Rewriting The Sacred Geography of Advait PDF

Locklin and Lauwers, “Rewriting the Sacred Geography of Advaita,” page 1
Note: This is a late, pre-review draft of an article that was subsequently published in a revised
form as: Reid B. Locklin and Julia Lauwers, “Rewriting the Sacred Geography of Advaita:
Swami Chinmayānanda and the Śaṅkara-Dig-Vijaya,” J Hindu Studies (2009) 2 (2): 179-208.
doi: 10.1093/jhs/hip017.
REWRITING THE SACRED GEOGRAPHY OF ADVAITA:
SWAMI CHINMAYĀNANDA AND THE ŚAṄKARA-DIG-VIJAYA
Abstract: In the short treatise Śaṅkara the Missionary, the modern Vedāntin Swami
Chinmayānanda famously invoked the medieval hagiographies of Ādi Śaṅkarācārya as
inspiration for his work as founder of the international Chinmaya Mission. Through their creative
retelling of this sacred life-story, Chinmayānanda and his collaborators did not merely invoke the
image of the eighth-century sage to authorize their twentieth-century movement. They also
charted what Thomas Tweed has recently described as a “translocative” identity from and for the
Advaita tradition, effectively rationalizing its emergence as a global religion while also re-
rooting it firmly in the land and culture of India.
Introduction
In his foreword to the short treatise Śaṅkara the Missionary, the modern Vedāntin Swami
Chinmayānanda (1916-93) appealed to the hagiographical portraits of the eighth-century
Advaitin (non-dualist) sage Ādi Śaṅkarācārya as inspiration for his own work as a public teacher,
movement initiator and founder of the international Chinmaya Mission. These hagiographies,
“Rewriting the Sacred Geography of Advaita,” page 2
dating from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries CE, narrate Śaṅkara’s life as a “conquest of
the quarters” (dig-vijaya), a triumphant tour of India modeled on the conquests and ritual
enthronements of legendary kings. Some interpreters have invoked Śaṅkara the Missionary as a
significant witness to the widespread influence of the hagiographical portrait of the great Hindu
saint, as well as a telling example of its continued reinterpretation into the modern period.1 The
specific details of this re-interpretation have, however, generally been passed over in silence. In
this essay, we propose to fill this gap and, in the process, to highlight distinctive features and
inherent tensions of Advaita Vedānta as a global religious movement.
Through their creative retelling of Śaṅkara’s life-story, we argue, Chinmayānanda and his
collaborators charted a new conceptual map from and for the Advaita tradition, albeit one in
dynamic tension with the traditional “quarters” of the hagiographies. The central theme of this
creative reinterpretation is the dig-vijaya itself. As a literary trope and social ideal, the dig-vijaya
motif does not originate with Śaṅkara or the Advaita tradition. On the contrary, it occurs
frequently in Indian epic and purānic texts to describe a kind of holy war, in which kings and
saints conquer territories and establish their institutions and empires (Granoff; Sax; Amaladass).
While the term refers most literally to a ritual of—and strategy for—territorial expansion, royal
dig-vijayas are depicted in these literatures as simultaneously moral and military campaigns: far
from being purely political, their religious aspects were central (Sax, pp. 40-45). Beginning at
least in the thirteenth century CE, the typical expression of this motif shifted from the military
conquest of great kings to the “proselytizing” efforts and extraordinary spiritual achievements of
great renouncers (Sax, pp. 45-46; Granoff, pp. 297-300). Devotees of various Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva
and other Hindu and Buddhist traditions narrated the lives of their founders and exemplary
renunciants precisely in terms of conquest, drawing special attention to central points of these
figures’ teaching, their debates and victories over stereotyped rivals and their connection to
important pilgrimage sites throughout the subcontinent. Śaṅkara’s legendary dig-vijaya, though
depicted variously in different hagiographies, fits seamlessly into this broader tradition. Śaṅkara,
cast as a powerful avatāra or incarnation of the god Śiva, is sent to revive the ancient dharma by
restoring correct worship and philosophy to an India overrun by Buddhists, Vaiṣṇavas, Śaivas
and a host of other opponents of the Advaita teaching.2
Translating this ancient trope into yet another idiom and a new social context, Swami
Chinmayānanda used the well-known hagiographical narrative of Śaṅkara’s conquest to set an
agenda for the Chinmaya Mission and to rationalize the emergence of Advaita Vedānta as a
global movement. The historical transformation of the tradition was already well underway by
the middle of the twentieth century, of course, beginning at the latest with the famous speeches
of Swami Vivekānanda (1863-1902) at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions and the
subsequent founding of the Ramakrishna Mission and Vedānta Society (see Beckerlegge;
Jackson; Williams). Chinmayānanda stands out in this broader development, however, by virtue
of the specificity and creativity of his and his disciples’ employment of the dig-vijaya theme. Just
as Śaṅkara revived, unified and defended the Hindu tradition in his great conquest,
Chinmayānanda argued, so also should members of the Chinmaya Mission. Chinmayānanda both
shaped and was shaped by the hagiographical portrait, and what he uncovered therein made a
distinctive contribution to the ongoing transformation of Advaita.3
In order to elucidate the most salient features of this transformation, we first attempt
briefly to locate Swami Chinmayānanda and the Chinmaya Mission as a Hindu missionary
movement. From this general treatment, in two subsequent sections, we then focus more
narrowly on the text of Śaṅkara the Missionary itself as a unique consolidation, extension and
imaginative translocation of the Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya narrative.

Swami Chinmayānanda the Missionary: Locating the Chinmaya Movement
In the final few pages of his magisterial study of the Śaṅkara hagiographies, Conquest of
the Four Quarters, Jonathan Bader reflects briefly on modern representations of the great sage,
including his depiction by Swami Chinmayānanda as a kind of “spiritual general” who wins a
“war of culture” for India. Bader remarks that this description “could as easily be read as a
tribute to Swami Chinmayānanda himself” (Bader, p. 328). Though we will eventually suggest a
more complex reading, this passing remark offers a helpful point of entry for locating this
founder and exemplary renunciant of the Chinmaya movement. Reading backwards from
Chinmayānanda’s own portrait of Śaṅkara, then, we might characterize this modern Swami as a
kind of missionary, spiritual general, cultural warrior and, at least from a perspective within the
tradition, world-teacher (jagad-guru) and world-conqueror (dig-vijayin).
