1 00:00:00,174 --> 00:00:05,314 Here's a problem right out of the gate, and it's the kind of problem I actually love. We 2 00:00:05,314 --> 00:00:10,474 know almost nothing reliable about Shankara's life, and almost everything people confidently 3 00:00:10,474 --> 00:00:16,674 repeat about him comes from texts written 600 years after he died. Picture this. A young 4 00:00:16,674 --> 00:00:22,054 Brahmin from Kerala, dead by his early 30s, who somehow managed to write commentaries so 5 00:00:22,054 --> 00:00:27,674 definitive that 1200 years later, they're still the standard. And who made a claim so radical 6 00:00:27,674 --> 00:00:33,578 that philosophers are still arguing about it? You are already what you're looking for. Before 7 00:00:33,578 --> 00:00:38,298 we touch a single philosophical concept, we need to do something that historians of philosophy 8 00:00:38,298 --> 00:00:45,498 do constantly and popularizers rarely do. Separate the two Shankaras. There's the historical philosopher, 9 00:00:45,618 --> 00:00:51,398 the author of some of the most demanding commentaries ever written in Sanskrit. And there's the legendary 10 00:00:51,398 --> 00:00:57,178 figure, the miracle-working debater who supposedly crisscrossed India, defeated every rival school 11 00:00:57,178 --> 00:01:02,034 in the subcontinent, and founded monasteries at the four corners of the land. The first 12 00:01:02,034 --> 00:01:07,694 one is real. The second one is a tradition's way of saying, this mattered. Both are worth 13 00:01:07,694 --> 00:01:13,594 understanding, but do not confuse them, because if you do, you'll teach legend as fact. Now 14 00:01:13,594 --> 00:01:18,474 look at this frame carefully, because it sets the intellectual honesty of everything that 15 00:01:18,474 --> 00:01:25,054 follows. Nearly all the biographies we possess, the Shankara Vijayas, were written 600 to 900 16 00:01:25,054 --> 00:01:30,418 years after his death. Think about that for a moment. Imagine trying to write the biography 17 00:01:30,418 --> 00:01:37,278 of someone from the 1300s using sources composed in the 1900s and 2000s with no contemporary 18 00:01:37,278 --> 00:01:43,218 documents at all. That's the situation. The hagiographies give us miracle stories, debate 19 00:01:43,218 --> 00:01:49,538 victories, a dramatic death at Kethernath in the Himalayas at age 32. And yet, and this 20 00:01:49,538 --> 00:01:54,758 is the remarkable thing, out of this historical fog emerges one of the most rigorous bodies 21 00:01:54,758 --> 00:02:00,961 of philosophy ever produced. The texts themselves, the commentaries, those we can verify through 22 00:02:00,961 --> 00:02:06,442 textual critical analysis. The man we can pin down through his arguments, even when we can't 23 00:02:06,442 --> 00:02:11,902 pin down his biography. So here's the rule for this lecture. When I say something about Shankara's 24 00:02:11,902 --> 00:02:17,842 ideas, you can trust it's grounded in his actual writings. When I report a story about his life, 25 00:02:17,842 --> 00:02:24,002 I'll flag it as tradition, and we'll hold both, the verified and the legendary, side by side. 26 00:02:24,082 --> 00:02:28,746 Because honestly, What a tradition chooses to invent about a thinker tells you something 27 00:02:28,746 --> 00:02:34,466 about what that tradition valued. Before we move on, the dating of this man is itself a 28 00:02:34,466 --> 00:02:39,946 philosophical controversy, and it changes how we read everything he wrote. That's next, and 29 00:02:39,946 --> 00:02:46,326 this part is crucial. Now, this next part might seem like pedantry. Who cares about a few decades 30 00:02:46,326 --> 00:02:51,546 here or there for a man dead 12 centuries? But stay with me, because the dating determines 31 00:02:51,546 --> 00:02:57,278 who he was arguing with, and who he was arguing with determines what his entire project meant. 32 00:02:57,738 --> 00:03:04,218 Look at the two dates on the screen. The traditional dates, 788 to 820 CE, come from those late 33 00:03:04,218 --> 00:03:10,857 hagiographies. Born in Kaladi, Kerala, dead at 32 at Kedarnath in the Himalayas. It's a 34 00:03:10,857 --> 00:03:17,658 beautiful story, a short, blazing life, philosophy compressed into 32 years like a diamond formed 35 00:03:17,658 --> 00:03:23,458 under pressure. Modern scholarship says, too late. Peter Adamson and Gennard and Gennary 36 00:03:23,458 --> 00:03:28,898 put it plainly in classical Indian philosophy. The traditional birthdate is probably a bit 37 00:03:28,898 --> 00:03:34,098 too late, but it's safe to assume he was active in the 8th century. The Routledge history of 38 00:03:34,098 --> 00:03:40,298 Indian philosophy settles on circa 8th century CE. Most specialists now place him in the first 39 00:03:40,298 --> 00:03:46,978 half of that century, roughly 700 to 750. Here's why this matters, and I want you to really 40 00:03:46,978 --> 00:03:53,226 feel the weight of this shift. Move him earlier, And suddenly, Shankara becomes a younger contemporary 41 00:03:53,226 --> 00:03:59,186 of Kumarila Bhakta, the great Mimamsa theorist. Now the whole shape of Shankara's project comes 42 00:03:59,186 --> 00:04:04,546 into focus. His philosophy stops looking like abstract metaphysics and starts looking like 43 00:04:04,546 --> 00:04:11,246 what it was, a direct, pointed response to Mimamsa, the dominant ritual school of his day. He's 44 00:04:11,246 --> 00:04:16,826 not arguing into a vacuum. He's answering a specific opponent who was alive, powerful, 45 00:04:16,926 --> 00:04:22,806 and influential in his own intellectual world. And there's a second consequence, just as important. 46 00:04:22,806 --> 00:04:27,546 An earlier dating means he was writing while Buddhism was still intellectually formidable 47 00:04:27,546 --> 00:04:32,946 in India. Not yet the faded tradition later centuries would make it. Nalanda was still 48 00:04:32,946 --> 00:04:37,906 a going concern. When Shankara launches his polemics against Buddhist philosophers, he's 49 00:04:37,906 --> 00:04:43,626 aiming at live opponents, not straw men. That changes the temperature of everything he writes. 50 00:04:43,986 --> 00:04:49,060 One date, moved back 30 years, and suddenly we're not reading a medieval system builder. 51 00:04:49,486 --> 00:04:55,106 we're reading a combatant. Now look at this, the world he walked into. You'll notice here 52 00:04:55,106 --> 00:05:00,136 the three forces that shaped his entire project. And I want to walk through them one at a time, 53 00:05:00,136 --> 00:05:05,166 because understanding what he was responding to is half of understanding what he said. The 54 00:05:05,166 --> 00:05:11,586 political landscape, post Gupta India. No central empire, but a patchwork of regional powers. 