Who Am I · c. 788–820 CE
Adi Shankara
He argued that the deepest self in you is not your body, your feelings or your thoughts — and that this is not a loss but the end of fear.
Kalady, India · lived 788 – 820
Their big question
If you strip away everything you call yourself, what is left?
Shankara’s question is the one Descartes and Ibn Sina asked, arriving in India from a different direction: what is it that is actually here, underneath the things I call me?
His answer is startling if you take it seriously. The body is not you, because it changes and you can watch it change. Feelings are not you, for the same reason. Thoughts are not you — you can notice a thought, and the thing noticing it is not the thought. Peel all of it away and what is left, he said, is not nothing. It is the one thing that was never absent.
He called it not-two, which is what Advaita means. His claim is that the deepest thing in a person is the same as the deepest thing in everything, so the ordinary sense of being a separate self locked inside a body is a mistake — not a small one, but the mistake that generates most suffering. Fear, he noticed, needs a boundary. Something has to be outside you before you can be frightened of losing what is inside.
The obvious objection is that this sounds like an enormous claim with no way to check it. Shankara’s answer was that it is not something to believe; it is something to look at. Nobody can do the looking for you, and if you look and find only more thoughts, that finding is also part of the investigation.
“Brahman is real; the world is appearance. The self is that Brahman, and you already are it.”
This is a summary of his position rather than a sentence he wrote. He argued it at length, and it is the foundation of Advaita Vedanta.
Three things worth knowing
- He is said to have travelled the length of India on foot, arguing with anyone who would argue, and to have died in his early thirties.
- Advaita means not-two: his claim was that the self and the ground of everything are not separate things.
- He wrote extensive commentaries on older texts, and almost all of his surviving work is argument rather than poetry.
Try it — think like Adi
Sit for two minutes and watch your thoughts arrive. Now ask: who is noticing them? Try to describe that noticer. Notice how every description you reach for is itself another thought.
We have no portrait of Adi that is both authentic and free to use, so this page uses a drawn mark rather than an invented face. About the pictures.