Philosophies of India

SR No.: 007309
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell
Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd
Publication Year: 1953
Total Pages: 709
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 34 MB

Page 435

BRAHMANISM
ṣādic ages has disappeared and a monkish, cold asceticism dominates the field; for the life-chilling theory of the ultimate and absolute inactivity of the Self has come to prevail-only now, instead of the individual life-monad (jīva, purușa), the Universal Self (ātman-brahman) is the inactive principle.
The most important name in this surprising development is that of the brilliant Sankara, the founder of the so-called "Nondualist" (advaita) school of Vedāntic philosophy. Little is known of his brief carcer, which is now supposed to have endured for but thirty-two years, somewhere about 800 A.D. Legends credit his conception to a miracle of the god Śiva, and state that the child was at an carly age a master of all the sciences; he is declared to have caused a river to come closer to his mother's door so that she should be saved the trouble of going to fetch water. At an extremely early age he retired to the forest, where he met the sage Govinda and became his pupil. And thereafter he wandered throughout India, engaging everywhere in victorious arguments with the philosophers of the day. Sankara's commentaries on the Brahmāsūtra, Bhagavad Gītā, and Upanisads, and his original philosophical works (such as the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi, "The Crown Jewel of Discrimination"), have exercised an incalculable influence on the history of philosophy throughout the Far and Middle East.
Basing his reasoning on the Vedic formula, tat tvam asi, "That art thou," 134 he developed with unwavering consistency a systematic doctrine, taking the Self (atman) as the sole reality and regarding all else as the phantasmagoric production of nescience (avidya). The cosmos is an effect of nescience, and so also is that interior ego (ahaňkāra) which is everywhere mistaken for the Self. Māyā, illusion, mocks the perceiving, cogitating, and intuitive faculties at every turn. The Self is hidden deep. But when the Self is known there is no nescience, no māyā, no avidyā; i.e., no macrocosm or microcosm-no world.
184 Supra, pp. 335-337
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