Adi Shankara 788 – 820

Adi Shankara was an Indian philosopher and theologian who consolidated the doctrine of Advaita Vedanta, the school of non-dualism. Working in a brief but extraordinarily productive life, he composed commentaries on the principal Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutras, and he founded monastic centers in the four corners of the Indian subcontinent. His central teaching is that Brahman, the ultimate reality, is identical with atman, the inmost self, and that the apparent diversity of the world is the work of ignorance. Shankara's influence on later Hindu thought is comparable to that of Aquinas on Christian thought in the West.

Adi Shankara was born, by the most widely accepted tradition, in 788 in Kaladi in present-day Kerala. The hagiographical sources describe him taking the vows of sannyasa as a child, traveling north to find his teacher Govindapada on the banks of the Narmada, and undertaking an extensive missionary tour that took him across the Indian subcontinent in a brief but extraordinarily productive life of thirty-two years.

His extant works include commentaries (bhashyas) on the principal Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras, and the Bhagavad Gita — together the Prasthana Trayi or 'three points of departure' of Vedanta — as well as independent treatises such as the Upadeshasahasri and a body of devotional hymns. He is credited with founding the four monastic centers (mathas) at Sringeri, Dwarka, Puri, and Joshimath that organize the Dashanami tradition of Hindu monasticism.

Shankara gave Advaita Vedanta its classical form: the doctrine that Brahman alone is real, that the apparent multiplicity of the world is the work of maya, and that liberation consists in the recognition that Atman, the inmost self, is not different from Brahman. He is reported to have died at Kedarnath in the Himalayas around 820, and remains the central figure of the non-dualist tradition within Hindu philosophy.