Vivekacudamani

Sri Samkara, reverentially adored as Sri Bhagavatpada, wrote illuminating Commentaries on the triple classics of Vedanta Philosophy, the Upanisads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Siitras to provide knowledge of the scriptural texts, reinforcing them by accordant reasoning and verifying them by personal experience. Out of compassion for those who are incapable of mastering these commentaries and to instruct them in the verities of Vedanta, he wrote a number of minor works known as Prakarana Granthas. Of these, the Yivekeciidsmeni is the best known. It gives the quintessence of spiritual knowledge. Significantly called 'the Crest Jewel of Discrimination', it shows that the ills of life are to be traced to one's inability to discriminate between the eternal and the ephemeral. Mistaking the worldly things which are the non- atman for one's real atman, one loses oneself in pursuit of them, and thus prolongs the samsaric cycle. Discrimination between the atman and the anatman is the primordium on which the entire spiritual process for, atmasalq;atkara which leads to liberation is based. Sri Bhagavatpada charts out this voyage of an afflicted and earnest inquirer across the sea of samsara in the form of a dialogue between a shishya and his Guru to whom he has supplicated, and who helps to transmute the textual knowledge of the sisya into a fact of realisation. There was no extant commentary on this work for long. This has now been graciously provided by the celebrated Jivanmukta, His Holiness Sri Candrasekhara Bharati Piijyapad~ of revered memory who adorned the Sarada Pitha at Sp'lgeri !is its thirty-fourth pontiff, on the lines of Sri Bhagavatpada's Bhasyas on the Prasthanatraya, endowing the golden petals of this classic with the fragrance of his masterly exposition. This book is an English rendering of this Commentary by a feeble pen which is conscious of its limitations to bring out the spirit of the original.