such perceptions have been left behind. The ultimate state of consciousness
or bliss was known as turiya.
Individual members of the Veda ̄nta school obviously made their own
contributions and diverged to varying degrees from the above consensus. It
is worth looking briefly at two of the most creative of South India’s thinkers
- S ́an.kara and Ra ̄ma ̄nuja.
S ́an.kara was born a Nambudiri brahman around 788 CEin Kerala. Clearly
a prodigy, tradition claims he was initiated into Vedic learning at the age of
seven and within two years had mastered much of the tradition. Early in his
youth, the tradition continues, he persuaded his mother to let him become
asamn.yasiwithout having to become a householder first. He is said to have
had teachers who were influenced by a Buddhist heritage. Gaudapa ̄da, for
example, one of his gurus, had been influenced by Bha ̄va ̄vineka, a Buddhist
philosopher.^20 In short, S ́an.kara may have been indirectly influenced by a
line of such Buddhist thinkers as As ́vaghos
̇
a,Vasubandhu, and especially
Na ̄ga ̄rjuna. Indeed, his contemporary and rival, Bha ̄skaran, called him a
crypto-Buddhist. In fact, S ́an.kara wrote commentaries on certain of the
Upanis.adsand sought to base his reflections on those texts while appro-
priating some quasi-Buddhist ideas. The end result of his lifetime was his
ability to outthink the alternative discussants of his day, including Buddhist
ones and thereby, in effect, pulling the intellectual rug out from under
Buddhist speculation and linking brahmanic speculation more persuasively
to the Upanis.adic sages. It could be argued that S ́an.kara was the brightest
mind of his century in the world.
It is impossible to do justice to S ́an.kara’s system in a brief space. Among
other things, he argued that the world, and the self as well, were derived from
brahman. The world was created at the act of brahman, but the result was less
nearly “real” or “pure” than the source just as curds, though derived from
milk, are less “pure” than the source. Hence, there were two forms of reality:
vyavaha ̄ra– the manifold or phenomenal world; the many (a concept stressed
by Ra ̄ma ̄nuja); and parama ̄tman– the one supreme a ̄tman– that “reality”
stressed by S ́an.kara.Ma ̄ya ̄described our misunderstanding of the world, our
propensity to think a rope is a snake, to assume what we see is ultimate. Avidya ̄
(ignorance) caused one to think the world was ultimate, when, in fact, as
one’s consciousness was raised, one saw the world as having been derived
frombrahman. S ́an.kara’s sense of the ultimate was nirgun.a– that which was
without attributes. His followers, however, especially sma ̄rtabrahmans insisted
he believed that several specific deities (sagun.a), representing the various
sectarian options of the time, were personifications of the absolute (nirgun.a),
and that these deities were thought to reside within one.
For S ́an.kara, perceptions (pratya ̄ha ̄ra) were of different kinds: s ́abda, for
example, was perception through inner understanding (i.e., jña ̄naor
The Post-classical Period 105