Shankara on the Absolute: Shankara Source Book Volume One

CHAPTER I

SOURCES OF ŚAṄKARA’S DOCTRINE: HIS LIFE AND WORKS

1. A Doctrine of Transcendence

Śaṅkara Bhagavatpāda (circa 700 AD), or Śaṅkara Ācārya as he later came to be called, was the man who produced, through his commentaries, the earliest surviving synthesis of the teachings of the main Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gītā and the Brahma Sūtras. The highest result and final aim of the study of the upanishadic texts according to traditional methods was for him ‘Brahma-vidyā’, variously rendered in English as ‘enlightenment’, ‘God-realization’ or ‘realization of the Absolute’. For Śaṅkara enlightenment implied that the individual awoke to a sense of his perfect identity with the Absolute, the principle of Being and Consciousness that illumines the body and mind but is not identified with them or subject to any form of limitation, or to pain or extinction.

Not everyone who is called to the task of realizing his latent spiritual powers is ready for a path leading to the transcendence of all the finite elements in the personality. To some it suggests the prospect of impoverishment or extinction. Hence it is understandable that at a later time other Teachers, such as Rāmānuja, Nimbārka and Vallabhācārya, should have arisen and made a different synthesis of the upanishadic teaching, regarding the highest result of it as a condition in which the soul retained its individuality, but remained in perpetual proximity with and adoration of the Lord of the Universe, conceived in personal form and understood as the great whole of which the individual worshipper was an infinitesimal part. But Śaṅkara adhered to the principle of transcendence that had been enunciated in the earliest Upanishads. ‘That which is not seen by the eye, but which beholds the activities of the eye — know that that, verily, is the Absolute (brahman) and not what people here adore’.¹ He could not accept that deliverance from the bondage of illusion and plurality had been attained as long as the notion of any difference between the worshipper and the object of his worship remained. Hence he regarded the theistic teachings of the ancient texts as provisional doctrine, aimed partly at introducing the student to the pure transcendent principle through clothing it in forms which he could readily conceive, and partly at preserving him from the grosser errors of materialism and spiritual negligence. He did not regard them as statements of the final truth. It is on account of his strict adherence to the principle of transcendence that Śaṅkara’s writings have been regarded as providing the classical formulation of the Indian wisdom. He alone could account for all the upanishadic texts. None of the pantheistic and theistic commentators who followed him were able to give satisfactory explanations of the negative texts which deny all empirical predicates of the Absolute. And yet, as we shall see, a tradition (sampradāya) which judged these negative statements to be the key texts of the entire Veda had existed long before Śaṅkara’s day.

2. Vedas: Saṃhitās, Brāhmaṇas, Upanishads

Śaṅkara was primarily a commentator. The student of his writings needs to know something of the works on which he composed commentaries and something, too, of earlier works which influenced his own views. He wrote commentaries not on ‘books’ in our sense of the word, but on bodies of texts memorized and handed down the generations by ‘families’ or ‘schools’ of priests. The hymns of the ancient Aryans of the Punjab, dating from perhaps the middle of the second millenium BC, constituted the Ṛg Veda. Addressed, say, to Varuṇa, god of the heavens, to Indra, the storm-god, or to Agni, the deity of fire (cp. Latin ignis) who carried the oblations up to the gods in heaven, they would often ask in simple-hearted fashion for material boons. Though Śaṅkara shows some knowledge of these hymns, they were of little practical concern to him, as he was a monk who had given up the householder’s ritual.

Later the sacrifices grew more intricate. The formulae used in the big sacrifices were codified as the Yajur Veda and handed down by special schools of priests (such as the Taittirīyakas, Kāṭhakas, Vājasaneyins, etc.) who specialized in carrying out the main ritualistic acts in the big sacrifices, each of which had to be accompanied by the murmuring of a benedictory formula. Meanwhile some of the hymns of the Ṛg Veda were re-arranged, with additions, in a special form for singing, and in this form were known as the Sāma Veda. Śaṅkara refers to schools of priests who specialized in this discipline too, such as the Tāṇḍins, Talavakāras and others. For long, these three bodies of texts (saṃhitās) must have constituted the whole recognized Veda. Later a fourth collection of texts, a mixed bag consisting partly of ancient incantations and charms but including some noble ‘cosmological hymns’ in a later vein, gained Vedic status as the Atharva Veda. Schools of priests began to specialize in the memorization and transmission of these texts also.