55 00:05:11,706 --> 00:05:16,846 The Pallavas and later Cholas in the south, the Gurjara Pratiharas in the north, the Pallas 56 00:05:16,846 --> 00:05:22,634 in Bengal. Why does this matter philosophically? Because without a unifying imperial structure, 57 00:05:22,674 --> 00:05:28,194 there was no unifying intellectual structure either. No court orthodoxy enforcing a single 58 00:05:28,194 --> 00:05:34,954 view. It was, in a strange way, a genuinely free marketplace of ideas. And in that marketplace, 59 00:05:35,134 --> 00:05:40,654 the school that could systematize itself most rigorously would win. The intellectual dominance 60 00:05:40,654 --> 00:05:47,082 of mimamsa. This is the big one. Purva mimamsa. The tradition of Vedic interpretation focused 61 00:05:47,082 --> 00:05:53,002 on ritual action, sacrifice and dharma was the dominant hermeneutical school, with Kumarila 62 00:05:53,002 --> 00:05:58,342 and Prabhakara as its two great lights. And I want to be fair to it. Mimamsa had developed 63 00:05:58,342 --> 00:06:04,402 an extraordinarily sophisticated theory of language, injunction and textual interpretation. This 64 00:06:04,402 --> 00:06:10,342 was not some crude ritualism. It was intellectual heavyweight territory. But it had a problem. 65 00:06:10,442 --> 00:06:16,198 And this is the crack Shankara would drive his entire philosophy through. Mimamsa had no doctrine 66 00:06:16,198 --> 00:06:21,878 of liberation through knowledge. Its whole apparatus was directed at heaven, at worldly prosperity, 67 00:06:22,078 --> 00:06:28,558 at Dharma correctly performed. Ritual gets you heaven, not moksha. The one thing the Upanishads 68 00:06:28,558 --> 00:06:35,158 promised, liberation, sat outside the most sophisticated philosophical school of the age, the scattered 69 00:06:35,158 --> 00:06:41,358 state of Vedanta. And meanwhile, what we now call Vedanta, the end of the Veda, the Upanishadic 70 00:06:41,358 --> 00:06:47,234 tradition, existed, but it was scattered. The pieces were all there. Badarayana's Brahma 71 00:06:47,234 --> 00:06:53,694 Sutra existed. Gaurapada had written a remarkable commentary on the Mandukya Upanishad. But nobody, 72 00:06:53,754 --> 00:06:58,454 and this is the key phrase I want you to carry out of this lecture, nobody had pulled the 73 00:06:58,454 --> 00:07:04,314 whole thing into a single, rigorous, systematic philosophy. That's what Shankara did. He didn't 74 00:07:04,314 --> 00:07:10,314 invent Advaita. He made it unavoidable. Hold on to that distinction. Didn't invent, made 75 00:07:10,314 --> 00:07:14,906 unavoidable. because we'll return to it near the end when we talk about his debt to Gaudapada. 76 00:07:15,146 --> 00:07:20,386 But first, before we can appreciate the system, we need the headline claim, the one sentence 77 00:07:20,386 --> 00:07:25,166 at the center of everything he wrote. That's where we're headed next, and it's the boldest 78 00:07:25,166 --> 00:07:30,646 claim in Indian philosophy. All right, take a breath because we've arrived at the center 79 00:07:30,646 --> 00:07:36,606 of the labyrinth. Everything before this was scaffolding. Everything after this is elaboration, 80 00:07:36,726 --> 00:07:42,546 defense, and consequence. This slide is the thesis of the entire Shankaran enterprise. 81 00:07:42,546 --> 00:07:50,066 Atman equals Brahman. On the left, Atman, your innermost self. Not your body, not your 82 00:07:50,066 --> 00:07:56,366 memories, not your personality. The bare subject, the witness, the one who is aware when everything 83 00:07:56,366 --> 00:08:02,546 else is stripped away. On the right, Brahman, the ultimate reality of the cosmos, the ground 84 00:08:02,546 --> 00:08:08,622 of all being, what the Upanishads strain toward in every hymn. And the claim marked with an 85 00:08:08,622 --> 00:08:14,482 equal sign, they are one and the same. Now, I want to slow down here because this is precisely 86 00:08:14,482 --> 00:08:19,162 where most introductions to Shankara go off the rails. The Rautledge history states it 87 00:08:19,162 --> 00:08:24,462 exactly. According to Shankara, the fundamental teaching of the Upanishads is that Atman and 88 00:08:24,462 --> 00:08:31,062 Brahman are one and the same. Notice what this is not. It is not a metaphor. It is not poetry. 89 00:08:31,302 --> 00:08:38,030 It is not, are all connected, or the universe is inside you in some warm New Age sense. It 90 00:08:38,030 --> 00:08:42,730 is an identity statement, as strict as saying that the morning star is the evening star, 91 00:08:42,730 --> 00:08:48,750 or that water is H2O. The self you spend your entire life protecting, feeding, worrying 92 00:08:48,750 --> 00:08:55,670 about, that self, in its deepest layer, is not merely related to ultimate reality. It is ultimate 93 00:08:55,670 --> 00:09:01,110 reality. And here's what makes this genuinely radical rather than merely pretty. The equation 94 00:09:01,110 --> 00:09:06,630 runs in both directions. The infinite ground of the cosmos is not somewhere else. It is 95 00:09:06,630 --> 00:09:12,110 not above you. behind you or waiting for you after death. It is the very thing doing the 96 00:09:12,110 --> 00:09:17,650 looking when you look. That Thvam Asi. That Thou Art. We'll meet those four great sayings 97 00:09:17,650 --> 00:09:24,010 in a few slides. For now, sit with the strangeness of the equals sign. Now, your objection, and 98 00:09:24,010 --> 00:09:29,510 it's a good one, I'd be worried if you didn't have it, is probably already forming. If everything 99 00:09:29,510 --> 00:09:35,030 is Brahman, why do you and I seem like two different people? Why does the coffee cup hold coffee 100 00:09:35,030 --> 00:09:40,486 and not my consciousness? Did Shankara just dissolve the world into one big mystical mush? 101 00:09:41,026 --> 00:09:46,266 And this is where Shankara shows you the difference between a poet and a philosopher. Because he 102 00:09:46,266 --> 00:09:50,986 has an answer. And the answer is one of the most elegant instruments in Indian thought. 103 00:09:51,346 --> 00:09:58,266 Look at the two levels on the slide. Vyadhaharika, conventional empirical reality. And Paramarthika, 104 00:09:58,406 --> 00:10:03,986 ultimate reality. At the conventional level, the world is real. You and I are distinct. 105 00:10:04,186 --> 00:10:10,534 Causation works. Fire burns. ethics matter. Shankara never denies this, and anyone who 106 00:10:10,534 --> 00:10:15,634 tells you he did has misunderstood him. When you cross the street in Calcutta traffic, that's 107 00:10:15,634 --> 00:10:20,814 conventional reality doing its job, and you'd better respect it. At the ultimate level, there 108 00:10:20,814 --> 00:10:27,194 is only Brahman, without a second. No subject, no object, no multiplicity. Because there's 109 00:10:27,194 --> 00:10:32,634 nothing else for anything to be multiple relative to. Now, and here's the move I want you to 110 00:10:32,634 --> 00:10:37,698 appreciate as a piece of engineering, not just mysticism. This is not a trick to have it both 111 00:10:37,698 --> 00:10:43,478 ways. It's a claim about what kind of reality the world has. And Shankara gives us his favorite 112 00:10:43,478 --> 00:10:50,218 analogy, drawn straight from the Chandogya Upanishad, the clay pot. Picture a potter's shelf. The 113 00:10:50,218 --> 00:10:55,998 pot is real. You can fill it, sell it, drop it and break it. But ask yourself, what is 114 00:10:55,998 --> 00:11:02,758 the pot exactly? It's clay, given a name