Conflicting hagiographies and history: The place of Śaṅkaravijaya texts in Advaita tradition
Vidyasankar Sundaresan
THE TEXTS AND THEIR CULTURAL CONTEXT
Many legendary stories are current about Śaṅkarācārya, the teacher of Advaita Vedānta, some of which are recorded in texts known as the Śaṅkaravijayas.’ The oft-quoted dates for Śaṅkara (788-820 CE) are found in one of these hagio graphic texts, but internal evidence from Śaṅkara’s undisputed works suggests a date earlier in the eighth century. The Madhavīya Śaṅkaravijaya, which informs most accounts of Śaṅkara’s life in both popular and scholarly literature (Bader 1991; Lorenzen 1983), is traditionally attributed to Vidyāraṇya, who lived in the fourteenth century. This text, along with another Śaṅkaravijaya by Anantānandagiri, was consulted in one of the earliest studies of Hinduism (Wilson 1977). The latter text is often mistakenly attributed to Anandagiri, a thirteenth-century author of ṭīkās (subcommentaries) on Śaṅkara’s works, but I show here that this text clearly dates from a much later period. Mādhavīya has two commentaries, Ḍiṇḍima by Dhanapatisūrin and Advaitarajyalakṣmi by Acyutarāya. Other important texts include Cidvilāsa’s Śaṅkaravijaya Vilāsa, Sadānanda’s Śaṅkaravijaya Sāra, on which Dhanapatisūrin wrote a commentary called Dundubhi, Rājacūḍāmaṇi dīkṣita’s Śaṅkarābhyudaya, and Govinda nātha’s Śaṅkarācāryacarita.
When one turns to the Daśanāmi sampradāya, the living tradition of monasticism in Advaita Vedānta, one realizes that the hagiology of Śaṅkara is an ongoing process. Daśanāmī monks, whose maṭhas (monasteries), aśramas (hermitages), and akhāḍās (schools) are found all over India, are so called because they use one of ten suffixes in their names: Araṇya, Aśrama, Bhāratī, Giri, Parvata, Purī, Sāgara, Sarasvatī, Tirtha, and Vana. The authors who wrote about Śaṅkara were either themselves Daśanāmi saṁnyasins (renunciants) or lay householder disciples, in whose families were born the men who became monks. This is the tradition that has produced hagiographic texts in the past and that continues to produce new texts while being influenced by the older ones. Nilakantha’s Śaṅkara-mandāra-saurabha and Śaṅkarābhyudaya, Hosinga Vāsudeva dīkṣita’s Śaṅkaravijaya Campū, and Lakṣmaṇasūrin’s Bhagavat pādābhyudaya are very recent texts, each being just about a century old. Wade Dazey (1987) has studied the influence of popular hagiographies on the organiza tion of Daśanāmi orders. However, studies of the written texts (Antarkar 1960, 1961, 1972) have not critically evaluated the claims of important monks and contemporary institutions. The written Śaṅkaravijaya texts, oral traditions, saṁnyāsa manuals, and maṭha texts reveal different aspects of a larger cultural tradition, incorporating several regional and temporal variants. Thus, Govinda nātha says that Śaṅkara passed away at Trichur in Kerala, although the more widely known tradition points to a site near Kedārnāth in the Himalayas. On the other hand, Himālayan oral traditions about Śaṅkara’s debates with Buddhists (Sax 2000: 47) are not found in any of the written texts. Modern scholars have tended largely to be unaware of such variants. This paper attempts to correct this situation by relating a number of hagiographic texts to the context of Daśanāmi history and tradition.
Śaṅkara is said to have been born at Kālaṭi in Kerala and to have lived a short life of thirty-two years. He is attributed with great debating abilities, leading to his ascension to the Sarvajñapīṭha (seat of omniscience) in Kāśmīra toward the end of his life. He is credited with the establishment of four principal maṭhas, namely, the Jyotispīṭha at Badrinath, Govardhanapīṭha at Puri, Śāradāpīṭha at Śr̥ṅgeri, and Kālikāpīṭha at Dvārakā. These are called the amnāya maṭhas, associated with the four Vedas, the corresponding Upaniṣad mahāvākyas (great sentences), and Śaṅkara’s four chief disciples. The Daśanāmi saṁnyāsa orders are traditionally affiliated to these four maṭhas, but in practice this is usually only nominal. A maṭha is primarily a residential educational center for monks, but the Hindu monk is ideally a wanderer (parivrājaka). Numerous maṭhas and āśramas have been established over time, either as official branches of pre existing institutions or separately by individual teachers. Vāranāsi alone is home to a number of maṭhas (Sawyer 1993). In northern India, the Daśanāmis are also organized into six akhāḍās, named Ananda, Atal, Āvāhan, Junā, Niranjani, and Mahānirvāṇi. These are said to have come into being much later than the amnāya maṭhas, but most monks identify themselves more strongly with their own institutions or with these akhāḍās than with the four principal maṭhas. For example, the right to precedence at the Kumbhamelās is decided on the basis of akhāḍā affiliations. In the south, the akhāḍās are largely non existent.
The heads of maṭhas are titled Śaṅkarācāryas, while the leaders of the akhāḍās are called Mahāmandaleśvaras. The latter is an elective position, and the disciples of a Mahamandaleśvara cannot expect to inherit the title automatically. In contrast, the history of a maṭha is inseparably linked to its succession of Śaṅkarācāryas. Usually, the Sarkarācārya of a maṭha nominates one of his disciples to be his successor. Thus, each maṭha functions remarkably independently of the others, but succession disputes arise if the head of a maṭha passes away without unambiguously nominating a specific disciple. This leads to the involvement of other maṭhas and members of the larger monastic community, as exemplified in the recent history of the Badrināth maṭha. In the twentieth century, the maṭhas at Puri and Dvārakā have also witnessed disputes regarding succession issues. The resolution of such problems has contributed to close relations among the four āmnāya maṭhas in recent times. Of these four principal maṭhas, Śr̥ṅgēri seems to have had the most stable history and continues to have a strong lay following, especially among Smārta Brāhmaṇa communities. This classical Advaita monastic tradition has also inspired modern neo-Vedāntic teachers, among whom Sivānanda and Cinmayānanda explicitly trace their lineage to the Śr̥ṅgēri maṭha, while Paramahamsa Yogānanda traces his to the Purī maṭha."
It is well known that in addition to the four Vedas, various candidates vie for the title of the fifth Veda, ranging from specific texts (the Mahābhārata) to entire disciplines (Ayurveda). Similarly, in addition to the four āmnāya maṭhas, numerous other institutions have claimed to be the fifth maṭha, established by Śaṅkara himself. These include the Kāmakoṭipīṭha at kañcīpuram, the Sumeru pīṭha at Vāraṇāsi, and the Karavīrapīṭha at Kolhāpur. However, like the tenuous status of the fifth Veda, the claims to antiquity of these other maṭhas have not gone unchallenged. Of these, perhaps the one institution that has obtained the greatest degree of general importance is the Kāñcīpuram maṭha, under the leadership of its late centenarian head, Candraśekharendra Sarasvatī. Today this maṭha is very prominent, and its head wields much political influence. As both Śr̥ṅgeri and Kāñcī maṭhas are located in southern India, relations between the two are marked by rivalry and competition, usually extremely fierce but some times cooperative and friendly. Not surprisingly, the claim of any institution to be considered a fifth principal maṭha creates its own traditions that affect the hagiographic literature.
Accounts found in the Kāñcī maṭha’s Gururatnamāla and Suṣamā differ widely from those in other sources such as Śr̥ṅgēri’s Guruvamśakāvya. The Kāñcī texts hold that Śaṅkara spent his last days at Kāñcīpuram, where he ascended the Sarvajñapīṭha and established a fifth maṭha for himself as a central institution. This disputes the tradition of four amnāya maṭhas as well as the more widely accepted traditions of the Sarvajñapīṭha in Kāśmīra and Śaṅkara’s last days in the Himālayas. In terms of amnāya classification, at least two different claims have been made.
- One set of publications claims the Dakṣiṇāmnāya title for the Kāñcī maṭha (Aiyer and Śāstri 1962; Devasenapati 1975; Mahadevan 1983). This necessarily comes at the expense of the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha, so that the same publications claim that Śr̥ṅgeri is not an old institution but only a branch of another maṭha at Kūḍali."
- Another claim is that the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha had been in a state of ’lapse’ for a long period of time (N. Venkataraman 1923: 25-27).
- A different technique has been to seek to add a new amnāya designation, with a different set of implications. Thus, Candraśekharendra Sarasvatī of the Kāñcī maṭha has claimed that Kasci represents the mūlāmnaya (the root āmnāya)’ and is the parent of the entire Daśanāmi order, with Indra-Sarasvatī as its unique suffix (Sunil 1987: 11).
- This directly brings this maṭha into conflict with the other three amnāya maṭhas. In response, leaders of the Dvārakā and Puri maṭhas have strongly repudiated the Kāñcī maṭha’s claim to an independent lineage from Śaṅkara.
- Other Daśanāmi akhāḍā records are remarkably silent about a maṭha at Kāñcī (Giri 1976: 15–17) and regard Indra-Sarasvatī only as a variant of Sarasvatī, one of the standard ten suffixes.
- The Sarasvatī suffix is unanimously assigned by all Daśanāmi traditions to the Śr̥ṅgēri maṭha, whose followers therefore insist that the Kāñcī maṭha is at least nominally subordinate.
The Kāñcī maṭha seems to have been originally based at Kumbhakoṇam’s near Tañjāvūr, where its oldest attested record dates from 1821 CE. Numerous lines of evidence show that the heads of this maṭha established themselves in Kāñcī after a kumbhābhiṣekam (temple consecration ceremony) of the Kāmākṣī temple in 1842 (Sharma 1987: 154). The Kāñcī maṭha claims that the 1842 temple ceremony marked a move back to its original home, as unstable political conditions had forced a move from Kāñcīpuram to Kumbhakoṇam at the turn of the nineteenth century. There is a tradition, recorded in many Śaṅkaravijaya texts, that Śaṅkara visited Kāñcīpuram, consecrated a śrīcakra (ritual diagram representing the goddess), and worshipped the goddess Kāmāksi. Śr̥ṅgeri followers do not contest this legendary account of Śaṅkara’s visit to Kāñcīpuram but reject the claims that the Kāñcī maṭha was established by Śaṅkara and has a right to the name Kāmakoti pīṭha. In their view, the Kāmakoṭipīṭha refers to the śrīcakra at the Kāmākṣī temple in Kāñcīpuram, which cannot be equated with a maṭha.
For most academic purposes, it is expedient to ignore such maṭha disputes. However, specific Śaṅkaravijaya texts have come to be associated exclusively with each of these maṭhas, so that although this controversy is less than two centuries old," it assumes much importance for any study of Śaṅkara’s hagiography. The leaders of the Daśanāmi akhāḍas and heads of all four āmnāya maṭhas seem to hold the Mādhavīya Śaṅkaravijaya in high esteem (B. Upadhyaya 1967: xi-xxii), and its widespread acceptance within the tradition is reflected in most modern literature on Śaṅkara. In addition, its attribution to Vidyāraṇya leads to a close alignment of the text with the Śr̥ṅgeri tradition.
The Kāñcī maṭha strongly denies that Vidyāraṇya wrote the Madhavīya Śaṅkaravijaya and claims that the text copies large portions from other late texts (Rama Śāstri 1976: 2–3). It also claims that the text was significantly altered in the late nineteenth century, in order to highlight the importance of the maṭha at Śr̥ṅgeri over that at Kāñcī (Nārāyaṇa Śāstri 1916: 158–65).
The Śaṅkaravijaya of Anantānandagiri is quoted frequently by Kāñcī maṭha followers and has come to be regarded as embodying its independent tradition (Lorenzen 1987: 64). However, one early Kāñcī source dismisses the text as ‘a valueless forgery’ (N. Venkataraman 1923: 16), and Śr̥ṅgeri followers have consistently rejected this text (Aiyar nd; Dakshinamurthy 1973). As I demonstrate below, this dispute has so greatly influenced a number of Advaita scholars from the University of Madras that even the project of preparing a critical edition of this text has afforded further opportunities for partisanship. The Śaṅkaravijayas of Madhava and Anantānandagiri being the two most widely cited texts, it is impossible to ignore the mutual relationship between Śaṅkara’s hagiography and the contem porary Śaṅkaran mahas. Although the maṭhas function more or less independ ently, they belong to the same larger tradition of Daśanāmi saṁnyāsa. Varying maṭha claims must, therefore, be evaluated against other independent sources of history and chronology.
However, it should not be assumed that all four āmnāya maṭhas always report the same traditions about Śaṅkara or are always pitted against the Kāñcī maṭha. There are many variant traditions, the most problematic being those regarding maṭha succession lineages and Śaṅkara’s date. There are numerous gaps in the Badrināth lineage, showing repeated breaks in its history. The list of successors to the Śaṅkarācārya title at Dvārakā is very long, but the Puri list is even longer, with about twice as many names. These three maṭhas often claim a date of origin in the fifth century BCE, relying upon a grant supposedly given by a king named Sudhanvan to Śaṅkara. If such a grant exists and is genuine, it would have to rank as one of the earliest examples of writing in India, but it has never been made available for detailed analysis. 1 The Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha does not accept this date, and its lineage gives only about half as many names as the Dvārakā list.2 Up to Vidyā Tīrtha (also called Vidyāśankara), the guru of Vidyāraṇya, Śr̥ṅgeri’s lineage is based mainly upon oral tradition, there being very few historical records of Śr̥ṅgeri from pre-Vijayanagara times. Vidyāraṇya, whose association with the Vijayanagara kingdom has become legendary, was the head of the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha in the fourteenth century. The pre-Vidyāraṇya lineage of Śr̥ṅgeri receives independent confirmation from a fifteenth-century Marathi text of the Dattātreya sampradāya,?! but Śr̥ṅgēri’s Vijayanagara-era records seem to be the oldest reliable historical evidence available for any maṭha in the Advaita tradition. For post-Vidyāraṇya times, the maṭha’s traditionally reported lineage tallies remarkably well with what can be reconstructed from inscriptions and other records (Shastry 1982: iv). Jūrgen Lūtt (1978: 411) holds that Śrīgeri must be the oldest institution and points out that the earliest available records of the Puri maṭha date only from the seventeenth century. Historical records of the other maṭhas and Daśanāmi akhāḍās seem to be even sparser and have not been studied closely. Sadananda Giri (1976: 6) assigns some of these records to the ninth century, but Dazey (1987: v) dates them to late medieval times. There is also a tradition crediting Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, a late sixteenth-century Advaitin, with having organized many of the Daśanami nāga groups (Ghurye 1953; Giri 1976; Sarkar 1946).
One way to take a neutral attitude with respect to such conflicting accounts is to concede as much as possible to all maṭha traditions. Thus, William Cenkner (1983) and G. C. Pande (1994) simply accept a number of variant maṭha traditions, without critically evaluating any of them or relating them to independent historical evidence. This seems to be an overly credulous approach that, in turn, affects others who rely on these scholars for information about the Advaita monastic institutions. Thus Richard King (1999: 129) and others routinely mention Kāñcī along with the four āmnāya maṭhas, whereas even modern Hindu institutions that would acknowledge this maṭha tend to describe it as secondary to Śr̥ṅgeri (Patchen 1989: 322; Subramuniyasvāmi 1993: 808-9).
An older generation of scholars completely disregarded all the maṭha traditions, doubting whether Śaṅkara really established any maṭhas at all. This extreme skepticism has resulted in a number of more or less fanciful postulates about the origins and growth of maṭhas.
- Thus, M. R. Bodas (1923: 5) suggests that the original southern āmnāya maṭha must have been located at Rāmeśvaram, the southern center in the cār-dhāma (four centers of pilgrimage) network. There is no real evidence for an old Advaita maṭha at this place, and it is the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha that has historically been associated with the major temples at Rāmeśvaram.
- Paul Hacker (1978: 478–80) says that none of the maṭha lists are reliable for the pre fourteenth century period; he, therefore, concludes that Śaṅkara did not establish any maṭhas at all. He proposes that it was Vidyāraṇya who established the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha in the fourteenth century and either originated or greatly popularized the tradition of affiliating the Daśanāmi orders with the four āmnāya maṭhas.3 Hacker sees this as part of Vijayanagara politics in the fourteenth century, basing his postulate on his reading of the Mādhavīya Śaṅkaravijaya that he unquestioningly attributes to Vidyāraṇya. As this attribution has been challenged seriously in recent times, Hacker’s proposal will have to be reconsidered after analyzing textual issues. Meanwhile, it must be noted that among the four āmnāya maṭhas, only the Śr̥ṅgeri lineage lists Vidyāraṇya. Thus there is no evidence that he established all these maṭhas himself. If one credits Vidyāraṇya only with popularizing the four āmnāya maṭha tradition, one must grant that all four maṭhas may have been functioning prior to his times.
- Karl Potter (1982: 113) goes further than Hacker and holds that the assumptions and practices of the Daśanāmi orders are fundamentally antithetical to Śaṅkara’s thought. This assumes an unjustifiable hiatus between Advaita thought and the associated tradition of Brāhmaṇical saṁnyasa that is older than Śaṅkara himself. This position may also be criticized for not being based on a comprehensive and critical investigation of maṭha and akhāḍā records. Such a study, along with the production of critical editions of Śaṅkaran texts, is long overdue and may offer better insights into the relationship of Śaṅkara to the Daśanāmi saṁnyāsa tradition.
That, however, is not the goal of the present discussion. As far as historical issues brought up by the Śaṅkaravijaya texts are concerned, it is sufficient to acknowledge that the widespread Daśanāmi orders have traditionally preserved a memory of an intimate association of Śaṅkara and his disciples with the four āmnāya maṭhas at Śr̥ṅgeri, Dvārakā, Badrināth, and Puri. A simple explanation for this is that these four are the oldest maṭhas and that all other institutions, including the one at Kāñcī, originate from relatively later times. One could suppose that different Daśanāmi institutions came into being over a period of time and that important post-Śaṅkara leaders, like Vidyāraṇya or Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, consolidated the existing ones into a national network, with regional centers at the prominent maṭhas of their times. If so, there is no reason a maṭha in such an important pilgrimage center as Kāncīpuram would have been left out of all old Daśanāmi records.
