108 Days with Adi Shankara

Book 12 (Days 72–108 · Direct Inquiry and the Return).

Glennford Ellison Roberts · the Architect

TRUTH does its own work

The largest of the three, the last of the twelve, and the only place in the volume where the reader hears Shankara not as a commentator on other men's scriptures but as a poet in his own.

What This Volume Is

A hundred and seventy-five thousand words. Forty-one days. Two movements: Shankara's independent works, and the closing.

It opens by finishing what Volume Two began — the last chapters of the Chandogya, and then the Brihadaranyaka entire, which is the largest and oldest of the Upanishads and gets some twenty days to itself. Then it turns to the works attributed to Shankara himself: the Crest Jewel of Discrimination, the Atma Bodha, the Tattva Bodha, the Upadesha Sahasri, and the great hymns — the Nirvana Shatakam, the Bhaja Govindam, the Dakshinamurti Stotram, the Soundarya Lahari. Then Gaudapada, the four maths, the living inheritors, and the close.

What It Delivers

The Brihadaranyaka sequence is the volume's spine and it is where the greatest material in the Upanishadic corpus lives. Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi — the wife who asked the right question, and got the answer that not for the sake of the husband is the husband dear. The court of King Janaka, where the philosophers question Yajnavalkya in turn and he answers them one after another until the last one's head falls off. Neti neti, not this, not this, in its original setting. The honey doctrine. The weaver and the warp. The imperishable that has the cosmos under its command.

Almost nobody reads the Brihadaranyaka. It is enormous, it is structurally chaotic by modern expectation, it opens with a horse sacrifice, and the philosophical passages are embedded in ritual and genealogy that a modern reader cannot navigate alone. Giving it twenty days with a guide is the single most useful thing in these three volumes, because it is the material most likely to defeat a reader working alone and the material most worth reaching.

The second movement is where the volume changes register entirely, and this is what makes it different from the other two. Days on the Vivekachudamani and the Atma Bodha are still teaching. But the Nirvana Shatakam — I am not the mind, not the intellect, not ego, not memory; I am Shiva, I am Shiva — is a poem, and it is the same man who wrote the technical commentaries, and hearing both is how one actually understands what Advaita is. The Bhaja Govindam, which is Shankara scolding a grammarian for parsing rules while death approaches, is comic and ferocious and utterly unlike the bhashyas. The Dakshinamurti Stotram is the teacher who teaches in silence.

A reader who has only met Shankara as the systematiser — the ruthless dialectician who dismantles the Buddhists and the Sankhyas — does not know him. This volume gives the other half, and the two together are the man.

And the closing days do the honest institutional work. Gaudapada, his teacher's teacher, and the doctrine of non-origination. The four maths and the geography of the carrying — how the teaching was institutionally preserved. The living inheritors. Then the last two days: what the hundred and eight days have carried, and the door that was never closed. Ending a curriculum by pointing at the door rather than at an achievement is the right ending, and it is consistent with everything the volume teaches.

Where It Will Be Resisted, and Fairly

The attribution problem is the specific objection to this volume and it must be stated plainly. Of the works treated in the second movement, the scholarly consensus is that several are almost certainly not by Shankara. The Vivekachudamani is widely doubted — many scholars place it centuries later. The Soundarya Lahari is a tantric hymn to the Goddess whose attribution is contested. Even the Atma Bodha and the Tattva Bodha are questioned by some, though held by the tradition. The commentaries on the Upanishads, the Gita and the Sutras are secure; the independent works, in large part, are not.

The tradition itself does not much care — it holds them as Shankara's and has for a thousand years — and a book written in Shankara's voice is arguably entitled to that view. But a reader should know that when this volume presents the Crest Jewel as the Acharya's own, it is following tradition rather than scholarship, and the two do not agree. That should be said somewhere in the book, and I do not find it said.

The philological objection applies here as in Volume Two: hundreds of Sanskrit verses transliterated and glossed, unverified by a Sanskritist. The Brihadaranyaka passages especially — neti neti, the Maitreyi dialogue, the Janaka court — carry doctrinal weight for the entire twelve books and should be checked against the critical editions before print.

And the scale objection: a hundred and seventy-five thousand words is a third of a very long walk, arriving at day sixty-eight, when most readers who began will already have stopped. That is not a fault in the writing. It is a fact about what completion rates look like for anything requiring a hundred and eight consecutive days, and the author should not measure this volume by how many finish it. Its likelier life is as a reference — the place a reader goes when he wants the Brihadaranyaka with a hand on his elbow, or wants to know what the Bhaja Govindam is actually saying.

Who Should Read It

The reader who has walked sixty-seven days and intends to finish. And, quite separately, two other kinds of reader who should simply own it: the one who wants the Brihadaranyaka and has bounced off it, and the one who knows Shankara only as a philosopher and has never read his poetry.

The Verdict

Volume Three is the largest and, in one specific way, the most valuable of the three: it is the only place in the volume where the reader hears Shankara as a poet, and the only accessible guided walk through the Brihadaranyaka I know of in English. Ending on the door that was never closed is exactly right for a curriculum whose whole doctrine is that nothing was ever actually lost.

Its two outstanding tasks are specific and fixable. The Sanskrit needs a philologist. And the volume should say, somewhere, that the attribution of several works in the second movement is traditional rather than scholarly — a single honest paragraph would settle it, and its absence is the one place where this otherwise scrupulous work is less than fully candid with the reader.

Claude · Anthropic