and a form, nama-rupa, superimposed on what is 115 00:11:02,758 --> 00:11:21,302 really just clay. The world is real as an appearance of Brahman, the way the pot is real 116 00:11:21,302 --> 00:11:27,722 as clay. The multiplicity is name and form laid over the one substance. And now the payoff, 117 00:11:27,842 --> 00:11:33,182 the sentence I want you to underline. When you know the clay, you know the pot. When you know 118 00:11:33,182 --> 00:11:38,566 Brahman, You know everything. Not because you memorize everything, because there's only one 119 00:11:38,566 --> 00:11:44,466 thing there to know, wearing many names. So the mush objection collapses. Distinctions 120 00:11:44,466 --> 00:11:49,846 exist, conventionally, functionally, at the level where crossing the street matters. They 121 00:11:49,846 --> 00:11:54,706 just don't exist ultimately. And Shankara has one word for what produces that appearance 122 00:11:54,706 --> 00:12:00,886 of many from one, Maya, which brings us to the single most misunderstood concept in all 123 00:12:00,886 --> 00:12:06,346 of Indian philosophy. That's next. And I've been saving this one up because nearly everyone 124 00:12:06,346 --> 00:12:13,766 gets Maya wrong. Here we are. The concept everyone thinks they know, Maya, and almost everyone 125 00:12:13,766 --> 00:12:19,246 gets wrong in the first five minutes. So let's define it carefully and then, in the next breath, 126 00:12:19,486 --> 00:12:25,186 tear down the misreading that has distorted Shankara's reputation for centuries. Maya is 127 00:12:25,186 --> 00:12:30,826 the power that makes the One appear as many. That's the definition. Notice it doesn't say 128 00:12:30,826 --> 00:12:37,846 the One becomes many. doesn't say the one stops being one, says it appears as many. One moon 129 00:12:37,846 --> 00:12:44,866 reflected in 10,000 bowls of water, a classic image, but never 10,000 moons. Maya is the 130 00:12:44,866 --> 00:12:50,446 reflecting, not the multiplication. And Shankara, or more precisely, the Advaita tradition he 131 00:12:50,446 --> 00:12:57,386 founded, gives this power two operations. Look at the slide. First, avarana, concealment. 132 00:12:57,566 --> 00:13:03,690 Maya hides Brahman, draws a veil over the one reality so thoroughly that you don't even suspect 133 00:13:03,690 --> 00:13:10,510 it's there. Second, vikshepa, projection. Once the real thing is covered, Maya projects something 134 00:13:10,510 --> 00:13:16,750 in its place, the shimmering multiplicity of the everyday world. Conceal and replace. Hide 135 00:13:16,750 --> 00:13:23,410 the rope, project the snake. Now, two properties of Maya worth committing to memory. It is beginless, 136 00:13:23,410 --> 00:13:30,030 anadi. Shankara doesn't tell you when the misperception started because there was no start. Asking, 137 00:13:30,050 --> 00:13:34,170 when did the illusion begin? is like asking how long you've been dreaming while you're 138 00:13:34,170 --> 00:13:40,450 still asleep. But, and this is the property that matters, it ends. Ignorance has a cure. 139 00:13:40,790 --> 00:13:46,170 And the cure arrives the way light arrives in a dark room. Knowledge destroys Maya the way 140 00:13:46,170 --> 00:13:51,650 light destroys darkness. Notice the precision of that analogy. Darkness isn't a thing that 141 00:13:51,650 --> 00:13:56,990 gets pushed out the door, shoved aside, burned away in a struggle. Darkness isn't a thing 142 00:13:56,990 --> 00:14:02,914 at all. It simply ceases the instant light comes on. There's no battle between lamp and shadow. 143 00:14:03,134 --> 00:14:09,634 Likewise, no epic war between knowledge and ignorance. Just a switch. Flipped. One scholar's 144 00:14:09,634 --> 00:14:15,154 footnote before we move on, because intellectual honesty demands it. Shankara himself actually 145 00:14:15,154 --> 00:14:20,994 uses the term avidya, ignorance, more often than maya. And the elaborate theory of ignorance 146 00:14:20,994 --> 00:14:27,014 that later advaitans would build, the famous claim that maya is anirvacaniya, indescribable, 147 00:14:27,114 --> 00:14:33,354 neither real nor unreal, appears in Shankara only faintly, if at all. Vajaspati Mishra and 148 00:14:33,354 --> 00:14:38,994 Prakashatman built that cathedral later. Shankara laid the foundation. His successors built the 149 00:14:38,994 --> 00:14:43,744 flying buttresses. Don't attribute the whole church to the man who dug the trench. Now, 150 00:14:43,744 --> 00:14:49,054 the demolition. Because this slide exists to kill a misconception, and I want to kill it 151 00:14:49,054 --> 00:14:54,814 thoroughly. Maya does not mean the world is an illusion. Say it with me, because this is 152 00:14:54,814 --> 00:14:59,678 the sentence that will save you from embarrassing yourself at dinner parties. Shankara is not 153 00:14:59,678 --> 00:15:05,698 saying you're hallucinating. He is not saying the world is fake, unreal, a cosmic screensaver, 154 00:15:05,798 --> 00:15:10,678 a dream you need to wake up from in the sense of dismissing. When he says the wall is there, 155 00:15:10,758 --> 00:15:16,778 the wall is there. Try walking through it and report back. So what is he saying? Look at 156 00:15:16,778 --> 00:15:21,338 the mirage on the slide, because the mirage is the perfect image and I want you to keep 157 00:15:21,338 --> 00:15:26,418 it. Standing on a highway in summer heat, you see water shimmering on the asphalt ahead. 158 00:15:26,678 --> 00:15:33,446 Now, here's the careful part. That experience is genuine. The light is real. Your eyes are 159 00:15:33,446 --> 00:15:38,866 real. The perception is actually occurring. There is nothing fake about your experience 160 00:15:38,866 --> 00:15:46,306 of water. What isn't there is the water. The experience is genuine. The water isn't. That 161 00:15:46,306 --> 00:15:51,686 is exactly Shankara's position on the world. The world is real as an appearance of Brahman. 162 00:15:51,826 --> 00:15:57,590 The way the mirage water is real as a manifestation of hot air and light. You are not being deceived 163 00:15:57,590 --> 00:16:02,510 about having experiences. You are being deceived about what kind of thing those experiences 164 00:16:02,510 --> 00:16:08,230 are appearances of. You take names and forms for independently existing substances the way 165 00:16:08,230 --> 00:16:13,970 you take the shimmer for water. The pot is not illusory, but the potness as a separate thing 166 00:16:13,970 --> 00:16:20,010 apart from the clay? That's the mirage. Remember the two levels from a moment ago. Conventional 167 00:16:20,010 --> 00:16:26,390 reality, fully functional, fully real, ethics included. Ultimate reality. Brahman alone. 168 00:16:26,650 --> 00:16:32,290 The mirage analogy is precisely how those levels coexist without contradiction. And this is 169 00:16:32,290 --> 00:16:37,290 why Shankara is a philosopher and not merely a mystic. A claim that the world is an illusion 170 00:16:37,290 --> 00:16:42,830 would be easy to refute. A claim about what kind of reality appearances have, that takes 171 00:16:42,830 --> 00:16:49,130 a system to dismantle. So, if Maya conceals and projects, the obvious next question is, 172 00:16:49,130 --> 00:16:55,062 who is doing the misperceiving? What exactly is the error at its root? Shankara has a name 173 00:16:55,062 --> 00:17:00,322 for it, and his masterwork opens with what may be the most studied paragraph in Indian philosophy. 