The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c21.34

c21.34

Sankarâcharya was a Brahman of the Nambudri class, and is supposed to have lived about the end of the eighth and beginning of the ninth centuries. His birthplace according to one account was in a village of the Malabar district, according to another at Chidambaram. There are numerous legends of the miraculous events attending his birth and early years. After some years of studentship at an âsrama on the banks of the Narmada under a famous Guru called Govinda, he renounced marriage and the life of a householder and took the vow of a sannyâsin. Then, like the Buddha, he went to Benares, where he gathered round him a number of disciples and probably wrote his most important works, the commentaries on the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gîta. He was still a young man when, accompanied by great numbers of his chelas, he started on his great pilgrimage throughout India, preaching the philosophy of the Vedanta, denouncing the immoral ritualistic practices of the Saktas and other sects, and refuting the arguments of the pandits of different schools who opposed him. To establish his teaching on a permanent footing he organised an order of sannyâsins open to all castes, after the model of the Buddhist Sangha, which was divided into ten grades, and with the help of his many royal adherents he built and endowed a number of monastic institutions as training centres for the exponents of reformed Hinduism. The chief Guru of the Sringeri Math, the most famous of his monasteries in Southern India, continues to be regarded as the spiritual head of the Saivaite cult to the present day. When Sankarâcharya’s mission had been thus accomplished, he retired to the Himâlayas, and, according to tradition, died at Kedarnath, one of the most venerated of the Siva tîrths, in A.D. 828, at the age of thirty-eight.¹