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Śaṅkara (c. 700–750 CE)

Śaṅkara was the most influential philosopher of the Advaita Vedānta tradition — the school that holds that ultimate reality is non-dual: there is only Brahman, and the apparent plurality of the world is superimposed on it by ignorance (avidyā). The individual self (ātman) is not different from Brahman; the appearance of difference is māyā — not illusion in the simple sense (the world is not a hallucination) but a cognitive distortion that takes the empirically real for the ultimately real. Śaṅkara’s programme was both constructive (establishing non-duality as the correct reading of the Upaniṣads and the Brahma Sūtras) and polemical (refuting rival interpretations within Vedānta and rival schools outside it, including Buddhism). His critique of Mādhyamaka emptiness — the charge that emptiness without a positive ground is nihilism — became one of the canonical objections to Nāgārjuna’s philosophy and provoked centuries of Buddhist response.

Life

The traditional dating places Śaṅkara at 788–820 CE, but modern scholarship has argued for earlier dates, most commonly c. 700–750 CE. Born in Kaladi, Kerala, in southern India, into a Brahmin family. The hagiographic accounts (Śaṅkaradigvijaya and related texts) describe a child prodigy who renounced the householder life to become a sannyāsin (wandering ascetic) at the age of eight, studied under Govinda Bhagavatpāda, himself a student of Gauḍapāda. Gauḍapāda’s Māṇḍūkyakārikā is the proximate precursor of Advaita and carries heavy Madhyamaka and Yogācāra colouring — its fourth chapter (Alātaśānti) uses distinctly Buddhist argumentative strategies, including the negation of origination (ajātivāda), in terms that closely track Nāgārjuna’s MMK. The structural closeness of Gauḍapāda’s work to the Buddhist traditions that Śaṅkara would later attack sharpens the pracchanna bauddha charge that his Hindu opponents would raise: the genealogical proximity to Buddhism is not only a matter of independent convergence but partly of inheritance through the Gauḍapāda lineage, and spent the rest of his short life composing commentaries and travelling across India to debate rival philosophers and establish monastic centres (maṭhas).

Śaṅkara is traditionally credited with founding four maṭhas at the cardinal points of the Indian subcontinent — Sringeri (south), Puri (east), Dwarka (west), and Jyotirmath (north) — which continue to function as centres of Advaita tradition. The attribution of texts is contested: the commentaries (bhāṣya) on the Brahma Sūtras, the principal Upaniṣads, and the Bhagavad Gītā are universally attributed to Śaṅkara. Many independent treatises (prakaraṇa) are attributed to him in the tradition but are likely by later authors in his school.

Advaita Vedānta

Śaṅkara’s philosophy is developed primarily in the Brahmasūtrabhāṣya — his commentary on the Brahma Sūtras of Bādarāyaṇa — and in his commentaries on the major Upaniṣads.

Brahman. Ultimate reality is Brahman — one, without a second (ekam evādvitīyam), without qualities (nirguṇa), without distinctions. Brahman is pure consciousness (caitanya), self-luminous, and identical with the self (ātman). The great utterances (mahāvākya) of the Upaniṣads — “That thou art” (tat tvam asi), “I am Brahman” (aham brahmāsmi) — are not metaphorical but literal identifications: the individual self is Brahman, and the appearance of difference is ignorance.

Māyā and avidyā. The world of plurality — many objects, many selves, change, causation — is not ultimately real but is not simply unreal either. Śaṅkara distinguishes three levels of reality: the pāramārthika (ultimate — Brahman alone), the vyāvahārika (empirical — the world as we experience it, including bodies, objects, and other selves), and the prātibhāsika (illusory — mistaken perceptions like a rope seen as a snake). The empirical world has vyāvahārika reality: it is functional, law-governed, and the context for moral and religious life. But it is superimposed on Brahman by avidyā (ignorance) — the failure to recognise that what appears as plural is in fact non-dual. Māyā is the principle by which this superimposition occurs: Brahman appears as the world through māyā, as a rope appears as a snake through ignorance. Liberation (mokṣa) is not a change in the world but a change in understanding — the recognition that the self always was Brahman.

