Shri Shankaracharya - India's Supreme Man of Culture

[Guest guest]

SHRI SHANKARACHARYA

INDIA’S SUPREME MAN OF CULTURE

The real history of India is not in politics, not in carnage, but in

contributions to culture made by men of illumination. One of them was Shankara.

Rare is the birth of such men. A Shankara is born in this cycle of several

centuries.

In the humble house of a villager was this great one born. His father died when

he was a boy. His mother looked after him and loved him dearly. She pinned all

her hopes in him. But the Call came to him and he resolved to dedicate his life

to the services of the Hindu Race. Shankara was a man of destiny. And of such as

he, God Himself is the Guardian.

When I think of his influence upon millions of India, I marvel at the man and

his achievements. I regarded him as the supreme figure in the movement of

idealistic philosophy.

He brought back to life the Ancient Faith; he saved "Hinduism" in a period when

"religion" was entangled in ‘rites and ceremonies’. Ritualism, he

called Karma; and he pointed out that Karma could not save. He won the battle

against nihilism and India could hope again. He made Hinduism dynamic; he

created an order of sanyasins, men of inner renunciation; he made them

guardians of the Hindu Dharma. "Your only possession" he said, "is Atman, the

Spirit".

Shankara and Kant are the two intellects the world has thrown up.

Shankara’s Vedanta and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason reveal two

masterminds of humanity. Yet Shankara is greater even than Kant. For Shankara

is not, like Kant, merely a first thinker. Shankara is also, an organiser, a

man of action, and a bhakta (devotee). In Shankara is a marvellous blend of

wisdom and action, of gyana, karma and bhakti. Shankara is one of the greatest

Teachers and Revealers of the Gita. And he became a saviour of the Hindu race,

in the days he appeared. Hindu society was assailed by over sixty sects; many

of them denying God and preaching rank ritualism. Shankara had the courage to

stand up against the atheistic and materialistic cults of the age. Shankara

re-proclaimed the doctrine of the Atman (the Spirit). Shankara declared: "Thou

art Divine." Shankara taught that an Eternal Energy is hidden in everyone.

"Awake the Eternal" was the message of Shankara and the Rishis of India and the

nations.

We live, today, in a period of the great ‘wandering of the nations’.

For ‘democracy’ has proved a failure and the ‘rule of the

people’ is become ‘the rule of money and sovereignty of the

people’. Such a rule destroys Culture. Shankara, India’s supreme

man of culture, pleaded for ‘rule of the best’, for sovereignty, of

men of non-possession.

Disintegration is widespread in the life and thought of Europe today. A new

barbarism is advancing to engulf the West. India, too, is corroded with the

touch of greed and gold; India is forgetting her Shankara and her Saints. If

India could thrill again to their message; there is yet hope that she might

lead the world out of the ‘mass age’ of these days to a new Age of

Light.

(Courtesy: Sadhu Vaswani in East and West Series – 29-4-2003 issue)