Adi Sankara’s excellence

Sankara fully accepted that the vast majority of people will marry, procreate and remain immersed in the world. He therefore, often addressed himself to the crucial question as to how a normal person should conduct himself while engaged in daily activities. One finds the answer to this all important query in his commentary on the Gita; Sankara unhesitatingly supports Lord Krishna’s advice to Arjuna to participate in the impending epic battle as it was his bounden duty as a warrior to do so. Sankara clearly lays down that everyone should discharge the obligations which befall his lot. Sankara was a votary of Karmayoga par excellence.

Sankara was the first sage who clearly understood that there could not be any single ‘Ideal Way of Life’ applicable to everybody, the saint as well as the lay person. To a spiritually elevated person should matrimony and pleasures of the world might be revolting; to an ordinary person they might hold utmost attraction. Sankara catered for both. He emphasised that an ordinary person need not feel any sense of inferiority because of his involvement in worldly affairs. He showed how he could raise himself spiritually while living within the society. Thus by clearly prescribing a separate path for lay people, Sankara removed a major ambiguity in ethical injunctions found in early texts. For instance, in Upanisads, some passages espouse reenunciation while some advocate worldly existence. What was the poor individual to do? Thanks to Sankara, this dichotomy was resolved.

We thus see that though Sankara is primarily renowned as a metaphysician, his message, as preached through his writings and illustrated by his personal example, covered the entire gamut of Hinduism, namely, metaphysics, rituals and ethical injunctions. These in totality constitute what may be called the ‘‘Hindu Way of Life.’’

Sankara repeatedly entered into polemics with Buddhist monks and rebutted their theological dogmas. But he had profound respect for Buddha; he initiated the practice of worshipping him along with other Hindu deities. He believed in attributeless Brahman, who is deemed to be totally divorced from man’s worldly affairs. But he would start his day by beseeching God’s grace.

The writer is a diplomat, who took a Tripos in pure math at Cambridge and is fluent in Arabic. Extracted from ‘From Vedanta to Modern Science’