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WorkĀdi Śaṅkara

A Thousand Teachings

Śaṅkara with no scripture to explain: a teacher's handbook in verse and prose on how to bring a pupil to know the self.

by Ādi Śaṅkara206 passages held

  • Sanskrit, the original language
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Original title
Upadeśasāhasrī
Original language
Sanskrit

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Overview

More than three hundred works have been handed down under Śaṅkara's name, and modern scholars accept only a few of them. Among those that are not commentaries, the Upadeśasāhasrī, "a thousand teachings", is the one nearly all accept, which makes it the main place where he argues without a scripture setting the order of topics. It has two parts that the manuscripts often copied and commented on separately: nineteen chapters in verse, and three in prose. The prose part is a manual on how to teach liberation. It says what a teacher must be, learned in scripture, calm and compassionate, and which pupil may be taught: one who has given up worldly aims and become a wandering renouncer. Then it shows a lesson. The teacher asks the pupil who he is, and the pupil answers with his birth, his family and his station in life. The teacher points out that the body he has just described will decay into earth, and that a body cannot carry anyone beyond death any more than ashes left on the near bank can cross the river. Across both parts the book argues the same teaching from many sides, against the Buddhists who held that awareness lasts only a moment, and against a method of long, repeated meditation on the great sentences of the Upanishads. Scholars identify that method with Maṇḍana Miśra, an older contemporary, who taught that such meditation was needed to turn understanding into direct knowledge; Śaṅkara answers that knowledge arises in the hearing. Paul Hacker, a German Indologist, translated the prose part in 1949. Sengaku Mayeda, a Japanese scholar, translated the whole into English in 1979 as A Thousand Teachings.

Key concepts

What is the witness, or sākṣin?

The witness is the self as pure awareness that sees every thought, feeling and perception without being any of them. Ideas in the mind change all the time, but what notices them changing does not. Śaṅkara argues that this witness is the real self: it never acts, never suffers and is never itself seen, because whatever is seen is an object for it.

What does kūṭastha, 'unchanging like an anvil', mean?

Kūṭastha is Śaṅkara's word for the self's complete changelessness. An anvil stays where it is while everything is hammered on it, and the self stays the same while thoughts, feelings and states pass over it. The word answers anyone who pictures the self as a doer or a sufferer: change belongs to the mind, and the self only lights it up.

What are the great sentences of the Upanishads?

They are short Upanishadic statements that identify the self with Brahman, the best known being 'that you are', said by a father to his son. Śaṅkara holds that such a sentence, heard from a teacher by a prepared pupil, itself gives knowledge of the self. It does not describe an object but removes the belief that the hearer is something other than Brahman.

What is prasaṃkhyāna, the repeated meditation Śaṅkara rejects?

Prasaṃkhyāna is long, repeated meditation on the meaning of the great sentences, practised to turn an understanding of them into direct knowledge. Some teachers held that hearing alone gives only indirect knowledge. Śaṅkara replies that knowledge of the self is not a state to be produced by effort: once the sentence is understood, the error it removes is gone, and nothing remains to be repeated into being.

What is the reflection of the self in the mind?

Śaṅkara explains the sense of 'I' with a mirror. The mind, being clear, holds a reflection of the self's awareness, as a mirror holds a face, and so it seems to be conscious itself. People then take this reflection, with its moods and plans, for who they are. Knowing the self means seeing that the face is not in the mirror.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

How to Teach the Self

How do you bring someone to know what they already are, when every answer they give names something else? The prose part is a teacher's manual for exactly that lesson.

Śaṅkara first sets the terms: the teacher must be learned in scripture, calm and compassionate, and the pupil must have given up worldly aims and become a wandering renouncer. Then he stages a lesson. Asked who he is, the pupil answers with his birth, his family and his station in life. The teacher points out that the body he has described will decay into earth, and that a body can no more carry anyone past death than ashes left on the near bank can cross the river.

  • teacher-student relationship
  • self-knowledge
  • scriptural authority
  • scripture
  • body
  • social identity
  • identity
  • renunciation
  • desire
  • language
  • embodiment

Enter a dialogue

The Unchanging Witness

What in us notices our thoughts, moods and memories coming and going? The verse chapters return again and again to that observer and insist it never changes.