The Chinmaya movement emerged from Swami Chinmayānanda’s vision of a broad
renaissance of Hindu culture and thought in the wake of Indian independence—a renaissance in
which the ancient wisdom of figures like Śaṅkara might be brought to bear on modern problems
of materialism, national disintegration, oppressive organized religion and general spiritual
malaise or forgetfulness.4 In many public lectures and discussions, he expressed his desire to re-
introduce this great Hindu heritage to the entire world, but especially to the educated elite of
India and the wider Hindu Diaspora. Swami Chinmayānanda’s own missionary efforts consisted
primarily of travels and teaching. The so-called jñāna yagñas, signature week- or fortnight-long
discourses on the Upaniṣads and especially on the Bhagavad Gītā, became—and remain—one of
the core activities of his movement. From the first jñāna yagñas delivered in Pune between
December 31, 1951 and April 8, 1952, to his first global tour, undertaken between March 7 and
July 5, 1965, Chinmayānanda embodied many of the characteristic features of the dig-vijaya
literature, albeit on a larger geographical scale: in the 2001 authorized history of the movement,
Call of the Conch, a full-colour illustration of the 1965 global tour is accompanied by the label
“Dik-Vijay Yatra,” characterizing the journey as a modern pilgrimage and conquest of these new
quarters.5 In 1971 Chinmayānanda went on his longest tour of foreign countries, a 190-day
missionary venture. During these travels in India and abroad, his talks often inspired the
establishment of more permanent institutions. Through a relatively open-ended process, the
Chinmaya Mission grew into an international movement with a clear institutional structure,
including centres on every major continent as well as educational institutions, social service
organizations, printing presses and distance-study programs in India and North America.
According to sources within the movement, this process of institutionalization was truly
organic: the foundation of the Chinmaya Mission itself in 1953 is typically ascribed less to the
initiative of Chinmayānanda than to the desire of participants in his jñāna yagñas to continue
their study of Vedānta.6 Eventually, Chinmayānanda and his collaborators in the Mission would
develop a unified “Scheme of Study” to guide such disciples, either as individuals or as members
of small study groups, through the entire Advaita teaching—as mediated, of course, by the
Swami’s own discourses and scriptural commentaries. One can find reliable introductions to this
teaching in a number of places, including A Manual of Self-Unfoldment, published in 1975 by the
newly founded Chinmaya Mission West. The second book in the Scheme of Study, the Manual
serves as a bridge between the brief, introductory reflections in the Scheme’s first volume,
Kindle Life, to the first of the commentaries on traditional Advaita texts—specifically, Bhaja
Govindam—in its third volume, as well as providing specific instructions for the formation and
maintenance of the study groups (Chinmayānanda, Manual, pp. 180-91). It can thus be
interpreted, as the title itself suggests, as a kind of user’s manual and schematic overview of the
teaching.
In his foreword to this work, Chinmayānanda describes its content as a “Science of
Reality,” similar to the natural sciences but distinguished by its inward focus (Chinmayānanda,
Manual, i-ii). This theme runs throughout the entire Manual. Chinmayānanda first offers a
portrait of true “Religion,” reflected in the sacred texts of all spiritual traditions, as a “great
science” and the ancient Rishis, correspondingly, as “scientists of the spirit” and “glorious depth-
psychologists” (pp. 4-5). He then turns, in subsequent chapters, to a systematic analysis of
experience in terms of the five “sheaths” of human embodiment from the Taittirīya Upaniṣad,
and the vāsanās, or mental impressions, which obscure the divine Self beneath all these layers
(pp. 53-87). From this diagnosis of the problem, the remainder of the Manual goes on to outline
a systematic therapy for its treatment, including preparatory ethical disciplines for cleansing the
mind, an array of practices for the conservation of energy and elimination of vāsanās, and, in the
final chapters, more detailed consideration of the threefold sādhana or means to release our
mental power and to attain final liberation—namely, scriptural study, repetition of mantras and
special techniques for deeper meditation (pp. 117-18). Chinmayānanda sums up this therapy as
follows: “[I]f the body-mind-intellect can be ‘tuned up’ properly and the mind-intellect can be
‘stilled’ or ‘quietened,’ there is a stage of ‘contemplative-ness’ reached. The mind-intellect, in
such a state of contemplation, can realize the Divine state – OM. In fact, the Divine, then
becomes self-evident!” (p. 178).
Swami Chinmayānanda’s presentation of Advaita philosophy in terms of science,
meditative technique and spiritual therapy represents an important move toward explaining its
power and relevance in the contemporary world. This is a common strategy, employed by a
number of other prominent modern Vedāntins, including Swami Vivekānanda, in order to

translate the ancient Upaniṣadic teaching into a quintessentially modern—and stereotypically
Western—idiom (e.g. Rolland, pp. 257-80; Biernacki, pp. 94-95). For Chinmayānanda, from the
very beginning of the movement, it also offered a platform for internal critique and reform. In the
famous address “Let Us Be Hindus,” which inaugurated the first public jñāna yagña in 1951, for
example, Chinmayānanda fiercely denounced the corruption of Hinduism by the “selfish,
arrogant, power-mad priest caste” and called for the rededication of the tradition as a pure
“Temple of Truth” and “Science of Perfection” through assiduous study of the Upaniṣads
(Patchen, pp. 158-62).7 By reviving the Vedic heritage and reframing this same heritage as an
emancipatory science, Chinmayānanda not only undertook his self-appointed task of “bringing
Hinduism to Hindus”; he also, thereby, claimed to purify Hinduism and “Religion” itself in the
service of a distinctively Advaitin ideal of pure, contemplative rationality.8 It may perhaps be no
coincidence that Swami Chinmayānanda chose to pen the foreword of A Manual of Self-
Unfoldment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, allusively locating the work’s ‘method’ alongside
such icons of Western scientific progress as Harvard and MIT (p. 2).