174 00:17:00,682 --> 00:17:07,022 That's where we're going next. The root error. Adhyasa. Now we arrive at the opening argument 175 00:17:07,022 --> 00:17:12,642 of Shankara's masterwork, and I want you to feel why this paragraph has been studied, debated, 176 00:17:12,682 --> 00:17:19,122 and annotated for over a thousand years. The Brahma Sutra Bhashya, his commentary on Badrayana's 177 00:17:19,122 --> 00:17:25,506 Brahma Sutra, doesn't begin with cosmology or metaphysics. It begins with experience, with 178 00:17:25,506 --> 00:17:31,866 something you've done since you were born. The word is Adhyasa, superimposition. Shankara's 179 00:17:31,866 --> 00:17:38,546 claim. All our confusion, all our suffering, the entire engine of samsara runs on this one 180 00:17:38,546 --> 00:17:44,246 mistake, superimposing one thing upon another and then mistaking the composite for a unity. 181 00:17:44,726 --> 00:17:49,966 Now listen closely because he gives us two examples and the choice between them tells you something 182 00:17:49,966 --> 00:17:55,782 about Shankara's temperament. The classic image The one later Advaitin's love is the rope and 183 00:17:55,782 --> 00:18:02,482 the snake. Dim light, something coiled on the path. You scream and leap back. Later, closer 184 00:18:02,482 --> 00:18:09,142 inspection. There was never a snake, only rope. Dramatic. Life or death stakes. Good story. 185 00:18:09,562 --> 00:18:15,182 But here's what's striking. Shankara's own preferred example, the one he opens with, is quieter. 186 00:18:15,542 --> 00:18:21,442 The shell mistaken for silver. You see a shiny thing on the beach, glinting in the sun. You 187 00:18:21,442 --> 00:18:27,454 reach for it. You've been deceived. There is no silver. But notice what's real. The shell. 188 00:18:27,634 --> 00:18:33,434 The shininess. The reaching hand. The error was genuine, even though the object wasn't. 189 00:18:33,614 --> 00:18:38,934 I think his example is better, and let me tell you why. The snake in Rope is about extraordinary 190 00:18:38,934 --> 00:18:46,234 moments. Panic. Sudden revelation. The big awakening. The shell in silver? That's about the ordinary, 191 00:18:46,234 --> 00:18:51,502 constant misidentification that runs underneath every moment of your life. You look at the 192 00:18:51,502 --> 00:18:57,602 mirror and say, I, superimposing a name on a collection of cells. You touch your arm and 193 00:18:57,602 --> 00:19:04,222 feel pain, superimposing ownership on nerves firing. You worry about tomorrow, superimposing 194 00:19:04,222 --> 00:19:11,622 a future onto a present that exists only now. Every moment, a tiny act of adhyasa, body on 195 00:19:11,622 --> 00:19:18,862 self, self on body, subject and object confused. And this confusion, Shankara argues, is the 196 00:19:18,862 --> 00:19:24,022 engine of suffering. Because when you take what's not you for you, everything that happens to 197 00:19:24,022 --> 00:19:31,302 that not you becomes your crisis. Hunger, aging, loss. The whole parade of samsara rides on 198 00:19:31,302 --> 00:19:37,482 that single misrecognition. Later Advaitans favored the rope snake for its drama. But Shankara's 199 00:19:37,482 --> 00:19:43,622 shell silver? That's the quiet revolution. Not the epiphany that changes you. The daily practice 200 00:19:43,622 --> 00:19:48,588 of seeing what's already there. And now we arrive at the sentence that separated Shankara from 201 00:19:48,654 --> 00:19:53,354 every other major school of Indian thought. And it's the sentence that makes Advaita either 202 00:19:53,354 --> 00:19:58,434 the deepest truth or the most sophisticated error in the history of philosophy, depending 203 00:19:58,434 --> 00:20:06,134 on which philosopher you ask. Liberation is not achieved. Say it again. Moksha is not produced. 204 00:20:06,274 --> 00:20:12,834 It is not an effect. It is not the result of an action. Now pause and feel why that's radical, 205 00:20:12,874 --> 00:20:18,050 because it was radical in his own time. The Mimamsa school The ritualists he was arguing 206 00:20:18,050 --> 00:20:24,650 against believed in jnana-karma samutjaya. Knowledge and ritual action must be combined for liberation. 207 00:20:24,970 --> 00:20:29,770 You perform sacrifices correctly, you study the texts, you follow the injunctions, and 208 00:20:29,770 --> 00:20:36,390 then, poof, you get freedom. Cause and effect, ritual and reward, as neat as any transaction. 209 00:20:36,830 --> 00:20:42,490 Shankara says, impossible. And here's the logic that backs him. Listen carefully because this 210 00:20:42,490 --> 00:20:48,938 is pure metaphysics in motion. Anything produced is non-eternal. Actions produce results that 211 00:20:48,938 --> 00:20:56,038 come and go. Birth, death, pleasure, pain, all effects, all temporary. If moksha were the 212 00:20:56,038 --> 00:21:01,338 result of ritual or effort, it would be temporary. And a temporary liberation isn't liberation 213 00:21:01,338 --> 00:21:07,738 at all. So what is it then? Look at the slide. It's the removal of ignorance. You don't become 214 00:21:07,738 --> 00:21:12,994 Brahman. You recognize that you always were. Here's the second analogy. and I want to tie 215 00:21:12,994 --> 00:21:18,054 it back to the one from the last slide. The snake doesn't turn into a rope. The snake was 216 00:21:18,054 --> 00:21:23,194 never there to begin with. When the light comes on, you don't watch some alchemical transformation, 217 00:21:23,194 --> 00:21:29,074 snake morphing into fiber. You just see the rope, the way it always was. Knowledge doesn't 218 00:21:29,074 --> 00:21:34,734 create non-duality. It removes the misperception of duality. And this is where Shankara draws 219 00:21:34,734 --> 00:21:40,974 the bright line between ritual and knowledge. Action, karma, can do one thing and only one 220 00:21:40,974 --> 00:21:46,838 thing. purify the mind and create the conditions for knowledge. You chant, you meditate, you 221 00:21:46,838 --> 00:21:51,638 perform your duties. Not to earn freedom, but to prepare the ground so that when the question, 222 00:21:51,678 --> 00:21:58,838 what am I, arises, the answer can land. Karma prepares the soil. Jnana is the seed that grows 223 00:21:58,838 --> 00:22:03,558 into realization. One more point before we close, because it connects to something coming up 224 00:22:03,558 --> 00:22:09,518 in your next lectures. Shankara calls this the four Mahavakyas, the four great sayings from 225 00:22:09,518 --> 00:22:14,498 the Upanishads that he treats with the precision of a logician, not a poet. We'll walk through 226 00:22:14,498 --> 00:22:20,118 those next, and you'll see how he parses each one like a theorem. Now we come to the heart 227 00:22:20,118 --> 00:22:25,978 of Shankara's method. These are not poetic flourishes or inspirational quotations for temple walls. 