Adi Sankacharya
The Man Who Killed God to Establish Your Godliness
Author : Shatabda Basu
cahpter 1 : The Vibe of sankara
chapter 2 : Sankara almost invisible
chapter 3 : So How He Became The BOSS
chapter 4 : Ressurection By Swami Vivekananda
1. The vibe of Śaṅkara
A man shadowed in myth and legend—because truth at that altitude always is. Literally the Batman of Hindus, stealthy, invisible, precise, without temples and monasteries, no patrons, no speech, who ruthlessly devastated every idea, every reasoning, every belief that insults you by calling you merely a man.
Nay—you are Śiva Himself, drunk in His own ignorance of His own infinitude.
You are that light which makes the sun shine. The moon borrows your light. The thunder sings of your glory—what then of this small world?
तमेव भान्तमनुभाति सर्वं तस्य भासा सर्वमिदं विभाति ॥
I was stunned by a line from the preface of a book—which I will attach when I remember it:
This may be the best opening statement for Vedānta I have ever encountered.
Because our entire Indian civilisation—its culture, philosophy, and thought—is built upon this very struggle: to see the world as it is, un-interpreted.
That is why so many ancient philosophies sprouted in this land. Not to add meaning—but to remove borrowed meanings.
And here is the man who rediscovered what the ancients of the Upaniṣadic epoch left for us.
Tat tvam asi. You are That. Was the answer.
It was a moment in human thought when the sky reached its height, the mountains reverberated with awe, the human mind dead in its insentience, and the cosmos lost its existence.
This is how raw truth looks.
It is not nausea. It is not annihilation.
It is the grandeur of your own being.
So grand is the idea, and greater still are the men who embodied it. Thus arose the great trio—the Śākyan prince the Buddha, the young ascetic Śaṅkara, and the warrior monk Vivekananda—whom gods and sages worship incessantly day and night. They are not meant for us, but for civilizations yet to come.
2. Śaṅkara, Almost Invisible
Unlike the Buddha, whose life is well documented in the Pāli Canon, Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita, Lalitavistara, Divyāvadāna, Mahāvastu, Fo Benxing Ji Jing (Chinese), and historically celebrated—the first true celebrity of India—the extent of his importance is found in the dating of the Mahāparinibbāna. And such was the force of this man that it almost killed his own civilizational ancestors: the monstrously giant Vedic culture, which was 1000 years older than his time.
His cultural value was like a god of another world, that many republics, kings, and clans waged war to own his relics and legacy—Mallas, for example; Ajātaśatru vs the Vajji (Licchavi) Confederacy. Such is the irony that a Brāhmin named Droṇa had to intervene for negotiation. And later, Indo-Greeks, Śakas, Kuṣāṇas vs Gandhāra, Hūṇa treated the Buddhist relics as some alien artifact of a Hollywood adventure.
So Buddha became a spotlight and is still today. But where is Śaṅkara amidst this?
Śaṅkara, even in the later post-Gupta period, appears as a thin ray—difficult to grasp both historically and philosophically. He is absolutely dead to archaeology, historical documents, no association with kings, patrons, and not a word on his life except some basic details which we get very late in biographic books.
Most popular among them is the Śaṅkara Digvijaya by Swami Vidyāraṇya of the Vijayanagara Empire, translated into English by Swami Tapasyānanda (Ramakrishna Mission publication)—a wonderful read and containing valuable insight into the historicity of Śaṅkara and its controversies (the controversies are much more interesting than the facts themselves; I like to cover in another article, will put link here).
The one-line insight I will borrow from there is that the real personality of Śaṅkara is blurred by the barrage of hagiographies of Śaṅkara, unlike Buddha, whose life was consistent and much more vibrant in our national memory.
Śaṅkara did not raise monasteries in his lifetime, did not raid courts, did not associate with kings, and enjoyed no royal patronage. There are no Aśokan pillars, no inscriptions, no missionary records, no armies of bhikṣus following him. His biography is not historically so precise, and he is never quoted by Buddhist opponents in polemical literature, unlike Kumārila.
One interesting note: In Indian philosophical polemics, to name an opponent explicitly is when you are tired of him. That recognition was given to Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, not to Śaṅkara. Kumārila was explicitly named and directly targeted by Śāntarakṣita in the Tattvasaṅgraha and by Kamalāśīla in the Tattvasaṅgraha-pañjikā. There exists no Buddhist text that cites Śaṅkara by name. (Why?)
Buddha—whose life was inspiring, full of public engagement, and historically vibrant, and whose Mahāparinibbāna is the most important date in Indian history—his demise brought chaos in the Saṅgha and the polity. Kingdoms waged war on each other to hold his relics and legacy.
And there is Śaṅkara who left almost no trace of himself. Even the Digvijayas cannot be fully relied upon. His disappearance at Kedārnāth was just another day. He simply vanishes from history and no one cares. Even the fate of his physical body is absent from tradition.
```3. Śo How He Became the BOSS
4. Ressurection by Swami Vivekananda
Śaṅkara is invoked a second time in the nineteenth century, but not as a historical figure to be recovered or a founder to be celebrated. He returns without biography, embodied in the stare and voice of Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda rarely spoke Śaṅkara’s name, yet carried the same refusal to ground human dignity in matter, mind, intellect, religion or even philosophy, revealing our identity as something much greater than what we believe about ourselves. What had once moved silently through monasteries now stood before the new world order and became a force for civilizations to come. This was not a repetition of Śaṅkara, not Śaṅkara 2.0, not another bhāṣya on the Upaniṣads, but an unleashing of the taboo around what we think we are. If the medieval Digvijaya writers resurrected Śaṅkara to stabilize traditional and cultural authority,
Vivekananda resurrected him as the touchstone of a humane civilisation,
making visible a presence that had always resisted being tied to a life, a date, or a name.
Śaṅkara appears like an anonymous stranger from a distant past—
a young lad who does not reveal his identity.
He approaches, stops far away, and leaves you with just enough
to glimpse something hopeful in this transitory world.
Is there something that stays?
You rush to investigate.
You search dates, history, ruins.
And you find
sentences that stare back at you,
that speak only to the god within you.
Perhaps Śaṅkara is not missing from history.
Perhaps history is simply too loud to notice him.
“The life of Sankara makes a strong impression of contrasts. He is a philosopher and a poet, a savant and a saint, a mystic and a religious reformer. Such diverse gifts did he possess that different images present themselves if we try to recall his personality. One sees him in youth, on fire with intellectual ambition, a stiff and intrepid debater; another regards him as a shrewd political genius (rather a patriot) attempting to impress on the people a sense of unity; for a third, he is a calm philosopher engaged in the single effort to expose the contradictions of life and thought with an unmatched incisiveness; for a fourth, he is the mystic who declares that we are all greater than we know. There have been few minds more universal than his.”
— Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, Volume II
You see, my entire writing stresses the fourth view alone.
Further readings
Will attach articles on the works of Śaṅkara
Śaṅkara Digvijaya — Swami Tapasyananda
A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy — Chandradhar Sharma
Sri Sankaracharya: Life and Philosophy — Swami Mukhyānanda
Eight Upanishads with the Commentaries of Śaṅkara — Swami Gambhirananda
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