As we have already noted, Swami Chinmayānanda is by no means unique, either in his
adaptation of a scientific idiom to communicate the Advaita teaching or in his attempt to revive
India and to spread its wisdom abroad. He received his renunciant status and name from Swami
Śivānanda, and his Mission can be, and sometimes has been, understood as simply one of several
movements emerging from the latter’s Divine Life Society (Hummel, p. 71; Flood, p. 272). In
The Saffron Mission, the Indian theologian C.V. Mathew has recommended that the movement
should be situated within a still broader interpretative trajectory: namely, a distinctively
Brahmanical history of conquest and absorption—“Aryanization” or “sanskritization”—which
began in the Vedic period and gained strength under colonial rule. The Brahmin teacher Śaṅkara
was indeed a kind of missionary, Mathew argues, as are the various modern and contemporary
Neo-Hindu and Hindu nationalist movements that work to extend the tradition through a
complex process of identity politics at home and assimilative strategies abroad. He declares:
The history of Saffron mission in the last century-and-a-quarter is the story of an
ideology built on a mythically created past, on a dogmatism that defies reason, logic, and
history, and on a vision that foresees the creation of a unitive and homogenous Hindu
nation in India. In due course the envisaged nation, already civilized on the basis of
Hindu (‘Aryan’) spirituality, will lead the rest of the world into an ‘Aryanized’
spirituality and culture (p. 301).
J. Kuruvachira makes a similar case, albeit with greater nuance. He identifies such
“sanskritization” as but one of several missionary strategies adopted by those invested in
propagating Hinduism in India and abroad (pp. 265-84). He also more fully documents the actual
diffusion of Hindu movements into Europe and North America. Particularly through the work of
Swami Vivekānanda and the Ramakrishna movement, the International Society of Krishna
Consciousness (ISKCON) and the Sangh Parivar network, Kuruvachira concludes, Hinduism has
truly emerged as “an ‘aggressive’ missionary religion, seeking followers not only in India but
also overseas, especially in the West” (pp. 39-40).9
In drawing such a conclusion, Kuruvachira echoes a number of earlier studies, including,
in addition to The Saffron Mission, Reinhart Hummel’s 1980 survey Indische Mission und
Frömmigkeit im Westen. But Hummel also draws attention to the enormous complexity of this
transition, as the broad Advaita inclusivism of the Ramakrishna Mission, the resolutely Vaiṣṇava
theism of ISKCON, and a thick diversity of other competing perspectives each pull up their deep
roots in Indian geography, caste and culture to enter new social contexts and to adopt more
universal theological formulations—transforming Hindu tradition from a mere “ethnic religion”
(Volksreligion) to a true “world religion” (Weltreligion). As Hummel and others have well
documented, it would be difficult to ascribe such a transformation to “Hinduism” as a whole.
Instead, it proceeds through the efforts of particular teachers and movements, and its results
should be regarded, at least to a very large extent, as provisional and subject to continual
renegotiation.
With these qualifications in mind, a second, less sweeping attempt to locate Swami
Chinmayānanda and the Chinmaya Mission might proceed by a more limited comparison with
one or more other examples of the “Saffron mission” at work in the West. The case of Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi (1917-2008) and his Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement is particularly
instructive in this regard. Like Chinmayānanda, the Maharishi translated Advaita into the
language of a “science of being,” interiority and special techniques of meditative practice.
Cynthia Ann Humes has argued that, for precisely this reason, many Western adherents initially
took up the practice of TM as a kind of “import religion,” free of the “baggage” of traditional
Hinduism (pp. 56-57).10 Difficulties arose when the TM movement was eventually revealed as
“a full-fledged incarnation of a multinational Vedantic Export Religion,” firmly rooted in the
idiom of Indian language, culture and ritual practice (p. 74).11 “Many of those who bought into
the program as a type of Import Hinduism,” Humes writes, “felt deceived when ultimately faced
with Maharishi’s true end: exporting not just a mantic technique, but a religion, a lifestyle, a
political ideology . . .” (p. 74). Maharishi Mahesh Yogi re-conceptualized the Advaita tradition
to reach a North American audience, and one result—after a period of enormous growth—was
tension and even betrayal on the part of some followers.
The case of Swami Chinmayānanda is specifically different from that of Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi, on several counts. First of all, the Chinmaya Mission was always focused
primarily on the revival of the Indian nation and on the formation of a committed network of
educated Hindus in India and abroad, rather than on attracting the adherence of “Westerners,”
per se—it is telling, for example, that C.V. Mathew discusses Swami Chinmayānanda almost
exclusively in connection with the rise of Hindutva in India and Chinmayānanda’s co-founding
of the Hindu nationalist organization Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in 1964 (Neo-Hinduism, pp.
54-57; Saffron Mission, pp. 204-13).12 In addition, the Mission’s most typical public expression
from its inception, the jñāna yagña, has consistently highlighted the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad-
Gītā and other culturally specific, Sanskrit-language texts as the fundamental basis of the
movement. This would, it seems, considerably reduce the possibility of misunderstanding or
betrayal.
Most importantly for our purposes, Swami Chinmayānanda and his followers in the
Chinmaya Mission have also typically framed the diffusion of the Advaita teaching in the
similarly specific, traditionally Hindu tropes of travel, pilgrimage and even a kind of territorial
conquest. We have already noted the map of Swami Chinmayānanda’s dig-vijaya in the 2001
Call of the Conch. One of the companion volumes of Call, entitled Chinmaya Vishwa—
“Universal Chinmaya” or “Chinmaya throughout the Entire World”—is structured and
punctuated by further such maps, interspersed with descriptive accounts of Swami
Chinmayānanda’s travels, of the work of other prominent teachers, and of the founding of
Mission centres and other institutions. The volume narrates the spread of the movement centre
by centre, country by country in the world, state by state in India, territorial map by territorial
map, concluding with yet another map of the complete “Indian Network,” a comprehensive
listing of Swami Chinmayānanda’s jñāna yagñas and global tours, and, finally, two
organizational charts of the institutional structure of the Central Chinmaya Mission Trust and the
worldwide Chinmaya Mission—further schematic maps, we might say, of the whole

movement.13 The Mission here speaks a language not primarily of product or even of person, but
of place: of maps, of territory, of sacred geography and, at least by implication, of the “quarters”
of Śaṅkara’s legendary vijaya and beyond.
