnana marga, the path of knowledge, karma marga, the path of selfless activity, and bhakti marga, the path of devotion to a personal god.

The five schools of philosophy that preceded Shankara’s systemic exposition of Vedantic metaphysics were the Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Sankhya, Yoga, and Purva Mimamsha. All these were essentially guided by two fundamental tenets, investigation or mimamsha, and reflection or vichara—about the ultimate nature of the world, and the consequential purposes of life.

The Nyaya Sutra

school’s principal preoccupation is with logic and dialectics, analysis and reasoning. To this end, the Nyaya relied primarily on four sources of knowledge: perception (pratyaksha), inference (anumana), analogy (upamana) and verbal testimony (shabda).

The Vaisheshika school of the sage Kanada (third century BCE) relied closely on the tools of reasoning expounded upon by Nyaya, but went beyond to formulate what must arguably be the first philosophical doctrine based on the recognition of the atom.

All material objects, it asserts, are ultimately the product of four basic atoms found in earth, water, fire or air.

the Vaisheshika recognises that not all substances are material. The non-material aspects of cosmology include space, time, ether (akasha), mind and soul.

The Sankhya school was essayed by Kapila in the seventh century BCE, and is one of the oldest systematised structures of thought in Hindu philosophy.

Sankhya posits a cosmic duality to the universe, consisting of Prakriti and Purusha.

Prakriti, representing the ‘potentiality of nature’6 lies latent, its three constituents, sattva, rajas and tamas, in equilibrium. Sattva stands for that which is pure; rajas signifies energy and activity; and tamas connotes inertia and stolidity.

This equilibrium is disturbed when Purusha interfaces with Prakriti, and evolution commences with all its manifest diversities.

The emergence of the five cognitive organs—taste, touch, sight, sound and smell—and the five motor organs of movement are part of this evolution, as is the emergence...

What is especially interesting is that in the self-evolving cosmic drama that it structures, there is no place for god.

The Yoga school broadly accepts the worldview of the Sankhya, but fleshes out the physical discipline and meditational regimen required by an individual to realise the separation (kaivalya) of Purusha, pure consciousness, from the non-sentient Prakriti.

The Yoga Sutra begins with this aphorism: Yogah chitta vrittih nirodha: Yoga is restraining the mind from discursive thought.

In the sutra, discipline is outlined as an eightfold path, starting from yama (self-restraint), niyama (virtuous observances), asana (posture), pranayama (consciously controlling breath), pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses), dharana (concentrating the mind), dhyana (meditation), and samadhi (a trance-like state in which there is complete union with the subject of meditation).

Yoga literally translates to ‘union’, and the purpose of the entire regimen of the eightfold path is to prepare the dis...