Gradually the ‘required learning’ of the various schools of priests was extended to include a whole range of new matter, embodying new speculations about the symbolic significance of various elements of the ritual, as well as legends of various kinds and scraps of cosmology. According to the texts of this period, advantages flow from a knowledge of occult ‘correspondences’, and in this connection distinctions were made between ‘the plane of the ritual’ (ādhiyajña), ‘the plane of the gods’ (ādhidaivika), ‘the plane of the external world’ (ādhibhautika) and ‘the plane of the individual’ (ādhyātmika). The texts conveying this new material were called Brāhmaṇas, and the various Brāhmaṇas went by the names of the schools of priests who evolved them. Thus the Aitareya school of Ṛg Veda priests had their Aitareya Brāhmaṇa, the Taittirīyaka priests of the Yajur Veda had their Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa and so on. The priests of this phase tended to regard themselves as able to dominate the gods through the instrument of the ritual. The old Ṛg Vedic deities who had been believed to grant boons in return for ritual offerings lost status in comparison to more abstract creator-gods, such as Brahmā and Prajāpati (sometimes identified), to whom new powers were ascribed.

With the passage of time, some of the priests from the various schools began to retire from the villages into solitary spots in the forest to practise single-minded meditation on the ritual and its symbolic significance. New texts for memorization came to be incorporated as a result of this practice, known as Āraṇyakas or texts-from-the-forest. And the most sacred parts of these texts were known as ‘Upanishads’, texts that could only be heard ‘sitting in proximity’, that is, removed from worldly intercourse and sitting at the feet of a Teacher who considered you worthy to hear them.

The Upanishads were known as the Vedanta or end-part of the Veda. And Śaṅkara is called a Vedantin because he is primarily a commentator on the Upanishads and other works expressing the upanishadic wisdom. Because he interpreted the upanishadic wisdom from the standpoint of strict non-dualism (advaita), according to which reality is not only bereft of all plurality but bereft even of internal distinctions, his system was known as Advaita Vedanta. By a further refinement, it came to be characterised as Kevala Advaita Vedanta (the Non-Dualistic Vedanta of Transcendence) to distinguish it from the Viśiṣṭādvaita system of Rāmānuja (c.1100 AD), who also interpreted the Upanishads as teaching non-dualism, but a theistic form of non-dualism, which permitted real internal distinctions in the Absolute, such as those between the conscious and the non-conscious, the individual soul and his Lord and so forth.

Already in the Brāhmaṇas we find the view that the world of plurality comes forth from unity and returns back into it. The world is said to come forth from Brahmā or Prajāpati, either directly through his own self-dismemberment or through intermediaries sprung from him and operating under his control. But in the course of their ‘metaphysical brooding’ in the forests (to say nothing of their metaphysical jousting in the royal courts) the sages whose teachings were fragmentarily recorded in the Upanishads, who were not all of the priestly caste, penetrated to a more abstract and ethereal realm. Their most profound utterances concern not the creator-deity (Brahmā, masculine) but the Absolute (Brahman, neuter), conceived as the impersonal (or supra-personal) ground in and through which manifestation takes place, itself bereft of all finite characteristics. The profundity, the age-long appeal, one might almost say the modernity of the upanishadic wisdom, lies in the fact that in their moments of deepest inspiration the upanishadic sages broke through to a realization of the transcendence of the Absolute. They knew that it could not be known as an object among objects through the medium of thought and its logical distinctions, but that as a result of a suitable discipline it could be apprehended in immediate intuition, carrying a conviction of identity that was beyond verbal expression. ‘He attains the Absolute in the sense that he is the Absolute’.²

While the doctrines of the upanishadic sages vary very considerably in their details, the main line of teaching is, to use Śaṅkara’s own phrase, a spiritual ‘monism’ (ekatva-vāda). All is one, and that one an eternal mass of homogeneous light. But as one fire breaks up into many sparks without losing its unity, so does the one Self (ātman) of all assume the form of the objects of the world and enter into living beings as their ‘living soul’ without forfeiting its essential unity. If the forms that go to make up the world are a ‘mere activity of speech’³ this means that the notion that they constitute a genuine plurality of completely distinct entities is due to the habit of referring to them by different names, when the truth is that they are nothing but manifestations of the one real principle, Being. If objects are real (satya), they are less real than the Self in that they owe their existence to the latter, while concealing its fundamental unity and homogeneity beneath their facade of plurality and variety.⁴

