[Advaita-l] Conference on that Date of Adi Sankaracharya in October, 2002

[Murali Karamchedu]

Vidyasankar Wrote:

>Any sane and reasonable answer to these questions
>has to be based on internal literary evidence, not on stories that people concoct. These
>answers also impinge directly upon the date of Adi Sankara. If you truly follow the thread
>of time bckwards via the texts that are available to us, the conclusion is inevitable that
>Adi Sankara's date has to be sometime in the 8th century, or maybe in the 7th century at
>a stretch.Furthermore, any such date also has to reconcile with other traditions where there are cross-referencing records.
Such as those of Jaina or Buddhist. In fact, Bhandarkar, Telang etc used these as corroborative evidences in their own 
assessment of Sankara's date. Mahamahopadyaya Satis Chandra Vidyabhusan's PHd Thesis on 'History of Medieval School of Indian Logic' 
traces many such cross-references between the contemporary arguments of Kumarila and Jaina's (and Buddhists), and points to Jaina records 
that date the texts Kumarila or others criticise, to the equivalent of 600-650 AD. Just to point to one example; One revered Jina logician by the name 
Samanthabhadra is critiqued by Kumarila (according to Bhandarkar in a record of a set of Manuscripts; the book details the references); 
and this Samanthabhadra is dated to 600AD according to internal Jaina records. 

So, if Kumarila and Sankara were contemporaries (at least according to hagiography), one needs to revisit all these Jaina records and Buddhist records
to reckon with an alternative, much earlier date.

Best Regards,
Murali Manohar