The Organiser, and the Problem of the Dates

Shankara was not only a philosopher but a formidable organiser of tradition, and much of his lasting authority rests on institutions credited to him. He is said to have travelled across the subcontinent debating rival schools and to have founded four monastic centres (mathas) at the compass-points of India, Sringeri, Dwarka, Puri and Jyotirmath, and to have established the Dashanami order of monks, giving Advaita a durable institutional body; he is also closely linked with the Smarta brahmanical tradition and its flexible worship of multiple deities as forms of the one brahman. Yet much of the biography is hagiography: the traditional life-story, the Shankara Digvijaya, is a devotional composition written centuries later, and even his dates are genuinely uncertain, a traditional reckoning gives 788-820 CE, but scholars debate the period and some place him earlier. Distinguishing the historical teacher from the vast legend that grew around him, including a proliferation of works doubtfully attributed to him, is one of the standing problems of Indian intellectual history.