The individual upanishadic sages voiced their sublime intuitions in the language of myth and symbol. As a traditional commentator and apologist, committed to the task of presenting all the texts as harmonious expressions of a single view, Śaṅkara was sometimes forced to translate the vivid imagery of the sages into the paler but more precise language of conceptual thought. Further, he had to subject their formulae to a degree of systematization. The sages of the Upanishads merely condemned the world and its finite objects as paltry and insignificant (alpa) in comparison with the Infinite (bhūman).⁵ In their most inspired moments, however, they had spoken of the Absolute in purely negative terms as beyond all human predication. Śaṅkara saw that all the intuitions of the earlier sages could be taken into account and presented as forming a single system, if all plurality was regarded as totally illusory from the standpoint of the highest truth. He held that the upanishadic texts which smack of dualism, pluralism or theism are mere provisional affirmations, of practical utility to the student. For what is non-dual by nature can only be communicated through texts which first assert its existence clothed in recognizable empirical characteristics and then subsequently deny these empirical characteristics. This was already a recognized principle amongst those who knew the true tradition (sampradāya-vid) for interpreting the Upanishads before Śaṅkara’s day,⁶ so he was not introducing anything new in applying it. It has been thought that the technique may originally have been borrowed from the early Teachers of the Mahāyāna, who used it in their interpretation of Sūtra texts attributed to Buddha.

3. The Smṛti: Viṣṇu-Worship and Śiva-Worship

Śaṅkara, in common with most of his co-religionists, distinguished between the texts of the Veda (Śruti), regarded as eternal and inviolable, and the ‘derivative’ texts called ‘Smṛti’, traditional Sanskrit lore that was regarded as authoritative because derived directly or indirectly from Vedic authority, but also as fallible because of human origin, and therefore subject to correction when it could be shown to contradict the Veda. For Śaṅkara the most important Smṛti texts were the Law Books (Dharma Śāstra), notably those ascribed to Manu, Yājñavalkya, Gautama and Āpastamba, the two Epics (the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa) and certain Purāṇas. Śaṅkara only refers very occasionally to the Rāmāyaṇa or to the Mahābhārata, apart from the Twelfth Book (the Śānti Parvan) and the Gītā. He attributes the Mahābhārata and all the Puranic texts he knew of collectively to Vyāsa. It is not possible to draw conclusions about his spiritual affiliations from stray identifications of his quotations from the Purāṇas made by modern translators, as the verses he quotes are sometimes to be found in several different works.⁷ The Viṣṇu Purāṇa, however, would appear to predominate. There are no references to the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the finest text of them all and the closest to Śaṅkara in spirit and metaphysical outlook. It was probably composed shortly after his day and partly under the influence of his own writings and perhaps of those of his earliest followers.⁸

These Smṛti works, especially the Epics and Purāṇas, embody what amounts to a new form of religion that had already begun to rise and spread before 300 BC, and which for a long time flourished under Brahminical patronage in more or less amicable partnership with the strictly Vedic form of worship, and which then gradually, during the course of the Middle Ages, virtually came to supplant it. Greatly simplifying, and omitting all reference to the importance of Brahmā at an earlier stage, we may speak of it as the religion of Viṣṇu-worship (Vaishnavism) and Śiva-worship (Shaivism).

We have seen that already before the upanishadic period the Vedic priests had begun to lose respect for the ancient Vedic gods. As living presences the deities were forgotten, while the priests occupied themselves with the meticulous performance of complicated ritual from which material benefits were expected eventually to flow. This mentality persisted in certain Brahminical circles. It was attacked in the Gītā.⁹ And it was represented in Śaṅkara’s own day by the Pūrva Mīmāṃsakas, the professional technicians of the Vedic ritual, towards whom he was not sympathetic.

But not all the upper castes retained their interest in Vedic ritual. It must be remembered that, particularly after Alexander’s invasion (327-325 BC), the north Indian plains had been regularly exposed to barbarian conquest. Some of the invaders settled and extended their patronage to Buddhism and Jainism and other religions which rejected caste. The Brahmins and their upper caste co-religionists responded by broadening the basis of their own support. Non-Aryan cults had always flourished among the humbler sections of society, and gradually many of them came to be adopted, in modified form, by the upper castes themselves. The Brahmins developed the legendary parts of their own traditions and absorbed some elements from local and non-Aryan cults. The outcome was a new body of religious tradition focused on the old Vedic deities Viṣṇu and Śiva now elevated by their worshippers to the status of supreme deity. Unlike Vedic ritualism, the new cults were predominantly devotional in character. Honour, not to say reverence and adoration, was restored to the deity. It is convenient to speak of those votaries of the new sects who accepted the old Vedic caste system and observed the code of the Law Books, the Smṛti par excellence, as ‘Smārta’ Vaishnavas or Shaivas, to be distinguished from those Vaishnava and Shaiva sects which rejected the Vedic traditions outright. The new cults evolved their own forms of ritual, mainly consisting in image-worship (pūjā) in temples, a form of religion unknown in the Vedic texts. New meditative techniques for gaining contact with the deity on the mental plane were also adopted. Amongst these may be included the practice of repetition of the Name of God with a rosary in such formulae (mantra) as ‘Om namo Vāsudevāya’ or ‘Om namaḥ Śivāya’, both attested before Śaṅkara’s day. The final goal of such worship was usually some form of intimate association with the deity after death, in his ‘heaven’ or ‘world’, together with perhaps a foretaste of this beatitude here below.