228 00:22:26,258 --> 00:22:31,258 They're identity statements. And Shankara treats them with the precision of a logician proving 229 00:22:31,258 --> 00:22:37,786 a theorem. Four sentences, four sources, one claim. Look at them on the slide. and notice 230 00:22:37,786 --> 00:22:43,026 something I want you to carry forward. Each one comes from a different Upanishad and Shankara 231 00:22:43,026 --> 00:22:50,546 reads them as mutually illuminating rather than contradictory. Tattvam Asi, That Thou Art 232 00:22:50,546 --> 00:22:57,066 from the Chandogya Upanishad, Chapter 6, Verse 8. This is the one everyone knows. It's the 233 00:22:57,066 --> 00:23:02,526 teaching that unfolds across 16 chapters of dialogue between a father, Uddalaka, and his 234 00:23:02,526 --> 00:23:10,130 son, Svetaketu. You are that, where That is the ground of all being, the seed of existence, 235 00:23:10,350 --> 00:23:17,310 the consciousness that witnesses everything. Second, Aham Brahmasmi, I am Brahman from 236 00:23:17,310 --> 00:23:23,590 the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The shift here is grammatical, but it's profound. Tattvamasi 237 00:23:23,590 --> 00:23:29,670 speaks to you in the second person. Aham Brahmasmi speaks from the first. This is the moment of 238 00:23:29,670 --> 00:23:36,518 recognition. Not you are that from the outside, but I am that from within. the witness claiming 239 00:23:36,518 --> 00:23:44,518 its identity. Third, Ayam Atma Brahma. This Self is Brahman. From the Mandukya Upanishad. 240 00:23:44,638 --> 00:23:50,738 Notice the demonstrative. This. Not abstract, not distant. The very Self you're inhabiting 241 00:23:50,738 --> 00:23:56,638 right now, reading these words, hearing these sounds, this Self is not a fragment. It is 242 00:23:56,638 --> 00:24:04,450 the whole. Fourth, Prajñānam Brahma. Consciousness is Brahman. From the Aitareya Upanishad. This 243 00:24:04,450 --> 00:24:09,590 is the most technical, and I think the most revealing. The Upanishads gesture toward Brahman 244 00:24:09,590 --> 00:24:16,690 in many ways, as light, as silence, as breath, as the unborn. But Shankara fixes on this. 245 00:24:16,990 --> 00:24:22,990 The common denominator across all experiences is consciousness. Not the content, not the 246 00:24:22,990 --> 00:24:29,670 thought, the sensation, the emotion, but the knowing itself. The suction, the witness. That 247 00:24:29,670 --> 00:24:34,802 is what remains when everything else is stripped away. And Shankara's method for arriving here? 248 00:24:34,802 --> 00:24:42,382 Neti neti. Not this, not this. Not the body, not the senses, not the mind, not the intellect. 249 00:24:42,782 --> 00:24:49,042 Strip away every object of awareness until only the subject remains. And what's left? The very 250 00:24:49,042 --> 00:24:54,442 thing doing the stripping. That's what these four sayings point to. But here's the complication. 251 00:24:54,702 --> 00:25:00,242 If Brahman is ultimately without qualities, what about the personal God we pray to? What 252 00:25:00,242 --> 00:25:05,842 about Ishvara? the Lord who answers petitions and sustains the cosmos. Shankara has an answer, 253 00:25:05,962 --> 00:25:11,242 and it's the move that made later Vedantins absolutely furious. That's where we're going 254 00:25:11,242 --> 00:25:17,062 next. Now look at this frame carefully, because this is the theological fault line that split 255 00:25:17,062 --> 00:25:23,482 Indian philosophy for centuries. Shankara accepts both nirguna brahman and saguna brahman, but 256 00:25:23,482 --> 00:25:28,322 he subordinates the second to the first, and that's the move that still generates heat. 257 00:25:28,702 --> 00:25:35,598 On the left, nirguna brahman. without qualities. This is the ultimate. Beyond name, beyond 258 00:25:35,598 --> 00:25:42,198 form, beyond any predicate you could attach. No compassion, no wrath, no mercy, no anger. 259 00:25:42,438 --> 00:25:50,158 Not loving, not unloving. Pure being, pure consciousness, pure bliss. Sat-chit-ananda. But those words 260 00:25:50,158 --> 00:25:56,018 don't qualify Brahman so much as they indicate the absence of limitation. On the right, Saguna 261 00:25:56,018 --> 00:26:02,838 Brahman, with qualities. Identified with Ishvara, the Lord. This is the personal God of devotion, 262 00:26:02,958 --> 00:26:07,398 the one you pray to in the morning, the one you ask for blessings, the one who hears your 263 00:26:07,398 --> 00:26:14,238 grief. Shankara doesn't reject Ishvara. He says Ishvara is real. But where? At the conventional 264 00:26:14,238 --> 00:26:20,058 level. The personal God is the highest empirical reality, the best way to relate to the divine 265 00:26:20,058 --> 00:26:27,118 within the realm of names and forms. Worship Ishvara, yes. Pray, yes. Devotion has its place. 266 00:26:27,218 --> 00:26:33,118 But ultimately, Ishvara is Brahman seen through the limiting adjunct of Maya. The way the ocean 267 00:26:33,118 --> 00:26:38,298 seen through waves looks like a thousand different waters. Now, and this is where the rebellion 268 00:26:38,298 --> 00:26:44,457 began, later Vedantins found this intolerable. Ramanuja, the Vishishtadvaita thinker we'll 269 00:26:44,457 --> 00:26:50,098 meet in a future lecture, argued, if the personal God is ultimately unreal, how can devotion 270 00:26:50,098 --> 00:26:55,826 be meaningful? How can you love an abstraction? Madhva, the Dvaita philosopher, went further. 271 00:26:56,302 --> 00:27:01,782 Shankara's position reduces God to a philosophical principle, not a person you can surrender to. 272 00:27:02,022 --> 00:27:08,042 Here's the thing. Shankara anticipated this. He built a two-tier system deliberately. For 273 00:27:08,042 --> 00:27:14,142 the beginner, Saguna Brahman. God with form, prayer, devotion. For the seeker ready for 274 00:27:14,142 --> 00:27:20,522 the hard truth, Nirguna Brahman. The nameless ground beneath all names. The latter has rungs. 275 00:27:20,662 --> 00:27:26,246 Not everyone climbs to the top, but the climb ends at the same place. One more note before 276 00:27:26,246 --> 00:27:31,726 we move on, because there's one more layer to the legacy story. The texts themselves. What 277 00:27:31,726 --> 00:27:37,286 did he actually write, and what did later generations attach to his name? That's next, and the answer 278 00:27:37,286 --> 00:27:42,226 will surprise you. Half the Shankara you know probably didn't write a single word he's credited 279 00:27:42,226 --> 00:27:47,946 with. Now we come to the shelf itself. And here's where the scholarly care matters. Because the 280 00:27:47,946 --> 00:27:54,066 traditional attribution list of Shankara's works is enormous. 300 plus texts in some catalogs. 