Adi Shankara - Life

Life

Traditional accounts of Adi Shankara's life can be found in the Śankara Vijaya, which are poetic works that contain a mix of biographical and legendary material, written in the epic style. The most important among these biographies are the Mādhavīya Śaṅkara Vijayaṃ (of Mādhava, c. 14th century), the Cidvilāsīya Śaṅkara Vijayaṃ (of Cidvilāsa, c. between 15th century and 17th century), and the Keraļīya Śaṅkara Vijayaṃ (of the Kerala region, extant from c. 17th century).

Adi Sankara was born to Vishwakarma and Nambudiri parents. Shankara's gotram (lineage) and sutram (recension - familial vedic trend) are known as being of Atreya lineage and of Aswalayana recension. These details are available in ancient hagiographies as well as contemporary write ups on the same.

Sankaracharya was a contemporary of the great Tamil saint Kulashekhara Alwar who was also a Chera king.

Read more about this topic:  Adi Shankara

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
    Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

    If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for—business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)