Śaṅkara’s writings provide the earliest surviving synthesis of the upanishadic wisdom with the Vaishnava and Shaiva teachings of the Smṛti. Hence he is not unjustly regarded by his followers as ‘a storehouse of compassion and Vedic, Smṛti and Purāṇa lore’. He did not regard the more recent practices taught in the Smṛtis, such as temple worship or repetition of the Name of God, as forming part of the discipline of the monk who had embarked on the upanishadic path to liberation.¹⁰ But he held them to be efficacious for the preliminary purification of the mind. And it appears that his own impulse to search for the Absolute on the upanishadic path may well have owed something to a pious upbringing in a Smārta Vaishnava environment. There is little in his commentaries to connect him with Śiva-worship. But he invokes Nārāyaṇa, equatable with Viṣṇu, at the beginning of his Gītā commentary in what the sub-commentator Ānandagiri calls an obeisance to his chosen deity (iṣṭa-devatā). And part of the verse in which he does so appears in the course of his statement of the doctrine of the Pāñcarātra school of Vaishnavas in his commentary on Brahma Sūtra II.ii.42. He there says: ‘There are parts of this (Pāñcarātra Vaishnava) doctrine which we do not deny. We do not deny that Nārāyaṇa is the supreme Being, beyond the Unmanifest Principle, widely acknowledged to be the supreme Self, the Self of all… Nor do we see anything wrong if anyone is inclined to worship the Lord (bhagavān) vehemently and one-pointedly by visits to His temple and the rest, for adoration of the Lord is well-known to have been prescribed (as a preliminary discipline) in the Veda and Smṛti’. Here the Nārāyaṇa of the early Pāñcarātras is equated with the supreme Self of the Upanishads.

We find further confirmation of Śaṅkara’s connection with the early Pāñcarātras in the introduction to his Gītā commentary. He there suggests that at the beginning of the world-period (kalpa) two separate groups of mind-born ‘sons of Brahmā’ were projected, to whom the Lord, called Nārāyaṇa, communicated a practical knowledge of the two-fold Vedic wisdom. To the ‘Prajāpatis’, Marīci and the rest, He communicated a practical knowledge of the ritualistic and ethical aspects of the Vedic path (pravṛtti-dharma). To others, such as Sanaka and Sanandana, He communicated the practical mastery of the path of renunciation of worldly duties and withdrawal from all action, including ritual. In the Gītā itself (IV.1ff) the imperishable yoga is said to have been taught by the Lord to Vivasvat, by Vivasvat to Manu, by Manu to Ikṣvāku and by him to the king-sages. Inasmuch as Śaṅkara deviates from this account of the original transmission of the eternal wisdom at the beginning of the world-period in the introduction to his Gītā commentary, he must have held the alternative account given in that introduction in high regard. But there seems to be at least some presumption that the latter was based on early Pāñcarātra tradition. For the account of the Pāñcarātra traditions in the Nārāyaṇīya section of the Śānti Parvan of the Mahābhārata, from which Śaṅkara quotes fairly frequently throughout his works, speaks twice of the ‘mind-born sons of Brahmā’.¹¹ The second passage says: ‘Marīci, Aṅgiras, Atri, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu and Vasiṣṭha — these seven beings are mind-born sons of Brahmā. It is they who have the best knowledge of the Veda, and they are the true Teachers of the Veda (veda-ācārya). They have been projected to function as Lords of Creation (prajāpati) with responsibility for the supervision of the active aspect of the spiritual law (pravṛttidharma). Hereby is manifest the eternal path for men of action… On the other hand Sana, Sanat-Sujāta, Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanat-Kumāra, Kapila and Sanātana are also spoken of as (another set of) seven ṛṣis and mind-born sons of Brahmā. Having attained to knowledge, they follow the spiritual law in its aspect of renunciation from action (nivṛtti-dharma)’.