There is no denying that the metaphors of assimilation and sanskritization, on the one
hand, or Import and Export Religion, on the other, both shed light on Swami Chinmayānanda
and his missionary movement. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that more may be gained by
focusing instead on the precise question of place and locality as constitutive features of this
movement, or—more specifically—on the Chinmaya Mission’s ongoing task of imagining and
constructing what the ethnologist and historian Thomas A. Tweed has called a “translocative”
religious identity (Lady of the Exile, pp. 91-98). Extending themes originally developed by
Jonathan Z. Smith and Charles H. Long, Tweed has suggested that
. . . religions can map and inhabit worlds of meaning in at least three ways. These might
be described as locative, in which religion is associated with a homeland where the group
now resides; supralocative, which names the inclination in later generations of some
diasporic peoples to diminish or deny the significance of both the homeland and the
adopted land in their religious life; and translocative . . . which refers to the tendency
among many first- and second-generation migrants to symbolically move between
homeland and new land (pp. 94-95).
The distinctive feature of a translocative religious identity, as articulated here, is the way it
places “homeland” and “new land” into dynamic relation. The position of such religious persons
and traditions is located not in one or another of these symbolic maps of reality, but in their
continual, imaginative movement between them.

In his more recent Crossing and Dwelling, Tweed has gone on to make such metaphors
of relation, position and movement central to a general understanding of religion itself. Like a
watch or compass, he suggests, religious traditions orient their adherents in the world; yet, this
very process of orientation also propels such adherents to cross geographical boundaries through
pilgrimage and mission, to cross social boundaries of status, race and gender, and, ultimately, to
move across the “limits of embodied existence” and/or toward “the zenith of human flourishing”
(p. 151), variously conceived. “As spatial practices, religions are active verbs linked with
unsubstantial nouns by bridging prepositions: from, with, in, between, through, and, most
important, across. Religions designate where we are from, identify whom we are with, and
prescribe how we move across” (p. 78).
There is good reason to doubt whether Tweed’s theory offers a truly comprehensive
account of religion; indeed, he is refreshingly candid about the limits of this or any general
theory (see Crossing and Dwelling, pp. 13-20, 171-78). Tweed’s central metaphors of crossing,
dwelling and translocative religious identity may nevertheless help us better to locate the
Chinmaya Mission and its contribution to the modern and contemporary transformation of
Advaita. Chinmayānanda and his disciples did not create an entirely new missionary movement,
as Hummel, Mathew, Kuruvachira and Humes, among others, amply demonstrate. What they did
do was significant in its own right: they mapped this missionary movement in a distinctive way
and, through such re-mapping, re-imagined the tradition in self-consciously translocative terms.
Unlike the oft-cited case of Pittsburgh’s Sri Venkateśwara Temple, where the sacred geography
of southern India is symbolically replicated in the Penn Hills (Tweed and Prothero, p. 6; Eck, pp.
123-27; and especially Narayanan). Swami Chinmayānanda and his disciples crossed the
traditional boundaries of Advaita through continuous itinerant travel, through a well-integrated
institutional network, and also, importantly, through a new narrative. At one end of this narrative
stands the “homeland,” the idealized religion and culture of ancient India. At the other stands the
“new land,” comprehending not merely new territories, but the rationalized, interiorized and
“scientific” reading of Advaita that purportedly frees it to address all humankind. Finally, joining
“homeland” to “new land,” one encounters the dynamic figure of Śaṅkara and a creative retelling
of his legendary dig-vijaya.
Śaṅkara the Missionary: Retelling the Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya
We turn now to the specific details of this new narrative of the tradition, as revealed in
the short treatise Śaṅkara the Missionary.14 As indicated in the prefaces of both editions (1998
edition, p. 3; 1978 edition, p. xxi), this work originated in 1978 as a souvenir volume to honor
Swami Chinmayānanda’s 267th Gītā Jñāna Yagña. Chinmayānanda ordered the souvenir to be
reprinted as a full volume the same year, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the founding of
the Chinmaya Mission (p. iv). In its first edition, Śaṅkara the Missionary consisted of three
major sections: 1) A synthetic narrative of the “Life” of Śaṅkara in four chapters; 2) a
compilation of “Literature” attributed to the great sage, including summaries of major works and
nearly 100 pages of devotional hymns; 3) four appendices, including a translation of Śaṅkara’s
famous debate with Maṇḍana Miśra, reflections on his four primary disciples, a brief précis of
his philosophy and a list of his major compositions. In a slimmer revised edition, produced
twenty years after the first edition and five years after Swami Chinmayānanda’s death, the work
was thoroughly re-organized: all the hymns save the compact Daśa Śloki were removed, and the
appendices and summaries of major works were seamlessly integrated as chapters in the main
narrative (see figure 1).
With the exception of the foreword, part of the introduction, and—as we will explain
below—a portion of the chapter on Śaṅkara’s philosophy, very little of Śaṅkara the Missionary
can be definitively traced to Swami Chinmayānanda himself; indeed, other authors are explicitly
credited for a number of the work summaries and for the translation of the Maṇḍana Miśra
debate. Chinmayānanda certainly gave the treatise his stamp of approval and recommended it “to
every student of Vedānta for a deep and sympathetic study” (Śaṅkara the Missionary, p. i), yet it
has no place in the Mission’s prescribed Scheme of Study. As an expression of
Chinmayānanda’s teaching, then, the work possesses a distinctive and somewhat ambivalent
status. We might characterize it, in both editions, as a visioning document of the Chinmaya
movement itself. The essential features of the vision undoubtedly spring from Chinmayānanda
and receive his explicit commendation; but the written text is no less undoubtedly composite.
In form, Śaṅkara the Missionary consists of a creative re-presentation of Śaṅkara’s life
and work as a source of inspiration for the Chinmaya Mission and for Hindu tradition more
generally. Both Chinmayānanda and the publishers identify their primary source as the most
influential of the Śaṅkara hagiographies: the Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya of Mādhava (ŚDV).15 This work
is traditionally identified with Vidyāraṇya, the renowned fourteenth-century “Śaṅkarācārya” or
“pontiff” of the major Advaita religious centre (maṭha) in the village of Śṛṅgerī.16 This text, like
all of the hagiographies, depicts Śaṅkara as an avatāra of Śiva on a rescue mission for the heart
and land of India. The first half of the text follows him from his miraculous birth through his
initiation into renunciant life and the teaching tradition of Advaita Vedānta (ŚDV 1.1—7.58). In
the second half, it traces his pilgrimage and victory tour across every corner of the subcontinent,
in which the great teacher engages in a series of verbal contests with rival Hindus, Buddhists,
Jains and other so-called “controversialists” (7.59—15.174). It concludes in the mountains of
Kashmir, where Śaṅkara defeats an army of such rivals and ascends a mythic “throne of
omniscience” as his reward (16.54-99). In so doing, we recall, he also replicates a ritual and
mythic pattern associated with many of India’s legendary kings. “The digvijaya,” writes Bader,
“is, strictly speaking, appropriate only for a king. But the hagiographers transpose this ritual
method of legitimizing authority from the sphere of politics to the realm of metaphysics” (Bader,
p. 139).
