A section from the journey

Shankara: Thou ART That

The bhakti tide had its singers; it also had its great thinkers. The first is Shankara, the master of Advaita, "not-two." He read the old line "that thou art" as plain identity: the deepest self in you is the one Reality, Brahman, with nothing between. The world of many things he called a kind of overlay, real enough for daily life but not the final truth. To wake from it is freedom.

The bhakti tide had its singers, with their lamps and their longing. But it had its thinkers too. For love this deep wanted a mind to match it, a way to say clearly what the heart already felt. Three great teachers gave it one.

Here is the lovely thing. All three built their whole philosophy by reading one short sentence, the same sentence, three different ways. We met it ages ago, in the forest age of the Upanishads. A father said it to his son: . "That thou art." Hold that line. We are about to watch three masters turn it in the light like a jewel.

The first and earliest is . His school is called , and the word tells you his whole heart. Advaita means "not-two." Whatever else is true, he says, in the end Reality is not two things. It is one.

So how does he read "that thou art"? As plainly as it can be read. The deepest you, the pure awareness at your very centre, the , is one and the same as , the single Reality behind all things. Not similar. Not joined. The same. There is nothing in between. "That" and "thou" point to one truth.

But wait, you say. The world plainly looks like many things, you and me and trees and stars. How can it all be one? Here Shankara gives his famous picture. Imagine walking at dusk and seeing a snake on the path, and freezing in fear. Then someone brings a lamp, and you see it was only a coiled rope. The snake was never there. You laid it over the rope with your own frightened mind.

The many-thing world, Shankara says, is like that. We lay it over the one Reality the way fear lays a snake over a rope. He had a careful word for that mistake of laying one thing over another. Listen to how he opens his greatest work.

"It is a matter not requiring any proof that the object and the subject, whose respective spheres are the notion of the 'Thou' (the Non-Ego) and the 'Ego,' and which are opposed to each other as much as darkness and light are, cannot be identified."

We mix up the "I" and the world, he says, as if light and darkness were the same. That mix-up has a name: , ignorance. And the world it spins, real enough to live in but not the final truth, he calls . Remember maya. We met it as a seed in the forest age. Here it grows: the world as a kind of shimmer over the one that truly is.

If that is the trouble, then freedom is not far away at all. , release, is not a place you travel to or a thing you earn. It is waking up. It is seeing the rope and laughing that you ever feared a snake. For Shankara, what frees you is not ritual and not even, finally, devotion, but knowledge, : clear seeing of what was always so. The whole of his teaching fits in a single famous half-line, which he hands us almost as a riddle to keep.

"In one half-verse I shall tell you what has been taught in thousands of volumes: Brahman is true, the world is false, the soul is Brahman and nothing else."

Now, when did this great teacher live? Here, gently, we reach a , for honest people give very different answers. Let us look at it plainly, and then return to the telling.

The rishi steps to the Threshold — where accounts differWhen did Shankara live? Traditional lineages and modern scholarship give strikingly different dates.

What scholars find

Modern scholarship places Shankara in the early eighth century CE, roughly 700 to 750. An older view among nineteenth-century scholars set him a little later, about 788 to 820 CE. Historians reach these dates by bracketing him between thinkers he argues against and later writers who cite him, since, as one survey frankly notes, there are no dependable historical records of his life beyond his own written works. They do not accept a date in the centuries before the common era.

As parts of the tradition hold

Some traditional monastic lineages, notably the Kanchi line, hold that Shankara lived far earlier, around 509 to 477 BCE, more than a thousand years before the scholarly date. They keep this reckoning as part of their guru-lineage's own memory and reverence. It is cherished within those mathas, though historians do not find it supported by the wider evidence.

Whenever he lived, his thought became one of the two great poles of Hindu philosophy. "Not-two." One Reality, and you are not outside it. Even those who would later disagree with him, as the next two masters will, had to begin by answering him. That is how large he stands.

Shankara says we often fear a snake that is only a rope, and call the fear the world. Is there a worry you have carried that, in clearer light, turned out to be smaller than it seemed? What was the lamp that showed you?