One could accept the contention of A. N. Aiyer and S. L. Śāstri (1962) that there has been an ancient and successful conspiracy to deny due recognition to the Kāñcī maṭha. This assumes a degree of concerted effort and internal cohesion on the part of all other Daśanāmi institutions that does not seem even remotely possible. It would be more reasonable to conclude, with Tapasyānanda (1980: xxiv), that whatever the actual origins of the four āmnāya maṭha tradition may be, the Kāñcī maṭha is a much younger institution.4
On the other hand, W. R. Antarkar, the first twentieth-century scholar to have studied most of the Śaṅkaravijaya texts in some detail, accepts all the claims of the Kāñcī maṭha, often to the exclusion of other, more widespread Daśanāmi traditions. William Cenkner (1983), Natalia Isayeva (1993), David Lorenzen (1983), and Yoshitsugu Sawai (1992), who accept most of Antarkar’s conclusions, perhaps do not realize that this uncritical outlook seriously compromises his analysis. Pande (1994), who has also analyzed some of the important primary texts, comes to significantly different conclusions. For example, while Antarkar (1972: 21-23) agrees with the Kāñcī maṭha’s claim that the Mādhavīya borrows heavily from other texts, Pande thinks that this text has become the victim of highly unfair criticism from the Kāñcī maṭha. However, both Antarkar and Pande seem to subscribe to a rather naive notion that every available legend carries reliable and factual historical information about Śaṅkara and that all variant legends can be made somehow to corroborate one another. As the following discussion will show, this results in serious misjudgments of both the written texts and the oral traditions.
THE Br̥hat Śaṅkaravijaya AND THE PRĀCĪNA Śaṅkaravijaya
A Br̥hat Śaṅkaravijaya has been attributed to one Citsukha, and a Prācīna Śaṅkaravijaya to Anandagiri, the ṭīkākāra (author of ṭīkās) of the Advaita tradition. Although an extensive search failed to locate any manuscript of either work,5 Antarkar (1960: 114, 119) reports that he has been reliably informed that the Kāñcī maṭha possesses manuscripts of both texts. He does not reveal his sources or how he estimated their reliability, nor does he tell us why he could not obtain copies from the Kāñcī maṭha. The only original sources for quotations from a Br̥hat Śaṅkaravijaya of Citsukha are T. S. Nārāyaṇa Śāstri (1916) and the author of Susamā (Antarkar 1960: 120), both of whom go to great pains to proclaim the supremacy of the Kancī maṭha over all other institutions and thus need to be taken cum grano salis. Both misquote well-known works and take unverifiable quotations from works long lost or completely unknown.6 Nārāyaṇa Śāstri (1916: 87) claims to have seen fragments of a manuscript of Citsukha’s Śaṅkaravijaya; he also claims that Citsukha was a childhood friend and a disciple of Śaṅkara7 and that his work is an authoritative biography written by an eyewitness. Nārāyaṇa Śāstri also claims that both Sadānanda’s Śaṅkaravijaya Sāra and Cidvilāsa’s Śaṅkaravijaya Vilāsa follow Citsukha’s account. Some hagiographies include the name Citsukha among Śaṅkara’s disciples, but none of them describe him as a childhood friend of Śaṅkara or as an earlier author of a Śaṅkaravijaya. Cidvilāsa and Sadānanda, who supposedly rely upon this Citsukha, are also remarkably silent about this story. Indeed, Sadānanda differs quite significantly from what has been attrib uted to Citsukha and instead seems indebted to the Madhavīya (Antarkar 1960: 116, 1961: 79; Rama Śāstri 1976: 1). With no corroborative evidence, all claims about Citsukha and his Br̥hat Śaṅkaravijaya ultimately derive from a highly questionable, solitary source.
There is better evidence to attribute a Śaṅkaravijaya to Anandagiri, the ṭīkākāra, although no manuscripts seem to be currently available. For reasons discussed below, this text should be distinguished from that of Anantānandagiri. The first verse of the Madhavīya mentions a Prācīna śankarajaya. Acyutarāya’s commentary, Advaitarājyalaksmī, interprets this as a reference to Anandagiri’s Prācīna Śaṅkaravijaya 2* However, in his comment on Madhavīya (15.3), Acyutarāya quotes fifty-eight verses that he attributes to a Br̥hat Śaṅkaravijaya of Anandagiri.8 Dhanapatisūrin’s Ḍiṇḍima, an earlier commentary on the Madhavīya, quotes the same fifty-eight verses in the same context but without specific attribution. Acyutarāya again refers to Anandagiri’s Br̥hat Śaṅkaravijaya in the context of Madhavīya (16.103), but his quotation there has been traced to a text named Sivarahasya." This makes it very doubtful that Acyutarāya referred to actual manuscripts of Anandagiri’s text. In addition to these quotations, another seven hundred fifty-three verses are anonymously quoted elsewhere in the Ḍiṇḍima, and Antarkar infers that these must have also originally been in Anandagiri’s text. This inference is not really supported by the available evidence. Dhanapatisūrin himself does not identify any unique source, and his anonymous introductions do not allow the conclusion that all his quotations are taken from the same text. Thus, it can be questioned whether the fifty-eight verses given by both the commentators can all be attributed to Anandagiri. Both Dundubhi, Dhanapatisūrin’s commentary on the Śaṅkaravijaya Sāra of Sadānanda, and an auto-commentary on Śr̥ṅgeri’s Guruvaṁśakāvya generally mention a text by Anandagiri but give no specific name to this work and attribute no quotations to it. It is possible that Acyutarāya’s adjectives, prācīna and br̥hat, merely indicate that Anandagiri’s text is old and voluminous, but such an interpretation would exclude their usage in a nominative sense. Alternatively, Acyutarāya may be seen as having independently used only the word bshat because he uses the word prācīna only under Madhavīya (1.1), which itself refers to a Prācīna Śaṅkarajaya. It is also appropriate here to note Polakam Rama Śāstri’s claim, that Mūkakavi, a fifteenth-century poet, composed a Prācīna śankaravijaya." In summary, it is probable that a śankaravijaya attributed to Anandagiri was available at some time in the past. However, without gaining access to and evaluating its primary manuscripts, no specific name should be given to this text, and quotations attributed to it must be viewed critically.
THE Śaṅkaravijaya OF ANANTĀNANDAGIRI
This text is often referred to as the Anandagirīya, which misleadingly implies an author named Anandagiri." None of the verses quoted by Dhanapatisūrin or Acyutarāya are found in this text. The author gives his own name as Anantānandagiri, not Anandagiri, and claims to be a direct disciple of Śaṅkara." Anandagiri, the ṭīkākāra, was a disciple of Śuddhānanda, and he lived most probably in the thirteenth century. Chapters 11 and 47 of Anantānandagiri’s text quote verbatim from the Adhikaraṇa Ratnamālā (also called Vaiyāsika Nyāyamālā) of Bhāratī Tīrtha (1980), a fourteenth-century author. In both chapters, the quotations are put into Śaṅkara’s mouth as if they were his own words. In chapter 47, the Adhikaraṇa Ratnamāla is named explicitly, and Śaṅkara is further depicted as explaining the quoted verse in great detail, 14 As these quotations are an integral part of this text, Anantānandagiri must have lived after the fourteenth century. This takes him to a date much later than that of the ṭikākāra and also falsifies his claim to having been a disciple of Śaṅkara himself. Many modern scholars are subject to a double error caused by the similarity in names and mistakenly attribute this text to Anandagiri, the ṭīkākāra, whom they also assume to have been Śaṅkara’s direct disciple." Anandagiri and Anantānandagiri clearly seem to have been two different authors, and neither of them was Śaṅkara’s disciple. In order to keep these two authors distinct and to clear away all the unnecessary confusion about this text, I will refer to the author only by the name Anantānandagiri and to this text only as the Anantānandagirīya.
Three editions of the Anantānandagirīya were published in the nineteenth century, two in Calcutta in 1868 (reprinted in 1982) and 1881 and another in Madras. N. Veezhinathan published an edition in 1971 at the University of Madras, with an introduction by T. M. P. Mahadevan. There has been a fierce controversy over this text for many decades now. Followers of the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha hold that this text is wrongly attributed to the tikākāra. As already noted above, there is good reason to support this position. Śr̥ṅgēri adherents also criticize the nineteenth-century Madras edition as an ’embellished’ text favorable to the Kāñcī maṭha because it describes itself as a pariskrta (embellished) work and differs in certain key particulars from both Calcutta editions (Aiyar and Venkataraman 1977: 26–37, 121-25). Kāñcī followers rely almost completely on this text and hold that it was written by the sīkākāra himself. Antarkar (1960, 1961) is quite aware of this controversy over the text and rejects the claim that its author was Anandagiri, the ṭīkākāra. However, he relies almost totally upon Kāñcī maha sources in various other aspects of his analysis, as discussed below.
(i) Antarkar goes out of his way to defend the supposed age and reliability of this text. He says nothing about its quotations from the Adhikaraṇa Ratnamālā and seeks to explain away its stories of the miraculous and the supernatural by appealing to parapsychology, clairvoyance, telepathy, and extrasensory percep tion. He dismisses earlier textual criticisms on the grounds that judgments of style and language usage are apt to be subjective and inconclusive. Nevertheless, he goes on to say that this text shares great similarity in style and content with the quotations made by Dhanapatisūrin and Acyutarāya, but he does not see fit to apply similar arguments in favor of the other texts. Most of his own argu ments against the Mādhavīya are based on style and language, and he finds fault with it for having a substantial element of the supernatural (Antarkar 1972: 5–19). The inconsistency is striking.
(ii) Antarkar is strangely silent about some rather surprising features of Anantānandagiri’s text, where Śaṅkara is frequently depicted as defeating his debating opponents by resorting to verbal and physical abuse. In chapters 23, 25 through 28, and 37, bodily harm is inflicted upon two Kāpālikas, a Cārvāka, a Saugata, a Jaina and his disciples, a Bauddha, and a devotee of Varāha. Further more, during his debate with Vyāsa, an exasperated Śaṅkara slaps the old man on the face and orders Padmapāda to push him face down and drag him away by his feet. Vyāsa, now afraid, moves out of reach. Antarkar’s (1961: 78) only comment about this extremely negative image of Śaṅkara is that Anantānanda giri describes the Śaṅkara-Vyāsa dialogue in a queer fashion’! On the other hand, he is extremely concerned about the manner in which the Madhavīya portrays Śaṅkara’s personality, stringently criticizes its account of the debate between Maṇḍana Miśra and Śaṅkara on the grounds that its introductory bantering tone does not bring credit to either person. Again, the inconsistency in his standards for evaluating these texts stands out significantly.
(iii) Śr̥ṅgeri sources have consistently maintained that the Anantānandagiriya should not be attributed to Anandagiri, the ṭīkākāra. This maṭha’s tradition would agree that Anandagiri, the sīkākāra, wrote a Śaṅkaravijaya, but it une quivocally rejects the idea that such a text is identical with the Anantānanda girīya. Antarkar finds sufficient reason to agree with this assessment. However, when finding fault with the Śr̥ṅgeri criticism of Anantānandagiri’s text, he inexplicably equates Anandagiri and Anantānandagiri, contradicting himself with respect to the identities of these authors. * Antarkar does not bother to check if the Śr̥ṅgeri criticism of this text indicates more than just anti-Kāñcī polemic. Śr̥ṅgeri followers point out that this text’s descriptions of Śaṅkara, especially in the debate with Vyāsa, are reminiscent of texts like Maṇimañjarī, belonging to the Dvaita school, and think that the basic intention of such legends is to ridicule Śaṅkara (Aiyar and Venkataraman 1977: 37).
(iv) Horace H. Wilson’s early study of medieval Hindu traditions relies partly on the Anantānandagirīya. Antarkar (1961: 77) attributes the following quota tion to Wilson: ‘The work is sufficiently historical since it bears internal and indisputable evidence of being the composition of a period not far removed from that at which he (Śaṅkara) may be supposed to have flourished. This is a sentence found verbatim in almost all Kāñcī maṭha literature, and Antarkar’s source for this quote is a pamphlet from the Kāñcī maṭha. Although Wilson does refer to this text, his actual estimate of it reads very differently:
Some of the marvels it records of Śaṅkara, which the author professes to have seen, may be thought to affect its credibility, if not its authenticity, and either Anandagiri must be an unblushing liar, or the book is not his own; it is, however, of little consequence, as even if the work be not that of Anandagiri himself, it bears internal and indisputable evidence of being the composition of a period, not far removed from that at which he may be supposed to have flourished (1977: 14; emphasis added).
Nowhere does Wilson say that the work is ‘sufficiently historical.’ Contrary to Antarkar’s parenthetical addition of the name Śaṅkara, the ‘he’ in his original statement refers only to the author of this text. Wilson clearly expresses his reservations about the text. However, he assumes that Anandagiri was Śaṅkara’s disciple and overlooks his own doubts about this text only because he assigns to it a date close to that of Anandagiri. As the extant work is clearly post fourteenth century, Wilson’s estimates of the date of the text and the identity of its author are both equally mistaken. However, it is most significant that Antarkar ignores Wilson’s own statement and quotes only a deliberately misleading version of it.
(v) Antarkar (1961: 78) notes A. C. Burnell’s (1880) opinion that this Śaṅkaravijaya is a modern and unreliable text, being full of discrepancies and mistakes. He claims that Burnell has given no reason for this assessment. However, Burell’s catalogue of the Tañjāvūr Sarasvatī Mahal Library’s manuscript collection is quite explicit:
This seems to be a quite modern work written in the interests of the schismatic maṭhas on the Coromandel Coast, which have renounced obedience to the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha, where Çankarācārya’s legitimate successor resides. This book has been indifferently printed in the B.I. and at Madras (1880:96).
Further comment is perhaps needless, but note the reference to an early printed edition from Madras. Antarkar (1961: 79) could find only the two nineteenth century editions from Calcutta. He quotes Rama Śāstri of the Kāñcī maṭha and concludes that Śr̥ṅgeri followers who criticize the nineteenth-century Madras edition are actually referring only to a paper manuscript at the Tañjāvūr Library. It is perhaps understandable that Antarkar was unable to locate an old and obscure edition, but, as with the supposed quotation attributed to Wilson, his disregard of Burnell’s comment reveals a blind reliance upon sources partial to the Kāñcī maṭha.
(vi) Anantānandagiri’s text implicitly refers to Rāmānuja and Mādhva, the Vaiṣṇava founders of rival Vedānta schools. Antarkar remarks that he was unable to find any such reference and complains that publications from neither Śr̥ṅgeri nor Kāñcī inform him where this is located, He might have found it easily, if he had only read the text as carefully as the maṭha pamphlets. Chapter 68 of the text carries an unambiguous title of ‘Vaiṣpavamatasthapanam.’ According to Anantānandagiri, when Śaṅkara was in Kāñcīpuram, he sent out a few disciples to propagate the Saiva, Vaiṣṇava, Sākta, Gāṇapatya, Saura, and Kāpālika tradi tions. Five of these traditions are assigned one disciple each, but Vaiṣṇavism alone gets two. Chapter 68 describes two Vaiṣṇava disciples named Lakṣmaṇa and Hastāmalaka, who are incarnations of Adiśeṣa and Vāyu, respectively.*’ Acting under Śaṅkara’s command, Lakṣmaṇa propagates the Vaiṣṇava religion by preaching to Brāhmaṇas in the east, making them wear the vertical caste mark, and branding the marks of the conch and discus on their shoulders. It should be obvious that these are references to Rāmānuja and the ŚrīVaiṣṇavas. The very name Lakṣmaṇa suggests Rāmānuja (younger brother of Rāma), who is also traditionally said to have been an amsa (part) of Ādiseṣa. Anantānandagiri’s intended reference to Rāmānuja is reinforced when he says that Lakṣmaṇa lived in Kāñcīpuram and wrote his own bhāṣyas (commentaries). The other disciple, Hastāmalaka, converts Brāhmaṇas in the west to Vaiṣṇavism, making them wear the five Vaiṣṇava marks. He teaches the eight-syllable Vaiṣṇava mantra and consecrates a Kr̥ṣṇa idol at Rajatapiṭha (modern Uḍupi).*’ These words clearly point to Mādhva, the Dvaita philosopher, who lived and taught in Uḍupi and was considered an incarnation of Vāyu. Even the geographical centers of the followers of Rāmānuja (Kāñcīpuram) and Mādhva (Uḍupi) are neatly taken care of. Still, Antarkar absolves this text of all anachronisms while finding fault with Madhavīya and other texts in this regard."
Clearly, Antarkar’s conclusion that Anantānandagiri’s text is an early and reliable one is extremely faulty. The barely concealed reference to Rāmānuja and Mādhva and the quotation from Bhāratī Tirtha’s Adhikaraṇa Ratnamālā indicate a post-fourteenth-century date. Antarkar simply disclaims the former reference and seems unaware of the latter. He contradicts himself about the identity of the author when he wishes to question the Śr̥ṅgeri criticism of this text. He ignores the old Tañjāvũr Library catalogue that provides Burnell’s estimate of the text and explicitly mentions the old Madras edition that he thinks to be non existent. Even for a quote from Wilson, Antarkar prefers to refer to the Kāñcī maṭha’s misquotation. This inspires no confidence in the independence of his analysis, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that he tries to legitimate this text only because of his own partisanship toward Kāñcī maṭha sources. 43
The Kāñcī maṭha and Veezhinathan’s edition of Anantānandagiriya
It is instructive to examine briefly a few early references to this text before proceeding to discuss the 1971 edition by Veezhinathan. Wilson relies on Anantānandagiri’s text only for its description of different Hindu traditions, not for its story of Śaṅkara’s life. Instead, he turns to the Mādhavīya and other oral traditions to locate the Sarvajñapīṭha at Kāśmīra and Śaṅkara’s last days in the Himālayas. Wilson (1977: 200-201) also gives a lineage list from Śr̥ṅgeri, quoting an old maṭha manuscript. J. N. Bhattacharya (1968: 296) refers to the 1868 edition of Anantānandagiri’s text and mentions the four āmnāya maṭhas but not the Kāñcī maṭha. Both these authors say that Śaṅkara was born in Kerala, although the nineteenth-century Calcutta editions of Anantānandagiri’s text place his birth at Cidambaram. V. S. Ghate (1924) mentions both the Kālaṭi and Cidambaram versions but places the Sarvajñapīṭha in Kāśmīra and mentions only the maṭhas at Śr̥ṅgēri, Dvārakā, Purī, and Badrinath. Burnell explicitly affiliates this text with maṭhas that had rejected the authority of Śr̥ṅgeri, while Max Weber describes the head of the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha as ’the mightiest until the present’ (1967: 300).44 It is clear that in the late nineteenth century, Smāgeri continued to be the most important center of the Śaṅkaran tradition, while Kāñcī (or Kumbhakoṇam) was relatively unknown. These references are also consistent with the fact that the nineteenth-century Calcutta editions of Anantānandagiriya mention neither a maṭha nor a Sarvajñapīṭha at Kancī.