At this respect, the essential vision of the Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya coheres seamlessly with
Swami Chinmayānanda’s own vision of spiritual, political and cultural revival. For
Chinmayānanda came to identify Śaṅkara as both an exemplar for his own movement and a pre-
eminent symbol of Indian unity. In 1968, for example, he proclaimed:
Adi Shankaracharya was an extremely effective missionary of his era. He was able to
revive the old heritage by expressing the ancient ideas in the language of his day, so that
they were grasped and understood. This process has been repeated time after time in
India. Whenever there is national disintegration, we have always returned to the sources
of our heritage, and a revival movement began because each individual, to the extent that
he was able to appreciate the subtle, great climes of thought that our forefathers had
attained, started respecting himself and revering the divinity within (quoted in Patchen, p.
172).
Chinmayānanda attributes the “national disintegration” he witnesses in India to a lack of
attention to its precious spiritual heritage. After years of foreign rule, Hindus are called to return
to their roots in order to effect a renewal of the nation and, ultimately, the world.
Ten years later, in his introduction to Śaṅkara the Missionary, Swami Chinmayānanda
echoes and intensifies these themes of national revival. He writes:

In his missionary work of propagating the great philosophical truths of the Upaniṣad-s
and of rediscovering through them the true cultural basis of our nation, Ācārya Śaṅkara
had a variety of efficient weapons in his resourceful armoury . . . [P]en alone would not
have won the war of culture for our country. He showed himself to be a great organizer, a
far-sighted diplomat, a courageous hero and a tireless servant of the country. Selfless and
unassuming, this mighty angel strode up and down the length and breadth of the country
serving his motherland and teaching his country-men to live up to the dignity and glory
of Bhārat. Such a vast programme can neither be accomplished by an individual nor
sustained without institutions of great discipline and perfect organisation. Establishing
the maṭha-s, opening temples, organizing halls of education, and even prescribing certain
ecclesiastical codes, this mighty Master left nothing undone in maintaining what he
achieved (pp. 2-3).
Chinmayānanda’s account seems very clearly to echo what William S. Sax has called the
“digvijaya ideal” of unity through territorial conquest and incorporation ( p. 51). “All
digvijayas,” Sax argues, “involve the defeat of enemies, the conquest of territory, and the
establishment of a type of rule or domination that is grounded in dharma” (p. 52). Such an ideal
of military and religious conquest is already re-configured and applied to great renouncers like
Śaṅkara in the vijaya literature itself; it simply receives a further twist and distinctively modern
application by Swami Chinmayānanda.
This appropriation of the dig-vijaya ideal is, however, neither simple nor naïve. When
Chinmayānanda enlists Śaṅkara as a “Spiritual General,” waging battle for the sacred land and
culture of India, he certainly consolidates a nationalist theme that runs, like a consistent thread,
through his entire corpus of commentaries and speeches. But he also signals his intention to draw
critically and creatively on the received portrait in the process. In his introduction to Śaṅkara the
Missionary, for example, after briefly reviewing some of the major Śaṅkara hagiographies and
singling out Mādhava’s Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya for special attention, he goes on to offer an initial
application to the present moment in history:
Today, there is throughout the country a great enthusiasm in Śaṅkara; the signs of revival
are everywhere around us. On Śrī Śaṅkara Jayantī day, we find celebrations everywhere.
Unfortunately, none of the thundering platforms successfully brings out the personality of
this great Master from Kālaḍy . . . a lot is known of Ādi Śaṅkara, but very few know of
‘The Śaṅkara.’ The more we learn to adore him, not as a divine incarnation but as a
sincere man inspired to serve the country and reconquer the nation from its slavery to
alien ideologies, the more we shall successfully pay tribute to our own culture (p. 4).
Here again the dig-vijaya ideal and language of conquest—or, more precisely, re-conquest—ring
out loud and clear. Yet, Chinmayānanda also indicates that a new story needs to be told for
contemporary persons, a shift in focus from “Ādi Śaṅkara” as an object of worship to “The
Śaṅkara”: that is, Śaṅkara the plain human person, inspired leader and movement initiator.
The narrative unfolded in the core chapters of Śaṅkara the Missionary can be read as a
faithful development of this vision. Its authors attempt to get behind “Ādi Śaṅkara” to arrive at
“The Śaṅkara.” This process of creative retrieval can be discerned, first and foremost, in the way
the narrative of Śaṅkara the Missionary revises the introduction and conclusion of its primary
source text. Mādhava’s Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya begins and ends, not in the land of India, but in a
heavenly realm. After a literary preface (ŚDV 1.1-26), the work’s prologue inaugurates
Śaṅkara’s life story by describing the consternation of all the celestial devas over the terrible
degeneration of the Vedic dharma, which has been fragmented and poisoned through the spread
of Buddhism and various Hindu bhakti cults. They beg the god Śiva for help, and he agrees to
descend in the form of Śaṅkara to set things aright (1.27-59). Similarly, at the conclusion of the
work, after Śaṅkara first ascends the “throne of omniscience” as a symbol of his victory over the
whole land (16.81-92), he travels to the holy site of Kedara, manifests his divine form as Śiva
and re-ascends to his divine abode, where he is greeted and celebrated by these same celestial
beings (16.100-107; see also Bader, pp. 76-77, 100-35; Lorenzen; and Sawai, pp. 83-116).
Though there is brief mention, between these two ascensions, of Śaṅkara’s continued teaching
and his decision to send some of his disciples to Śṛṅgerī and “other places” to continue his work
(16.93), the focus remains resolutely on the image of Śaṅkara himself as the “sacred centre” and
“hub of the wheel” not only for the hagiographical narrative, but also for the heavens and earth
themselves (Bader, p. 174).
