शिवमानसपूजा

Shankara was born at Kaladi on the Periyar, in the country that is now Kerala. The hagiographies give his parents as Shivaguru and Aryamba, an elderly couple who had waited a long time for a child, and what those books tell of his boyhood is what is always told of prodigies: that he had the Vedas by heart while other boys were learning to sit still, and that he argued his mother out of her only son and left in the robe of a sannyasin before he was ten.

He went north to the Narmada, and at Omkareshwar he found Govinda Bhagavatpada and took him as his teacher. Govinda's own teacher had been Gaudapada, who wrote the verses on the Mandukya Upanishad that are the oldest surviving statement of the position Shankara would spend his life defending. So the lineage is short and traceable: Gaudapada, then Govinda, then Shankara, and the argument passes down it whole.

The dates are contested and worth stating as such. The years usually given are 788 to 820 of this era; a good many scholars now prefer something closer to 700 to 750; the monasteries he founded keep an older reckoning and place him twelve centuries earlier still. What nobody disputes is that he was about thirty-two when he died.

In those thirty-two years he wrote commentaries on the Upanishads, on the Bhagavadgita, and on the Brahmasutras of Badarayana, which have been argued with for more than a thousand years and are not finished with yet. And he walked: from the south of the country to the north of it and from the eastern sea to the western, and he walked all of it. He stopped in the towns where the schools were strong and asked for a hearing, and stated his opponent's case better than the man could state it himself, and then took it apart. It was the custom that the loser should take the winner's teaching, and a good many who came to refute him stayed on as students.

The most famous of those was Mandana Mishra, a ritualist of the Mimamsa school living at Mahishi, who held that liberation comes by right action correctly performed. The two of them argued for days. The judge was Mandana's wife, Ubhaya Bharati, who was reckoned his equal in learning and whom tradition calls an incarnation of Sarasvati, and who ruled at the end of it against her own husband. Mandana took the robe as the wager required, and the Advaita tradition identifies him with Sureshvara, who became one of Shankara's four principal pupils. Scholars are less sure the two men were the same.

What Shankara taught was that the self which looks out of a man and the ground which holds the world are not two things, and that not seeing this is the whole of what ails him. Advaita, they call it, not-two. It is a cold doctrine to bring flowers to.

At the four quarters he left a house, and each still stands under its own name: the Sharada Pitham at Sringeri in the south, the Govardhana Pitham at Puri by the eastern sea, the Kalika Pitham at Dwarka by the western, and the Jyotir Pitham at Badari in the mountains. At Badrinath it is said that he brought the image of the god up out of the Narada kund, where it had been hidden in a bad time, and set it in its shrine again. Then he went up the Mandakini.

The last of that road is the worst of it. It runs in gorges and is cut into the rock where the mountain gives no ledge, and the valley shuts behind a man as he climbs. The temple at the head of it is not beautiful. It is a block of grey stone set down in a bowl of mountains and built for what happens there, and it has outlasted a great deal, the flood of 2013 among other things, which took the town below and left the temple standing with a boulder wedged at its back.

There is no carved image inside, only a rough cone of rock, and the story attached to it is older than Shankara by a long way. After Kurukshetra the Pandavas went looking for Shiva to be rid of two things they had done, the killing of their own kin and the killing of brahmins, and it was Vyasa who told them to go and ask. Shiva did not want to be found by them. He left Kashi and went into the Himalaya and took the form of a bull, and at Guptakashi, on the Mandakini, Bhima recognised him and caught hold of him. The bull went into the ground. What was left in Bhima's hands was the hump, and that is the rock in the temple at Kedarnath. The rest of the animal surfaced elsewhere, and the five places together are called the Panch Kedar: the hump at Kedarnath, the arms at Tungnath, the face at Rudranath, the navel at Madhyamaheshwar, and the hair at Kalpeshwar.

A few paces behind the temple wall at Kedarnath there is a samadhi, and they say it is Shankara's, and that he climbed to it at thirty-two and did not come down again. Other traditions bury him at Kanchi, and others in Kerala. Nobody can settle it.

So the story runs: that he came, and the doors were shut, and he had nothing, and he stood where he was and made the whole worship inside his head. The seat of jewels and the bath in snow-water, the silk, the sandal ground with musk, the jasmine and the campaka and the three-leaved bilva, the lamp, the gold bowl heaped with food, the parasol and the whisks and the drums, and the fall on all eight limbs. And Shiva took it.

The story is told everywhere and it is in none of the old books. The Madhaviya Shankara-digvijaya of Madhava, which is the life men have read for centuries and which is not sparing of wonders, has nothing of it, and neither have the printed collections. Only the end of it is everywhere, in Sanskrit and in Hindi and in every tongue between: that Shiva received this puja. Stories gather where there is room for them, and a poem made for the man who cannot get in will draw to itself, in time, a man who could not get in.

Whoever made it was doing a thing that had been done for a long age before him. In the beginning the sacrifice was fire. A fire built in a marked place, and butter and grain and beasts given to it, and priests who knew the words and were paid in cattle for knowing them; and it was public, and it was costly, and it could not be had for nothing. Then over a great many generations the books began to say another thing. That the fire is also the fire in the belly of a man. That the breaths going in and out of him are offerings, and are offered whether he attends to them or not. That the whole apparatus may be raised inside a man sitting still, and that when it is raised there it is not a poor copy of the sacrifice but the better making of it. The Upanishads say so plainly and do not apologise for saying it.

The tantras afterwards gave the two halves their names and set them side by side: bahiryaga, the offering made outside with things, and antaryaga, the offering made inside with attention. Worship in the mind belongs to the second of these, and there are such hymns for many gods. It is the largest thing that ever happened to the religion, because it took worship out of the hands of those who could pay for it, and a man with a temple and a man with nothing came to stand in the same relation to a fire lit inside them.

Whether Shankara wrote this one cannot be shown. The scholars allow him some thirteen books for certain, the great commentaries and the Upadeshasahasri, the Thousand Teachings, and no more than that. The houses he founded allow him near three hundred, and most of those are hymns. Between the two numbers lies an old habit, that a poem was given to a teacher's name much as a man is given to a family, to say where it belonged and whom it came from. Now and then the teacher had made it himself.

No Purana carries it. It has come down in the stotra books, the collections of hymns kept in houses and temples, copied by hand and then printed and then printed again for as long as there has been printing in that country. It lasted because it is short, and the metre carries, and it costs nothing to say. Those who have no temple say it, and those who have just walked out of one say it too, the first for want of a shrine and the second in apology for the shrine they had.