On the other hand, if this text is to be especially related to the Kāñcī maṭha (Lorenzen 1987), this is due in no small measure to Veezhinathan’s 1971 edition published in Madras. Numerous lines of evidence show that this so called ‘critical edition of the text seems to have been specifically designed to proclaim the superiority of the Kāñcī maṭha over Śr̥ṅgeri. Veezhinathan’s (1971: vii) preface criticizes Burnell for having made ‘very disparaging’ comments and finds fault with him for talking of schismatic maṭhas in the plural. When Burnell catalogued the Tañjāvūr Library’s collection, he was primarily a British colonial administrator. It cannot reasonably be claimed that he had some partisan feeling for the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha. His statement about Śr̥ṅgeri and schismatic maṭhas probably reflects his own reading of the historical evidence from Tañjāvār. He must have been aware of the history of the nineteenth-century conflict between the Kumbhakoṇam-Kāñcī and Śr̥ṅgēri maṭhas. Burnell’s use of the plural number is also quite understandable. To an outsider, the maṭhas at Kāñcīpuram and Kumbhakoṇam might have appeared to be two different, if related, institutions, but we cannot rule out that Burnell was perhaps aware of other southern maṭhas with similar claims.
Veezhinathan acknowledges that the quotation from Bhāratī Tirtha’s Adhi karaṇa Ratnamālā in chapter 11 is found in all manuscripts but asserts that this is entirely a late interpolation into the text. He says nothing about the more explicit reference to the work in chapter 47. It should nevertheless follow that the extant text is not by a single author, but Veezhinathan provides no evidence to think that the original author may have been Anandagiri or some other earlier author. Neither Mahadevan nor Veezhinathan bothers to examine this authorship problem in any detail, although they claim to have produced a critical edition.’ A similarly arbitrary approach to what is original and what is a late addition to the text is seen in chapter 68, which contains the veiled references to Rāmānuja and Mādhva. Although the first sentence of this chapter declares the Vaiṣnava disciple, Lakṣmaṇa, to be an incarnation of Adiśeṣa, Veezhinathan’s (1971: 188-90) footnote simply asserts otherwise. He includes the text’s descriptions of Lakṣmaṇa and Hastāmalaka in parentheses and claims that Tantric Vaiṣṇavas may have interpolated these sentences into Anantānandagiri’s text. If these were late interpolations, whoever introduced them must have considered themselves followers of Śaṅkara and may not have been Tantric Vaiṣṇavas at all. The intention of the text seems to be to subordinate both Rāmānuja and Mādhva to Śaṅkara by calling them his disciples. In any case, if the descriptions of Śaṅkara’s Vaiṣṇava disciples are late additions to an original text, the same could be said of the descriptions of the Sākta, Saiva, and other disciples in the adjoining chapters. These chapters also claim to describe Śaṅkara’s last days in Kāñcīpuram. Veezhinathan does not foresee that his reasoning, carried to its logical end, can only end in a conclusion that all these chapters have been heavily tampered with or are perhaps entirely late additions, thereby vindicating Burnell’s opinion of this text.
Mahadevan (Veezhinathan 1971: i–xxiv) refrains from naming Śr̥ṅgēri explic itly in his introduction, preferring to talk of the institution on the banks of the Tungabhadrā.’ In contrast, he extols the holiness of Kāñcīpuram in great detail and says that Śaṅkara wanted to spend his last days there because it is the only southern mokṣapuri (place that grants liberation). To substantiate this claim, he includes pictures of sculptures from temples in and around Kāñcīpuram that depict ekadanḍi saṁnyasins (monks holding a single staff) and claims that all of them represent Sarkara. Most of these sculptures datę to late Vijayanagara times. All that Mahadevan proves is that sculptors in Kāñcī have depicted ekadanḍi saṁnyāsins. It is not necessary that all the cited instances are sculptures of Śaṅkara.47 Hindu saṁnyāsa has an ancient history, and similar artistic depictions can probably be found elsewhere, including places where there are no currently famous maṭhas. Curiously, Mahadevan does not even acknowledge the presence of the more widespread tradition that places Śaṅkara in his last days in the Himalayas. He then cites Antarkar and Acyutarāya’s commentary on the Mādha vīya to equate Anantānandagiri’s text with Anandagiri’s Br̥hat or Prācīna Śaṅkaravijaya. This identification with Anandagiri’s lost text is so complete that although the title page refers to Anantānandagiri, the index page names only Anandagiri. The fifty-eight verses given by Acyutarāya and the seven hundred and fifty-three additional verses of Dhanapatisūrin are also included as appendices to this edition. It must be reiterated that Antarkar was ‘reliably informed’ that the Kāñcī maṭha possesses manuscripts of Anandagiri’s Prācīna and Citsukha’s Br̥hat Śaṅkaravijaya texts. Mahadevan says nothing whatsoever about Citsukha and simply identifies Anantānandagiri with Anandagiri."
Interestingly, all the chapters in Veezhinathan’s edition have been given titles, except for the one that mentions Śr̥ṅgeri. Thus, chapter 60 is titled ‘Nrsiṁha Sākṣātkārah,’ chapter 61 is ‘Sarasvatī Jayah,’ and chapter 63 is ‘Kāñcī Nagara Nirmānam’; whereas chapter 62, which describes Śaṅkara’s stay at Śr̥ṅgeri, is a plain ‘Dviṣaṣti Prakaraṇam’ (‘chapter 62) (Veezhinathan 1971: 181–83). The index and the chapter colophon mention Guroḥ Sarasavānyāśca Śr̥ṅgagiri sthāna Nivāsanam, but the text mentions the establishment of a temple for Sarasavāṇi near Śrīgeri (śrngagiri samipe), and the older reading of aśrama has been altered to aśrayā. Chapter 63 mentions Padmapāda as the head of the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha, and Veezhinathan’s footnote says that this is the reading in all manuscripts. Surely Veezhinathan, who refers frequently to the earlier editions, should know that both Calcutta editions and all their source manuscripts mention Sureśvara, not Padmapāda, at Śr̥ṅgeri.9 In chapter 65 of the 1971 edition, Sureśvara is reserved for the Kāñcī maha itself, whereas the older editions do not mention any maṭha at Kāñcī. Chapter 63 also mentions the establishment of a bhogaliṅga (Śiva-liṅga named for enjoyment) at Śr̥ṅgeri, while chapters 65 and 74 mention a yogaliṅga (Siva-liṅga named for union) at Kāñcīpuram and a mokṣaliṅga (Siva-liṅga named for liberation) at Cidambaram. The corresponding footnotes and the preface inform us that these details about Siva-liṅgas are found only in Kāñcī maṭha manuscripts, citing another text named Mārkaṇḍeya Saṁhitā in support of these readings. Chapter 77 has a phrase, ‘Kāñcīpithādi tattatpattana sthāyinīm krtvā’ (having established the lineage at Kāñcī and other cities). A footnote acknowledges that most manuscripts and the earlier Calcutta editions read ‘Śr̥ṅgagiri sthānasthām kr̥tvā’ (having established the lineage at Śr̥ṅgēri) instead. Not surprisingly, both manuscripts that provide the new reading are originally from Kāñcīpuram. Veezhinathan justifies his editorial decision in adopting this particular reading by claiming that Śr̥ṅgeri has already been mentioned in chapter 62, so that there is no need to mention it again in chapter 67 while mentioning Kāñcī is more appropriate.
Veezhinathan divides his manuscripts into two sets based on irreconcilable differences in reading. The preface and numerous footnotes make it clear that he mainly adopts readings found in Kāñcī maṭha manuscripts. His edition differs from the two nineteenth-century Calcutta editions in one crucial detail. In these older editions, which are supported by one set of manuscripts, Śaṅkara was born in Cidambaram to a Brāhmaṇi who worshipped the ākāśaliṅga (Siva-liṅga named for space) of the temple there with great devotion. In this older version, Śaṅkara’s guru, Govinda, was already in Cidambaram, and Śaṅkara left the place only after becoming a saṁnyāsin to go on tours of religious conquest. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this account is that this text either describes some other Sarkara, who is different from the teacher of the Advaita tradition, or that it records a variant tradition about Śaṅkara’s birth. In the 1971 text, this Cidambaram version is given only as a footnote in chapter 2 (Veezhinathan 1971: 8). The main narrative follows the second set of manu scripts, describing Śaṅkara’s birth at Kalaṭi after his parents had worshipped Siva at the Trichur Vrṣācaia temple. Veezhinathan and Mahadevan claim that this is the original, authentic reading and that the version that mentions Cidam baram must be false. The only reason they offer for this is that Acyutarāya’s Advaitarājyalaksmi is said to refer to the Kālaṭi reading soff Acyutarāya has specifically referred to Anantānandagiri in this context, he has also referred separately to Anandagiri elsewhere. This implies that he did not equate the two authors or their texts. Veezhinathan and Mahadevan cannot have it both ways. If Acyutarāya is to be cited in support of adopting the Kalaṭi reading, he cannot also be claimed to support the equation of Anantānandagiri’s text with Anandagiri’s text. Moreover, in the 1971 edition, Govinda is still placed in Cidambaram, and Śaṅkara travels from kālaṭi to Cidambaram to meet his teacher. Mahadevan takes the opportunity to mention that according to the Kāñcī maṭha’s Gururatnamālā and Suṣamā, Gauḍapāda also lived in Cidambaram itself. In his own earlier work on Gauḍapāda, Mahadevan (1960: 12-13) explicitly doubts the reliability of Gururatnamālā and Suṣamā. However, in his introduction to Veezhinathan’s work, he raises no doubt whatsoever. If he has changed his mind about these texts, he does not tell us his reasons for doing so, and Cidambaram continues to remain central to Veezhinathan’s edition of Anantānandagiri’s text.
That the Kālaṭi version of Śaṅkara’s birth remains problematic for this text is further evident from chapter 3, which compares the infant Śaṅkara to Cidambaresa. In the earlier editions, the boy is born as a result of worshipping Siva at Cidambaram, and this simile requires no explanation. However, in the 1971 text, since Śaṅkara’s parents worship Siva as Vrṣācaleśa at Trichūr, the reference to Cidambaresa stands out and calls for an editorial comment. Mahadevan provides one, by claiming that Cidambareśa is a popular name for Śiva throughout the south. He draws attention to a siva temple called Adi cidambaram at Perūr near Coimbatore and says that the name Perūs is also found in Tiru-sivap-perūr, the full name of Trichûr (Veezhinathan 1971: vii). This is extremely fanciful reasoning that conveniently overlooks temple traditions in Tamilnadu and Kerala." Perūs (Adi-cidambaram) has a Nataraja temple and a Sthalapurāṇa connection to the more famous temple in Cidambaram, while the Trichur temple has only as much connection to Cidambaram as to any other Śiva temple in southern India. Moreover, in Tamil and Malayalam, the name Perūr simply means ‘big town’ and may be found in the names of a number of places. Mahadevan fails to explain away the reference to Cidambaresa, having to invoke Cidambaram in a twice-removed fashion. The straightforward explana tion is that manuscripts describing Śaṅkara’s birth at Cidambaram are probably the only authentic versions of this text. Manuscripts with the Kālaṭi version have probably been tampered with. It should, therefore, be clear that what has been designated a critical edition of the Anantānandagiriya is nothing more than a faithful reproduction of the Kāñcī maṭha’s latest version of this text.
The yogaliṇga at Kāñcīpuram
We have seen that in chapter 65 of the Anantānandagiriya, Veezhinathan refers to a text named Mārkaṇḍeya Saṁhitā in support of a legend of a yogaliṅga at Kāñcīpuram. According to his preface, this Mārkaṇḍeya Saṁhitā has one hundred kāṇdas (sections), each with chapters called parispandas. Veezhinathan quotes a few verses that he attributes to the seventh and eighth parispandas of the seventy-second kāṇda but does not give us any other information about this text. Candraśekharendra Sarasvatī (1980) of Kāñcīpuram tells us that this Mārkaṇḍeya Saṁhitā is part of the Brahmānda Purāṇa. However, no edition of the Brahmānda Purāṇa includes a section called Mārkaṇḍeya Saṁhitā, and Śr̥ṅgeri adherents hold that it is not found in any of the available manuscripts of this Purāṇa either."
Interestingly, Candraśekharendra Sarasvatī (1980: 58–64) says that Śrīharṣa’s Naiṣadhīyacarita, a twelfth-century poem, refers to this yogaliṅga in verse 12.38:
sindhoh jaitramayam pavitram asrjat tatkirtipurtādbhutam yatra snānti jaganti santi kavayah ke vā na vācamyamāḥ. yadbindußriyam induh añcati jalam ca āviśya drsyetarah yasyāsau jaladevatā sphatikabhūh jāgarti yogeśvarah.
The Naiṣadhīyacarita is a retelling of the Mahābhārata legend of Nala and Damayanti. Candraśekharendra gives the following translation of the above verse:
This is yogaliṅga. Candramaulīśvara is yogaliṅga. It is He that is yogeśvara. Śrīharṣa refers to Him in this verse. From this it is known that Śrīharsa had devotion to yogaliṅga which was worshipped by Śrī Ācārya. We have already seen that the poet had devotion to Śrī Ācārya and Advaita (1980: 63-64).
We are told that according to this verse, the king of Kāñcīpuram dug a tank filled with clear water that was used for the abhiseka (ritual bathing during worship) of the yogaliṅga worshipped at the Kāñcī maṭha. The water in this tank is said to be so pure that the crystal Śiva-liṅga becomes invisible when bathed in it. Śrīharsa is the author of a dialectical treatise named Khandana khandakhadya, which has inspired a long line of commentaries, so that his status as an Advaita Vedāntin is undisputed. In addition, he is now claimed to have been especially devoted to the kañcī maṭha’s yogaliṅga. The reader is thus expected to infer that a Kāñcī maṭha existed in the twelfth century CE and was well known to Śrīharṣa. This is no doubt a very creative exposition, and if correct, it would indeed be early and irrefutable literary evidence with respect to the Kāñcī maṭha. The only problem is that Candraśekharendra Sarasvatī’s reading of yogeśvara is found nowhere in the Naiṣadhiyacarita. The last line of the quoted verse actually reads, ‘yasyāsau jaladevatā sphatikabhūh jāgarti yāgeśvarah’ (Śrīharsa 1952: 504). Is yogeśvara an attested variant reading? The evidence of the numerous commentaries says otherwise:
[Nārāyaṇa: asau jaladevatā jāgarti. asau kā? yā sphaṭikabhūh ageśvarah kailāsaḥ jāgarti iti vā….yāgeśvaraḥ sphātika iti prasiddhiḥ.
This deity of water appears [to be invisible). Who is this deity? It is Kailāsa, the king of the immovables, who is made of crystal…. It is well known that yāgeśvara means (a Siva-liṅga) made of crystal. (Candupandita:) yā sphatikabhūh kailāsaḥ agānām parvatānām īśvarah. tatra api jaladevatā yāgānām īśvarah yajñapuruṣaḥ adrśyah.
Kailasa, the king of the immovable mountains, made of crystal. There too, the deity of water, the lord of sacrifices, the person of the sacrifice, is invisible.
[Vidyādhara:) eṣah sphatikabhūḥ kailāsagirih eva yā jaladevatā ageśvarah jāgarti sphurati…udakam ca avisya pravisya drsyetarā adrśyā.
Upon entering the water,…this Kailāsa Mountain, made of crystal, the king of immovables, appears…to be other than visible, that is, invisible.
eva [Iśānadeva:) yasya kīrtitadāgasya asau sphatikabhūḥ kailāsagirih yāgeśvaraḥ maheśvarah jaladevatā jāgarti…drśyetarā adrśyā.
Of the tank of glory, this Kailāsa Mountain itself, made of crystal, the lord of sacrifices, the great god, the deity of water, appears…other than visible, invisible.
(Jinarāja:) yasya kirtipūrtasya jalam avisya praviśya drśyetarā adrśyā sati jāgarti….yāgeśvara sabdena sphatikanirmita śivaliṅgam iti.
Entering the tank filled with the water of glory, it appears to invisible…. The word yāgeśvara refers to a Siva-liṅga made of crystal.
(Mallinātha:) sphatikodbhavati iti sphatikabhūh sphasikodbhavah yāgeśvarah san jāgarti. sphatikalinge yāgeśvara iti prasiddhiḥ.
Being made of crystal, the lord of sacrifices appears [to be invisible). A crystal liṅga is well known as yāgeśvara.
Not a single commentator reads yogeśvara. Three analyze the word yāgeśvarah as yā + ageśvarah (a simple sandhi), the reference being to Kailāsa, the king of mountains, the abode of Śiva. This is certainly not a moveable sphatikaliṅga at Kāñcī. Rama Śāstri (1976: 61) objects that the pronoun yā is feminine while the noun ageśvaraḥ is masculine, so that the word cannot be split in this fashion. This objection is quite invalid, as, in this case, yā refers not to ageśvarah but to jaladevatā, which is grammatically a feminine word. Three different commentators mix linguistic gender in a related way, by reading drsyetarā and adrśyā, aligned with yā and jaladevatā, instead of drsyetarah and adrśyaḥ, which go with the word ageśvarah. Candupandita is even more specific in his alternative explanation. The words yajñapurusa and vāgānām īśvara (a tatpurusa samāsa) show that the reading is definitely yāgeśvara (lord of sacrifices) and not yogeśvara (lord of yoga). Note also that according to Nārāyana, Jinarāja, and Mallinātha, any crystal Śiva-liṅga is generally called yāgeśvara. 4 There is no reason to suppose that the poet intended to refer to a specific one in this verse.
Moreover, the verse really says nothing about the king of Kāñcī digging an actual water tank. The water and the tank are both metaphorical. The ‘clear water in this verse consists of the king’s glory (kirti), which is so great that a tank filled with it (kirtipurta) would rival the ocean in its extent. A mere drop of this metaphorical water is comparable to the moon, and yāgeśvara, the jaladevatā, made of sphafika, would disappear when immersed in it. All this is poetic praise of the king’s greatness. Converting a metaphorical tank filled with the water of the king’s glory to a material water tank violates the basic poetic intention. More prosaically speaking, converting vāgeśvara to yogeśvara constitutes an ill-conceived attempt at deliberate textual tampering.