Given that the authors of Śaṅkara the Missionary include another important scene from
Mādhava’s prologue—namely, the defeat of leading Buddhists by Kumārila Bhaṭṭa (ŚDV 1.60-
98; recounted in Śaṅkara the Missionary, p. 33)—it is all the more telling that Śiva’s heavenly
court finds no place in its pages. Instead, the first chapter of the volume offers a brief sketch of
the historical evolution of Hindu tradition, from the origins of Brahmanism in the Vedic period,
through the subsequent rise of Jainism, Buddhism and the bhakti traditions, to Śaṅkara’s own era
in the eighth century (pp. 11-12). Its authors’ interest in constructing a credible historical
background for their narrative reappears at several points in the subsequent account. At the end
of chapter one, for example, Śaṅkara the Missionary provides a summary of evidence for and
against assigning Śaṅkara’s birth to the date 788 CE, and, at the end of the main narrative in
chapter three, its authors go on to list the various Śaṅkara hagiographies and even to concede
their legendary character (pp. 18-20, 56). Despite an initial disclaimer that “the religious mind
does not bother much for the history of religion” (p. 11), then, it is not the heavens but precisely
this history which offers the primary interpretive context for understanding Śaṅkara’s true
significance.
In his foreword to Śaṅkara the Missionary—distinct from his introduction—Swami
Chinmayānanda notes that Ādi Śaṅkarācārya can and even should be regarded as a divine
avatāra beyond the reach of rational testing and enquiry. But he also suggests two alternative
ways of viewing this divine figure: namely, as a “highly competent person,” on the one hand,
and as an “institution,” on the other (p. i). Both alternatives echo the brief sketch of “The
Śaṅkara” offered by Chinmayānanda in the introduction to the same treatise, and both also direct
attention away from the heavens and toward the exigencies of human life and history, just as the
overall narrative of Śaṅkara the Missionary does.
Chinmayānanda’s twofold perspective on Śaṅkara also, finally, leads us from the
introduction of this new narrative to its conclusion. For, if the way that the authors of Śaṅkara
the Missionary revise Mādhava’s prologue emphasizes Śaṅkara’s humanity and historical
location, their re-configuration of its conclusion clearly brings out the more institutional figure. It
comes as no great surprise that, since Śiva does not descend from heaven at the beginning of this
narrative, neither does Śaṅkara re-ascend to heaven at its end. After touring the most sacred sites
of India, unifying the sub-continent through his teaching and debate, and ascending the throne of
omniscience, he does indeed travel to the sacred site of Kedara, as in the Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya. In
this narrative, however, he does so in order to organize his disciples to assume control of the four
great religious centres (maṭhas) at Jagannātha Purī in the north, Śṛṅgerī in the south, Dvārakā in
the west, and Jyotirdhāma in the east, to write a code of discipline to govern these maṭhas, and
then to merge into “his own supreme state of perfect Bliss” (pp. 53-54).17 In the 1978 edition,
moreover, this account at the end of chapter three is immediately followed by a fourth chapter
which introduces the maṭhas in greater detail and tells the colourful stories of the four great
disciples, Padmapāda, Sureśvara, Hastāmalaka, and Toṭaka, surgically extracted from their
integral places in Mādhava’s main narrative and made to stand entirely on their own. Each
disciple’s story concludes, significantly, with his installment as the principal ācārya at one of the
four maṭhas (1978 edition, pp. 55-73).18
It may be worth noting at this point that, in distinction from some of the other Śaṅkara
hagiographies, Mādhava’s Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya never explicitly mentions the four maṭhas. Given
the work’s widespread popularity and close association with the Śṛṅgerī maṭha in particular, its
restraint on this score seems remarkable (Bader, pp. 232-44; Clark, pp. 150-51; Sundaresan, pp.
147-48). For Mādhava, the evidence suggests, the disciples are intended to be understood almost
exclusively in terms of their relation to Śaṅkara as the central, divine figure of the narrative. In
Śaṅkara the Missionary, on the other hand, these same disciples are understood primarily in
terms of their role in perpetuating the great teacher’s mission. This role, the authors of Śaṅkara
the Missionary carefully point out, continues unbroken into the present, through institutions such
as the four maṭhas themselves and also, in connection with Śṛṅgerī, through the work of more
modern movements such as the Ramakrishna Mission, the Divine Life Society and the Chinmaya
Mission (p. 82). Śaṅkara represents an absolutely crucial link in this historical chain. The
reader’s attention is, nevertheless, turned away from his person and toward his continuing
mission and historic legacy, unfolded in explicitly social and institutional terms. The vision of
the hagiographies has been transposed and, thereby, subtly transformed.
New Conquest, New Quarters: Re-Locating the Advaita Tradition
Thus far, we have confined our attention to the basic structure of Śaṅkara the Missionary
and its creative re-presentation of “Ādi Śaṅkara” as “The Śaṅkara” of ordinary human history.
There is, as yet, little to suggest that the work effects a transition from India to Europe and North
America, much less that it somehow re-shapes Advaita from a so-called “ethnic religion”
(Volksreligion) to a “world religion” (Weltreligion), as an interpreter like Reinhart Hummel
might require. The narrative remains resolutely focused on the land, religion and culture of India.
Yet, something has changed. These two alterations to the fabric of Mādhava’s Śaṅkara-dig-
vijaya, one at the story’s beginning and the other at its end, function both to preserve the
essential features of the traditional “conquest of the quarters” and to re-inscribe this same
conquest within a longer arc that begins in the Vedic age, reaches a climax in the life and work
of Śaṅkara, and then continues on, unabated, through the work of prominent Advaita institutions
like the Śṛṅgerī maṭha, the Ramakrishna Mission and the Chinmaya Mission itself. If, as Tweed
suggests, one vital function of religion is to “orient in time and space” (Tweed, Crossing and
Dwelling, p. 74), it is clear that the narrative of Śaṅkara the Missionary effects a small but
significant re-orientation for the tradition, re-locating Śaṅkara’s dig-vijaya from a timeless,
mythic past to a critical moment in a dynamic history that is, importantly, still underway.
