ADI SANKARACHARYA

Sankara-The Spiritual General
- by Swami Chinmayananda
Sri Adi Shankaracharya(Shankara) was not only a great thinker and the noblest of Advaitik philosophers, but he was essentially an inspired champion of Hinduism and one of the most vigorous missionaries in our country. Such a powerful leader was needed at that time when Hinduism had been almost smothered within the enticing entaglements of the Buddhistic philosophy, and consequently the decadent Hindu society came to be disunited and broken up into number­less sects and denominations, each championing a different view-point and engaged in mutual quarrels and endless argumentations. Each pandita, as it were, had his own followers, his own philosophy, his own interpretation; each one was a vehement and powerful opponent of all other views. This intellectual disintegration, especially in the 'scriptural field, was never before so serious and so dangerously calamitous as in the times of Sankara.
It had been at a similar time, when our society was fertile for any ideal thought or practical philosophy to thrive, that the beautiful values of non-injury, self-control, love and affection of the Buddha had come to enchant alike the kings and their subjects of this country. But the general decadence of the age did not spare the Buddhists either. They, among themselves, precipitated different viewpoints, and by the time Shankara appeared on the horizon of Hindu history, the atheistic school of Buddhists (Asad-vadis) had enticed away large sections of the Hindu folk.
It was into such a chaotic intellectual atmosphere that Shankara brought his life-giving philosophy of the Non-dual. Brahman of the Upanishads. It can be very well understood what a colossal work it must have been for any one man to undertake in those days when modem conveniences of mechanical transport and instruments of propaganda were unknown. The genius in Shankara did solve the problem, and by the time he placed at rest his mortal coil he had whipped the false Buddhistic ideology beyond the shores of our country and had reintegrated the philosophical thoughts in the then Atyavarta. After centuries of wandering, no doubt richer for her various experiences but tired and fatigued, Bharat came back to her own native thoughts.
In his missionary work of propagating the great philosophical truths of the Upanishad-s and of rediscovering through them the true cultural basis of our nation, Acharya Shankara had a variety of efficient weapons in his resourceful armoury. He was indeed pre-eminently the fittest genius who could have undertaken this self-appointed task as the sole guardian angel of the Rishi-Culture.
An exquisite thinker, a brilliant intellect, a personality scintillating with the vision of Truth, a heart throbbing with industrious faith and ardent desire to serve the nation, sweetly emotional and relentlessly logical, in Shankara the Upanishads discovered the fittest spiritual general. It was indeed a vast programme that Shankara had to accomplish within the short span of about twenty effective years; for at the age of thirty two he had finished his work and had folded up his manifestation among the mortals of the world.