Shankara as Turning Point of the Networks. Shankara’s creative energy came
from his having grown up in close proximity to the surge of creativity of the
Mimamsa revolution; he reaped the charged-up energy of the group, while his
cosmopolitan travels put him in touch with the opportunities for filling the
institutional gaps left by a declining Buddhist base. Shankara carried on the
impetus of establishing the basis of Hindu orthodoxy, but he broadened the
cultural turf beyond Kumarila’s criterion of accepting the authority of the
oldest Vedas (Smith, 1989: 18). Shankara’s lifework succeeded almost as if it
had been deliberately calculated to give Hinduism an institutional identity. He
produced the first comprehensive set of commentaries on the Upanishads; the
set of “major” Upanishads became those which Shankara selected.^57 By insti-
tutionalizing the enterprise of Upanishadic commentary, Shankara created a
distinctive identity of “Vedanta,” to which his predecessors were retrospec-
tively assimilated. Similarly it was Shankara who moved the Bhagavad Gita
from the heterodoxy of Vaishnava theism (i.e., the worship of Vishnu as
paramount god) into a topic for orthodox Brahmanical commentary (Raju,
1985: 528).
Shankara gave this intellectual program a material base by organizing a
Hindu order of celibate monks to take the place of the Buddhists, and estab-
lishing maths as centers of scholarship to replace Nalanda and the Buddhist
mahaviharas.^58 Henceforward, the traditional Brahman householder-teacher
role would be challenged by a new form of organization for religious intellec-
tuals. At the same time, Shankara separated his Smarta order from wandering
Hindu ascetics such as the antinomian Shaivas by prohibiting extreme practices
such as branding one’s body, as well as by establishing propertied settlements.
Here too Shankara paralleled the original move which made Buddhist monas-
ticism successful, staking out a moderate path between organizational ex-
tremes.
Fanning-out of Victorious Vedanta. Dominant intellectual positions split to fill
the available slots in the attention space, and the successful Advaita revolution
was followed by subsidiary branchings. The creativity of philosophy is a
process of controversies, and four positions emerge among Shankara’s contem-
poraries and followers. The main points at issue arise from the relation between
Brahman and the world; the arguments hinge on older conceptions of sub-
stance, difference, and causality. The Vedantins were recirculating older cul-
tural capital in a new framework.
Vedanta was not exclusively the development of Shankara, even in conjunc-
tion with predecessors such as Gaudapada and a few little-known earlier
figures whose doctrines were less clearly formed (Isayeva, 1993: 39–41). A
movement was forming around commentaries on the Brahmasutra and the250 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths