Adi Sankara

April 24, this Saturday (Vaisakha Shukla Panchami), is Adi Sankara’s birthday. The Government of Karnataka has declared it ‘Philosopher’s Day’ to honour this long-ago thinker-activist’s contribution to the history of thought. He founded his first matham at Sringeri on the green banks of the river Tunga, where he spent 12 of his 32 years. Sankara was moved to found his peetham there because he saw a cobra spreading its hood to give shade to a frog in labour. Surely a place where such compassion existed between natural enemies was holy ground. The first head of this first matham was none other than Suresvaracharya or Mandana Mishra, the eminent north Indian scholar whom Sankara had won over to his cause of bringing ‘Bharatavarshe’ into unity of thought.

Sankara taught that reasoning is a part of religion. It becomes fruitful when harmonised with belief in God, and both are applied to our spiritual growth. When we introspect, we solitary beings realise our connectedness to each other and to that One Power that animates us all. All differences melt away, as told in the Upanishads, and we can work together for the welfare of all. In a land riven into regional kingdoms, Sankara set up mathams in its four zones: Badrinath in the north, Dwarka in the west, Puri out east and Sringeri, in the south (the Kanchi matham is believed to have been his last rest). To integrate them, he switched around regional pujaris.

It’s appealing to modern minds that Sankara understood human nature and did not impose one set way of approaching God. Instead, for those who loved to use their intellect, he taught jnana marga, in which study and contemplation led you to understand the dazzling infinity of God. To the action-oriented, he taught karma yoga, the path of achieving selfhood through selfless service and practical caring. For those with a mystic bent, he taught bhakti marga, the path of total surrender to Divine Love, which let one evolve to a stage of loving just everybody, because the Beloved was present in all (this is the message, by the way, of Krishna’s Raas Lila). He saw the material world as part of God, not separate. However, it was a starting point from which to rise into lightness of being.

No wonder that in The Discovery of India, Nehru said of him: “Adi Sankara (CE 788-820) was a man of amazing energy and vast activity. He was no escapist retiring into his shell or into a corner of the forest seeking his own individual perfection and oblivious of what happened to others…he strove hard to synthesise the diverse currents that were troubling the mind of the India of his day and to build a unity of outlook out of that diversity. In a brief 32 years he did the work of many long lives”.