Mandukya Karika

Twelve prose sentences of Upanishad, and two hundred and fifteen verses of commentary riding on them. The Mandukya Karika, also called the Agama Shastra, is where Advaita Vedanta stops being an exegetical tendency and becomes a system.

What it is

Four books, called prakaranas, attributed to a teacher named Gaudapada whom the tradition holds to be the parama-guru of Shankara, the teacher of his teacher Govinda. That places him around the sixth century, though the date is convention. The firm outer limit is that the eighth-century Buddhist Kamalashila already quotes Books Two and Three as authoritative.

Agama, scripture, walks through the Upanishad’s own teaching. Vaitathya, unreality, presses the Upanishad’s equation of dream and waking into a claim about the world. Advaita, non-duality, gives the doctrine its name and introduces the discipline it calls asparsha-yoga, the yoga of no contact. Alatashanti, the quieting of the firebrand, delivers the image the whole work moves toward: whirl a burning stick and it seems to draw a circle of fire, and there is no circle.

The conclusion is ajativada, the doctrine of non-origination. Nothing is ever really born. The same claim is made twice, once as psychology in Book Two and once as metaphysics in Book Four, in verses that are nearly identical in wording.

Two disputes that have not closed

Whose commentary is it? A commentary on the Karika is transmitted under Shankara’s name, and Anandagiri wrote his sub-commentary on it as Shankara’s, so the attribution was accepted deep inside the tradition. Hajime Nakamura doubted it. Vidhushekhara Bhattacharya, editing the Karika in 1943, argued from defects of metre in the opening verses and from a handling of certain karikas that reads unlike the Shankara of the undisputed works. The record is genuinely divided.

How Buddhist is it? Book Four is saturated with Madhyamaka vocabulary and four-cornered logic, uses samvriti and paramartha for conventional and ultimate truth, and even carries an epithet, dvipadam vara, best of bipeds, that Buddhists used of the Buddha. Richard King reads the work as composite, by authors turning Buddhist arguments to Vedantic ends. Bhattacharya thought the four books may not be by one hand at all. The tradition answers from inside the text, at 4.99: naitad buddhena bhashitam, this was not spoken by the Buddha.

What is not in it

An English rendering anyone agrees on. Manilal Dvivedi’s 1894 edition and Bhattacharya’s 1943 edition are the public-domain standards and they differ substantially; Swami Nikhilananda’s 1949 translation is the most quoted and is in copyright. Renderings of the same verse diverge widely, so a quotation of the Karika means little unless the translator is named.