Dakshinamurti Stotram

Shiva as the teacher who faces south, seated under a banyan, saying nothing. The Dakshinamurti Stotram is the hymn built on that image, and it is one of the few devotional poems in Sanskrit that is also a compressed statement of Advaita Vedanta.

What it is

Ten numbered verses, attributed to Adi Shankara, each closing with the same salutation: tasmai shri-gurumurtaye nama idam shri-dakshinamurtaye, to him, the guru made form, to Sri Dakshinamurti, this salutation. The repetition is structural. Every verse argues something about the self and the world, and every verse ends by handing the argument back to a figure who is simultaneously a statue in a temple niche and the awareness behind the reader’s own eyes.

Verse one sets the whole position: vishvam darpana-drishyamana-nagari-tulyam, the universe is like a city seen in a mirror, arising within oneself yet appearing as if outside, the way things appear in a dream. The hymn’s subject, from that first line, is not Shiva’s biography. It is the status of the world.

The four verses that are not in it

This is the thing worth knowing before citing the hymn, and the reason a great many quotations of it are mislabelled.

The stotra proper is preceded by dhyana-shlokas, meditation verses used to fix the image before recitation begins. Standard editions give four. They are not numbered as part of the hymn, they are not covered by its colophon, and they are almost certainly not by the same hand.

They include the most quoted lines in the entire tradition of Dakshinamurti. Chitram vatataror mule vriddhah shishya gurur yuva, a wonder, under the banyan the disciples are old and the guru is young, and guros tu maunam vyakhyanam, the guru’s teaching is silence. Also nidhaye sarvavidyanam bhishaje bhavaroginam, to the treasure-house of all knowledge, the physician for those sick with becoming.

Both are dhyana-shlokas. Neither is verse three or verse four of the stotra. When a source cites “Dakshinamurti Stotram 3” and quotes the banyan, it has silently promoted a preliminary verse into the hymn. The distinction matters here more than it usually would, because the silence-as-teaching image that the whole popular reception rests on sits outside the text it is attributed to.

The ashtaka problem

The colophon in the standard recension reads dakshinamurty-ashtakam sampurnam, here ends the eight verses on Dakshinamurti. The hymn it closes has ten numbered verses.

No popular edition explains the discrepancy, and we are not going to invent a resolution. Two things can be said. The word ashtaka does appear inside the hymn, at verse nine, where Shiva is named in his eightfold form, the ashtamurti, as earth, water, fire, air, ether, sun, moon and the living being. And hymns of eight verses are a standard Sanskrit form, which makes a later expansion from eight to ten an obvious possibility rather than a demonstrated fact. Whether verses nine and ten are additions, or whether the title counts something other than verses, is not settled by anything we have seen.

The commentaries

The hymn attracted serious exegesis, which is unusual for a devotional stotra and is the best evidence that the tradition read it as philosophy.

Sureshvaracharya, Shankara’s direct disciple, wrote the Manasollasa, a vartika or explanatory verse-commentary on the stotra. It is substantially longer than the hymn and is the reason the ten verses are read as a systematic argument rather than a sequence of praises. Svayamprakasha wrote the Tattvasudha, and Ramatirtha commented in turn on Sureshvara’s Manasollasa, so the layer above the hymn is itself three deep.

What is not in it

Iconography. The hymn says almost nothing about how Dakshinamurti is carved: the fire and the rosary, the book, the hand in chin-mudra, the dwarf underfoot, the south-facing niche. All of that is governed by the shilpa texts and documented in T. A. Gopinatha Rao’s Elements of Hindu Iconography. The stotra assumes the image and argues from it.

Nor is it a narrative. There is no story of how Shiva came to teach, no scene, no cast. What the hymn offers instead is a sequence of positions about perception, dream, waking and the self, closing each time on a bow to the figure who embodies them.