The date of Sankara

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

"Elliot M. Stern" <emstern at BELLATLANTIC.NET> wrote:

>You might also look at K. Kunjunni Raja's article "On the dates of ZaMkara
>and MaNDana" (ALB 55 (1991):104-116). In this later article, he claims
>(page
>114): "MaNDana's *Brahmasiddhi* does not refer to the views of ZaMkara, and
>Zamkara, too, does not refer to MaNDana or his views", but he neglects to
>explain his rejection of S. Kuppuswami Sastri's carefully justified
>position
>(in the introduction to his edition of brahmasiddhiH) that maNDanaH refers
>in brahmasiddhiH to zaMkara's brahmasUtrabhASyam, a position that he had
>apparently accepted in the 1960 article (page 142).

Perhaps I can fill in a little detail here, based on
personal communication with Kunjunni Raja from three years
ago. What is behind this 1991 position is the recognition
that many sections of zaMkara's brahmasUtra bhASya are
reproduced from earlier works, perhaps the often mentioned
vRtti(s). In which case, what is apparently a quote from the
bhASya could turn out to be a quote from earlier author(s),
and the zaMkara-maNDana question would have to be revisited.
Kuppuswami Sastri's edition of Brahmasiddhi was done in 1937,
when not much was generally known about bhAskara's commentary.
Writing in the same period, S. N. Dasgupta says only that
bhAskara was post-zaMkara and pre-udayana. He does not give
a narrower range for bhAskara's date than that, although
Hiriyanna had already shown that vAcaspati responds to
bhAskara's arguments against zaMkara.

In this context, Ingalls's PEW paper (1954, 3: 291-306)
is very pertinent. There are entire sections in bhAskara's
brahmasUtrabhASya that are identical with zaMkara's bhASya.
It could hardly be that bhAskara, who is the first to call
zaMkara a crypto-Buddhist, has lifted these verbatim from
zaMkara. We could build on the postulate that as far as
these common portions are concerned, both bhAskara and
zaMkara are reproducing sections of earlier work(s). It
then needs to be checked whether maNDana refers to those
sections that are found in zaMkara's work and not in
bhAskara's work. If not, one cannot be certain that
maNDana quotes from zaMkara's bhASya. E-texts of both
zaMkara's and bhAskara's commentaries would greatly
facilitate such work. Somebody needs to do it.

Needless to say, this would also have wide implications
for another issue that greatly interests me - criteria
that decide the genuineness of texts attributed to zaMkara
(Hacker, Mayeda etc.). These are based on the notion that
zaMkara is, by definition, the author of the brahmasUtra
bhASya. If numerous passages from this work are not original
with zaMkara, authorship criteria have to be appropriately
revised.

Best wishes,
Vidyasankar
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