That Veezhinathan quotes from an unavailable Mārkaṇḍeya Saṁhitā and includes the story about the yogaliṅga in his edition of Anantānandagiri’s text may be understood in terms of his devotion to the Kāñcī maṭha and its leader ship. Strangely enough, Pande (1994: 369) also does not bother to investigate the so-called Mārkaṇḍeya Saṁhitā and simply repeats the yogaliṅga story as found in Kāñcī publications. On the one hand, he acknowledges that all the manuscripts of and commentators on Naiṣadhiyacarita unanimously give the yāgeśvara reading. There is absolutely no textual basis for reading yogeśvara. Nevertheless, Pande simply accepts the special claim of the Kāñcī maṭha regarding this supposedly early reference to its yogaliṅga, on the grounds that the poetic metaphor requires an actual Śiva-liṅga and an actual water tank. All that is required for Śrīharṣa’s metaphor is that a crystal Siva-liṅga becomes invisible when immersed in water. Any crystal Siva-liṅga and any body of water would satisfy this purpose. Indeed, Nārāyana, the first commentator cited above, describes this as a well known general test for the quality of the crystal. Pande also does not take into account that the verse in question praises one of Damayanti’s suitors, who is a king of Kāñcīpuram, not the ascetic head of a monastery in that city. The claim that Śrīharṣa refers to a specific yogaliṅga that was worshipped at the Kāñcī maṭha by Śaṅkara has no basis in the poem. Indeed, it is contradicted by the attested reading of yāgeśvara and by the commentators who explain the verse with no reference to Śaṅkara or to a maṭha at Kāñcīpuram. The issue of four mabāvākyas
This brings me to an examination of another tradition unique to the Kāñcī maṭha, but only because Mahadevan and Veezhinathan go out of their way to draw attention to it. It is generally said that there are four mahāvākyas used at the time of upadeśa (initiation) into saṁnyāsa. The standard four sentences are prajñānam brahma, aham brahma asmi, tat tvam asi, and ayam ātmā brahma, one each taken from the principal Upaniṣads of the four Vedas. The mahāvākyas lie at the heart of Daśanāmi tradition. In Advaita Vedānta, a ‘great sentence’ is a śruti vākya that teaches the fundamental identity of the jīvātman with Brahman. There are many sentences that state or imply this equation, but the crucial issue for a guru-sisya lineage pertains to the sentences used for upadeśa during saṁnyāsa initiation." The Kāñcī maṭha disagrees with the tradition that these are four in number and claims that its own mahāvākya is om tat sat (Pande 1994: 358). However, the Bhagavad Gitā says that the words om, tat, and sat each directly denote Brahman; thus the others in the tradition do not accept that a collection of synonymous terms makes a mahāvākya.+++(5)+++
A footnote in Mahadevan’s (Veezhinathan 1971: viii) introduction brings up this controversy about the number of mahāvākyas. Mahadevan claims that in the independent text named Pañcīkaraṇa, Śaṅkara lists only three mahāvākyas and uses the term ‘ityādi, implying many more such sentences. However, Pañcīkaraṇa concludes, ’tat tvam asi, brahma aham asmi, prajñānam ānandam brahma, ayam ātmā brahma, ityādi vākyebhyah (through such sentences as, “You are that,’ ‘I am Brahman,’ ‘Consciousness and bliss is Brahman,’ and “This self is Brahman’) (Sundaresan 2002: 26). There are four sentences specifi cally listed here, not three. Except for the variant readings in two of these, these are identical to the four standard upadeśa mahāvākyas. Clearly, the Pañcīkaraṇa text also indicates the importance of these four sentences for the Advaita saṁnyāsa tradition. Mahadevan’s claim that only three such sentences are specifically listed in the Pancikaraṇa is extremely mystifying, to say the least.
In a footnote to chapter 41, Veezhinathan (1971: 145) holds that om tat sat is a mahāvākya. He holds that the four mahāvākya theory is refuted by the fact that one usually studies only one Vedic sākha (branch). Apparently, aham brahma asmi, which is from the Brhadaraṇyaka Upaniṣad (Sukla Yajurveda), cannot be a mahāvākya for monks of Krṣṇa Yajurveda schools. If such exclusivity is part of the tradition, Veezhinathan must accuse even Śaṅkara of having violated it because Śaṅkara wrote commentaries on Upaniṣads of all four Vedas and emphasized tat tvam asi, the Sama Veda mahāvākya. Veezhinathan then proceeds to claim that om is a mahāvākya ali by itself and that tat sat is also an independent mahāvākya because tat denotes Brahman while sat denotes the individual jiva. That om is a mahāvākya is contradicted directly by śruti and smr̥ti.S* As for Veezhinathan’s claim that sat denotes the jīva, this is contrary to both the Upaniṣads and the noted writers of Advaita texts. In UpadeśasāhaŚrī, Śaṅkara uses sat directly to denote Brahman. In the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the word sat denotes the highest Brahman, not the individual jīva. In this scriptural text, Uddālaka defines sat as Brahman, the One cause, and then equates that (tar) Brahman (sat) with the word tvam. In Advaita Vedānta, this is explained by explicitly sacrificing the usually assumed referents of tvam (as transmigrator) and sat or tat (as Brahman with attributes), so as to arrive at a fundamental identity. Veezhinathan’s stance that sat denotes only the jīva literally contradicts scripture and also the Advaita tradition of its exegesis.
Moreover, the four specific mahāvākyas have acquired special significance within the Daśanāmi tradition in the context of initiation. The saṁnyāsa manuals provide an option for using any one or all four mahāvākyas, but Daśanāmī tradition also associates these four sentences with the four āmnāya maṭhas. This is probably based on nothing more than the fact that each of these sets has four elements. In any case, in the Advaita tradition, the mahāvākyas are śruti sentences specifically related to saṁnyāsa. On the other hand, om tat sat is from the Bhagavad Gitā, which for all its importance as smr̥ti is not śruti. Veezhinathan seems to realize that this remains a serious problem. Although he argues in favor of om tat sat in his footnote, he does not include it in the main text. Instead, in chapter 41, he inserts ’neha nānasti kiṁcana’ (no diversity whatsoever exists here) in parentheses after the four traditionally enumerated mahāvākyas. This sentence is not found in the Calcutta editions, and Veezhi nathan is silent about the manuscript evidence for this reading. Chapter 41 of Anantānandagiri’s text now presents a highly curious situation in which the main text parenthetically includes a fifth sentence in the form of ’neha nānāsti kiṁcana,’ which is a śruti sentence, but the corresponding footnote argues for the entirely different om tat sat, which is a smr̥ti phrase.10 More confusion follows. The very next sentence in Anantānandagiri’s text refers to the mana vākya-catustaya in the context of upadeśa, indicating that the original author intended only the well-known set of four sentences. This is further confirmed by an explicit reference to the Sukarahasya Upanisad, a text that lists the standard four mahāvākyas. Undoubtedly, the original text of Anantānandagiriya must have listed only the same four sentences, leaving no room for either om tat sat or neha nānāsti kiṁcana.“!
While Veezhinathan’s arguments can be criticized on traditional grounds, it should also be clear that he and Mahadevan have failed in their stated project of producing a critical edition of this hagiographic text. The editor and his advisor have quite unjustifiably tampered with the text in order to suit their political purposes. The Kancī maṭha may have its own reasons for attempting to develop a new tradition regarding the mahāvākyas, but these two scholars have succeeded only in refuting the most probable original reading of the Anantānandagirīya. This is a singular disservice, both to the old tradition of Advaita Vedānta that they claim to uphold and to the new tradition of critical scholarship that they claim to represent at the University of Madras.
THE Śaṅkaravijaya OF MADHAVA
The Śaṅkaravijaya of Mādhava is quite well known and has been discussed in some detail by David Lorenzen (1983) and Natalia Isayeva (1993). Also known as the Samksepa Śaṅkarajaya, it has been printed and translated many times. It is very popular within the Advaita tradition and portions of it are recited during annual Śaṅkara Jayanti celebrations. The author is usually identified with Vidyāraṇya, and the text has come to be known as the Śaṅkaravijaya of Mādhava-Vidyāraṇya.62 Antarkar (1972) mentions that he has seen very old, complete palmleaf manuscripts and smaller extracts from this work, which is uniformly attributed to Mādhava, from libraries all over India. He notes that wandering religious preachers like the kirtanakāras rely solely on this text. However, for various reasons that will be reexamined below, he concludes that this text dates from much later times and that its author should not be identified with Vidyāraṇya.
The commentaries to this text help in fixing its latest possible date. Dhana patisūrin’s Ḍiṇḍima informs us that it was completed in 1798 CE® while Acyutarāya’s Advaitarājyalakṣmi was written in 1824. Thus, a definitive text of the Mādhavīya was fixed before the early nineteenth century. This has generally been taken to be the last possible date for the Mādhavīya (Lorenzen 1983; Sawai 1992), but it seems likely that this text was composed at an earlier date. Sadānanda’s Śaṅkaravijaya Sāra was written in 1783 CE (Aiyar and Venkata raman 1977: 63), and according to Dundubhi (Dhanapatisūrin’s commentary on this text), Sadānanda mainly follows Mādhava’s account. This indicates that Mādhava’s text must have been well accepted within the tradition even before 1783. These dates assume importance in light of an early twentieth century controversy over the Mādhavīya. Nārāyaṇa Śāstri (1916) holds that the Anandāśrama edition (1891) of this text was printed hastily, with alterations prepared by a Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha adherent so as to highlight Śr̥ṅgeri’s importance over Kāñcī. He traces the motivation for this to a dispute between the Śr̥ṅgeri and Kumbhakoṇam-Kāñcī maṭhas in 1845. Nārāyaṇa Śāstri claims that the Kumbhakoṇam maṭha relied on Mārkaṇḍeya Saṁhitā and Sivarahasya but that Śr̥ṅgeri could produce nothing, so the Mādhavīya was produced as a late response. Relying on extended hearsay, he also identifies the author as one Bhattaśri Nārāyana śāstrī, who lived in the late nineteenth century. The name Mādhava is claimed as a pseudonym of Nārāyana (Antarkar 1972: 22–23;
Nārāyaṇa Śāstri 1916: 158–67; Tapasyānanda 1980: ix-xiii).
The above claims essentially mean that the Mādhavīya was either entirely written or significantly altered at the behest of the Śr̥ṅgēri maṭha around 1891, that is, a full century after Dhanapatisūrin wrote his commentary on this text. Antarkar notes these objections, but refers to the old manuscripts of the text and the date of the commentary, to conclude: ‘We have therefore, to set aside the charge against S. S. Jaya of Madhava as unproved and even disproved by evidence to the contrary’ (1972: 5). This is a strong statement about the age of this text that essentially dismisses Nārāyaṇa Śāstri’s claims. Yet, in his concluding remarks, Antarkar contradicts his own earlier stand and says, ‘It is quite possible that it was tampered with by Bhattaśrī Nārāyana śāstri’ (1972: 22). The only reason he offers for this reversal is that another paṇdita named Bāla śāstrī, whom Antarkar regards as a great scholar, accepts Nārāyaṇa Śāstri’s claims. Thus, he disregards concrete evidence provided by the commentaries and old, complete manuscripts from many different parts of India in favor of one person’s opinion, based on his own estimate of that person’s greatness. Antarkar admits that all printed editions of this text agree with one another and with the manuscripts to a remarkable extent. The 1891 Anandāśrama edition includes both commentaries to this text. Sengaku Mayeda’s (1992: 7) list also includes an earlier edition from Bombay. Although a critical edition of this text has not been published, it should be noted that editions published directly from Śr̥ṅgeri also do not differ from these earlier editions. The allegation that this text was substantially altered in the late nineteenth century cannot be upheld. Antarkar does not stop to consider that if the Mādhavīya had been tampered with in the interests of the Śr̥ṅgēri maṭha, the text published from Smīgeri might differ from the other independent editions and manuscripts, at least in some details.
All of Nārāyaṇa Śāstri’s objections to the Madhavīya emanate from his assertion that the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha needed to produce some text, having lost a lawsuit against the Kumbhakoṇam-Kāñcī maṭha in 1845. Publications from the two maṭhas present very different accounts of the outcome of this case. The correct judicial details are probably available in legal records, but the textual claims are more relevant here. Nārāyaṇa Śāstri claims that during the proceed ings, the Kumbhakoṇam-Kāñcī maṭha quoted Sivarahasya and Mārkaṇḍeya Saṁhitā. Various versions of a sivarahasya are available, but I have already pointed out that the Markaṇḍeya Saṁhitā is completely untraceable. Antarkar does not ask his Kāñcī sources for details about these texts. Besides, the Śr̥ṅgeri Guruvaṁśakāvya had been written more than a century before this dispute arose, while the Mādhavīya itself had gained sufficient importance to have influenced Sadānanda and to have been commented upon by Dhanapatisūrin and Acyutarāya many decades earlier. Antarkar’s clear indebtedness to Kāñcī maṭha panditas results in a self-contradictory stance on the allegation that Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha followers greatly altered the text in the late nineteenth century.
Large numbers of verses in the Mādhavīya (about two-thirds of the available text) are also found in Vyāsācala’s Śaṅkaravijaya, Tirumala Dīkṣita’s Śaṅkarā bhyudaya, Rājacūļāmaṇi Dīkṣita’s Śaṅkarābhyudaya, and Rāmabhadra dīkṣita’s Patañjalicarita. There is no unanimity about the exact number of common verses in each case, but some of these are identical reproductions of one another, while others have variant readings. It is well known that the last two poets lived in the seventeenth century and that Vidyāraṇya lived in the fourteenth century. Antarkar (1972: 22) argues that it is Madhavīya that has borrowed extensively from the texts of Vyāsācala and the three Diksitas. He concludes that one Madhava Bhatta, the author of a Bhārata Campū, must have put together this text some time after the seventeenth century. Rama Śāstri (1976: 55–56) makes the same argument and says that in addition to the texts attributed to Vyāsācala, Rāmabhadra, and Rājacūļāmaṇi, Madhavīya borrows forty verses from a Bhagavatpādasaptati of a Jagannāthakavi and an unspecified number of verses from another Bhagavatpādasaptati of one Umāmaheśvara śāstrī. However, Rama Śāstri offers no reasons for this assertion. R. K. Aiyar and K. R. Venkataraman (1977: 37–43) hold that the borrowing is really in the opposite direction. They maintain that the Madhavīya was commented upon and published much before any of these other texts came to light and that Kāñcī maṭha followers have heavily tampered with these works by inserting into them numerous verses taken from the Madhavīya. Both Kāñcī and Śr̥ṅgēri sources remain silent about Tirumala’s Śaṅkarābhyudaya. For his part, Antarkar does not inform us whether the Mādhavīya Śaṅkaravijaya shares any common features with the Bhārata Campū of Mādhava Bhatta, nor does he give other reasons for identifying this particular author. He tells us nothing more about this Bhārata Campū or any other works of Mādhava Bhatta, nor does he thoroughly investigate the authorship of the texts claimed to be sources of the Mādhavīya. It is one thing to say that the Mādhavīya is a composite text and quite another to say that a specific person borrowed extensively from numerous other texts. The first alternative allows for a text that has grown over the centuries through well-known processes of textual accretion, but Antarkar holds that the Mādhavīya is merely a product of deliberate and cunning plagiarism.
Much of Antarkar’s argument about the direction of borrowing is based upon stylistic criteria and the variety of poetic meters found in the text. However, Tapasyānanda (1980) praises the poetic value of the text and views its usage of a variety of meters as a positive literary feature. An analysis of poetic style and meters is outside the scope of this paper. Here I review some of Antarkar’s other objections against this text before discussing the texts attributed to Vyāsācala and others. Antarkar never sees fit to extend the same concessions to the Mādhavīya that he does to the Anantānandagiriya. In contrast to his defense of the latter text, claiming that stylistic criteria are subjective and inconclusive, he criticizes the former text on stylistic grounds, He finds fault with Madhavīya for not being a literally factual account but defends Anantānandagirīya by appealing to telepathy, clairvoyance, and parapsychology. Antarkar (1972: 20) claims that the Mādhavīya account of Śaṅkara’s debate with Maṇḍana Miśra depicts both of them in a negative light, 68 although many within the Daśanāmi tradition find it to be rather well written. His criticism that Mādhava describes the same individual as an incarnation of different gods is just a quibble, for Mādhava explicitly tells us that he is reporting different traditions.69 Antarkar finds another problem in Mādhava’s description of how Śaṅkara identified himself as the one Śiva, independent of all attributes, when first meeting Govinda, his teacher.10 Antarkar’s apparent disappointment at not finding a servile attitude of the disciple towards the guru betrays a highly deficient understanding of both the philosophy of Advaita and its living saṁnyasin tradition. According to all accounts, Śaṅkara was a boy of extraordinary ability, who had already assumed the vows of saṁnyāsa and only then gone in search of a preceptor.” The Madhavīya simply emphasizes that even before he met Govinda, Śaṅkara had already realized the real ātman, which is sānta, siva, and advaita. Consistent with this outlook, tradition also recounts that when Hastāmalaka first met Śaṅkara, he identified himself as the ever-present ātman, and Śaṅkara took him on as a disciple because he immediately realized that this was not an ordinary boy.72 In UpadeśasāhaŚrī, Śaṅkara has a student introduce himself as a Brāhmaṇa, with family background and other details. The teacher tells the student that this is an error and that he is really the eternal ātman, never limited by any attributes, including caste, family, and purificatory ceremonies (Mayeda 1992: 214–15). Even today, after the saṁnyāsa initiation, gurus address their disciples as svāmin, and the relationship between preceptor and disciple matures into one of equality, mutual respect, and regard. A little knowledge of the philosophy and ethos of the tradition shows that Antarkar’s criticism of the Madhavīya is highly misguided.
