Adi Shankaracharya

Life and work

Shankara was born at Kaladi on the Periyar river in Kerala to a brahmin family that had performed long penance to Vrishachala Shiva for a son. By the age of eight he had mastered the four Vedas; at sixteen he had crossed the subcontinent on foot, taken sannyasa from Govinda Bhagavatpada in a cave on the Narmada at Omkareshwar, and reached Banaras where he debated the eminent Mimamsaka Mandana Mishra and his wife Ubhaya Bharati — a debate that lasted weeks and ended with Mandana taking sannyasa and becoming Sureshvara, his foremost disciple. Through the remaining sixteen years of his life he carried out a fourfold project: he authored the surviving Advaita corpus — the great commentaries on the Brahma Sutra, the Bhagavad Gita, and the ten principal Upanishads, plus prakarana works and a vast hymn literature; he established four mathas at the cardinal directions of India (Sringeri in Karnataka, Puri in Odisha, Dwarka in Gujarat, Jyotirmath in Uttarakhand), each with a designated principal Upanishad, mahavakya, and disciple-pontiff; he unified the existing six sects into the Shanmata system in which Shiva, Vishnu, Devi, Ganapati, Kumara, and Surya are equally valid bhakti routes to the one Brahman; and he restored Vedic ritual practice where it had been displaced by Buddhist and Jaina movements. He is said to have ascended into the Himalayas at Kedarnath at the age of thirty-two, leaving behind both the philosophical and the institutional architecture that has carried Sanatana Dharma ever since.