Māṇḍūkya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

Three voices speak in this commentary by Śaṅkara, which explains an Upanishad together with the verses an earlier teacher wrote on it, and the reader has to keep them apart. The first is the Māṇḍūkya Upanishad, the shortest of the Upanishads: twelve prose paragraphs on the syllable Om and on the self's four conditions, waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep and a fourth, turīya, which is the self itself. The Upanishad is counted as a work in its own right, sixth in the canon of 108. Yet its whole text has come down woven into the second voice: the Kārikā of Gauḍapāda, 215 verses in four chapters that explain the Upanishad and argue far beyond it. Gauḍapāda is usually placed in the sixth century, and tradition makes him the teacher of Śaṅkara's own teacher, Govinda. The third voice is Śaṅkara's bhāṣya, a prose commentary on both. The boldest claim belongs to Gauḍapāda: nothing has ever come into being. The rival schools, he observes, refute one another, some showing that what already exists need not be born and others that what does not exist cannot be, and between them they establish his case. His fourth chapter borrows Buddhist vocabulary and takes its name from a whirling firebrand, which seems to draw straight and crooked lines in the dark while nothing comes out of it, as the world appears in awareness without being produced. Śaṅkara's gloss names the Buddhist idealists, the Vijñānavādins, as the source of that chapter's arguments against outer objects, accepts their conclusion as far as it goes, and then turns it against their own view that the mind itself comes into being. The last verse marks the teaching off from the Buddhists'. How much Gauḍapāda took from Buddhism is still disputed. Manilal Dvivedi's English translation of all three layers was printed at Bombay in 1894 for the Theosophical Publication Fund.