We’ve already noted some of the ways that Śaṅkara the Missionary, though it cannot be
considered a work of Swami Chinmayānanda, nonetheless resonates with broad strokes of his
own interpretation. Unsurprisingly, its authors’ creative re-orientation of the main narrative can
also be seen to reflect his wider vision of spiritual renewal. Throughout many of his works, for
example, Chinmayānanda accords great importance to individuals, institutions and nations in
contributing to the historical and spiritual progress of the whole world.19 In his nationalistic
urgings for a cultural and spiritual revival of India, he insists that this renewal be seen as one
moment in the ongoing evolution of humankind toward its own self-realization. On the one hand,
individual self-realized figures such as the Buddha, Vivekananda and Śaṅkara have “alone
brought into our life flashes of love and light, life and liveliness, which constitute the glory of all
civilizations” (Chinmayānanda, Vedanta, vol. 3, p. 960). On the other, such extraordinary
individuals do not merely exemplify universal human progress; they are also products of it. Thus,
in Love Divine, Chinmayānanda writes:
. . . the collective activities, cultural contributions, personal sacrifices of all the fathers of
spiritual culture, the dead ancestors, the Rishis, etc. are realized in the devotee who
realizes the supreme love . . . The great one, on realizing Truth, enriches his mind with
love, and becomes the very goal and culmination of a consistent and inexorable cultural
march of evolution (p. 132).
Historical figures and institutions play an important role in fostering authentic spiritual
development, and this same development, though always focused on personal mental and
intellectual dispositions, necessarily has social effects.20 Individual, collective and universal
human histories are all mutually related and mutually implicating, according to Swami
Chinmayānanda, and all are marching inexorably toward their final fulfillment.
Though the authors of Śaṅkara the Missionary do not explicitly invoke Chinmayānanda’s
notion of cultural and spiritual evolution, they do use their re-inscription of the dig-vijaya to set
an interpretative trajectory that echoes many of its major themes. The first element of this new
trajectory might simply be described as a no less inexorable march from few to all, from a
religion of the elite to a spiritual ideal for all Indians and, at least potentially, all humankind. This
development is signaled at several key points in the narrative. When Śaṅkara the Missionary first
introduces the religion of the Upaniṣads in chapter one, it notes that “by its very nature this
religion was severely individualistic; hence, it could only be the religion of the few” (p. 12). In
tracing the history from the Vedic period to Śaṅkara’s own era, alongside an account of
corruption, decline and sectarian fragmentation familiar from the traditional hagiographies, these
interpreters also describe the rise of Buddhism as a “second renaissance” of Hindu tradition and
note that, through the emergence of Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava devotional sects, the teachings of the
Upaniṣads became simplified and thereby gained wider acceptance among “the common people”
(pp. 14, 16-18). Śaṅkara’s conquest, the reader is invited to infer, not only arrests the decline of
dharma, as described in Mādhava’s Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya, but also consolidates and further
extends a progressive movement in history, whereby the Advaita teachings reach beyond the
“few” to the whole nation and even to the world.
This movement culminates and reaches its climax in Śaṅkara’s grand victory tour, as
summarized at the beginning of chapter three:
The Ācārya conceived India as one cultural unit from the Himālayas to Kanyākumārī and
from Kāmarūpa to Gandhāra (i.e. from Assam to Afghanistan). With his lofty vision of
the cultural unity of Bhārat, and the supreme realisation of the one underlying God-
principle pervading all the animate and inanimate world of beings and things, he could
infuse into the people the idea of their essential oneness, in spite of the seemingly
different customs, traditions and methods of worship. Thus it was truly a dig-vijaya yātrā,
a triumphant tour and conquest, annihilating the forces of ignorance and disruption, of
consolidation and establishment of the unifying forces of the universal brotherhood and
mutual understanding, culminating in the goal of all pursuits, the intimate experience of
the non-dual reality, no matter what paths were followed (Śaṅkara the Missionary, p. 45).
Here, as before, the basic framework remains resolutely focused on the cultural and spiritual
unity of India. But the description also presses beyond its own geographical bounds, speaking of
the one underlying reality of all “beings and things,” of “universal brotherhood,” and of the
singular goal of all diverse spiritual pursuits. Customs, traditions and “methods of worship” do
not necessarily need to be reshaped or reformed to reconcile them with Brahmanical orthodoxy,
as one discovers in the traditional hagiographies (Bader, pp. 253-72). Here Śaṅkara’s conquest
consists in a somewhat more radical revelation of their “essential oneness,” despite any
appearance of diversity. To anyone familiar with Swami Chinmayānanda’s teachings, this
language would carry a special resonance, echoing the many places where he extols the unique
power of Advaita to transcend all boundaries of nation, culture, race or religion.
In the actual text of Śaṅkara the Missionary, such universalism does not translate into a
literal, territorial conquest of new quarters. Though Swami Chinmayānanda did explicitly
identify the West as a prime candidate for cultural and spiritual transformation,21 nowhere does
this new narrative of Śaṅkara’s vijaya speak explicitly of extending it to include North America
or Europe. Instead, as in the passage above, its authors read universalist themes into the
traditional narrative itself. Building on the famous episode of Śaṅkara’s meeting with Śiva in the
form of an outcaste (cāṇdala), for instance, they characterize Śaṅkara as a person “whose heart
throbbed with compassion and sympathy for all men and beings irrespective of whether they
were rich or poor, learned or illiterate, brāhmaṇa or cāṇdala” (pp. 30, 55-56). Recounting the
great teacher’s composition of the Bhaja Govindam, they describe this hymn as “a philosophical
song addressed to mankind as a whole” (p. 49). Finally, in a separate chapter—originally, in the
1978 edition, an appendix—they follow the lead of another teacher, Swami Jñānānanda Bhāratī,
in identifying Śaṅkara’s four disciples as symbols of diverse spiritual paths to the one goal of
Advaita (pp. 78-79). “Thus,” they write, “we have in these four great disciples an
exemplification of the various levels and various paths, a rare phenomenon in the spiritual
history of the country, nay, of the whole world” (p.79). We might draw a very rough analogy to
the Christian narrative of Pentecost in the New Testament Book of Acts: just as the early apostles
symbolized the spread of the movement to all nations by speaking many tongues in the Christian
text, so too these four disciples may be read to symbolize the spread of Advaita to every possible
kind of spiritual seeker, irrespective of geography or birth.
If the disciples of Śaṅkara the Missionary may be so interpreted, however, it is not
because they speak the tongues of many nations. It is because they embody a universal language
of the human mind. Hence, prior to drawing correlations to the diversity of spiritual paths, the
chapter on the four disciples dwells on their significance as symbols of a universal faculty
psychology, with Padmapāda representing the “I-notion” (ahaṃkara), Sureśvara the
discriminative intellect (buddhi), Hastāmalaka the passive consciousness (citta) and Toṭaka the
“restless mind” (manas) pushed and pulled by worldly objects (pp. 76-77).
