Shankara has intensely positive con-
notations, yet the verb shank, from
which this name is almost certainly
derived, has associations with doubt,
uncertainty, and anxiety. This sort of
ambivalence has a long association
with Shiva; the earliest accepted refer-
ence, in the Shvetashvatara Upan-
ishad, mentions both his death-deal-
ing arrows, and his kindness to his
devotees (bhakta). The traditional
meaning of this name may thus be a
form of propitiation—knowing that
Shiva wields awesome and unpre-
dictable power but describing him as
“auspicious” in the hope that he will
show his kinder side.
Shankaracharya
(788–820?) Writer and religious thinker
who is unquestionably the most sig-
nificant figure in the Advaita Vedanta
philosophical school, and arguably the
single greatest Hindu religious figure.
Very little is known about his life—
even his dates are a matter of specula-
tion—but popular tales abound.
According to one story, he was the god
Shiva incarnate, who descended to
earth to reveal the knowledge of the
absolute. This connection is shown by
his name—Shankarais one of the epi-
thets of Shiva, and acharya(“teacher”)
is an honorific suffix. He is traditional-
ly believed to have been born in a
Nambudiri brahminfamily at Kaladi
in the state of Kerala, to have become
an asceticat a very young age, and to
have traveled widely engaging in reli-
gious disputes, particularly with the
Buddhists, whose religious influence
he put in permanent decline. He is
believed to have established the ten
Dashanami Sanyasi orders and the
four mathsthat are their centers, to
have written commentaries on the
three texts central to the Vedanta
school—namely the Upanishads, the
Vedanta Sutras, and the Bhagavad
Gita—and to have gone finally to the
high Himalayas, where he died at the
age of 32.
Many of these claims cannot be sub-
stantiated, but the significance of his
work cannot be denied. His commen-
tary on the Vedanta Sutras, the
Brahmasutra Bhashya, gives the classic
formulation of Advaita Vedanta, with its
emphasis that the Ultimate Reality is the
unqualified (nirguna) Brahman, which
is eternal and unchanging, and to which
the human soul is identical. The chang-
ing phenomenal world (the world we
see and sense) is an illusion, created
through the superimposition (adhyasa)
of mistaken ideas upon the unqualified
Brahman. Since Shankaracharya believes
that one is released from bondage by
replacing this mistaken understanding
with the correct one, insight and not
action is the means to liberation. This
moment of understanding can be
described as a flash of realization, but it
seems mistaken to characterize Shanka-
racharya as a mystic. This is because
he strongly emphasizes the authority
of the sacred texts as a source of accu-
rate knowledge about the ultimate
truth. Although this stress on insight
devalues the ultimate worth of ritual
action, except in a preparatory role
by removing defilements, Shankara-
charya also believed that required ritual
actions should be performed from a
sense of duty.
Shankaracharya is as philosophically
significant for his silence as for his
speech. He gives no definitive answer
on many philosophical issues: about
whether selves are one or many, about
whether the locus of ignorance (avidya)
was Brahman or the individual, about
the nature of ignorance itself, and about
the real nature of the material world. His
refusal to take a position on these issues
left many different routes open to those
who came after him. Shankaracharya
himself tended to emphasize epistemo-
logical issues—how human beings
come to know things, and particularly
how to correct the mistaken ideas
through which human beings are held
in bondage. The image that comes
through his writing is of a deeply reli-
gious man whose primary concern wasShankaracharya