Another instance of unwarranted faultfinding with the Mādhavīya is Antarkar’s reference to the composition of subcommentaries to Śaṅkara’s bhāṣyas. He says that in Mādhava’s account, Śaṅkara is not very particular about what sort of subcommentary he wanted to be written on his own works. According to him, Madhava uses the terms vrtii, vārttika, and ṭikā interchangeably. Thus, he finds Madhava to be guilty either of inconsistent usage or of ignorance of the specific technical connotations of these terms. However, even a casual reading of the Madhavīya shows otherwise. Toward the end of chapter 7, Śaṅkara meets Kumārila, hoping to get that renowned scholar to comment upon his work. In verse 103 of this chapter, Kumārila mentions a vr̥tti, but in verse 107, Śaṅkara suggests that he should write a vārttika. Accordingly, in verse 118, Kumārila uses the word vārttika. Similarly, in chapter 13, Sureśvara first proposes to write a vr̥tti on Śaṅkara’s Brahmasūtrabhāṣya, but Śaṅkara tells him to write a vārttika, following which Sureśvara consistently uses the word vārttika. According to this story, other disciples are either suspicious or jealous of Sureśvara and propose that Padmapāda should write a ṭikā on the Brahmasūtra bhāṣya, while Padmapāda suggests that Hastāmalaka should do so. To settle this problem, Śaṅkara decides that Sureśvara should write a completely inde pendent treatise first and that Padmapāda should comment upon the Brahma sūtrabhāṣya. Accordingly, Sureśvara writes Naiskarmyasiddhi, and Padmapāda writes Pañcapādikā. In this account, only Kumārila and Sureśvara use the word vrti, but Śaṅkara wants them to write a vārttika on his own commentary. He changes his plan only to resolve a conflict among his disciples, who refer to a ṭīkā.11 Antarkar seems to cavil against the Mādhavīya, seeing contradictions where none exist.
Antarkar (1972: 2) thinks that the salutation of Vidya Tirtha in the first verse of the Madhavīya is spurious; thus he disregards the commentators when they identify the author as Vidyāraṇya. However, he relies on the same first verse and its commentaries when he holds that Mādhava himself refers to Anandagiri’s so-called Prācīna śankaravijaya (Antarkar 1960: 114, 1972: 2). This is a self-contradictory assessment of this verse. He then rejects Nārāyaṇa Śāstri’s contention that this text was manipulated in the late nineteenth century, yet he proceeds to contradict himself once again by accepting it after all, in spite of strong evidence to the contrary. He claims that this Śaṅkaravijaya is a result of plagiarism by one Mādhava Bhatta but thinks that this person possessed sufficient poetic talent to write his own Bhārata Campū. He then adds Tirumala Dīksita’s text to three of the six texts found in Rama Śāstri’s list, bringing the total number of claimed sources of the Madhavīya to seven. These texts have thus steadily increased in number, although most of them have remained obscure. The two Bhagavatpādasaptati texts seem to have never been published, and we have only Rama Śāstri’s assertion that the Mādhavīya borrows from them. Except for Rāmabhadra dīkṣita’s poem, which has no more than fifteen verses in common with the Madhavīya, none of these works was published before the twentieth century. In contrast, the Mādhavīya has been widely available for more than two centuries now. It has merited a commentary in the late eighteenth century, another in the early nineteenth century, and repeated publication by independent institutions. The texts that account for about 90 percent of the supposed borrowing have only been unearthed recently, and they have unde niably close connections to the Kāñcī maṭha, Tirumala is claimed to have been a disciple of Paramasivendra Sarasvatī, who has been included in the Kāñcī maṭha’s list, and Anandagiri and Vyāsācala are also claimed to have been at Kāñcī.” No manuscripts of Anandagiri’s Prācīna Śaṅkarajaya and Citsukha’s Br̥hat Śaṅkaravijaya are available, but Antarkar (1960) believes the Kāñcī maṭha’s ‘reliable information about them. Nothing more has been heard of Citsukha’s text, while Rama Śāstri (1976: 29, 59) attributes a Prācīna Śaṅkara vijaya to Anandagiri in one place and to Mūkakavi in another. Mahadevan and Veezhinathan claim that Anantānandagiri’s text is the same as Anandagiri’s Śaṅkaravijaya. However, as there is nothing in common between Anantanānda giriya and Mādhavīya, Madhava’s own reference to a Prācīna Śaṅkarajaya cannot be to Anantānandagiri’s text. Antarkar says nothing about this and seems to be more interested in endorsing the Kāñcī maṭha’s rejection of this text than in an impartial comparative analysis. The following discussion shows that the direction of borrowing of common material is not as conclusively evident as Antarkar presents it.
The Śaṅkaravijaya of Vyāsācala
The Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras, published a Śaṅkara vijaya attributed to a Vyāsācala (Chandraśekharan 1954), with about twelve hundred verses in twelve chapters. Antarkar (1972: 5-8) holds that Madhava borrows four hundred seventy-five verses from this work. Rama Śāstri (1976: 55) mentions five hundred verses, while Aiyar and Venkataraman (1977: 47-48) say that there are about six hundred common verses. The editor of the 1954 text says that Madhavīya refers to this particular text in one verse,12 which is found in an Oriental Library manuscript. Antarkar informs us that one Mahādeva śāstrī also gave him another verse, attributing both verses to the first chapter of the Mādhavīya. Antarkar infers, ‘at least tentatively,’ that the second verse may also be found in the same Madras manuscript." Neither verse is found in any printed edition of the Mādhavīya, and the two commentators do not notice them at all. Rama Śāstri (1976: 56) suggests that both verses were originally present in the Madhavīya but that they have been deliberately omitted from the printed editions because of the Śr̥ṅgēri maṭha’s influence. The 1798 date of Dhanapatisūrin’s commentary argues against this contention as well. Madhavīya seems to have been available to various authors all over India at least before the end of the eighteenth century, and printed editions are admitted to match remarkably well with manuscripts of this text. Only the Madras manuscript has an extra verse: whether it has Mahādeva śāstri’s second verse is open to question. In the absence of text-critical apparatus, no reliable information is available about the history of manuscript transmission. The 1954 edition of Vyāsācala’s text offers another instance of verses that are not found in the corresponding manuscripts. A pasted postscript to the preface informs us that after the text was printed and bound, Rama Śāstri handed over to the editor four additional verses extracted from the Kāñcī maṭha’s Suṣamā and attributed to the Vyāsācalīya. These verses have been included in the postscript but not in the main text, and the editor clarifies that they were not found in any of his source manuscripts, including those obtained from the Kāñcī maṭha. It is not very surprising that these four additional verses describe Śaṅkara’s last days at Kāñcī and his establishment of a maṭha there. Note that the main text places Śaṅkara’s last days in the Himālayas and says nothing about any maṭhas.
Who is this Vyāsācala? The published text gives no clue to the author’s identity, but the editor’s preface quotes one Atreya Krṣṇa śāstri (another Kāñcī maṭha pandita) and identifies Vyāsācala with a Mahādevendra Sarasvatī, one of the heads of the Kāñcī maṭha who performed penance on a hill named Vyāsācala. The location of this hill is unknown, and no such story about any of the Mahādevendra Sarasvatīs on the Kāñcī list is to be found in that maṭha’s Gururatnamālā or Suṣamā. Krṣṇa Śastri’s reasons for identifying Vyāsācala with a Mahādevendra Sarasvatī remain mysterious. A different identification of this Vyāsācala had earlier been made by the Kāñcī maṭha; Nārāyaṇa Śāstri (1916) had identified Vyāsācala with either Vidyāśankara or Śaṅkarānanda (Antarkar 1960: 113). Now, unlike the references available uniquely to Kāñcī maṭha panditas, Madhavīya (1.17) does refer to a Vyāsācala. However, both Dhanapatisūrin and Acyutarāya interpret this as a self-descriptive term used by the author and equate Vyāsācala with Mādhava (Antarkar 1972: 2). Neither commentator sees this as a reference to another author named Vyāsācala who wrote a different text. Aiyar and Venkataraman (1977: 47–64) offer other evidence, which indicates that Govindanātha’s Śaṅkarācāryacarita (the Keralīya Śaṅkaravijaya) also identifies Vyāsācala with Mādhava. Even the author of the Kāñcī maṭha’s Suṣamā seems to refer only to the Madhavīya in one of his supposed quotations from a Vyāsācalīya. Thus, he mentions the Cāndāla episode,13* with the introduction, ‘vistytam idam vyāsācalīye’ (This is elaborated in the Vyāsācalīya), and quotes twenty-eight verses which are completely identical in wording and order to Madhavīya 6.25–52. Manuscripts attributed to Vyāsācala do not describe the Cānļāla episode at all, and none of these twenty eighth verses is found in the 1954 publication. Another such instance is found in reference to Śaṅkara’s upanayana (sacred-thread investiture) ceremony, where Suṣamā refers to a Vyāsācaliya but quotes Mādhavīya (4.11). The corresponding verse in the 1954 Vyāsācalīya text (11.116) has a different reading. Thus, there is sufficient reason to question whether there was any independent author named Vyāsācala. Antarkar disregards all this, and on the strength of the two stanzas not found in the vast majority of manuscripts, he says, ‘Mādhava definitely refers to Vyāsācala in the stanzas vyāsācala pramukha pūrvika’ (1972: 9). Again, he trusts the oral evidence of a Kāñcī maṭha pandita and his own tentative’ inference against the evidence of the numerous manuscripts of the Mādhavīya and the commentaries. As is now a consistent pattern with him where Kāñcī sources are concerned, he adduces no reasons. The Mādhavīya can be accused of plagiarism only if Vyāsācala is proved to be a completely different author. However, such a supposition rests on two verses of highly suspect origins. In his eagerness to judge the Madhavīya adversely, Antarkar does not investigate the 1954 Vyāsācalīya properly, and he considers no alternative explanations of the textual evidence. The entire exercise smacks of specious reasoning, designed as an explanation for a prejudiced conclusion about these texts.
One criterion that Antarkar uses to decide the direction of borrowing is that the Mādhavīya gives more stories than the other works and elaborates more on the common ones. Such an argument would actually work more effectively against the text attributed to Vyāsācala. For example, Mādhavīya (2.46_47) refers to the legend of Upamanyu when Śaṅkara’s parents decide to propitiate Śiva in order to obtain a son. The story continues with the parents worshipping Siva at Trichur. In the published Vyāsācaliya, both these verses are found towards the end of the first chapter. The next two chapters, containing one hundred and thirty-nine verses, describe the story of Upamanyu in great detail, and Śaṅkara’s birth is described only in the fourth chapter. The use of two entire chapters out of twelve to digress from the main narrative stands out very significantly. Similarly, in Mādhavīya (16.14–15), Śaṅkara’s disciples are described as having gone on a search for doctors in order to treat Śaṅkara when he was ill. The 1954 text has both these verses as 10.12 and 10.17, but quite irrelevantly, the intervening four verses describe the beauty of sunrise and sunset. In verse 10.18, the disciples soon forget their mission. The text then begins describing the Sahyādri Mountains, the ocean, the spring season, and the erotic sentiments it arouses in young lovers. Chapter 11 continues with a description of all the seasons that follow in order, until, in verse 11.78, we are told that the disciples eventually returned with the doctors. Apparently, it took more than a year for the disciples to find competent doctors; meanwhile they took a vacation, enjoying seasonal delights and various other sensuous pleasures, quite oblivious to the state of Śaṅkara’s health! Hagiographies usually intend to glorify, but one hundred and seventeen verses in chapter 10 and seventy-seven verses in chapter 11 of the 1954 text of Vyāsācala are not only irrelevant to Śaṅkara’s life, but they also cast his disciples in an extremely poor light. Contrast this with the Mādhavīya, where three verses (16.14-16) give the whole story. This is definitely the simpler treatment of the episode. It may be said that lyrical descriptions of the seasons and the beauty of nature are standard features of kāvya literature and that Madhavīya describes Śaṅkara’s travels similarly. However, the context in which such descriptions have been introduced in the 1954 text of Vyāsācala is hardly appropriate. And if greater elaboration of stories indicates a specific direction of borrowing, a very strong case can be made that it is the text published in 1954 and attributed to Vyāsācala that has borrowed extensively from the Mādhavīya, embellishing and elaborating a few selected accounts. Finally, these two examples themselves fill almost four chapters out of twelve, utilizing three hundred and thirty-three out of a total of twelve hundred verses (28 percent).It is therefore more than a little astounding to read Antarkar’s (1972: 8) opinion of the matter, when he contends that Vyāsācala’s text is more cryptic in both style and arrangement than Madhava’s text.
The Śaṅkarābhyudaya of Tirumala Dīkṣita
Antarkar (1965) published Tirumala dīkṣita’s Śaṅkarābhyudaya, using a tran script from the Oriental Research Institute, Mysore, which is said to possess the sole manuscript of this text. The text seems to be incomplete, as it ends abruptly after Śaṅkara’s debate with Maṇḍana Miśra, but is claimed to be the source of four hundred and seventy-five verses in the Mādhavīya. The most serious problem with Antarkar’s analysis of this text is his dating. Each chapter colophon salutes one Paramasivendra Sarasvatī. Antarkar, who has thrown out Mādhava’s verse salutation of Vidyā Tirtha as spurious, does not look deeper into Tirumala colophon reference. The Kāñcī maṭha claims Paramasivendra as its head between 1539 and 1586 CE. Antarkar accepts this date and concludes that Tirumala dīkṣita must have also lived in the sixteenth century. However, this is at least a century too early. Paramasivendra’s Daharavidya Prakāśikā (1991) mentions one Tryambakarāya Makhin, a minister of the Tañjāvūr Marāthā kings, Sāhaji (1684–1711) and Serfoji I (1711-29). Sāhaji’s grant to VenkataKr̥ṣṇa Diksita, one of Paramasivendra’s disciples, carries a date of 1692 CE. Sadāśiva Brahmendra, a more famous disciple, was contemporaneous with Tukoji (1729- 36) of Tañjāvūr and Vijayaraghunātha Tondaimān (1730-69) of Pudukkottai (Sewell 1975). Paramasivendra Sarasvatī’s date is definitely later than 1675 CE, and this Tirumala dīkṣita, if he was indeed Paramasivendra’s direct disciple, should have lived around 1700 CE.
Antarkar acknowledges that old and complete manuscripts of the Mādhavīya exist, although he does not tell us how old the oldest one is. Let us assume that he is right about the direction of borrowing between the Madhavīya and this Śaṅkarābhyudaya, if not about the date of the latter. We may now hypotheti cally reconstruct the origins of the former text. One Mādhava Bhatta borrows heavily from various texts to produce the text that is now called the Mādhavīya. No manuscript of Mādhava’s text can be much older than 1700 CE, which must also be the earliest possible date for this Mādhava Bhatta. We must now allow for a reasonable period of time over which manuscripts of Mādhava’s compilation are copied and widely distributed all over India. In some mysterious manner, the Madhavīya then gets attributed to Vidyāraṇya and quickly becomes very popular among traveling religious preachers (kirtanakāras) and learned Daśanāmi saṁnyāsins all over India. Thus, Sadānanda relies upon it in 1783 when he composes his Śaṅkaravijaya Sāra, and a commentary is written upon it in 1798.*’ Even as the Mādhavīya gains in popularity, Tirumala dīkṣita, a disciple of such a notable guru as Paramasivendra Sarasvatī, is very much alive. Still, his work is eclipsed effectively by a plagiarized compilation that borrows substantially from him. Tirumala’s Śaṅkarābhyudaya is disregarded so totally that only one incomplete manuscript of his work survives. Dhanapatisūrin also remains quite unaware of it, although he is sufficiently interested in the hagio graphic literature to write commentaries on two different texts, the Mādhavīya and the Śaṅkaravijaya Sara.
In my opinion, this could have only happened via a fantastic conspiracy on the part of this Mādhava Bhatta and the Śr̥ṅgēri maṭha, and also perhaps Sadananda and Dhanapatisūrin, against Paramasivendra Sarasvatī and his disciples. However, every traditional Advaitin, including the recent heads of the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha, has always held Paramasivendra and his disciple, Sadāśiva Brahmendra, in extremely high regard. On the other hand, the date claimed by the Kāñcī maṭha for Paramasivendra is quite impossible, while Tirumala’s text has remained unnoticed even by Kāñcī maṭha panditas. Antarkar’s contention that it is a source for the Mādhavīya depends crucially upon his faulty dating; the error of a century creates serious problems for his argument that this Śaṅkarābhyudaya is an old text and a source for the Mādhavīya.
Antarkar does not investigate the sole manuscript of this work and its history, and he does not try to authenticate his transcript. He says that the transcript was full of mistakes and gaps that he has had to correct as much as possible. Did an inferior scribe put together the bad transcript or even the original manuscript using select verses from the Mādhavīya? This question is as valid as the accusa tions that have been made the other way round and would indeed be considered seriously by anyone interested in making a fair comparison of the two works. Antarkar always uncritically accepts a specific set of sources, while a bad transcript would have created its own biases. His footnotes claim to give better readings’ than the transcript wherever possible. Having already decided that this work is prior to the Mādhavīya, has he emended Tirumala’s Śaṅkarābhyudaya by referring to corresponding verses in the Mādhavīya? In this context, note Antarkar’s (1972: 13) claim that only Madhava relates a story in which Śaṅkara reinterprets Jaimini’s Mīmāmsā Sūtras to Maṇḍana Miśra at the end of their famous debate, whereas Tirumala does not. Interestingly enough, chapter 5 of his own edition of Tirumala’s work begins with precisely such a story, using identical verses. Either his comparison of these two texts is faulty, or his edition of Tirumala’s text has itself borrowed this story from the Madhavīya. Given that the Madhavīya was well known for at least two centuries before Antarkar published Tirumala’s work, the opposite conclusion, that is, that the Śaṅkarābhyudaya attributed to Tirumala Diksita has effectively borrowed from the Mādhavīya, remains a serious possibility to be investigated.
The Śaṅkarābhyudaya of Rājacūdāmani Diksita
Unlike Vyāsācala and Tirumala dīkṣita, who are not known for any other poetic works, Rājacūḍāmaṇi Diksita is a well-known poet from the seventeenth century. His śankarābhyudaya has been published by S. V. Radhakrishna Śāstri (1986: iv), who says that the Adyar Library’s manuscript of this poem contains six chapters with a commentary. The published text has eight chapters, with the seventh and eighth chapters taken from a Kāñcī maṭha manuscript. Antarkar (1972: 5-8) enumerates one hundred and twenty-five verses in common between this work and the Mādhavīya. Aiyar and Venkataraman (1977: 46) point out one hundred forty-nine verses in common, while Radhakrishna Śāstri (1986: iv) says that there are one hundred sixty-seven such verses. The seventh chapter of this text describes a Sarvajñapīṭha at Kāñcīpuram, and the last verse of the eighth chapter says that Śaṅkara experienced brahmānanda (supreme bliss) by worshipping the goddess Kāmeśvari at kañcīpuram. Radhakrishna Śāstri (1986: 110) and Rama Śāstri (1976: 61) interpret this to mean that Śaṅkara spent his last days in Kāñcīpuram, where he established a maṭha.82 This reads too much into this verse. An experience of brahmānanda does not imply physical death, especially for Advaita Vedānta, which lays great emphasis on jīvanmukti (living liberation). The text contains no references to maṭhas and also does not explic itly describe Śaṅkara’s last days.
