A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c20.19

c20.19

Another important, though less popular, aspect of the same revival is seen in the work of Kumārila and Śankara. They were Smārtas (traditionalists) who laboured in the cause not of any one sect in particular but of the ancient brahminical religion as it had been developed through the centuries. They held up as the religious ideal a youth occupied with ritual observances followed by an old age given up to philosophic contemplation. Kumārila frequently attacks Buddhists in his works, and tradition asserts that he did much to discredit them in the course of his many scholarly journeys. He elucidated the philosophy of ritualism (Mīmāmsā) in all its aspects, but Śankara was the greater thinker. Few details of his life are very well attested, but he is generally taken to be a Nambūdiri Brahmin from Kālaḍi on the banks of the Alwaye river in north Travancore, where he was born in 788. He lost his father early in life and turned ascetic, with Govinda yogi, a pupil of Gauḍapāda, as his guru. In a short life he travelled all over India propagating his new philosophy of a rigorously consistent monism and triumphing against all rivals who met him in debate. He reorganized the ascetic order of Hinduism on the model of the Buddhist order, and founded a number of maṭhas in different parts of India, the best known being those at Śringeri, Dvārakā, Badrināth, Puri and Kāñchi. His philosophy, which traces all apparent multiplicity and difference to illusion (māyā), is indeed derived from the Upanishads, but clearly owes much in detail to Mahāyānist speculation; nevertheless, he regarded Buddhism as Hinduism's chief enemy. Within a few years of his death in 820, one of his pupils, Śivasoma, was spreading his doctrine in distant Kambuja across the seas. Not without justice, it has been said that Śankara ‘would have a higher place among the famous names of the world had not his respect for tradition prevented him from asserting the originality which he undoubtedly possessed’.