There are other circumstances which combine to suggest that Śaṅkara had affinities with the worshippers of Viṣṇu Nārāyaṇa. He refers to Kṛṣṇa as Nārāyaṇa several times in his Gītā commentary, although the name Nārāyaṇa does not occur in the Gītā text.¹² He identifies the being whom Gauḍapāda calls ‘the best of men’ (Kārikā IV.1) with Nārāyaṇa, interpreting ‘the best of men’ to mean ‘the supreme Spirit (puruṣottama)’.¹³ And Śaṅkara’s pupil Sureśvara, who represents Śiva in a subordinate rôle to Viṣṇu at Naiṣkarmya Siddhi IV.76 and opens the work with a salutation to Viṣṇu under the name of Hari, elsewhere quotes the same verse that Śaṅkara had attributed to the Pāñcarātras and placed at the head of his Gītā commentary, and remarks that Nārāyaṇa is the best form under which to worship the supreme Self, as the supreme Self is represented under this form not only in the Smṛtis but also in the Veda itself.¹⁴ The Vivaraṇa attributed to Śaṅkara on the Yoga Sūtra Bhāṣya of Vyāsa salutes Viṣṇu in its opening and closing benedictory stanzas even though Vyāsa’s Bhāṣya, at least in some manuscripts, salutes Śiva.¹⁵

It is true that Śaṅkara often explains away references to the personal aspect of the Lord Kṛṣṇa or Viṣṇu in his Gītā commentary, interpreting them as references to the impersonal, or rather supra-personal, Absolute (brahman) of the Upanishads. Yet there was undoubtedly a devotional component in his spiritual personality, capable of breaking out into poetic metaphors at any time. When the Gītā speaks of the ‘lamp of wisdom’(X.11), Śaṅkara elaborates the metaphor and speaks of the lamp as ‘filled with the clear oil of devotion’, ‘fanned by the breezes of ardent longing for Me (Kṛṣṇa)’, as having ‘intelligence purified by celibacy and other observances for its wick’ and ‘a dispassionate mind for its base’, and as being ‘protected by the chimney of an imagination that is withdrawn from sense-objects and unstained by attachment and aversion’ and ‘shining with the right-insight that springs from constant one-pointed meditation’. Here, as elsewhere in Śaṅkara’s writings, knowledge and devotion, jñāna and bhakti, are fused. Though we cannot say for certain that any of the devotional hymns attributed to Śaṅkara are genuine, there can be little doubt that he had the capacity for composing devotional poetry of a high order.

Whether Śaṅkara also worshipped Śiva as well as Viṣṇu must be accounted doubtful in the present state of our knowledge. We have seen that there is little evidence of it in his commentaries. But we have the verse commentary called the Mānasollāsa Vārttika attributed to his pupil Sureśvara on the Shaiva hymn called the Dakṣiṇāmūrti Stotra attributed to himself. On the one hand, the authenticity of the commentary is doubtful, and even if it could be proved there would still be, as its learned editor remarks, nothing in it to connect Śaṅkara with the hymn. Indeed, the absence of any eulogistic references to Śaṅkara is unparalleled in Sureśvara’s certainly authentic works. On the other hand, certain features of the commentary do suggest that Sureśvara may have been its original author. And there is a passage in the Brahma Sūtra Commentary of the early post-Śaṅkara author Bhāskara, in which he appears to be recalling the image of a perforated pot inverted and placed over a light, that occurs in the hymn, and attributing it to Śaṅkara.¹⁶ If the Mānasollāsa and the Dakṣiṇāmūrti Stotra really are works of Sureśvara and Śaṅkara respectively this would point to a sojourn in Kashmir, as both speak the language of Kashmiri Shaivism in places. Thus whereas Śaṅkara’s connection with Vaishnavism is certain and emphatic, his connection with Shaivism is highly problematic, and, if it existed at all, may have occurred in Kashmir.

The more developed and independent form of Shaivism associated with the name ‘Tantra’ had already begun to flourish before Śaṅkara’s day. Although certain Tāntrika hymns have come down falsely associated with his name, there is no trace of the influence of Tāntrika ideas in his commentaries. Tāntrika ritual was ‘anti-Vedic’ in the sense of being specifically designed to supplant the Vedic ritual and meditation. Certain branches of it included woman-worship, in both its loftier and cruder forms. Śaṅkara attacked the orgiastic variety of Tāntrika worship as sinful according to Vedic law.¹⁷

4. The Bhagavad Gītā

The second ‘starting-point’ of