Shankaracharya

The Story

Born in Kaladi, Kerala, around the 8th century, the child Shankara mastered the Vedas and, after his father's death, chose the life of a renunciate against his mother's tears. He went north to the Narmada, found his guru Govindapada, and completed his mastery of the scriptures in a few short years.

Then began the most extraordinary intellectual campaign in history of Bhārat: walking the length of the land, he debated and defeated the Buddhist and rival Hindu schools, establishing the primacy of the Upanishads and their teaching that the individual soul and the universal Self are one — Advaita. His commentaries on the Upanishads, the Gita, and the Brahma Sutras remain the standard texts of the tradition.

He founded four monasteries — at Sringeri, Dwaraka, Jyotirmath, and Puri — to guard the teaching in the four corners of Bhārat, and he died at Kedarnath in the Himalayas at thirty-two. In his brief life he did the work of centuries: a boy from Kerala who became the spiritual emperor of Bhārat.