The most outstanding feature of this text is its structure. The first four chapters give most of the commonly known legends of Śaṅkara’s life, with events arranged according to major themes. That they are not necessarily in chronological order is seen by the frequent use of the word kadācana (at some time). The first chapter describes the poet, his family, his guru, Girvāṇendra Sarasvatī, and the events from Śaṅkara’s birth to his initiation into saṁnyāsa and composition of various works. The second chapter describes all the impor tant people in Śaṅkara’s life, including Vyāsa, Kumārila Bhatta, and the disciples Padmapāda and Sureśvara, and their compositions. In the third chapter, the important themes are fire and Śaṅkara’s memory. When his mother passes away, Śaṅkara overrules the objections of his relatives and produces fire for the cremation through the power of a mantra. Padmapāda reports that his manuscript of the Pañcapādika was burnt in a fire orchestrated by an uncle. Śaṅkara relies on his memory to restore the portion that he had read earlier. He similarly restores the plays of the king, Rājaśekhara, which had been lost in another fire. Śaṅkara visits the village of Sivavallī, where the air is filled with smoke from the sacrificial fires of Brāhmaṇas. Here Hastāmalaka becomes his disciple. When Śaṅkara suffers from a disease caused by excess body heat, the devoted disciple, Toṭaka, takes care of him. The fourth chapter has brief descriptions of Śaṅkara’s travels through the Kerala and Karnataka regions. It also includes many other common legends, such as the miraculous resurrection of a dead boy, Śaṅkara’s encounter with a Kāpālika whose plan to use him as a sacrificial victim is thwarted by Padmapada, and Śaṅkara’s animating the dead body of a king with his yogic powers. It is noteworthy that all the verses common to the Mādhavīya and this Śaṅkarābhyudaya are found in the approxi mately two hundred and fifty verses of the first four chapters.
The last four chapters give detailed descriptions of Śaṅkara’s pilgrimage tours in the Tamil region and his composition of hymns to various deities. Of the forty-nine verses in the fifth chapter, twenty-four constitute a hymn to Padmanabha at Anantaśayana (Trivandrum?) and twenty verses are in praise of Minākṣi-Sundareśvara at Madurai. The sixth chapter describes Rāmeśvaram, with forty-two out of forty-five verses devoted to the legend of Rāma. The seventh chapter describes temples on the banks of the Kaveri and contains hymns to Śrīrangam, Mannārgudi, Cidambaram, Aruṇācala, and Kāñcīpuram. Along the way, the ācārya visits the poet’s ancestral home on the banks of the river Pinākini and travels through the poet’s father’s village. Finally, he ascends a Sarvajñapīṭha at Kāñcīpuram and composes verses based on the fifteen-syllable Śrīvidyā-mantra and a related six-syllable mantra.83 The eighth chapter concen trates entirely on the description of the śricakra and has hymns in praise of its associated deities. However, most of these verses are incomplete and also seem to have doubtful readings, according to Radhakrishna Śāstri’s footnotes. This binary structure of the text, with a clear demarcation of content, is remarkable. The first four chapters rearrange various commonly known legends of Sarkara’s life in a thematic manner, while the last four chapters introduce us to various hymns in the guise of Śaṅkara’s pilgrimage tour. In the first chapter, Rājacūḍāmaṇi dīkṣita salutes Gīrvānendra Sarasvatī with the words Paryāya Sarkarācārya, that is, as equivalent to Śaṅkarācārya. Girvāṇendra is the author of a commentary on the Prapancasāra, a mantraśāstra text traditionally attributed to Śaṅkara. Rājacūdāmani also mentions this in his salutation. The Prapanca sāra is again given a very prominent place in the poet’s list of Śaṅkara’s compo sitions. The hymns in the last two chapters are predominantly associated with mantraśāstra. It is quite possible that these and the other hymns in the last four chapters are compositions of Girvāṇendra but attributed by the poet to Śaṅkara. When Rājacūḍāmaṇi tells us that the acārya visited his ancestral home and his father’s village, it is far more likely that this was some Śaṅkarācārya who lived closer to his own times rather than the original Śaṅkara. This leads me to believe that Rājacūdamani’s Śaṅkarābhyudaya presents us with a composite figure of Śaṅkara, with the first four chapters condensing Śaṅkara’s traditional hagiography and the last four chapters presenting pilgrimage tours and compositions of a later personality, most probably Girvāṇendra Sarasvatī.
The image of Śaṅkara preserved in this text also contrasts very significantly with that in the Mādhavīya. In the Śaṅkarābhyudaya, philosophical debates are described in a cursory manner, and the emphasis is on Śaṅkara as an adept in mantraśāstra and as a composer of hymns. Mādhavīya has its share of such hymns but mainly focuses on Śaṅkara’s defense of Advaita against Bhedābheda Vedānta and Pūrva Mimāṁsā. Taking into account the fact that debates with these two specific schools belong to an earlier period in the history of Advaita, Madhavīya emerges as the comparatively older text. The first four chapters of the Śaṅkarābhyudaya seem indebted to an earlier, fully developed hagiography. There is nothing to suggest that this earlier text is not the Madhavīya. This is diametrically opposed to Antarkar’s conclusion about these texts.
Antarkar’s (1972: 5–8) argument that more elaborate details of some legends indicate the late date of a text is neither conclusive nor made consistently. For example, Rājacūḍāmaṇi briefly mentions the composition of Pañcapādikā and Naiṣkarmyasiddhi in his second chapter, whereas Mādhava gives a detailed account of these two texts in his thirteenth chapter. The 1954 Vyasacalīya also gives the same kind of detail, with many verses identical to those in Mādhavīya. However, Antarkar still thinks that the Vyāsācaliya was composed in the fifteenth century, that is, two centuries before Rājacūḍāmaṇi wrote his Śaṅkarābhyudaya. If the 1954 Vyāsācalīya is older than this Śaṅkarābhyudaya, in spite of a relatively greater degree of elaboration, there is no valid reason to think that a similar degree of elaboration in the Mādhavīya indicates a late date.
The Patañjalicarita of Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita
Rāmabhadra dīkṣita is a well-known poet from the seventeenth century. Kāñcī maṭha texts cite his Patañjalicarita (1934) as a valuable authority on the lives of Gauḍapāda, Govinda, and Śaṅkara, but Mahadevan (1960: 12-13) takes the safe route and does not rely on it. Antarkar (1972: 5-8) finds eleven verses in common between the last chapter of this work and the Madhavīya. Aiyar and Venkataraman (1977: 44-45) point out fifteen such verses and argue for borrowing in the opposite direction. The last chapter of this text seems to identify Govinda, Sarkara’s guru, with one Candragupta. Aiyar and Venkataraman (1977: 37) comment that Candragupta does not sound like the name of a Brāhmaṇa. In response, Candraśekharendra Sarasvatī (1980: 11-13), Radhakrishna Śāstri (1986: 111-16), and Rama Śāstri (1976: 1-5) give the name not as Candragupta, but as Candraśarmā. In any case, as the title Patañjalicarita suggests, Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita is concerned mainly with Patañjali and Bharthari, the notable grammarians. Indeed, it is open to question whether the last chapter is really a part of Rāmabhadra’s original Patañjalicarita. It does not naturally fit in with the preceding chapters in this poem, and it is quite unclear what Govinda and Śaṅkara have to do with Patañjali and Bhartshari. Śaṅkara is mentioned very briefly, in roughly seventy verses in the last chapter, with only eleven (or fifteen) verses in common with Mādhava’s text. The possibility that this chapter does not originally belong to the Patañjalicarita cannot be ruled out, but it is also possible that Rāmabhadra dīkṣita himself borrowed a small number of verses from Mādhava.
A reappraisal of the Mādhavīya
In summary, the argument that the Mādhavīya borrows from other texts simply ignores the fact that its supposed source texts present numerous insurmountable problems. The Śaṅkarābhyudaya of Tirumala dīkṣita and the published text of the Śaṅkaravijaya of Vyāsācala account for roughly 90 percent of the verses that the Madhavīya is said to have borrowed, and, significantly enough, these two texts give rise to the most severe doubts about their origins. It is also not clear that a greater elaboration of stories indicates a later date because a later author can choose either to build upon or to condense earlier accounts. Rājacūļā maṇi’s Śaṅkarābhyudaya may represent the latter case. A more basic issue to be clarified is the number of common verses found in the Madhavīya as compared to the other texts. Completely different counts are given by Antarkar and by sources from Śr̥ṅgeri and Kāñcī maṭhas with respect to the texts of Vyāsācala, Rājacūđāmaṇi, and Rāmabhadra. Antarkar’s list of common verses in Tirumala’s Śaṅkarābhyudaya is faulty, but no pandita from either maṭha has noticed this text. The two Bhagavatpâdasaptati texts claimed by Rama Śāstri do not seem to have ever been published. While Kāñcī maṭha panditas make explicit claims, Antarkar (1972: 20–23) insinuates a systematic conspiracy behind the production and popularization of a plagiarized Śaṅkaravijaya on the part of Mādhava Bhatṭa and/or the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha. It is worth reiterating that complete manuscripts of the Mādhavīya are available from many places, as admitted by Antarkar himself, whereas those of the claimed source texts are relatively scarce. Thus, the claim is that Mādhava Bhatta and/or the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha prepared a Mādhavīya text by borrowing extensively from a number of other texts, successfully attributed it to Vidyāraṇya, arranged for it to be repeatedly copied and widely distributed, and effectively suppressed the circulation of its sources. This does not seem very likely. It would be equally or more probable that these other texts have borrowed from the Mādhavīya.
Tapasyānanda (1980: ix-xv) dismisses the Kāñcī maṭha’s arguments against the Madhavīya as ‘scurrilous criticism’ and ‘bazaar gossip.’ He takes the stance that Madhava is Vidyāraṇya and that it is a literary feature of Vidyāraṇya’s undisputed works to quote other authors without specific attribution. This argument ultimately goes nowhere, as Vidyāraṇya’s date is undoubtedly in the fourteenth century, while the two Śaṅkarābhyudayas and the Patañjalicarita come from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even Vidyāraṇya could not have anonymously reproduced verses from texts written three or four centuries after him. Moreover, anonymous quotation is not just characteristic of Vidyāraṇya; most classical Sanskrit texts make quotations without specific attributions, having been written for a specific audience that is expected to be knowledgeable. If the Madhavīya were indeed by Vidyāraṇya, the contention of Śr̥ṅgēri followers regarding the direction of borrowing would be vindicated. However, Tapasyananda does not seem to have done a detailed investigation of the texts attributed to Vyāsācala and Tirumala. Thus, the problem of the common verses in these texts admits of no easy solutions. Antarkar’s conclusions about the direction of borrowing are vitiated by his faulty evaluations of the other texts, a result of his undeniable bias toward one particular maṭha’s sources.
Tapasyānanda also offers a stronger defense, praising the value of Madhavīya as a hagiography. He highlights the depth of philosophical acumen found in its description of Śaṅkara’s debates and the author’s deep familiarity with all Hindu philosophical doctrines. This is definitely the most important feature of the text. In his descriptions of Śaṅkara’s debates with Maṇḍana and Bhāskara, Mādhava presents a fine defense of Śaṅkaran Advaita against other kinds of Vedānta and Mimāmsā. Among the available hagiographies, this text gives the best account of the philosophical and religious background of early Advaita, which may account for its great popularity within the tradition. Mādhava even mentions Vācaspati Miśra as a future rebirth of Sureśvara, owing to prārabdha karma (karma that has already begun to fructify), so that Sureśvara’s thwarted desire to comment on the Brahmasūtrabhāṣya gets fulfilled in a future life through the composition of the Bhāmati. One should also note that in spite of Mādhava’s anachronisms, independent evidence more or less confirms his description of Kumārila, Bhāskara, and Maṇḍana as Śaṅkara’s contemporaries.
Seen in proper context, the Mādhavīya is neither partial to Śr̥ṅgēri or to the other āmnāya maṭhas nor biased against Kāñcī. All Śaṅkaravijaya texts that describe maṭhas mention Śr̥ṅgeri and connect it with the story of Śaṅkara’s debate with Maṇḍana Miśra, alias Visvarūpa. The main legend is that Maṇḍana’s wife, Bhāratī, was so learned that she was considered an incarnation of the goddess Sarasvatī. She was the referee at this debate, and after her husband lost to Śaṅkara, a temple was established in her name at Śr̥ṅgeri. Some version of this story is found in all the Śaṅkaravijaya texts, and the Madhavīya (10.71) is no exception. 87 Chapter 12 of the Madhavīya describes Śr̥ṅgeri in a total of six verses (12.64–69) and proceeds to narrate other traditions about śankara’s disciples. If some staunch Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha follower had put together this text as late as the seventeenth or eighteenth century, one might expect him to have taken the opportunity to introduce at least some of the other legends specific to Śrīgeri into this chapter. On the contrary, after briefly mentioning Śr̥ṅgeri in chapter 12, Madhavīya (14.168) implies that Śaṅkara had already left the place. Dvārakā and Badrināth are mentioned along Śaṅkara’s travel route (Mādhavīya 15.73–75, 16.93–94), but Puri is not. Kāñcī is mentioned once in a description of Padmapada’s pilgrimage (Mādhavīya 14.59-61) and again with respect to Śaṅkara’s reform of the Tantric worship at its Devi temple (15.4–5). Finally, Mādhava does not mention how many maṭhas were established by Śaṅkara. He provides only a general description, implying aśramas at Śr̥ṅgeri and other places.
It might be objected that this text is indeed partial to Śr̥ṅgēri, singling it out as the site of a Śaṅkaran institution. However, this needs to be compared with what is found in other texts. Cidvilāsa’s Śaṅkaravijaya Vilasa (Antarkar 1973) devotes three entire chapters to a description of Śr̥ṅgēri and the establishment of the maṭha and the Śāradā temple at that place. Cidvilāsa also devotes one chapter each to the āmnāya maṭhas at Dvārakā, Puri, and Badrināth. He describes the consecration of a śrīcakra at Kāñcīpuram, where he also places the Sarvajña pīṭha, but he does not mention the establishment of a maṭha in that city.89 Thus, when Cidvilāsa’s text was written, the four āmnāya maṭha tradition seems to have been undisputed but that of a Sarvajñapīṭha at Kāñcī must have been current. Interestingly, texts that place the Sarvajñapīṭha at Kāśmīra do not mention a maṭha there. One must therefore distinguish between a maṭha established by Śaṅkara and the tradition of a preexisting Sarvajsapīṭha. Even the Kāñcī maṭha’s Suṣamā and chapter 63 in all editions of Anantānandagiri’s Śaṅkaravijaya explicitly mention that Śaṅkara and his disciples stayed at Śr̥ṅgēri for twelve years. This is a widespread oral tradition, but Mādhava does not mention it. Thus, no account of monastic institutions seems to find it possible to eliminate a reference to Śr̥ṅgeri. Whoever its author may be, the Madhavīya is not more partial to Śr̥ṅgeri than these other texts. It is also not very likely that all the kirtanakāras and preachers who have traditionally used this text are especially close to the Śr̥ṅgēri maṭha, to the exclusion of all other religious institutions. The simple fact seems to be that of the numerous Śaṅkaravijaya texts with all their variant traditions, the Madhavīya and its traditions have been most widely accepted. It is in this perspective that one must view the endorsement of the Madhavīya by the Śr̥ṅgēri maṭha and other Daśanāmi institutions, while only the Kāñcī maṭha rejects this text.
The author of the Mādhavīya explicitly informs us, in his very first verse, that he has relied upon a Prācīna Śaṅkarajaya. However, many other texts have come to be identified as his sources, without investigating whether these other texts are themselves indebted to this putatively older text. It should also be investigated whether the texts claimed as sources of the Mādhavīya have borrowed from one another. An Ur-Śaṅkaravijaya may have been only an oral account, growing variously in time and branching into different versions. In particular, the two texts attributed to Madhava and Vyāsācala may represent different written redactions of this text, as they share the greatest amount of material, while Rājacūļāmaṇi’s text may be a condensation of such an older account. My discussion of these texts has been largely exploratory, so that an independent, impartial, rigorous, and comparative textual analysis still remains to be done.
TEXTUAL TRADITIONS AND MODERN RESEARCH
All hagiographic texts locate Śaṅkara’s birth in Kerala, except for the earlier editions of Anantānandagiri’s text that mention Cidambaram. A few texts say nothing at all about the establishment of maṭhas. Mādhava provides only a generic statement about monastic institutions, but Cidvilāsa explicitly mentions all four āmnāya maṭhas. Both Cidvilāsa and Madhava place śankara’s last days in the Himālayas, agreeing with other Daśanāmī traditions (Giri 1976; Sarkar 1946). The earlier editions of Anantānandagiri mention a maṭha only at Śr̥ṅgeri, but the 1971 Madras edition mentions a maṭha near Śr̥ṅgēri and another at Kāñcīpuram. All editions of Anantānandagiri’s text are silent about the Sarvajñapīṭha, which is in Kāśmīra according to the Mādhavīya and the 1954 Vyāsācalīya but in Kāñcī according to the texts of Cidvilāsa and Rājacūdāmani. In this context, Rājacūļāmaṇi Dīksita’s reference to the Prapañcasāra and his salutation of Girvāṇendra Sarasvatī, his guru, as a Paryāya Śaṅkarācārya are notable. That the first verse of Prapañcasāra salutes the goddess Śāradā is usually explained by the tradition that Śāradā is the presiding goddess in Kāśmīra, where Śaṅkara ascended the Sarvajñapīṭha (Pande 1994). Therefore, the older Kāśmīra Sarvajñapīṭha tradition is perhaps to be traced to the author of Prapancasāra. However, while Gīrvāṇendra, the teacher, wrote a commentary on Prapancasāra, Rājacūdāmani, the disciple, is totally silent about Kāśmīra. This fits in with my hypothesis that the last four chapters of the Śaṅkarābhyudaya refer to Gīrvāṇendra Sarasvatī or some other guru in his immediate lineage. One of these later gurus must have given rise to a Kāñcī Sarvajñapīṭha tradition, which is recounted by Rājacūḍāmaṇi. Under this recon struction, Cidvilāsa, who places the Sarvajñapīṭha at Kāñcī, may have lived in the seventeenth century or later.
