Āgamaśāstra

These verses are dated by the Buddhists who quote them. Bhāviveka, a Buddhist philosopher of the sixth century, cites them, as do Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla after him, and those citations are how scholars place the author, Gauḍapāda, around the year 500. The work is a set of 215 Sanskrit verses, or kārikās, in four chapters, written to explain the Māṇḍūkya Upanishad, the shortest of the Upanishads, which teaches the syllable Om and the self's four conditions: waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep and a fourth beyond them. It also goes by Āgamaśāstra, the treatise on the traditional teaching, and Gauḍapādīya-kārikā, Gauḍapāda's verses. Here the verses stand alone, without the Upanishad's prose that they explain. The work's central claim is that nothing has ever come into being. Waking life is like a dream, the second chapter argues, because what does not exist at the beginning and at the end does not exist in the middle either; and the third chapter adds that the one self, which is Brahman, only seems divided into many selves, as space seems divided among separate jars. The same chapter teaches asparśa-yoga, a "touchless" discipline that brings the mind to rest without contact with any object. Each rival gets its answer. The Sāṃkhya school, which holds that a cause is born as its effect, is shown an endless regress. Those who worship Brahman as something that has been born are called pitiable. The dualists are told that scripture speaks of difference only at the level of appearance. The fourth chapter speaks the vocabulary of the Buddhist schools so freely that some scholars, Richard King among them, take it for the work of another author, noting that the Vedānta writers who came after Gauḍapāda quote only the first three chapters. Vidhushekhara Bhattacharya, whose edition and translation appeared at Calcutta in 1943, argued for its debt to Buddhist sources; others hold that its doctrine stays Vedāntic. A commentary on the verses is ascribed to Ādi Śaṅkara, and the Advaita tradition makes Gauḍapāda the teacher of Śaṅkara's teacher. Yet Rāmānuja and Madhva, both opponents of Advaita, treated its first chapter as scripture.