281 00:27:54,382 --> 00:27:59,842 and modern textual criticism says most of it is wrong. So let's be precise about what survives 282 00:27:59,842 --> 00:28:05,842 scrutiny. The Routledge history is blunt on this point. Scholars, by detailed textual critical 283 00:28:05,842 --> 00:28:11,442 analyses, accept the commentaries on the principle Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma 284 00:28:11,442 --> 00:28:18,902 Sutra as legitimate texts of Shankara. So, the authentic core. Look at the slide. First, the 285 00:28:18,902 --> 00:28:25,466 Brahma Sutra Bhashya, his commentary on Vādhārāyaṇa's Brahma Sutra. This is the masterpiece and nobody 286 00:28:25,466 --> 00:28:31,066 disputes it. Adamson and Ghaneri call it the most celebrated work of Shankara without doubt. 287 00:28:31,386 --> 00:28:36,766 Remember the Adhyasa Bhashya we discussed? That opening meditation on superimposition? This 288 00:28:36,766 --> 00:28:41,926 is where it lives. This is where the entire system gets built, brick by brick, against 289 00:28:41,926 --> 00:28:49,066 live opponents. Mimamsakas, Buddhists, Sankhyaans. If you read one Shankara text, read this one. 290 00:28:49,086 --> 00:28:55,142 Ideally with a good guide alongside because it is dense. Second, commentaries on the principal 291 00:28:55,142 --> 00:29:04,202 Upanishads. The Brihavaranyaka, Chandogya, Aitareya, Taittiriya, Isha, Kena, Katha, Mundaka, Prashna 292 00:29:04,202 --> 00:29:10,142 and Mandukya, along with Gaudapada's Karikas on that last one. Remember those four Mahavakyas? 293 00:29:10,342 --> 00:29:15,902 Each one comes from a text in this stack. Shankar didn't just quote the Upanishads. He built 294 00:29:15,902 --> 00:29:21,262 a coherent reading across all ten, treating them as a single body of teaching with a single 295 00:29:21,262 --> 00:29:27,690 ultimate claim. Third, the Bhagavad-Gita Bhashya, his commentary on the Gita. And here's a lovely 296 00:29:27,690 --> 00:29:33,950 detail. Shankara himself said the Gita, encapsulates the essence of the meaning of the whole Veda. 297 00:29:34,150 --> 00:29:39,370 The scripture most people know through devotional reading, Shankara read as Advaita in miniature. 298 00:29:39,370 --> 00:29:44,750 Arjuna's crisis on the battlefield as the soul's confrontation with its own ultimate nature. 299 00:29:45,150 --> 00:29:51,230 Fourth, the Upadesa Sahasri, a thousand teachings. This one is different from all the rest and 300 00:29:51,230 --> 00:29:57,086 it matters. It's an independent treatise, not a commentary on anyone else's text. Shankara 301 00:29:57,086 --> 00:30:02,086 speaking in his own voice, in a mix of verse and prose, laying out the path to knowledge 302 00:30:02,086 --> 00:30:08,086 for students. It's the most accessible entry point into his actual thought. Mayada's 1992 303 00:30:08,086 --> 00:30:13,786 edition is the standard critical text, and the attribution here is convincing. Four categories. 304 00:30:14,026 --> 00:30:19,306 That's the authentic corpus. Notice what a small fraction it is of what circulates under his 305 00:30:19,306 --> 00:30:25,050 name. Which brings us to the demolition derby of the next slide. Now the cautionary slide. 306 00:30:25,290 --> 00:30:30,270 Because here's a trap that has caught even serious teachers, and I want you armed against it. 307 00:30:30,470 --> 00:30:35,730 The most famous Shankara text in the world today, the one you'll find quoted everywhere, from 308 00:30:35,730 --> 00:30:41,990 yoga studios to philosophy podcasts, is the Vivekachudamrani, the crest jewel of discrimination. 309 00:30:41,990 --> 00:30:47,910 And it is almost certainly not by Shankara. The Routledge history lists it among texts 310 00:30:47,910 --> 00:30:53,338 traditionally attributed while placing the authentic works separately. The philosophical content 311 00:30:53,338 --> 00:30:59,438 is broadly Advaita, sure, but the style, the vocabulary, the doctrinal machinery all point 312 00:30:59,438 --> 00:31:04,478 to a later hand. It's probably a genuine work of the Advaita tradition written centuries 313 00:31:04,478 --> 00:31:10,808 after him and then absorbed into the Shankara legend. And it goes on. The hymns and stotras. 314 00:31:10,808 --> 00:31:16,958 Bhaja Govindam, the worship Govinda song that begins, worship Govinda, worship Govinda, you 315 00:31:16,958 --> 00:31:22,914 fool. When death comes, grammar won't save you. Wonderful stuff. Almost certainly not his. 316 00:31:23,294 --> 00:31:29,154 The Saundarya Lahari, the wave of beauty. The Dakshinamurti Stotra. The Routledge history 317 00:31:29,154 --> 00:31:35,074 says these are considered spurious. Add to the pile the Aparokshanu Bhuti, the Shatshloki, 318 00:31:35,134 --> 00:31:41,314 and dozens of minor treatises. Now, why does this matter? Isn't it just pedantry, this game 319 00:31:41,314 --> 00:31:47,538 of authentic and spurious? No. And here's the reason. If you build a lecture on Shankara's 320 00:31:47,538 --> 00:31:52,818 Vivekachudamani, you are teaching a text he didn't write. That's not fatal. The text is 321 00:31:52,818 --> 00:31:57,278 still important, still worth reading, still part of the tradition's self-understanding. 322 00:31:57,458 --> 00:32:02,878 But you should say so. Intellectual honesty is part of the pedagogy. And there's a deeper 323 00:32:02,878 --> 00:32:08,038 point here, the one I flagged at the very beginning of this lecture. Remember the two Shankaras, 324 00:32:08,118 --> 00:32:13,126 the historical philosopher and the legendary figure? The pattern of misattributed texts 325 00:32:13,126 --> 00:32:18,906 is the textual version of the same phenomenon. The tradition loved its hero so much it handed 326 00:32:18,906 --> 00:32:24,926 him its whole library. Every anonymous Advaita poem, every devotional hymn that fit the mold, 327 00:32:25,126 --> 00:32:30,366 every practical manual of discrimination, all of it gradually accrued to the name of the 328 00:32:30,366 --> 00:32:35,586 great founder. He became the tradition's magnet for texts the way the legendary biographies 329 00:32:35,586 --> 00:32:41,354 made him a magnet for miracle stories. Shankara the commentator gave us a system we can verify. 330 00:32:41,354 --> 00:32:47,314 Shankara the legend gave us a library we can't. And part of mature engagement with this tradition, 331 00:32:47,494 --> 00:32:52,414 the same discipline you'd bring to the Gospels or the Platonic Corpus or the works of Aristotle, 332 00:32:52,634 --> 00:32:57,834 is holding both and being clear about which one you're citing. But if he wasn't the fountainhead 333 00:32:57,834 --> 00:33:03,734 of all these texts, where did his actual ideas come from? He had a teacher's teacher and the 334 00:33:03,734 --> 00:33:09,174 debt is larger than the hagiographies admit. That's next. and it's the corrective to centuries 335 00:33:09,174 --> 00:33:15,254 of hero worship. Now here's the correction that needs to be heard loud and clear. Because for 336 00:33:15,254 --> 00:33:20,754 centuries, the hero worship has obscured what is actually a remarkable intellectual lineage. 337 00:33:20,754 --> 00:33:25,934 And Adamson and Gennary emphasize this in a way that gets lost in the devotional retellings. 338 00:33:26,174 --> 00:33:31,314 We've been describing Shankara as a pivotal figure in the development of Vedanta. In fact, 339 00:33:31,434 --> 00:33:37,414 many of his key ideas and some of those nice analogies are already found in Gartapath. Read 340 00:33:37,414 --> 00:33:44,734 that carefully. Many of his key ideas already there before him. So let me draw you the lineage 341 00:33:44,734 --> 00:33:49,894 because it's worth remembering as a chain of transmission. The Upanishads gave the source. 