The two Sarvajñapīṭha traditions are conflated in Govindanātha’s Keraliya Śaṅkaravijaya, usually dated to the seventeenth century (Antarkar 1992a). This text seems to identify Kāñcīpuram with Kāśmīra and the goddess Kāmākṣī, usually considered to be a form of Pārvati, with Vāgdevi and Bhāratī, which are names of Sarasvatī. An identification of Kāñcī (a pura) with Kāśmīra (a deśa) can be easily disregarded, but it should be noted that the goddess Śāradā of the Kāśmīra Sarvajñapīṭha is also a form of Sarasvatī. The Kāśmīra Sarvajñapīṭha tradition may have been already well known, but the Kāñcī Sarvajñapīṭha tradition must have been gaining strength; this author acknowledges both in his own way." Interestingly, Govindanātha holds that Śaṅkara finally returned to Trichûr in Kerala and passed away there. Evidently he wants to complete the circle, so that Sarkara’s last days are spent at the same place where his parents first prayed for his birth. It seems clear that placing the Sarvajsapīṭha in the south significantly enhances his narrative of Śaṅkara’s return to Trichūr towards the end of his life.
Rama Śāstri (1976: 58-59) builds imaginatively upon Govindanātha’s account of the Sarvajñapīṭha and holds that Kāñcīpuram is known as “South Kāśmīra,’ a name that is unheard of in any other source. However, he dismisses the story of Śaṅkara’s last days in Trichūr as arising out of too much ’local patriotism’ on Govindanātha’s part. This may be so, but he relies on this text quite selectively; his criticism of Govindanātha can also be applied to Rama Śāstri himself, as his brand of local patriotism’ extends only to Kāñcīpuram. Thus, he relies on the Kāñcī maṭha’s Suṣamā and claims that Govindanātha’s Śaṅkarācāryacarita has six additional verses. These say that after ascending the Sarvajñapīṭha, Śaṅkara established a maṭha at Kāñcī, appointed Sureśvara as its head, installed a yogaliṅga, and spent his last days there. However, these six verses are not found in any manuscript of Govindanatha’s text (Antarkar 1992a: 58) and contradict its account of Śaṅkara’s last days in Trichūr. The Śaṅkarācāryacarita is also silent about the establishment of maṭhas. Clearly, different traditions about the same place do not necessarily go together in the textual sources (Table 1), while other traditions have little textual support. Śaṅkara is also claimed to have established the Karavīrapīṭha near Kolhāpur in Maharashtra and to have passed away there (Rama 1989: 197, 478). Yet another tradition places his last days at a Dattatreyapīṭha in Māhūr in Maharashtra (Tapasyānanda 1980: xxxiii). Thus, a number of places claim the honor of being Sarkara’s final destination, but only the Himālayas and Kāñcīpuram are well known in this context nowadays. Unlike Kāñcīpuram, there are no currently influential maṭhas pressing for the claims of Trichūr, Kolhāpur, and Māhūr.
The great visibility of a few specific traditions among a number of different variants creates many problems for modern academic studies of Advaita Vedānta and its teachers. Mahadevan and Veezhinathan are self-professed followers of the Kāñcī maṭha. Their 1971 edition of Anantānandagiri’s text is basically a Kāñcī maṭha publication, but Mahadevan seems to have retained some independence in his earlier works. In a historical account of Śaṅkara and his disciples, Potter (1981: 17) associates Sureśvara especially with Kāñcīpuram, the only sources for which are the 1971 Anantānandagiriya edition and other Kāñcī publications. In a separate introduction to an account of Sureśvara’s works, Potter (1981: 420) mentions that Sureśvara was given control over all the maṭhas.” All sources for this claim can be traced to the Kāñcī maṭha’s Suṣamā, according to which Sureśvara was not a paramahamsa saṁnyāsin (highest order of monks); he was not qualified for becoming the head of any maṭha and was therefore asked to supervise all of them. While the claim that Sureśvara was not a paramahamsa saṁnyasin is certainly unique, it is mystifying how this supposed non paramahamsa status disqualified him for direct charge of any maṭha while simultaneously giving him effective control over all of them. Suṣamā also insists that Śaṅkara appointed one Pịthvīdhara at Śr̥ṅgeri and Sarvajñātman at Kañci, both under the tutelage of Sureśvara. Sarvajñātman is claimed to have become Śaṅkara’s direct disciple, but after Śaṅkara passed away, Sureśvara was supposedly in charge of Sarvajñātman’s education. However, Sureśvara is said to have left Sarvajñātman at Kāñcī and gone to Śr̥ṅgeri (Aiyer and Śāstri 1962).
Table 1. Major Textual Traditions
| Source | Birth-place | Last Days | Sarvajñapīṭha | maṭhas |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Daśanāmī traditions (Giri 1976; Sarkar 1946) | Kālaṭi | Himalayas | Kāśmīra | Śr̥ṅgeri, Dvārakā, Puri, Badrinath |
| Madhava | Kālaṭi | Himalayas | Kāśmīra | Śr̥ṅgeri and other places |
| Cidvilāsa | Kālaṭi | Himalayas | Kāñcīpuram | Śr̥ṅgeri, Dvārakā, Purī, Badrināth |
| Govindanātha | Kālaṭi | Trichur | Kāñcīpuram and/or Kāśmīra | - |
| Rājacūḍāmaṇi | Kālaṭi | ? | Kāñcīpuram | - |
| Anantānandagiri (1868, 1881, 1982) | Cidambaram | ? | - | Śr̥ṅgeri |
| Anantānandagini (Veezhinathan 1971) | Kālaṭi | Kāñcīpuram | - | near Śr̥ṅgeri, Kāñcīpuram |
| Guruvaṁśakāvya (Śr̥ṅgeri text) | Kālaṭi | Dattatreya cave (location?) | Kāśmīra | Śr̥ṅgeri, Dvārakā, Puri, Badrinath |
| Gururatnamālā, Suṣamā (Kāñcī texts) | Kālaṭi | Kāñcīpuram | Kāñcīpuram | Śr̥ṅgeri, Dvārakā, Purī, Badrināth, Kāñcīpuram |
Notes:
- A dash in a column indicates that the text says nothing about the corresponding category.
- A question mark leaves open a possibility that the corresponding text may be incomplete.
This leaves unexplained both Pṣthvīdhara’s role at Śr̥ṅgeri and Sureśvara’s role at the other three maṭhas while effectively conceding the Śr̥ṅgēri tradition about Sureśvara. Although Veezhinathan gives all these stories in his 1972 edition of Sarvajñātman’s Samksepa Sārīraka, his 1971 Anantānandagiriya edition says nothing about Pịthvīdhara or Sarvajñātman and claims Sureśvara solely for the Kāñcī maṭha, assigning Padmapāda to Śr̥ṅgeri.
Cenkner (1983) talks of the five Vidyāpīṭhas at Śr̥ṅgeri, Dvārakā, Puri, Badrināth, and Kāñcī, but he discusses Śr̥ṅgeri and Kāñcī more than the other three. When he notes that a reconstruction of a critical and definitive history embracing all five centers is quite improbable, Cenkner does not seem to realize that this is precisely because of the nature of the Kāñcī maṭha’s claims. One can have either what he calls the more inclusive tradition of the Kāñcī maṭha or a definitive and critical historical reconstruction, but not both, Clearly, the Kāñcī maṭha has been, and is currently, in direct competition with the Śr̥ṅgēri maṭha for being considered the most important center of the Śaṅkaran tradition in southern India. In the process, a number of claims and counterclaims have been made that have also changed with time. Śr̥ṅgēri has the benefit of a recorded history that is more than six centuries old and the support of old Daśanāmi tradition, while all available evidence indicates that Kāñcī is a comparatively recent institution. Cenkner seems to be highly influenced by the Kāñcī maṭha’s contemporary image, to the point that a major portion of his work reads like an apologetic on its behalf. Although he is aware of the controversy that has surrounded the Kāñcī maṭha throughout its known history, he accepts most of its claims. This comes at the expense of accuracy in reporting, even with respect to events in recent history. For example, he says that the succession in Puri, Dvārakā, and Śr̥ṅgeri have all been challenged recently (Cenkner 1983: 110). He is right about Puri and Dvārakā, but not about Śr̥ṅgeri. His source for this statement is a Kāñcī maṭha publication (Aiyer and Śāstri 1962: 188) that talks about a succession dispute not at Śr̥ṅgēri but at the Kūḍali maha. Surely, Cenkner has to be aware of the Kāñcī claim that Kūḍali is the parent of Śr̥ṅgēri, as this has been repeated many times by his sources. He seems to be thoroughly confused by the complicated nature of the inter-maṭha rivalries, but much of his confusion originates from his uncritical acceptance of all the Kāñcī maṭha’s claims about itself and about others. Another problem is that Cenkner does not seem to pay the same attention to the other maṭhas as compared to Kāñcīpuram. Thus, he is strangely silent about the ongoing succession controversy at Badrināth and conveys the impression that this seat is undisputed. The political connections of all the rival contenders, and the relationship of one faction with Maharṣi Mahesa Yogi (Transcendental Meditation), have been widely known for over four decades now. Pande (1994) discusses the Śaṅkaravijaya texts, maṭha traditions, and related literature in some detail. He mentions that only the Śr̥ṅgēri records and one other text are consistent with internal evidence from Śaṅkara’s undisputed works. Pande also differs from Antarkar’s analysis of the Mādhavīya and other texts and allows the possibility that the borrowing may be in the opposite direction. However, although he says that maṭha traditions need to be viewed critically, his analysis is not very critical at all. He tries to accept all the historical claims of the maṭhas that are currently well known. Thus, he talks of five āmnāya maṭhas, whereas the Daśanāmi sources are quite specific about the number four. Moreover, he ignores the Kolhāpur Karavīrapīṭha and the Vāraṇāsi Sumerupīṭha, which have also been candidates for “fifth maṭha’ status. He describes Indra-Sarasvatī as an eleventh-name suffix, although the very word Daśanāmi refers to the ten (daśa) accepted names (nāma), Sarasvatī being one of these ten. Like Antarkar, Pande also accepts the Kāñcī maṭha’s claim to Anandagiri, the sīkākāra, and his guru, Śuddhānanda, in its lineage. Neither of these scholars seeks to compare the Kāñcī list with independent, external sources, and both seem to be unaware of the Dvārakā maṭha’s claim to Śuddhānanda and Anandagiri, Pande claims to have studied the traditions of all the maṭhas, but surely the Dvārakā tradition deserves an equal consideration, if not more, compared to that of Kāñcī. He also accepts an early twelfth-century date given by a Kāñcī maṭha follower for a copper-plate inscription from Tamilnadu and holds that this is the earliest available independent evidence for any Śaṅkarite institution. This date for the inscription is highly problematic, as neutral scholars with no stakes in the maṭha controversies have given dates in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. There is no indication that the maṭha mentioned in it belonged to the Advaita tradition. Moreover, the language of the inscription leads to legitimate questions about the identities of the donor and donee of the gift that it records. * Pande seems overly anxious to project a unified face for all the currently famous maṭhas, but this comes at the cost of neglecting other traditions such as those of the Dvārakā maṭha. In postulating a close connection between Śr̥ṅgeri and Kāñcī in Śaṅkara’s times, Pande is indulging in unnecessary speculation. There has indeed been some connection between the two centers, especially over the last two centuries, but this cannot be traced to Śaṅkara’s own times.
RELATING HAGIOGRAPHY TO HISTORY
Studies on Śaṅkara’s hagiography have hitherto concentrated mainly on the mythic paradigms employed in these texts and have not tried to relate the texts to the post-Śaṅkaran Advaita tradition. Lorenzen (1983) sees the Śaṅkaravijaya texts, especially the Mādhavīya, as belonging to a late genre in which Śaṅkara is apotheosized into an incarnation of Siva, following a Vaiṣṇava conception of avatāra. However, it should be noted that even Sureśvara and Padmapāda compare Śaṅkara to Siva in their salutation verses in Naiṣkarmyasiddhi and Pañcapādikā. An avatāra conception is not explicit here, but the notion that Śaṅkara was an incarnation of Siva may have crystallized over a period of time and later been amplified into a full-fledged account in the hagiographic texts. William Sax (2000) notes the late dates of the important hagiographic texts and postulates that Śaṅkara’s hagiographies perhaps emulate the historical accounts of the pilgrimage journeys of late Vaiṣṇava leaders, such as Mādhva, Vallabha, and Caitanya. On the other hand, by the time these texts were composed,
Śaṅkarācārya’ had already become a title for significant Advaita gurus and for heads of Advaita monastic institutions. It was no longer the name of a single historical person. It should also be noted that the more scholastic focus on Śaṅkara as a composer of bhāṣyas is limited to the core of the monastic tradition. In the popular perception, Śaṅkara’s fame has more to do with his reputation as a religious leader who harmonized the major Hindu traditions, visited various temples, and composed hymns. Indeed, Rājacūļāmaṇi Diksita’s Śaṅkarābhyudaya and Govindanātha’s Keraliya Śaṅkaravijaya present to us only this ‘popular’ Śaṅkara. Many of these tours and hymns are probably attributable to the later titular Śaṅkarācāryas. With an increase in the number of maṭhas, the number of Śaṅkarācāryas and the legends associated with this title would have correspondingly increased. Thus, it is very likely that each text invests Śaṅkara with a different composite personality, with each later author drawing upon legends associated with those whom he himself regarded as titular śankarācāryas. This would account for the many variant textual accounts of Śaṅkara’s life. Anantānandagiri’s Śaṅkara was probably someone who was bom at Cidambaram, and Govindanātha’s Śaṅkarācārya must have been someone who passed away at Trichūr. The Kāñcī Sarvajñapīṭha may be associated with Girvānendra Sarasvatī, whom Rājacūḍāmaṇi explicitly salutes as a Śaṅkarācārya. However, Girvāṇendra’s own maṭha must have been elsewhere, as he is not listed in the Kāñcī maṭha’s lineage. By the same reasoning, one may perhaps relate the Kāśmīra Sarvajñapīṭha in Mādhava’s text to Vidyā Tirtha (Vidyā śankara) of Śr̥ṅgeri, whom Madhava salutes at the beginning of his text. In both cases, the geographical locus of a Sarvajñapīṭha needs to be distinguished from that of a maṭha.
There are other interesting aspects of these texts that remain to be explored. Bruce Lincoln (1989) points out that historical facts are discernible within the generic ahistorical patterns of myth and that one can deduce an author’s conception of his hagiographic text as a record of history and as a political tool. Unlike other Hindu traditions that have strong associations with specific regions and communities, the Śaṅkaran tradition is widespread all over India. This considerably complicates a comparative study of the Sarkaravijayas. Therefore, I propose to place these texts in their historical and political context based on what we know about the authors to whom they are traditionally attributed. All the currently extant Śaṅkaravijaya texts date from relatively late times and most are of southern origin. This contrasts significantly with the fact that subcom mentaries were written on Śaṅkara’s works from very early times by authors from all over the country. The earliest date that can be given to the Madhavīya, based on its traditional attribution, is the fourteenth century, while the Anantānandagiriya is an even later text. It is questionable if the text attributed to a so-called Citsukha ever existed. The lost Śaṅkaravijaya of Anandagiri, the sīkākāra, if it ever existed, would not have been older than the thirteenth century. Thus, it seems that a detailed written hagiography of Śaṅkara is a late development within the Advaita monastic tradition, In an early post-Śaṅkaran period, Advaitins may have handed down a few oral traditions that would have eventually found their way into the written hagiographies. Therefore, the common elements preserved in oral Daśanāmi accounts, maṭha traditions, and written texts most likely represent the oldest traditions about Śaṅkara. Divergent accounts can probably be related to various local developments spread over several centuries.
The earliest possible dates of the Mādhavīya and the Anantānandagiriya take us squarely to early Vijayanagara times. A brief discussion of Vijayanagara history would, therefore, place the issues raised by these texts and the contem porary maṭhas in a critical perspective. Early Vijayanagara inscriptions tell us about the Advaita maṭha at Śr̥ṅgeri and its fourteenth-century maṭhādhipatis (heads of monasteries), Bhāratī Tīrtha and Vidyāraṇya, who were also important authors in the post-Śaṅkaran Advaita tradition. Along with Vidyāśankara, their guru, they were greatly revered by the first dynasty of Vijayanagara, and royal honors were extended to them and the succeeding mashādhipatis at Śr̥ṅgeri. Such ritual honors continued to be shown by most Indian princes to the Sarkarācāryas of Śr̥ṅgeri, right up to India’s independence (K. Venkataraman 1959: 4). Thus, all the currently available hagiographic texts were written in a period when the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha was already a famous institution. This explains numerous salient features of the maṭha disputes, such as why Śr̥ṅgēri is mentioned in every textual description of maṭhas, why the other three āmnāya maṭhas endorse Śr̥ṅgeri in spite of other internal differences, and why the Kāñcī maṭha’s conflicting claims are all necessarily directed against Śr̥ṅgēri.” Perhaps the more intriguing feature of the hagiographic literature is that at least two seventeenth-century southern authors, Govindanātha and Rājacūḍāmaṇi dīkṣita, do not mention any maṭhas. This may represent an incipient southern schism, perhaps due to the decline of Vijayanagara in the late sixteenth century or due to the birth of a Kāñcī Sarvajñapīṭha tradition in the south. Cidvilāsa mentions all four amnāya maṭhas, together with the Kāñcī Sarvajñapīṭha tradition, but Govindanātha conflates the latter with the older Kāśmīra Sarvajñapīṭha tradition. These texts are probably results of attempts to bridge older traditions with a newly divergent, and possibly schismatic, tradition in the south.
