Shankara

Shankara (788-820), Indian philosopher and religious thinker, who developed the system of Advaita Vedanta. Believed to have been born into a Namboodiri Brahmin family of Kaladi, on the Malabar coast of South India (now part of the state of Kerala), Shankara studied the Vedas under Govinda, a disciple of Gaudapada, who first established the principles of Advaita.

Shankara rejected the materialism of the world early in his youth, choosing to become a sannyasin (one who has relinquished the worldly life in order to seek spiritual truth). He was far from becoming a recluse, however, and travelled widely across India, teaching and meeting philosophers and spiritual leaders of different persuasions. He gained many disciples and established religious communities and temples at Sringeri, Puri, Dwaraka, and, most importantly, at Badarinath, in the Himalaya. Shankara is believed to have died at Kedarnath, high in the mountains.

Shankara's philosophical thought is preserved in his commentaries on texts such as the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Vedanta Sutra. He also wrote a number of religious and mystical poems. But it is his highly intellectual analysis of his metaphysical position that makes him one of the greatest of Indian thinkers. He sought to revive what he felt to be the central message of the Upanishads, contained in the statement tat tvam asi (“Thou art That”), which establishes the relationship between the individual soul and the universal Spirit. In Shankara's interpretation, the universal, undivided Being, or Brahman, is the true reality, and the individual soul or atman is identical with it. The perception of separateness of self and other, our experience of the world around us, is a limited and distorted view due to ignorance (avidya), which clouds the reality of Brahman. Brahman, transcending the world and causality, cannot be described but can be experienced. Shankara constructed a series of reasoned arguments to show the relationship of the immanent world to Brahman, on which it is entirely dependent, tackling the difficult issue of causality in the process.

The concept of Brahman in Advaita Vedanta is fundamentally different to the idea of even a monotheistic God. It is without attributes and one can say no more than that Brahman is. A qualified monism, that enabled the idea of a God in the more traditional sense, was developed by Ramanuja in the 11th century.