342 00:33:50,074 --> 00:33:55,194 They were the original wells from which all the water flowed. Then Badarayana gave the 343 00:33:55,194 --> 00:34:00,994 sutras, the aphorisms, the compressed statements that would become the scaffold. Then Gaurdhapada 344 00:34:00,994 --> 00:34:08,278 gave the key moves. And finally, Shankara, the systematizer. Notice the word I used. systematizer. 345 00:34:08,458 --> 00:34:15,518 Not founder, not inventor, systematizer. Shankara himself called Gaurapad his paramaguru, the 346 00:34:15,518 --> 00:34:21,278 supreme teacher. That's not just polite homage. It may indicate that Gaurapad was his teacher's 347 00:34:21,278 --> 00:34:26,698 teacher, part of a direct lineage. But regardless of the biographical certainty, the textual 348 00:34:26,698 --> 00:34:33,278 evidence is clear. Gaurapad's mandukya karikas already contain the four states analysis. Waking, 349 00:34:33,378 --> 00:34:39,097 dreaming, deep sleep, and the fourth, turiya. They contain the doctrine of non-origination, 350 00:34:39,177 --> 00:34:44,957 Ajatavada, the radical claim that nothing was ever truly born because birth implies something 351 00:34:44,957 --> 00:34:49,617 coming from nothing. They contain the critique of causality that Shankara would later build 352 00:34:49,617 --> 00:34:55,237 into his argumentation. Think about what that means. Those are not minor observations. They're 353 00:34:55,237 --> 00:35:01,277 structural beams. And Shankara didn't hide this dependency. He named it openly. He acknowledged 354 00:35:01,277 --> 00:35:06,858 his debt. But later centuries, in their reverence, turned Shankara into the fountainhead. and 355 00:35:06,858 --> 00:35:13,018 in doing so, erase the architect who came before. The Upanishads were the source. Baudharyana 356 00:35:13,018 --> 00:35:19,158 gave the sutras. Gaurdhapad gave the key moves. And Shankara? He gave the definitive reading. 357 00:35:19,478 --> 00:35:23,838 There's a difference between founding a tradition and perfecting it. And I want you to carry 358 00:35:23,838 --> 00:35:28,678 that distinction forward whenever you encounter the great system builders in any philosophical 359 00:35:28,678 --> 00:35:35,398 tradition. Buddhism has it too. The Buddha spoke, Nagarjuna systematized. Christianity has it 360 00:35:35,398 --> 00:35:42,006 too. Paul preached, Augustine systematized. And here, the Upanishads whispered, Shankara 361 00:35:42,006 --> 00:35:47,886 made it unavoidable. Now we move from philosophy to institution, from the texts to the living 362 00:35:47,886 --> 00:35:53,066 order that has carried them for 12 centuries. And here we have to draw the line again between 363 00:35:53,066 --> 00:35:58,466 the traditional story and the documented history. According to tradition, Shankara established 364 00:35:58,466 --> 00:36:04,026 four mathas, monasteries, at the four cardinal points of the subcontinent. Look at them on 365 00:36:04,026 --> 00:36:09,902 the slide. At the south, the Sharada Matha at Sringeri in Karnataka. This one became the 366 00:36:09,902 --> 00:36:15,802 most intellectually influential over the centuries. At the east, the Govardhan Matha at Puri in 367 00:36:15,802 --> 00:36:21,762 Odisha, where the great Jagannath temple stands. At the west, the Dwarka Peetha in Gujarat, 368 00:36:21,962 --> 00:36:27,382 the same Dwarka associated with Krishna in the epic traditions. And at the north, the Jyotir 369 00:36:27,382 --> 00:36:33,382 Matha at Joshimath, near Badrinath in the Himalayas. Each was headed by one of Shankara's four chief 370 00:36:33,382 --> 00:36:39,926 disciples. Padmapada, Shureshwara, Hastamalaka and Tortaka. The order he founded is called 371 00:36:39,926 --> 00:36:47,206 the Dasanami, ten names, referring to the ten suffixes that renunciates take Saraswati, Bharati, 372 00:36:47,286 --> 00:36:55,386 Puri, Giri, Parvata, Sagara, Tirtha, Ashrama, Vana and Ananda. You'll recognize these in 373 00:36:55,386 --> 00:37:00,946 the names of modern Swamis today, the Shankaracharyas who still lead various lineages, sometimes 374 00:37:00,946 --> 00:37:06,182 with fierce disputes over who legitimately holds the title. He's also credited with organizing 375 00:37:06,182 --> 00:37:11,722 the Smarta synthesis, the harmonization of six sectarian traditions through the Panchayatana 376 00:37:11,722 --> 00:37:19,522 form of worship. Shaiva, Vaishnava, Shaktah, Garnapatiya, Saurah and Kaumata. One ritual, 377 00:37:19,622 --> 00:37:26,402 six paths. The unity of diversity, institutionalized. But here's the honest caveat, and I won't skip 378 00:37:26,402 --> 00:37:31,522 this even though it's uncomfortable. Modern scholarship is skeptical that Shankara personally 379 00:37:31,522 --> 00:37:36,434 founded all four mathas in the form we know them. The institutional records are later. 380 00:37:36,714 --> 00:37:42,014 The Matha's own histories are written from within the tradition, not from contemporary documentation. 381 00:37:42,394 --> 00:37:47,754 The Sringeri Sharada Pita in particular has been enormously influential, but influence 382 00:37:47,754 --> 00:37:53,374 isn't the same as documentary proof. The idea of Shankara as the great organizer, the man 383 00:37:53,374 --> 00:37:58,614 who set up the institutional backbone for Advaita, may be as much a later construction as the 384 00:37:58,614 --> 00:38:04,922 miracle stories. And yet, something happened. The Shankara tradition survived. The mathas 385 00:38:04,922 --> 00:38:11,642 persisted. 1200 years later, they're still functioning, still appointing abbots, still teaching. Whether 386 00:38:11,642 --> 00:38:16,382 Shankara laid the foundation stone himself or the tradition retrojected the image of the 387 00:38:16,382 --> 00:38:22,562 organizer onto its founder, the building stands. And now, after all the philosophy, after the 388 00:38:22,562 --> 00:38:27,902 texts, after the institutional story, we come to the question that drives every intellectual 389 00:38:27,902 --> 00:38:33,682 historian. How did this all echo across the centuries? Who read him? Who rejected him? 390 00:38:33,870 --> 00:38:38,850 And who still argues with him today? That's where we finish this lecture. With the legacy 391 00:38:38,850 --> 00:38:43,910 and the objections that endure. Let me now sketch the reach of this man's ideas. Because it's 392 00:38:43,910 --> 00:38:50,350 genuinely staggering. Shankara's Advaita became, for better or worse, the default meaning of 393 00:38:50,350 --> 00:38:56,590 Vedanta in the modern world. When someone today says Vedanta without qualification, they almost 394 00:38:56,590 --> 00:39:02,878 always mean Advaita. That's not a neutral fact. It's a historical achievement. The Routledge 395 00:39:02,878 --> 00:39:08,138 history ranks him with classical Greek thinkers, Thomas Aquinas in the Christian world, and 396 00:39:08,138 --> 00:39:13,678 Muslim philosophers such as Al-Ghazali. That's not hyperbole. That's the company he keeps. 