Daily News Analysis

Adi Shankaracharya & Advaita

stylish_lining

All 4 shankaracharyas will not attend Ram temple inauguration in 2024.

  • Birth – Kalady village on the bank of the River Periyar in Kerala.
  • Period – Between 788 and 820 AD.
  • Guru – Govinda Bhagavatpada.
  • Works – Visiting spiritual centres, challenging prevalent philosophical traditions, and establishing mathas, organising monastic orders and a proponent of Advaita Vedanta.
  • Spiritual visits – From Kanchi in Tamil Nadu to Kamrup in Assam, from Kashmir, Kedar & Badri dhams in the Himalayas to Kashi on the bank of the Ganga and Puri on the Bay of Bengal.
  • Contributions – He is also popularly identified as the author of 116 works, including celebrated commentaries (or bhashyas) on 10 Upanishads, the Brahmasutra, and the Bhagavad Gita.
  • Shankara’s legacy – His mathas are seen as keepers of Hindu faith and traditions and imagined of Hindu India transcending the political boundaries of his time.

Shankaracharyas

They are religious teachers who belong to a line of teachers going back all the way to Adi Shankara himself.

Meaning – Teacher of the way of Shankara.

  • A religious title used by the heads of the 4 cardinal maths believed to have been established by Adi Shankara (c 788 CE-820 CE).

Mathas – Dwarka (Gujarat), Joshimath (Uttarakhand), Puri (Odisha), and Sringeri (Karnataka)

  • They comprise religious shrines and temples, as well as libraries and residences.
  • There is little historical evidence for the existence of these mathas prior to the 14th century CE, when the Vijayanagara kingdom began to patronise the Sringeri matha.

Advaita Vedanta

  • A school of Hindu philosophy and spiritual discipline.
  • Proponent – Adi Shankara
  • Principles – Radical nondualism, it posits that all that we perceive is ultimately illusory (maya), and that the principle of brahman is the only true reality of all things, transcending empirical plurality.
  • Fundamental thrust – It lies in the unity of atman or individual consciousness, and brahman or the ultimate reality.
  • Spread – Through systematised theories of metaphysics, language, and epistemology.

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