India's most revered philosopher may have been little known in his own time
Adi Shankara is hailed today as the towering teacher of Advaita Vedanta, credited with over 300 texts. Yet for centuries he was overshadowed by a rival, and no Hindu, Buddhist or Jain source mentions him until the 11th century. The heroic, all-conquering Shankara of legend was largely a 14th-century creation.
His core teaching concerns liberating knowledge: the individual self, the jīvātman, is in truth identical with Ātman-Brahman. Shankara held that right understanding can dawn the moment one hears the great sayings of the Upanishads, which he treated as the authoritative source of knowledge, above the ritual-focused Mīmāṃsā reading of the Vedas. His Advaita shows Mahayana Buddhist influence despite his criticisms of Buddhism.
The legend grew in the 14th century, when the Sringeri monastery gained patronage from Vijayanagara emperors and shifted allegiance towards Brahmanical Advaita orthodoxy. Hagiographies from the 14th to 17th centuries turned him into a ruler-renunciate making a conquest of the four quarters of the subcontinent, defeating opponents in debate. Before the 10th century, his older contemporary Maṇḍana Miśra had been the bigger name, and the historical Shankara was probably Vaishnava-leaning.
Most of the 300-plus works bearing his name were likely written by admirers or later scholars sharing the name. Those widely accepted as genuine include his commentary on the Brahma sutras, commentaries on ten principal Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, and the Upadeśasāhasrī. Scholars mostly reject his authorship of the popular Vivekacūḍāmaṇi.
His dates vary wildly. Leading Advaita monasteries place his birth in the 5th century BCE, with individual houses naming years from 509 to 483 BCE. Scholars in the early 20th century, including Max Müller, accepted 788 to 820 CE, a range now questioned. Current scholarship prefers roughly 700 to 750 CE: his works engage with Buddhist and Mimansa writers of the 5th to 7th centuries, and a commentary on him by Vachaspati Mishra from the first half of the 9th century sets the upper limit. Sringeri records say he was born in the 14th year of a king called Vikramaditya, most likely the Chalukya ruler Vikramaditya II.
Source: Adi Shankara
