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Śaṅkara
Systematised the claim that you are already the absolute and simply do not know it — dead at thirty-two, and accused by his own tradition of being a Buddhist in disguise.
Who they were
Ādi Śaṅkara, conventionally dated to around 700–750 CE, was the systematiser of Advaita Vedānta and, by most accounts, the most influential philosopher India produced.
By tradition he died at thirty-two, having in that time written the standard commentaries on the entire Vedāntic canon, debated the leading philosophers of rival schools across the subcontinent, and founded a monastic order.
Where they came from
Born in Kerala, in a brahmin family; renounced as a boy; studied under Govinda Bhagavatpāda; and travelled continuously, debating.
The traditional biographies are hagiographic and cannot be relied on for detail. What survives securely is the work: commentaries on the Brahma Sūtras, on the principal Upaniṣads and on the Bhagavad Gītā — the full prasthānatrayī — plus the Upadeśasāhasrī, a teaching manual. The attribution of the popular Vivekacūḍāmaṇi to him is disputed.
He is credited with founding or reorganising four maṭhas at the cardinal points of India and the Daśanāmī order of monks, which still exists.
What they taught
Brahman alone is real; the world is mithyā; the self is not other than Brahman. That formula is the whole position, and each term needs care.
Mithyā is usually mistranslated "unreal" or "illusion", and Śaṅkara means something more precise: neither real nor unreal, but dependently apparent — like the snake seen in a rope at dusk. The snake is not nothing; you genuinely see it and your heart genuinely races. It is also not there. When the rope is seen, the snake does not go anywhere, because it never was anywhere.
Adhyāsa — superimposition — is the technical name for this, and the opening pages of his Brahma Sūtra commentary are devoted to it. The fundamental error is superimposing the properties of the body-mind onto the self, and the self onto the body-mind: I am tall, I am tired, I will die.
Two levels of truth. From the pāramārthika standpoint, the absolute, there is only Brahman. From the vyāvahārika, the conventional, there is a world, a self, other people, ethics, and scripture — all fully valid at their own level. Śaṅkara is not saying the world does not matter; he is saying it is not ultimate. Without this distinction Advaita collapses into either nihilism or absurdity, and critics who ignore it are attacking a position he did not hold.
Liberation is knowledge, and it is available now. Not an achievement, not a place reached after death, not something produced by action — because what is already the case cannot be produced. Jīvanmukti, liberation while living, follows: the liberated person continues to eat and teach and age, without the misidentification.
What we can and cannot say
We can say the system is rigorous and its central move genuinely difficult to answer. If liberation were something achieved, it would be an event in time and therefore impermanent; so it cannot be achieved, and can only be recognised.
We can say his own tradition accused him of being a crypto-Buddhist, and the charge is worth taking seriously. Later Vedāntins called him pracchanna bauddha — a Buddhist in disguise — because the structure of his position resembles Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka: two levels of truth, the conventional world as dependently apparent, liberation through seeing through it.
Śaṅkara himself attacked Buddhism vigorously, and the difference is real — he affirms a positive absolute where Madhyamaka refuses one, and Buddhists regard that affirmation as precisely the error. But he was working after several centuries of Buddhist philosophical dominance in India and had plainly absorbed its methods. The accusation was not stupid.
We can say his modern position is inflated relative to his historical one. Śaṅkara as the Hindu philosopher is substantially a colonial-era and Neo-Vedāntic construction. In terms of living practice, Rāmānuja and Madhva shaped far more of what Hindus actually do, and the devotional traditions covered under bhakti shaped more still.
We can say the comparison with Western idealism is illuminating and imperfect. Brahman is not a mind having experiences and māyā is not Berkeley's divine perception. The resemblance is a starting point for reading, not an identification.
We cannot say much about the man. Thirty-two years, an enormous body of work, and a biography that dissolves on inspection.
Further reading
- Upadeśasāhasrī, in Sengaku Mayeda's translation — the most direct route to what he taught.
- His Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya, opening section on superimposition.
- Richard King, Early Advaita Vedānta and Buddhism (1995), on the crypto-Buddhist question.