Superimposition (adhyāsa). The opening section of the Brahmasūtrabhāṣya — the adhyāsabhāṣya — is Śaṅkara’s most celebrated philosophical argument. He defines superimposition as the erroneous attribution of the properties of one thing to another — specifically, the mutual superimposition of self (subject) and not-self (object). All empirical knowledge, Śaṅkara argues, rests on this fundamental confusion: we attribute objective properties to the self and subjective properties to objects. Philosophy begins by recognising the superimposition and proceeds to dissolve it.

The critique of Buddhism

Śaṅkara engaged with Buddhist philosophy extensively, particularly with Mādhyamaka and Yogācāra.

Against Mādhyamaka. Śaṅkara’s principal objection to Nāgārjuna’s emptiness (śūnyatā) is that emptiness without a positive ground is indistinguishable from nihilism (nāstika). If everything is empty of self-nature, and there is no underlying reality in which things are grounded, then nothing exists — which is absurd. Śaṅkara’s alternative: the world is indeed not ultimately real (this much he shares with Nāgārjuna), but it has a ground — Brahman. Emptiness fails because it dissolves the world without providing anything on which the dissolution rests. Advaita dissolves the world as independently real but grounds the dissolution in Brahman, the non-dual reality that is never empty.

The Mādhyamaka response — developed by later Buddhist philosophers including Candrakīrti and in the Tibetan tradition — is that Śaṅkara’s objection misunderstands emptiness. Emptiness is not the absence of existence but the absence of inherent self-nature; dependent origination is the positive content. The charge of nihilism confuses “empty of self-nature” with “non-existent.” The debate has continued across centuries and traditions; it remains one of the foundational disputes in Indian philosophy.

Against Yogācāra. Śaṅkara also argued against the Yogācāra “mind-only” school, which holds that the objects of experience are constructs of consciousness rather than independently existing things. Śaṅkara’s objection: if only consciousness exists, what accounts for the shared, law-governed character of the empirical world? The Advaitin answer — māyā superimposed on Brahman — provides an account that pure idealism (consciousness without a ground) cannot.

The relationship between Śaṅkara’s Advaita and the Buddhist traditions he criticised has been debated since his own time. His Hindu opponents — particularly the Vaiṣṇava schools of Rāmānuja and Madhva — accused him of being a pracchanna bauddha — a “crypto-Buddhist” — on the grounds that his denial of the ultimate reality of the world and his use of a two-truths framework are too close to Buddhist positions for a genuinely Vedāntic philosophy. Whether the structural parallels between Advaita and Madhyamaka reflect historical influence, independent convergence, or the shared logic of anti-essentialist argument in the Indian philosophical context is debated in the scholarship.

Where Śaṅkara stops

The status of māyā is the persistent difficulty. Māyā is the principle by which Brahman appears as the world — but what is māyā’s own status? It is not real (it cannot exist independently of Brahman) and not unreal (it produces the empirical world). It is anirvacanīya — indeterminable, neither being nor non-being. Śaṅkara’s opponents — both Buddhist and Hindu — have pressed the question: if māyā is indeterminable, the system has an unexplained element at its core. The post-Śaṅkara Advaita tradition (Maṇḍana Miśra, Sureśvara, Padmapāda, Prakāśātman) developed competing accounts of māyā’s relation to Brahman, but no consensus has been reached within the tradition itself.

The relationship between liberation (mokṣa) and the empirical world raises a parallel difficulty. If liberation is the recognition that the self always was Brahman, what changes? The world does not change (it continues to appear as before); the self does not change (it was always Brahman). What changes is understanding — but understanding is itself an event in the empirical world, which is the domain of māyā. The question of how liberation is possible within the framework it is supposed to dissolve — whether the framework is self-undermining or self-transcending — is a structural problem that Śaṅkara’s commentators have addressed in different ways without resolution.

Key works

See also: Nāgārjuna · Candrakīrti