This reconstruction of history is quite tentative, but it brings us back to Paul Hacker’s suggestion that it was Vidyāraṇya, not Śaṅkara, who established the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha. Hacker thinks that the tradition of four āmnāya maṭhas was an intentional act of cultural policy (“einer Art bewūßter Hindu-Kulturpolitik’) to counteract Muslim influence in southern India.”* This argument is based upon the important role played by Vidyāraṇya in the early Vijayanagara kingdom and an unquestioned attribution of the Madhavīya to Vidyāraṇya. If one were to doubt this authorship, one must also raise doubts about Vidyāraṇya’s responsi bility for such a tradition. Even so, as this Śaṅkaravijaya does not mention the number four, Hacker’s argument has very little textual evidence for it. As for other Vijayanagara records, Hermann Kulke (1985: 133–36), following Hacker’s lead, points out that the earliest inscription that explicitly mentions a maṭha at Śr̥ṅgēri dates from 1356. He describes another authentic inscription that mentions a vijayotsava (festival celebrating victory) held at Śr̥ṅgeri in 1346 and acknowledges that Vidyāraṇya’s predecessors, Vidyāśankara and Bhāratī Tirtha, were already at the place then. Because of the sparse reference to Śaṅkara in these early inscriptions, he concludes that the Śr̥ṅgeri tradition of the fourteenth century had really nothing to do with Śaṅkara himself. Kulke modifies Hacker’s comments slightly to credit Vidyāśankara, rather than Vidyāraṇya, with the establishment of the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha and the four āmnāya maṭha tradition. He proposes that the “Śr̥ṅgēri Śaṅkara tradition” provided a further legitimation to Vijayanagara’s claim to be the center of the new orthodoxy’ (Kulke 1985: 141).
There are several important considerations that are overlooked by the proposal that the amnāya maṭha tradition was born only in the fourteenth century. For example, Vidyāraṇya is credited with having established the Virūpākṣa maṭha at Hampi that continues with its own independent lineage. The proposals of Hacker and Kulke would make both Śr̥ṅgeri and Virūpākṣa maṭhas roughly equal in age. A maṭha at the capital would have been even more useful to the new royalty than the one at Śr̥ṅgeri. It is only oral tradition that takes the history of Śr̥ṅgeri back to Śaṅkara’s own times, but the fact that early Vijayanagara inscriptions regard Śr̥ṅgeri as the primary center of the tradition indicates that this maṭha had probably been functioning from earlier times. Second, a seal of Vidyāśaṅkara, dated to 1235 CE, has been found near Śr̥ṅgeri. Antonio Rigopoulos (1998: 236–37) reports that this inscription “salutes Gauḍapāda, Govinda, and Dattātreya and carries the impression of a boar.” Thus, more than a century before Vijayanagara was born, Vidyāśankara must have already been a person of sufficiently advanced age and leadership status in order to have required a seal in his name. This calls for careful reevaluation of the Vijayanagara inscriptions about Vidyāśankara, Vidyāraṇya, and the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha. Third, a vast amount of literary evidence is available to us from the works of Bhāratī Tirtha and Vidyāraṇya, namely, Adhikaraṇa Ratnamāla, Vivaraṇaprameya Saṅgraha, Jīvanmukti Viveka, Pañcadasī, and subcommentaries on Śaṅkara’s Upaniṣad bhāṣyas. These texts constitute sufficient evidence for accepting that these two authors and the institution they headed were indeed affiliated to Śaṅkaran Advaita Vedānta.
It should also be remembered that Ananda Tīrtha (Madhvācārya) began as a Daśanāmi monk, in charge of a maṭha at Uḍupi, before breaking away to form the Dvaita Vedānta tradition. His hagiographers mention debates with ‘Śaṅkara’ at Śr̥ṅgeri (Aiyangar nd: 233-36). This is perhaps only a reference to Vidyā Śaṅkara. The ekadanḍi saṁnyāsins of the Dvaita tradition continue to use Daśanāmi suffixes, particularly Tirtha, but they are not nowadays counted as Daśanāmis. As a matter of fact, the origin and growth of Dvaita Vedānta represents a major schism within the Daśanāmi monastic tradition as it existed in the thirteenth century. Thus, conflicts internal to the monastic tradition must have already created a need for Daśanāmi-Kulturpolitik, much before the need for Hindu-Kulturpolitik, in Vijayanagara times. The affiliation of the Advaitin monks to four representative maṭhas in the four regions of the country may have been a response that aimed to consolidate the saṁnyāsa tradition of Advaita. The lack of early Vijayanagara inscriptions with Śaṅkara’s name may, indeed, point to the opposite conclusion, that is, that the maṭha tradition predates the birth of the Vijayanagara kingdom. After all, any new maṭha merely pretending to have been established by Śaṅkara would have itself needed some legitimization. If a new maṭha tradition was established purely to legitimate the new royalty, there would have been significant motivation, and more than ample opportunity, to get precisely such records prepared as to create the requisite pretense of antiquity. The absence of such records may indicate merely that a preexisting Advaita institution at Śr̥ṅgeri lent its support to the new rulers and did not have to invoke Śaṅkara’s name in its Vijayanagara-era records.
Finally, one need not assume that a maṭha was anything more than a school associated with significant Advaita teachers, especially in early times. Tradition remembers four principal disciples of Śaṅkara, although only two of them, Sureśvara and Padmapāda, have significantly influenced philosophical develop ments in post-Śaṅkaran Vedānta. Even if Śaṅkara did not deliberately set out to establish maṭhas, it is likely that such institutions developed in the places associated with these four disciples and their disciples in turn, thus coming to be known as the principal centers of the Śaṅkaran tradition. If Śaṅkara’s works attracted a long line of subcommentaries between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, this could not have been possible without traditional schools where Śaṅkara’s commentaries were studied. Indeed, Śaṅkara himself must have inherited an ancient tradition of Brāhmaṇical saṁnyāsa, the scholastic output of which was primarily concerned with Upaniṣadic exegesis. This tradition was perhaps earlier affiliated with the school of Bhedābheda Vedānta, later eclipsed by the rise of Advaita Vedānta. In post-Śaṅkaran times, the same monastic tradition gave birth to the school of Dvaita Vedānta. This tradition of monas ticism needs to be correlated with the central importance given to renunciation in Śaṅkara’s thought. The relative absence of evidence for maṭhas in pre Vijayanagara times, in the form of inscriptions or other records, may be due to a number of valid reasons and need not be construed as evidence for the total absence of maṭhas in earlier times, maṭhas may have come into being gradually, or the earliest onęs may have been established as late as the fourteenth century, or the amnāya maṭha tradition may be an even later development within the tradition. Whatever role one may assign to different historical personalities in the development of the amnāya maṭhas, the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha’s traditional and historical primacy is undeniable. This places the Kāñcī maṭha’s claims in a particularly problematic position and also has direct implications for any discussion of the Śaṅkaravijayas. The attribution of the Madhavīya to Vidyāraṇya may be doubted, but neither the Kāñcī maṭha’s arguments nor Antarkar’s discussions of this text have proved that it dates from a very late period. Indeed, the Kāñcī maṭha’s claims about Śrīharṣa’s Naiṣadhiyacarita, Anantānandagiri’s Śaṅkaravijaya, the unavailable Mārkaṇḍeya Saṁhitā, and the verses not found in the Vyāsācalīya, Keraliya, and Madhavīya Śaṅkaravijayas reveal a curiously deliberate pattern of textual manipulation. Ignoring the problems associated with these texts has seriously misled Antarkar in his analysis of the Madhavīya. Thus, he essentially authenticates the Kāñcī maṭha’s claims that this is a recent text, written in order to favor the Śr̥ṅgēri maṭha. However, notwithstanding the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha’s Dakṣiṇāmnāya status, the highly diffuse nature of the monastic leadership ensures that this maṭha could not have forced other independent institutions to accept unequivocally one of its late texts. When the documented history of the Spřgeri maṭha is taken into account, it seems exceedingly naive to think that its followers waited until the eighteenth or nineteenth century before producing their own original hagiogra phies.
The fact that many variant traditions are recorded in the Śaṅkaravijayas, without having resulted in much serious controversy in the past, shows that if the claims of a text are reasonable enough, or if they seek to alter the pre existing tradition only marginally, they generate little controversy. Tensions arise only when systematic manipulations of texts are made and propagated with great intensity. This is exemplified by the Kāñcī maṭha and its claims about the Naiṣadhiyacarita, Vyāsācaliya, Keraliya, and Anantānandagiriya. Veezhinathan has clearly designed his 1971 edition of the last text as a political tool to deliberately challenge the preexisting authority of Śr̥ṅgeri within the Advaita Vedānta tradition. The only mitigating factor is that he retains its statement that Śaṅkara stayed at Śr̥ṅgeri for twelve years. The Calcutta editions of this text place Sureśvara at Śr̥ṅgeri, not at Kāñcī, and do not acknowledge any of the other unique claims about the Indra-Sarasvatī name, the yogaliṅga, and the fifth mahāvākya. The last is a highly problematic issue, representing a clear departure from mainstream Daśanāmi tradition. If Anantānandagiri’s text is to be seen as representative of the Kāñctradition (Lorenzen 1987: 64), this is largely the contribution of Mahadevan and Veezhinathan from Madras, building upon earlier efforts from Kumbhakoṇam and Kāñcīpuram. This should be viewed in the context of the relatively young age of the Kāñcī maṭha. An older institution either defines the tradition or it has otherwise already been well recognized within the tradition. Its conception of history and its political uses of hagiography belong to a more remote period in time. A newer institution probably feels a need for substantially rewriting this older hagiography, if it is to define its own unique place within the tradition. Part of this process involves rejection of some well-accepted texts (Madhavīya), along with deliberate modifications of and interpolations into other texts (Anantānandagiriya and Naiṣadhiyacarita). A natural confusion arising from the similarity of the names Anandagiri and Anantānandagiri is utilized effectively. Different strategies are adopted with respect to other obscure texts. Thus, specific verses are attributed to keraliya and Vyāsācalīya that are not found in any of the available manu scripts. Extensive quotations are made from a Mārkaṇḍeya Saṁhitā, a Br̥hat Śaṅkaravijaya attributed to Citsukha, a Prācīna text attributed to Mūkakavi, and a Śaṅkarendra Vilāsa, none of which is attested in any other source and the manuscripts of which have always been a little too conveniently ‘missing.’
This discussion should show the reader that Śaṅkara’s hagiographies are living texts, taking different forms and serving different uses at different times. It is important to note that the contemporary presence of a maṭha at a particular place is not correlated with other older traditions about that place. Nor does a textual reference to some place lend legitimacy to all the claims of a maṭha that is currently based there. Not all traditions are reported in the same texts, so that the hagiographies and the traditions of individual maṭhas have to be studied against the larger background of recorded history and other available oral accounts. Each text can be discussed on its own merits, but none of these texts can be legitimately viewed completely in isolation from the others. Independent historical evidence should be given its due importance.
In conclusion, a personal note would perhaps be appropriate. Śaṅkara’s hagiography is a fascinating topic that requires more serious analysis than it has hitherto received. In relating the hagiographic texts to the contemporary monastic institutions, I have had to severely criticize a few scholars for having treated their work as a tool for advancing the limited interests of one particular maṭha. I have also pointed out where an undue reliance on these few scholars has misled many others. In tum, some readers may suspect that I am interested only in advancing the interests of a different maṭha. However, I have tried to be as evenly critical and impartial as possible in discussing the known history of these institutions. I trust that this paper will be read in this light and not be dismissed as yet another exercise in inter-maṭha politics. My study attempts to combine my own inherited native tradition with a critical scholarly perspective. It is for an impartial reader to judge how far I have succeeded in this endeavor.
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VIDYASANKAR SUNDARESAN is an independent scholar residing in San Diego, California.
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Aiyer and Śāstri (1962) give the text of the so-called Sudhanvan grant in modern Devanāgari script. The original script of this record and the process of its decipherment are unknown. The Puri list has more than one hundred and forty names, but Dvārakā lists about seventy names. The Kāñcī list is as long as that of Dvārakā. Candraśekharendra Sarasvatī (1983) upholds a fifth-century BCE date for Śaṅkara and rejects much of standard Indian history, beginning with the identification of Megasthenes’ Sandrocottus with Candragupta of the Maurya dynasty.+++(5)+++ ↩︎
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The Śr̥ṅgēri list has thirty-six names, and its tradition gives Śaṅkara’s date as the fourteenth year of Vikramāditya. If this were to be interpreted as fourteen Vikrama era, we would get a first-century date, but it has been suggested that the actual reference may be to a seventh- or eighth-century Cālukya king of the same name. Tapasyānanda (1980: xii-xiii) quotes a letter from the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha that leaves the date and identity of this Vikramaditya open to historical analysis and interpretation. ↩︎
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Hacker is silent about the Kāñcī maṭha and only mentions the four amnāya maṭhas in a general fashion. Śr̥ṅgeri accounts acknowledge that the fourteenth century marked a turning point in the maṭha’s history, when Vidyāraṇya’s leadership transformed a forest hermitage into an influential institution with intimate connections to Vijayanagara (K. Venkataraman 1959). ↩︎
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Due to the current rivalry between Kāñcī and Srīgeri maṭhas, this might seem rather partial towards Śr̥ṅgēri. However, as noticed by Dazey (1987) in a critical discussion of the Advaita tradition, it is impossible not to characterize the Kāñcī maṭha’s claims as being highly exaggerated. Kāñcī can legitimately claim a longer history than the newly revived Badrinath maṭha. However, it should also be noted that the very impetus given to revive the Badrināth maṭha came from the memory of its old status as the Uttarāmnāya institution. Numerous other extinct maṭhas have not been revived. ↩︎
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Pande (1994) also failed to locate manuscripts of both works. He mentions another Br̥hat Śaṅkaravijaya, by one Brahmānanda Sarasvatī, which probably dates to the seventeenth or eighteenth century. ↩︎
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Suṣamā attributes four verses to Vyāsācalīya and six verses to Keralīya that are not found in the corresponding manuscripts and that also contradict other details in these works. Aiyar and Venkataraman (1977: 68–70) give a more detailed list of misquotations, attributions to unknown authors, and ‘quotations of verses not found in any of the cited sources’.+++(5)+++ ↩︎
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Tapasyānanda (1983: ix-xv) characterizes Nārāyaṇa Śāstri’s claims about manuscripts of Citsukha’s Śaṅkaravijaya as being highly unreliable. Antarkar (1960: 114) identifies Citsukha as the thirteenth-century author of the Tattva pradipikā (also called Citsukhi) and a disciple of Jñānottama. ↩︎
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‘ānandagiri-viracite brhacchankaravijaye yathā’ (As in the Br̥hat Śaṅkaravijaya, composed by Anandagiri)–Acyutarāya on Mādhavīya 15.3, followed by fifty-eight verses (Antarkar 1960: 118). ↩︎
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Veezhinathan’s footnote says, ‘iti sarvāsu matr̥kāsu’ (in all manuscripts). The 1971 edition lists manuscripts obtained from the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras, where P. P. Subrahmanya Śāstri and S. Kuppu swami Śāstri were once curators. Note that Subrahmanya Śāstri’s foreword to Kuppuswami Śāstri’s (1982: ix) edition of Maṇḍana Miśra’s Brahmasiddhi says that chapter 63 of the Anantānandagirīya mentions Sureśvara as the head of the Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha! Veezhinathan (1972) has also edited Sarvajñātman’s Samkṣepa Śāriraka; his introduction quotes his Anantānandagirīya edition and makes much of the words samipa and aśrayā in its comments about Śr̥ṅgeri. Clearly, these comments need to be viewed in the context of Kāñcī maṭha’s claim that Śr̥ṅgeri maṭha is a branch of Kūḍali maṭha, which is near Śr̥ṅgeri (samīpa). ↩︎
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The boar emblem was used by the Cālukyas of Badami (seventh through ninth centuries) and Kalyāṇa (eleventh through twelfth centuries), by the Hoysaļas in Karnataka and Tamilnadu (twelfth through thirteenth centuries), and, more recently, by the Mysore Wodeyars (seventeenth through twentieth centuries). Historically, the use of royal symbols in the Daśanāmi tradition is usually linked to Vidyāraṇya and his connection to Vijayanagara. However, the early thirteenth-century date for the seal in the name of Vidyāśankara indicates a probable prehistory to the connections between Advaita monks and royalty. Kulke (1985) seems to be unaware of this inscription, although it is documented in the Epigraphia carnatica (Rigopoulos 1998: 237). ↩︎
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In fact, Madhava’s account is perfectly consistent with the meanings of these terms. Some disciples are jealous that Śaṅkara asks Sureśvara to write a vārtika. Others are suspicious that he would misuse the opportunity and compromise the Advaita teaching, as he had been a Pūrva Mimamsaka until recently, having only converted after a tough debate. They also think that the master’s work does not need a critical vārttika and suggest that a simpler ṭīkā is sufficient. ↩︎
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*vyāsācala pramukha pūrvika pandita kṣmābhrtsambhrta uccatara kāvya taroh sugūdhāt. vidvanmadhuvrata sukhorurasāni sarvāṇyādātum artha kusumāny aham akṣamaḥ asmi’ (Vyāsācala and other earlier scholars have composed trees of poetry on earth; I am unable to extract and present all the essences of the flowers on them). This verse is said to be obtained from a Mādhavīya manuscript (numbered D 12174) at the Oriental Library, Madras. Antarkar (1972: 2) reads surīteh, instead of sugūdhāt, in the first line. This verse is different from Madhavīya 1.17, which has the words, ‘dhanyah sah vyāsācala-kavivarah’ (Blessed is the great poet, Vyāsācala). ↩︎
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Bharati Kr̥ṣṇa Tīrtha, who was originally a student at Śr̥ṅgeri, became a monk at the Dvārakā maṭha, succeeded to this seat in 1921, and moved to the Puri maṭha in 1925. In 1945, he installed Abhinava Saccidānanda Tirtha at Dvārakā, thereby putting an old succession dispute to rest. His own passing in 1960 created a succession problem at Puri, which was resolved when Niranjana deva Tirtha was installed in 1964. Meanwhile, Badrināth maṭha, also known as the Jyotirmaṭha or Joṣimaṭha, had been revived in 1941, after a hiatus of more than a century, with the support of the heads of the other three āmnāya maṭhas. The lineage of Brahmananda, who was appointed as Śaṅkarācārya of Badrināth, is traced to Śr̥ṅgeri, probably based on the affiliation of the Sarasvatī orders with this maṭha. Brahmananda Sarasvatī’s demise in 1953 resulted in a new succession dispute that still awaits resolution (for details, see http://www. ucl.ac.uk/-ucgadkw/position/shank-jyot.htm). A 1979 meeting of the heads of all four maṭhas is usually described as a historic first. There does not seem to be a history of sustained relations among these maṭhas before the twentieth century (Aiyar nd: 71–73). In 1982, after Abhinava Saccidānanda Tirtha of Dvārakā passed away, Abhinava Vidyā Tirtha of Śr̥ṅgeri installed Svarūpānanda Sarasvatī of Badrināth at Dvārakā. Svarūpānanda is officially the head of both these amnāya maṭhas now, but the Badrināth title is under dispute. ↩︎