21/04/2026
Today is adi Shankaracharya Jayanti
Adi Shankara (8th c. CE) also called Adi Shankaracharya (Sanskrit: आदि शङ्कर, आदि शङ्कराचार्य, romanized: Ādi Śaṅkara, Ādi Śaṅkarācārya, lit. 'First Shankaracharya'pronounced [aːd̪i ɕɐŋkɐraːt͡ɕaːrjɐ]),was an Indian Vedic scholar-monk, philosopher, and teacher (acharya) of Advaita Vedanta.While in recent times he is often revered as the most important Indian philosopher.
Yoga and contemplative exercises
Shankara considered the purity and steadiness of mind achieved in Yoga as an aid to gaining moksha knowledge, but such yogic state of mind cannot in itself give rise to such knowledge.To Shankara, that knowledge of Brahman springs only from inquiry into the teachings of the Upanishads.The method of yoga, encouraged in Shankara's teachings notes Comans, includes withdrawal of mind from sense objects as in Patanjali's system, but it is not complete thought suppression, instead it is a "meditative exercise of withdrawal from the particular and identification with the universal, leading to contemplation of oneself as the most universal, namely, Consciousness".Describing Shankara's style of yogic practice, Comans writes:
the type of yoga which Sankara presents here is a method of merging, as it were, the particular (visesa) into the general (samanya). For example, diverse sounds are merged in the sense of hearing, which has greater generality insofar as the sense of hearing is the locus of all sounds. The sense of hearing is merged into the mind, whose nature consists of thinking about things, and the mind is in turn merged into the intellect, which Sankara then says is made into 'mere cognition' (vijnanamatra); that is, all particular cognitions resolve into their universal, which is cognition as such, thought without any particular object. And that in turn is merged into its universal, mere Consciousness (prajnafnaghana), upon which everything previously referred to ultimately depends
Photo source Takht-i-Suleiman, Srinugger Srinagar," a photo by Samuel Bourne, 1860's* (BL) by tradition, this is the hill on which Shankaracharya meditated during his round of tr
