BUILDER OF AN EMPIRE OF THE SPIRIT
Most historians are agreed that if a count were taken of the 12 greatest men who ever lived in any country at any age, Adi Shankaracharya would undoubtedly be one of them. I would call him the Universal Man. He deserves to be called the Universal Man in more senses than one. First of all, his accomplishments were of the highest order in a number of fields of mental and spiritual activity, each one of which would have been enough to make him immortal.
He was a poet of the first order and also a philosopher par excellence. He was a savant and a saint of the highest spiritual development. He was a mystic and a religious reformer.
"Adi Shankaracharya was not so much a man propounding a religion as a man propounding the religion which underlies all religions."
The four essences of his philosophy, as summarized by both Eastern and Western thinkers, are the following:
First, he says that you must discriminate between what is eternal and what is ephemeral. The One remains, and the many changes and passes; so don’t get attached to what changes and passes, but get attached to the eternal, because that alone is the ultimate final Reality.
He was not against family life. He was sensible enough to realize that if there was no family life the human race would come to an end. But his message was, “Realise that everything around you, including your wealth and your family, are all ephemeral things”. Too much attachment would result in diverting your mind from what is eternal to what is ephemeral.
His second message was that each one of us has to learn to renounce the thought of reward for what we are doing. Your attitude must be that you are not interested in the reward for what you are doing. One would doubt whether Shankaracharya in his own life got the reward for what he did. But he knew that ages and ages hence, people would realize the importance of his message. Christ was crucified by the majority vote of the people around him. So much for democracy. Never mistake the majority vote for a vote in favour of reason or for a vote in favour of what is right. What is right is often quite different from what the majority believes in. Socrates was put to death, given the hemlock, by his own fellowmen. That again was by a majority vote.
"See yourself in all beings and give up the false sense of difference."
The third message of Shankaracharya was moral preparation. He believed that each life has to be so lived that you are prepared to meet the Maker at the time of “crossing the bar”, and to present a clean record when the final call comes, of what you have accomplished with whatever you have been given by way of wealth, intelligence or talent. So, you hold your talent, as much as your wealth, in trust for your fellowmen.
He believed that Universal compassion and love are a part of moral preparation. I would like to quote a few words, which are from one of his hymns. “In you and in me and everywhere else, there is but one Vishnu”. See yourself in all things, and give up the false sense of difference from other human beings everywhere. This is his message of universality; the brotherhood of the entire human race. In fact, we find it difficult to develop that kind of sense of brotherhood even in one single country, leave aside the entire human race. Even if there are two states adjoining each other, we find it difficult to have a sense of brotherhood among the people of the two states. So we have a long way to go before we realise the great message of Adi Shankaracharya.
And his last message was the longing for liberation, what St. Luke in his Epistle calls the ‘Longing for the Eternal Life’. Adi Shankaracharya said this world is just a preparatory ground, a school where we are trying to prepare ourselves and educate ourselves, for eternal life.
About his year of birth and death, there is no certainty. Max Mueller believed that he was born in 788 and we celebrate the 1200th anniversary in the year 1988 to 1989. We are not also sure in which year he died, though the general consensus is that he was perhaps 32 years when he passed away. But whatever may have been the exact year of his birth or death, it is his message which counts, more than his own individual, personal life. He established what I would call the Empire of the Spirit. Whole generations have come and gone, and empires have flourished and vanished, but Shankaracharya’s Empire of the Spirit survives. And so long as his great spirit abides with our people, there is hope for the future greatness of our country.