[Advaita-l] 'Shankara Vijaya History' by Sri Vidyasankar Sundaresan

[Raghav Kumar Dwivedula]

Dear Subbu ji
I read the following in it in the article sent by you.

“Paul Hacker (1978: 478-80) …. concludes that Sankara did not establish any
mathas at all. He proposes that it was Vidyaranya who established the
Srngeri matha in the fourteenth century and either originated or greatly
popularized the tradition of affiliating the DasanamI orders with the four
amnaya mathas. Hacker sees this as part of Vijayanagara politics in the
fourteenth century, basing his postulate on his reading of the Madhaviya
Sahkaravijaya that he unquestioningly attributes to Vidyaranya.” (Page
114-115)

My comments - As usual Paul Hacker (who हाइड्स his malevolent Christian
missionary agenda of dismissing modern Hinduism as just a stepping stone to
Christianity which is the the only path to salvation) thinks all
post-Shankara Advaita is divergent from Shankara, also ….. yawn….. very
predictably says Sri Shankara did not establish *any* Mathas  at all. So
much for his scholasticism on Sankara Digvijaya.

His Christian apologia reduces one’s curiosity in hearing him out when he
supports SSSS. Maybe a one paragraph chatGPT summary of Hacker’s entire
life’s work is sufficient to size him up in order to confirm he is
मूर्खवदुपेक्षणीय:

Another disreputable view is of the well-known Karl Potter who says in that
article that daśanāmī sannyāsīs’ praxis is antithetical to Sri Śankara’s
thought. If he ever found himself amongst nāga sadhus, that might have
changed his mind.

As we can see, a significant quantum of western scholarship (with
honourable exceptions) is insidious in exploiting fault-lines within the
Dharma traditions to push its Marxist oppressor-oppressed narratives or a
Macaulayist missionary agenda of the “white man’s burden” of “reforming”
and uplifting the heathen idolaters.

On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 at 4:07 PM, V Subrahmanian via Advaita-l <
advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> wrote:

> This is a well analyzed article of 76 pages:
>
> https://archive.org/details/SundaresanShankaravijayaHistory_201706/mode/2up
>
> warm regards
> subbu
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