On zankara's date - 2

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan <Palaniappa at AOL.COM> wrote:

>According to the advaita web site, "The Sringeri maTha's record states that
>Sankara was born in the 14th year of the reign of vikramAditya. The record
>does not give any clue about the identity of this king." On the basis of
>the
>identification of this vikramAditya with one of the two Chalukya kings,
>vikramAditya I and vikramAditya II, some scholars seem to have argued for a
>700 AD date. (But we find later vikramAdityas  V and VI of the  Chalukyas
>of
>Kalyani in the 11th century. This means there were probably two other
>vikramAdityas in the intervening centuries.) But if we suppose that  the
>Sringeri tradition is based on information related to kings in Kerala and
>not
>Karnataka, we get some interesting results.
>
>The south Kerala/Tamilnadu Ay king karunantaTakkan2's successor was called
>vikramAditya varaguNa.  It is not known when exactly he began his rule. The
>name suggests that he must have been a contemporary of his Pandyan overlord
>varaguNa II who ruled between 862-880 AD. This means that if we place
>zankara

I remember having read somewhere (Sewell perhaps?) that there is a similar
reference (14th year of vikramAditya) in konkuteca rAcAkkaL. The problem is
that there are too many vikramAdityas to choose from, even within one
dynasty, and of course, many dynasties to choose from!

In a letter to Swami Tapasyananda of the Ramakrishna Mission (reproduced in
his translation of the mAdhavIya Sankaravijayam), the Sringeri Matha has
officially declined to attach a firm date to this tradition. However,
contemporary Matha publications often give the 788-820 CE dates that have
generally come to be accepted in India.

Finally, a lot depends on how one thinks of the society of those times. The
data are complex. Although there have been many gRhastha authors in the
tradition, the study of vedAnta is intimately associated with saMnyAsa. One
alternative name for bAdarAyaNa's brahma-sUtra is bhikshu-sUtra. It may be
that religious colleges with substantial endowments did not venture into
vedAnta, and left it to those totally outside general society. Certainly, it
seems to have taken a few centuries after Sankara for the force of vedAnta
to have been felt, but I wonder if that would be sufficient to bring his
date down to the late 9th century. There is the date of vAcaspati miSra to
consider, as also the inevitable conclusion that Sankara and bhAskara were
more or less contemporaries. Add to this the fact that although Sankara is
traditionally said to have been a nambUdiri by birth, his vehement rejection
of ritual contrasts starkly with the pronounced ritualism of the community,
even within living memory.

Your approach is certainly very interesting, and surely long overdue.
Somehow, scholarly interest in such issues seems to have gone steeply
downhill. It would be interesting to investigate similar sources from the
other southern states too.

Vidyasankar

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