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Sankaracharya and his philosophy ( Visual No VII) |
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"There have been few minds more universal than his" |
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Sankaracharya and his philosophy ( Visual No VII) |
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"There have been few minds more universal than his" |
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Shankara wrote the famous commentaries on the Brahmasutra, the Bhagavat Geetha and the principal Upanishads, which by themselves could be the life time work of any scholar. As Brahmanism had developed factions such as Vaishnavism, Shavaism, the Devi cult and so on, Shankara stressed on the supreme Vedic truth: " Ekam Sat, Pipra, Bahudha Vadanti". (truth is one and indivisible), the sages call it differently. Shankara's birth place Kaladi lies a few Kilometers to the north of this Museum. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (who was India's Prime Minister for 17 years) wrote of Shankara: "During all these travels he met innumerable people arguing, debating, reasoning, convincing and filling them with the part of his own passion and tremendous vitality. He strove hard to synthesize the diverse currents that were troubling the mind of India of his day and to build a unity of outlook out of that diversity... He was a curious mixture of a philosopher and a scholar., an agnostic and a mystic, a poet and a saint and in addition to all this a practical reformer and an able organizer.. At the age of thirty two, this Brahmin from the tropical south died at Kedarnath in the upper snow- covered reaches of the Himalayas". |
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Sankaracharya (Guru Sankara) occupies a unique place in the
intellectual and cultural history of India. Young Shankara, a prodigy, who became well
versed in all the important Hindu religious treatises such as the Vedas, Upanishads,
Shastras and Puranas while still a young boy sought to 'save' Hinduism, from the influence
of other religions. He considered the rising influence of Buddhism as the main rival to
Hinduism, was practical enough to adopt Buddhism's own methods by establishing four great
"mutts" (centers of religious scholarships) in four far flung corners of the sub
continent.