On Shankara: Schools of Advaita

The anecdotes about Śaṅkara’s pupils contained in the traditional biographies hardly seem worthy of credence today, but it is clear that we do have some of the actual works that were written by his direct pupils and early followers.

The Vārttikas (verse sub-commentaries) on his Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Taittirīya Upanishad commentaries attributed to his personal pupil Sureśvara are clearly genuine, as is the short general summary of Advaita doctrine called the Naiṣkarmya Siddhi by the same author.

There are grounds for thinking that the Śruti Sāra Samuddharaṇa attributed to Troṭaka was indeed the work of a personal pupil,and the same could be said of the short Hastāmalaka Stotra.

But the case of the Pañcapādikā, a large-scale sub-commentary on the Brahma Sūtra commentary which was probably never completed and of which only a fragment beyond the part on the first four Sūtras has survived, is more dubious.

Sureśvara and the author of the Śruti Sāra Samuddharaṇa, then, were direct pupils of Śaṅkara, and the author of the Pañcapādikā was either a direct pupil or an early follower.

Sureśvara, though a much more independent and inspired author, did not depart enough from the main line of Śaṅkara’s teaching to stand out as the founder of a particular branch of Śaṅkara’s school.

The author of the Pañcapādikā, however, was a more systematic thinker than either Śaṅkara or Sureśvara. He was more concerned with definition than Śaṅkara, and less keenly aware than Sureśvara that the empirical means of knowledge and proof are due to fade away completely under the floodlight of spiritual illumination.

Another important contributor to post-Śaṅkara Advaita Vedanta was Maṇḍana Miśra, who, as we have seen, was probably a younger contemporary of Śaṅkara.

More important than the opposition between Vācaspati and Prakāśātman, however, is the opposition between Gauḍapāda, Śaṅkara, Troṭaka and Sureśvara on the one hand and (with Maṇḍana added) all the writers of the school who followed them on the other.

Advaita Vedanta, which in the hands of Gauḍapāda, Śaṅkara and Sureśvara had remained basically a system for raising the student above the realm of individual experience through the instrumentality of the upanishadic texts administered by a Teacher who enjoyed an intuitive conviction of their truth, tended amongst Śaṅkara’s followers after Sureśvara and Troṭaka to become a group of competing speculative systems, in the formation of which hypothetical reasoning (tarka) unchecked by practical experience (anubhava) was given free rein.

We know that Śaṅkara’s teaching has survived in its pure form as there are men who have attained enlightenment through it even today. In a sense, too, Śaṅkara’s later followers who ‘intellectualized’ the doctrine were only performing again the service previously performed by Gauḍapāda and Śaṅkara themselves, that of restating the upanishadic teaching in language intelligible to men of their own day

As philosophy in India grew more abstract and complicated, the Advaitins of Śaṅkara’s school kept pace. But the starting-point of any enquiry into Advaita Vedanta must surely be the work of Śaṅkara himself. And the glance we have taken at developments in his school after his death should be enough to convince us of the need for adhering very strictly to his own texts of proven authenticity, and for avoiding the temptation to seek light on his views from the writings of his followers after Sureśvara.

~Alston, Absolute, pp62-67