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This name was borne by the teacher of Śankara's teacher, who must have lived about 700 A.D., but the high position accorded to the work, which is usually printed with the Mâṇḍûkya Upanishad and is practically regarded as a part of it, make an earlier date probable.
This idea seems implied by Śankara's view that creation is similar to the sportive impulses of exuberant youth and the Bhagavad-gîtâ is familiar with pravritti and nirvritti, but the double character of the rhythm is emphasized most clearly in Śâkta treatises.
Jacobi's arguments seem to me suggestive rather than conclusive but, if they are confirmed, they lead to an interesting deduction. There is some reason for thinking that Śankara's doctrine of illusion was derived from the Buddhist Śûnyavâda.
It will be a large car, the handiwork of Viswakarman, designed with intelligence. Saying this, those tigers among the gods began the construction of that car. And they made Vishnu and Soma and Hutasana the arrow for Sankara's use. Agni became the staff, and Soma became the head, and Vishnu the point, O king, of that foremost of arrows.
Indeed, through Sankara's grace, O chief of the Bharatas, those sorrowing kinsmen were filled with amazement and delight at the restoration of their child to life. Then, O king, casting off that grief of which their child had been the cause, those Brahmanas, filled with delight, quickly went back to their town taking the restored child with them.
The writers of these passages have not quite reached Śankara's point of view, that the Âtman is all and the whole universe mere illusion or Mâyâ. Their thought still tends to regard the universe as something drawn forth from the Âtman and then pervaded by it. But still the main features of the later Advaita, or philosophy of no duality, are there.
This is not the land of giant gopurams and multitudinous sculpture, but of lives dedicated to the acquisition of traditional learning and the daily performance of complicated but inconspicuous rites. The accounts of Śankara's life are little but a collection of legends, in which, however, the following facts stand out.
He was perhaps the first eminent exponent of Mahayanist metaphysics, but the train of thought was not new: it was the result of applying to the external world the same destructive logic which Gotama applied to the soul and the result had considerable analogies to Śankara's version of the Vedanta.
Driven off by an exclamation of Hun which Narayana uttered, the dart, its energy being lost, returned to Sankara's hands. At this, Rudra became highly angry and as the result thereof he rushed towards the Rishis Nara and Narayana, endued with the puissance of severe austerities. Narayana then seized the rushing Rudra with his hand by the throat.
Kutashtha is rendered by K. T. Telang as "the unconcerned one", by Mr. Davies as "the lord on high." I incline to the scholiasts who explain it as "the uniform or the unchangeable one." Sreedhara explains it as Sarvaprakarena. Why may it not mean "with the whole soul" or "with excess of love." I adopt Sankara's explanation of the last compound of the first line of this sloka.
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