Every idea in the mind, Śaṅkara argues, is seen by a witness, and what sees ideas change cannot itself change, as an anvil stays put under the hammer. The sense of "I" belongs to the mind, which holds a reflection of the self as a mirror holds a face, and the mistake is to take that reflection for the one it reflects. Agency, pleasure and pain belong to the mind and body. The witness neither acts nor suffers, and knowing oneself as that witness is liberation.

  • witness consciousness
  • consciousness
  • self-awareness
  • perception
  • cognition
  • mind
  • intellect
  • agency
  • ego
  • memory
  • superimposition
  • appearance and reality

Enter a dialogue

Knowing in the Hearing

Does the sentence that tells a person they are Brahman free them when it is understood, or only after years of practice? The book stakes its method on the first answer.

A rival method, which scholars identify with Maṇḍana Miśra, held that the great sentences of the Upanishads give only indirect understanding, to be turned into direct knowledge by long, repeated meditation. Śaṅkara answers that knowledge arises in the hearing, for a pupil ready to hear, because it removes a wrong idea rather than producing a new state. Liberation is not reached but uncovered. Rites and their tools, the sacred thread among them, presuppose a difference between self and Brahman, so the knower gives them up.

  • knowledge
  • ignorance
  • liberation
  • nonduality
  • epistemology
  • suffering
  • meditation
  • action
  • ritual
  • samsara
  • negation
  • reality

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
206
distinct concepts
157
by passages held, corpus-wide
#343

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “nonduality” and “self”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 75 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
nondualityself30
consciousnessself28
liberationnonduality26
liberationself24
ignoranceliberation20
liberationself-knowledge20
ignoranceself19
consciousnessnonduality18
nondualityself-knowledge16
ignorancenonduality15
ignoranceself-knowledge13
knowledgeliberation13
selfwitness consciousness13
consciousnessignorance12
knowledgeself12
consciousnessself-knowledge11
ignoranceknowledge8
consciousnessliberation7
ignorancewitness consciousness7
knowledgenonduality7
knowledgewitness consciousness6
consciousnessknowledge5
self-knowledgewitness consciousness5
liberationwitness consciousness4
nondualitywitness consciousness4
consciousnesswitness consciousness3
knowledgeself-knowledge2
selfself-knowledge2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. A Thousand Teachings (Upadeśasāhasrī) you are here SA
  2. Aitareya Upanisad, with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Aitareya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya)

    Three chapters of the Aitareya Āraṇyaka, a ritual text of the Ṛgveda tradition, that tell a creation story; for Śaṅkara its point is that Brahman is consciousness.

     SA
  3. Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya

    His principal work, a commentary on the most compressed of the texts he explained; both later schools of Advaita grew from commentaries on it.

     EN
  4. Brhadaranyaka Upanishad with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya)

    Sureśvara, his pupil, wrote verse commentaries on two of Śaṅkara's Upanishad commentaries, this one and the Taittirīya; the Bṛhadāraṇyaka is by far the larger of the two.

     SA
  5. Īśa-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

    One of his shortest commentaries, in which the case against combining ritual and knowledge that the longer commentaries argue at length is made on a single disputed verse.

     EN
  6. Kaṭha-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

    The Kaṭha is a poem from the Black Yajurveda tradition, two chapters of three sections each; Śaṅkara's prose commentary follows it line by line.

     SA
  7. Māṇḍūkya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

    A commentary on a commentary: Śaṅkara glosses both the Upanishad and the verses of Gauḍapāda, his teacher's teacher in the tradition, whose Kārikā scholars count as the earliest surviving systematic treatise of Advaita.

     EN
  8. Praśna-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya

    A teaching dialogue from the Atharvaveda tradition, six questions put to one teacher, which Śaṅkara follows from the origin of living beings to the nature of the knower.

     SA
  9. Śrīmad Bhagavad Gītā Bhāṣya (Bhagavadgītā-bhāṣya)

    One of the three commentaries on which Advaita rests, beside those on the Upanishads and the Brahma Sūtras, and the one in which Śaṅkara must draw a case for giving up action from a text that urges a warrior to fight.

     EN
  10. Taittiriya Upanisad with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Taittirīya-Upaniṣad-bhāṣya)

    The source of the five selves, or sheaths, that later Advaita manuals such as the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi teach at length; here Śaṅkara reads them in the Upanishad itself.

     SA
  11. Vivekacūḍāmaṇi

    A teaching manual copied in many Advaita monasteries; tradition counts it as Śaṅkara's, and most modern scholars doubt it is his.

     SA
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