The Acarya: Sankara of Kaladi (Augmented and Improved)

Sankara was one of those rare teachers who emphasized the testing of theoretical postulates before people accepted their validity. He laid down the basic tenets of lofty advaita in a few instruction manuals (prakaranas) that, if followed carefully, would light the ordinary man’s path to Self-realization. Four of those texts, Atmabodha, Aparoksanubhµuti, Upadesa Sshasri, and Vivekacudamani have been used in this third edition to highlight the essence of what the Acarya had to say, without recourse to his more profound commentaries. 

Sankara’s instructions on the practice of self-discipline, the goal of the practice, and the resulting bliss have been organized under an alphabetical list of topics of common interest. Selected verses from the texts have been paraphrased and included under the appropriate heads. The purport of the verses has been restated to facilitate understanding. The sole purpose of this new edition is to make the book more useful to more people who are interest-ed in finding out who they are and what their place here on earth is, and what they can do to make themselves better human beings. The original life story of the saint still fascinates the reader.

About the Author: 

INDUSEKHARA S. MADUGULA, Ph.D., is convinced that the simplest and the straightest path to understanding ‘the meaning of life’ is through an inquiry into one’s own origins, one’s own Self, and one’s own inevitable mergence into the Supreme Consciousness. As a writer, his passion is the application of linguistic tech-niques to the analysis of poetry and how it touches one’s inmost being. While The Acarya is an effort to understand how Sankara helps in the former endeavor, his two later works, Sankara the Poet: Sivanan-dalahari (2021) and Beauty and the Saint: Sankara’s Saundaryalahari (2023) aim to understand how his poetry uniquely engages the savant.