Adi Shankaracharya Revives Hinduism

Around 788 CE (traditional dating), Adi Shankaracharya was born in Kaladi, Kerala. By age 32 — when he is said to have died — he had walked the entire subcontinent, defeated rival scholars in debate, composed commentaries on the Upanishads, Brahma Sutras, and Bhagavad Gita, and established four monasteries (mathas) at the cardinal points of India: Sringeri (south), Puri (east), Dwarka (west), and Jyotirmath (north). His philosophy of Advaita Vedanta ("non-duality") argued that the individual self (Atman) and the ultimate reality (Brahman) are one — and that the perceived world of multiplicity is maya (illusion). Shankaracharya's intellectual achievement revitalized Hinduism at a time when Buddhism was the dominant tradition in much of India, and his institutional framework — the four mathas — provided Hinduism with an organizational structure it had previously lacked.