Date and Life of Samkara

According to telang, samkara flourished about the middle or the end of the sixth century A.D. Sir R.G. Bhandarkar proposes A.D. 680 as the date of samkara’s birth, and is even inclined to go a few years earlier. Max Mueller and professor Macdonnell hold that he was born in A.D. 788 and died in A.D.820. That he flourished in the quarter of the ninth century is also the opinion of Professor Keith.

The picture of a solitary ascetic thinker, at home in austere meditation as well as in practical work, touches our imagination. Some of samkara’s disciples complied samkaradigvijaya and Anadagiri’s samkaravijya. Samkara belonged to the simple, learned and hardworking Nambudri sect of Brahmins of Malabar and is generally supposed to have been born at Kaladi, on the west coast of the peninsula. Though there is a tradition that siva was the family deity of samkara, it is also held that he was by birth a Sakta. Early in his youth he went to a vedic school, presided over by Govindha, who evidently taught him the main principles of Advaita system. Even while a young boy of eight, he is said to have devoured with avidity and delight all the Vedas. Apparently he was a youthful prodigy of vedic learning and free intelligence. He was impressed with the mystery and importance of life, and had an early vision of the beauty of holiness.Before he learned ways of the world, he rejected them and became a sannyasin. But he was no passionless recluse. The pure flame of truth burned within him. He wandered as a teacher from place to place, engaging in discussions with the leaders of other schools of thought.According to the traditional accounts he met, in the course of these tours Kumarila and mandana misra , who later became his disciple under the name of suresvaracharya. The story of his entering the dead body of amurka shows that samkara was an adept in yogi practices. He established four mutts or monasteries, of which the chief is the one at Sringeri in the Mysore State. The others are those at Puri in the East , Dwaraka in the west and Badrinath in the Himalayas. A touching incident, about which tradition is unanimous , shows how full of the milk of human kindness of filial affection Samkara was. In open defiance of the rules which govern the order of sannyasins, samkara performed the funeral rites of this mother , and thus incurred the serious opposition of his community. He died at kedarnath in the Himalayas at the age of thiry-two , according to the tradition. To, us men of life and feeling, there seems to be a certain bareness in the life of samkara , lacking the colour and joy of cheerful fellowship and social amusement , but this is generally the case with those3 who pursue the higher life and feel called to exalt God’s righteousness and the claims of spirit . He was a prophet commissioned to lead a people along the paths of virtue, and nobody in india can undertake this task if he does not back his message with a life of detachment from the cares of the world.

In the few years Samkara practiced several careers, each enough to satisfy an ordinary man. His great achievement in the field of speculation is the adavaita system which he developed by means of commentaries on the ancient texts.He found it the best way to reconcile contemporary standards of knowledge and belief with the ancient texts and traditions. The Sixth and Seventh centuries saw the rise of popular Hinduism. In the south Buddhism had begun to decline and Jainism was at its zenith. The vedic rites were falling into disrepute . Saivite bhaktas and vaishnavite devotees were popularising the way of devotion to God. Festivals and temple worship connected with Puranic Hinduism were spreading everywhere. In South India the Pallava sovereignty was supreme, and in the freedom and peace afforded by a central government, Brahmanism was being transformed into Hinduism. The religious persuations of the Pallava kings give a clear indication of the reconstruction then taking place. While the earliest rulers of the Pallava dynasty were Buddhists, those next in order were vaishnavites, while the latesyt were Saivites. As a reaction against the ascetic tendency of Buddhism and the devotional one of theism, the Mimamsakas were exaggerating the importance of Vedic rites. Kumarila and Mandana Misra denounced the value of jnana and sannyasa, and insisted on the value of karma and the stage of the householder. Samkara appeared, at one and the same time, as an eager champion of the orthodox faith and a spiritual reformer. He tried to bring back the age from the brilliant luxury of the Puranas to the mystic truth of the Upanishads. The power of the faith to lead the soul to the higher life became for him the test of its strength. He felt impelled to attempt the spiritual direction of his age by formulating a philosophy and religion which could satisfy the ethical and spiritual needs of the people better than the systems of Buddhism, mimamsa and Bhakti. The theists were veiling the truth in a mist of sentiment. With their genius for mystical experience, they were indifferent to the practical concerns of life. The Mimamsaka emphasis on karma developed ritualism devoid of spirit. Virtue can face the dark perils of life and survive only if it be the fine flower of thought. The Advaita philosophy alone, in the opinion of Samkara, could do justice to the truth of the conflicting creeds, and so he wrote all his works with the one purpose of helping the individual to a realization of the identify of his soul with Brahman, which is the means of liberation from samsara. In his wanderings from his birthplace in Malabar to the Himalayas in the north, he came across many phases of worship and accepted all those which had in them the power to elevate man and refine his life. He did not preach a single exclusive method of salvation, but composed hymns of unmistakable grandeur addressed to the different gods of popular Hinduism – Vishnu, Siva, Sakti, Surya. All this affords a striking testimony to the universality of his sympathies and the wealth of natural endowment. While revivifying the popular religion, he also purified it. He put down the grosser manifestations of the Sakta worship in South India, and it is a pity that influence is not perceptible in the great temple of Kali in Calcutta. In the Deccan, it is said that he suppressed the unclean worship of Siva as a dog under the name of Mallari, and the pernicious practices of Kapalikas whose god Bhairava desired human victims. He condemned branding or making the body with hot metallic designs. He learned from the Buddhist church that discipline, freedom from superstition, and ecclesiastical organizations help to preserve the faith clean and strong, and himself established ten religious orders of which four retain their prestige ever today.

The life of Samkara makes a strong impression of contraries. He is a philosopher and a poet, a savant and a saint, a mystic and a religious reformer. Such diverse gifts did he possess that different images present themselves if we try to recall his personality. One sees him in youth, on fire with intellectual ambition, a stiff and intrepid debator; another regards him as a shrewd political genius, attempting to impress on the people a sense of unity; for a third; he is a calm philosopher engaged in the single effort to expose the contradictions of life and thought with an unmatched incisiveness: for a fourth, he is the mystic who declares that we are all greater than we know. There have been few minds more universal than his.