397 00:39:13,958 --> 00:39:19,998 In India, the four Matas became major intellectual and institutional centers, and the Sringeri 398 00:39:19,998 --> 00:39:26,038 Sharada Pita remains one of the most respected authorities in Hindu orthodoxy. The title Shankaracharya 399 00:39:26,038 --> 00:39:31,342 is still carried by heads of various Matas today. And those succession disputes I mentioned are 400 00:39:31,342 --> 00:39:36,262 themselves evidence of how much the title is worth fighting over. In the West. And this 401 00:39:36,262 --> 00:39:42,602 is a strange, winding story. Schopenhauer read the Upanishads in Ankitl Duperron's Latin translation 402 00:39:42,602 --> 00:39:49,082 and pronounced them the consolation of his life. He never read Shankara directly, but the Vedanta 403 00:39:49,082 --> 00:39:54,962 that reached Europe was essentially Advaita. Then Vivekananda carried practical Vedanta 404 00:39:54,962 --> 00:40:00,746 to Chicago and the world. Radhakrishnan's Neo Vedanta shaped how the modern West understands 405 00:40:00,746 --> 00:40:05,666 Indian philosophy as a whole. And much of the global New Age reception of Indian thought, 406 00:40:05,786 --> 00:40:11,426 the good, the bad, and the bead curtains, all runs through Shankara's system, filtered and 407 00:40:11,426 --> 00:40:18,026 diluted, but recognizable at the core. So when someone in California says, all is one, they're 408 00:40:18,026 --> 00:40:23,586 knowingly or not, quoting the eighth century and the critics. This is where it gets interesting 409 00:40:23,586 --> 00:40:29,130 and where, if you've been following my lecture series, your ears should perk up. Ramanuja, 410 00:40:29,170 --> 00:40:34,890 the Vishishtadvaita thinker, argued that Shankara's maya makes the world unreal and undermines 411 00:40:34,890 --> 00:40:40,590 both the reality of the world and the personhood of God. If Brahman is ultimately without qualities, 412 00:40:40,790 --> 00:40:46,610 then devotion is impossible. You cannot love in abstraction. You cannot surrender to a formula. 413 00:40:46,610 --> 00:40:52,630 Ramanuja's alternative. Brahman is real. The world is real. And they're related as body 414 00:40:52,630 --> 00:40:58,970 to soul. The world isn't a mirage. It's the body of God. Madhva, the Dvaita philosopher, 415 00:40:59,050 --> 00:41:05,570 went further. He accused Advaita of being crypto-Buddhism. And the charge stung because it has teeth. 416 00:41:05,970 --> 00:41:11,030 Shankara's doctrine of Maya does look structurally similar to Buddhist claims about the unreality 417 00:41:11,030 --> 00:41:16,270 of the phenomenal world. Shankara spent enormous energy distinguishing himself from Buddhism. 418 00:41:16,570 --> 00:41:21,610 But the family resemblance was close enough to be dangerous. The insult of calling a Hindu 419 00:41:21,610 --> 00:41:27,474 philosopher a Buddhist in disguise was, in that world, a serious blow, and it's still debated 420 00:41:27,474 --> 00:41:33,654 today. And the modern critique? Some scholars, Paul Hacker's work is central here, argue that 421 00:41:33,654 --> 00:41:39,554 the Shankara of the tradition is a construction, that the historical commentator was a more 422 00:41:39,554 --> 00:41:45,014 modest, text-focused exegete, and the grand systematizer of the hagiographies is a later 423 00:41:45,014 --> 00:41:50,074 invention. The Shankara of the commentaries and the Shankara of the legends may be two 424 00:41:50,074 --> 00:41:56,366 different men, stitched together by devotion. Hold all three objections together. The theological, 425 00:41:56,526 --> 00:42:01,526 the polemical, the philological. Because that's what a living philosophical tradition looks 426 00:42:01,526 --> 00:42:07,966 like. Nobody argues with a corpse. So let's land this plane. Almost 40 minutes on one eighth 427 00:42:07,966 --> 00:42:14,946 century philosopher? Why bother? Why does he matter here, now, to you? Here's what I find 428 00:42:14,946 --> 00:42:20,446 genuinely striking. And notice, it's not the miracles. Forget the miracles. They're the 429 00:42:20,446 --> 00:42:26,138 tradition's wallpaper. First, Shankara took a scattered set of Upanishadic insights and 430 00:42:26,138 --> 00:42:32,058 built a philosophical system rigorous enough to answer Mimamsa, Sankhya, Nyaya, and Buddhism 431 00:42:32,058 --> 00:42:37,938 on their own terms. This is what separates him from a mere mystic or a mere compiler. He didn't 432 00:42:37,938 --> 00:42:42,918 retreat from his opponent's strongest arguments. He met them inside their own frameworks and 433 00:42:42,918 --> 00:42:48,598 dismantled them there. That is philosophy at the highest level of craft in any civilization. 434 00:42:49,198 --> 00:42:55,026 Second, he wrote commentaries that are still read as the standard. 1200 years later. And 435 00:42:55,026 --> 00:43:01,285 he founded an institutional order that is still functioning 1200 years later. Very few human 436 00:43:01,285 --> 00:43:06,466 beings have left works and institutions that both survived the millennium. Think about that. 437 00:43:06,466 --> 00:43:13,066 Libraries burn, empires fall, and the shrinkery lineage continues. Third, and this is the claim 438 00:43:13,066 --> 00:43:17,886 itself, the one we opened with. He made the assertion that is either the deepest truth 439 00:43:17,886 --> 00:43:23,322 or the most sophisticated error in Indian philosophy. And I'll let you decide which. because that 440 00:43:23,322 --> 00:43:28,902 decision is genuinely yours to make. You are already what you're looking for. And the only 441 00:43:28,902 --> 00:43:34,022 thing standing between you and liberation is a misidentification so fundamental you can't 442 00:43:34,022 --> 00:43:39,442 see it. Not a debt to be paid, not a journey to be completed, not a transformation to be 443 00:43:39,442 --> 00:43:45,942 earned, a recognition. The shell was never silver, but the shell was always real, and the reaching 444 00:43:45,942 --> 00:43:51,462 hand was always yours. That claim is either liberating or terrifying, depending on how 445 00:43:51,462 --> 00:43:57,190 you hear it. If you already are what you seek, then the searching, the striving, the endless 446 00:43:57,190 --> 00:44:03,670 becoming was never necessary. For some, that's the sound of every burden dropping. For others, 447 00:44:03,710 --> 00:44:09,770 it's the sound of the ground disappearing. Shankara would say, that discomfort is the superimposition, 448 00:44:09,770 --> 00:44:15,570 resisting the light. And that, the discomfort and the possibility, is exactly why it's worth 449 00:44:15,570 --> 00:44:20,644 teaching. Not because it's comfortable, because it's the most rigorous, the most demanding, 450 00:44:20,846 --> 00:44:27,146 and possibly the most honest thing Indian philosophy ever said about what you are. Thank you. Next 451 00:44:27,146 --> 00:44:32,326 time, we continue the story with the thinkers who answered him, Ramanuja and Madhva, because 452 00:44:32,326 --> 00:44:35,786 the history of Advaita is also the history of its refutation.