Adi Shankara Quotes (0-)

“Sitting in a solitary place, freeing the mind from desires and controlling the senses, meditate with unswerving attention on the Atman which is One without-a-second.”

“On the level of the body I am your servant. On the level of the soul I am your lover. On the level of the Self I am you.”

“Like bubbles in the water, the worlds rise, exist and dissolve in the Supreme Self, which is the material cause and the prop of everything.”

“Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu, Guru Deva Maheshwara. Guru Sakshath Parambrahma, Tasmai Shri Gurave Namaha. Guru is the creator Brahma, Guru is the preserver Vishnu, Guru is the destroyer Shiva. Guru is directly the supreme spirit — I offer my salutations to this Guru.”

“Like bubbles in the water, the worlds rise, exist and dissolve in the Supreme Self, which is the material cause and the prop of everything.”

“One should understand that the Atman is always like the King, distinct from the body, senses, mind and intellect, all of which constitute the matter (Prakriti); and is the witness of their functions.”

“All the manifested world of things and beings are projected by imagination upon the substratum which is the Eternal All pervading Vishnu, whose nature is Existence-Intelligence; just as the different ornaments are all made out of the same gold.”

“Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu, Guru Deva Maheshwara. Guru Sakshath Parambrahma, Tasmai Shri Gurave Namaha. Guru is the creator Brahma, Guru is the preserver Vishnu, Guru is the destroyer Shiva. Guru is directly the supreme spirit — I offer my salutations to this Guru.”

“Ancient or pre-Buddhistic Hinduism sought Him both in the world and outside it; it took its stand on the strength and beauty and joy of the Veda, unlike modern or post-Buddhistic Hinduism which is oppressed with Buddha's sense of universal sorrow and Shankara's sense of universal illusion,-Shankara who was the better able to destroy Buddhism because he was himself half a Buddhist.”

“In his short life of thirty-two years Shankara achieved that union of sage and saint, of wisdom and kindliness, which characterizes the loftiest type of man produced in India... There is much metaphysical wind in these discourses, and arid deserts of textual exposition; but they may be forgiven in a man who at the age of thirty could be at once the Aquinas and the Kant of India... Shankara establishes the source of his philosophy at a remote and subtle point never quite clearly visioned again until, a thousand years later, Immanuel Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason... We do not know how much Parmenides’ insistence that the Many are unreal, and that only the One exists, owed to the Upanishads, or contributed to Shankara; nor can we establish any connection, of cause or suggestion, between Shankara and the astonishingly similar philosophy of Immanuel Kant.”

“Among Hindus, the date of Shankara is controversial; some date him to c. 500 BC. In this case, I wholeheartedly support the conventional date established by Indologists, among other reasons because his choice of Dwarka for his Western matha, and not Hinglaj (west of the Indus) as intended, fits neatly with the fact that the latter area had passed under Muslim control in the early eighth century.”