Such a strategy of internalization emerges even more forcefully a bit further along in the
text, in the chapter entitled “the Philosophy of Śaṅkara.” This chapter begins with the
programmatic announcement that Advaita “commands the admiration of the whole world,” due
in no small part to Śaṅkara’s “scientific exposition of the Upaniṣadik philosophy” (p. 102). After
a brief précis of major Advaita teachings on the ultimate unity of self, world and Brahman, the
authors of Śaṅkara the Missionary return to this familiar motif:
Ours is an Age of Science, wherein we are trained to live and think with a spirit of
enquiry. The modern scientists, by their wondrous discoveries in the world outside, have
contributed much to usher in the Age of Enquiry. Their achievements deserve praise; but
the scientists and the thinkers of the present generation have another role to play. They
must deliver their brethren from an Age of Enquiry to an Era of Contemplation . . . Their
enquiry and research have so far been in ‘the outer world,’ and now they must shift their
field of enquiry from the world of the ‘object’ to the ‘subject,’ that is, the enquirer
himself. The enquiry into the ‘subject’ cannot be done in any laboratory. Subjective
enquiry should be pursued in one’s own within. And, therefore, it is an enquiry with a
difference: an enquiry which we choose to call ‘contemplation’ (pp. 104-5).
On the one hand, this interpretation of Vedānta as a contemplative science appears only as an
appendix in the original 1978 edition. On the other, by situating this in terms of an historical
transition from the “Age of Enquiry” to the desired “Era of Contemplation,” the authors of
Śaṅkara the Missionary seem quite clearly to invite the reader to consider this new Era as the
terminus of the same historical trajectory established in the volume’s main narrative. The
teachings of the Upaniṣads, initially communicated only to the few in the late Vedic period,
spread more widely through the rise of bhakti sectarianism and eventually, by means of
Śaṅkara’s eighth-century victory tour, become the spiritual and cultural basis of India. Then,
through Śaṅkara’s scientific systematization, this same teaching now emerges as a powerful
force to set the world and science itself on a more deeply contemplative foundation. From few to
all, from outward inward, the great teacher’s vijaya marches on.
Strictly speaking, of course, the scientific reinterpretation of the Upaniṣads is not the
work of Śaṅkara or even of his medieval hagiographers: it is the work of Swami Chinmayānanda
and other modern Vedāntins. The section from which we have drawn the above quotation is
titled “Self-Unfoldment,” and, as it turns out, close examination reveals that it is actually a
lightly edited excerpt from Swami Chinmayānanda’s own Manual of Self-Unfoldment, which we
summarized briefly in the first section of this essay (Śaṅkara the Missionary, pp. 104-106;
Chinmayānanda, Manual, pp. 75-76). Even more intriguingly, the authors of Śaṅkara the
Missionary, again following the account in the Manual, conclude their discussion of
humankind’s progressive evolution toward the Era of Contemplation with a conceptual map from
and for such Contemplation: namely, Swami Chinmayānanda’s well-known “Body-Mind-
Intellect (BMI) Chart” (figure 2; see Manual, p. 76; Śaṅkara the Missionary, p. 106). Anita
Raina Thapan, a contemporary Mission member, offers the following explanation:
To facilitate the comprehension of some complex yet key concepts of Vedanta, [Swami
Chinmayānanda] devised this visual aid which was always present at his discourses. It
helped him explain how and why individuals remained limited by their conditionings of
body, mind and intellect and how the knowledge of the Upanishads and the Gita was the
key to transcending this limiting state to experience the divinity within. The chart proved
to be of great benefit to numerous lay persons who had to grapple with several new terms
and concepts constantly alluded to by Chinmayananda during the yajna (p. xiii).
Like Swami Chinmayānanda himself, the BMI chart rendered the Advaita message into an
accessible, universal and systematic form, beyond the limitations of its original Sanskrit and
Hindu idiom. And, again like Chinmayānanda, it could travel.
In the Manual of Self-Unfoldment, the presentation of the BMI chart leads Swami
Chinmayānanda into a discussion of Ātman, the innermost self and “Divine-Principle” of every
living being, the realization of which carries the Advaitin disciple—and, indeed, any truly
religious person—from “Manhood to Godhood.” “Whether we like it or not,” he concludes,
“through a slow process of evolution, we are every hour creeping toward the goal of self-
realisation” (p. 81). Precisely as an evolutionary process, this growth toward self-realization both
fulfills the highest goals of the scientific era and purifies it of its worst materialistic excesses. As
Chinmayānanda will suggest, later in the Manual:

. . . the very laboriously conceived and ingeniously assembled appliances of power and
prosperity, of pleasure and happiness, of productivity and distribution now maliciously
turn, as it were, upon the very scientists who have conceived them, and have multiplied
problems for man to solve. Against these arrayed forces of sorrow and destruction, the
very creators of the scientific era and the generation who glorifies the achievement of the
materialistic age have no remedy at all . . . Under the pressures of the mounting pile of
problems—human, social, national and international—a groaning society is listlessly
rolling in voiceless agony, sobbing in tearless pains, tearing themselves in disgust with
their naked hands. Is this progress? (pp. 113-14).
Swami Chinmayānanda’s rhetorical question answers itself. Clearly, since the objective and
external study of the world cannot resolve this turmoil, the only real solution is to be found in the
deeper enquiry of contemplation. “We must,” he declares, “seek for strength within, marshal our
abilities against the self-created enemies who surround us on every side” (p. 115).
Here we again encounter the language of conquest, but this time the “quarters” are the
self-generated ills of modern society. Indeed, Chinmayānanda’s explicit discussion of Hindu
culture and religion, although implied throughout the Manual, arises only late in this work, in its
tenth chapter, long after the initial account of human experience, presentation of the BMI Chart,
and identification of the “Divine-Principle,” represented on the chart by the sacred syllable oṃ,
as the singular goal “advocated by all Religions” (pp. 75-79, 157-70). This account of Hinduism,
in turn, immediately leads into a question-and-answer about the “Composition of Man,”
including a re-presentation of the BMI Chart (pp. 170-79). The religious culture of India is thus
skilfully introduced and re-inscribed into a more universal understanding of religion and an
easily transportable series of meditative practices, both symbolized by the BMI Chart.
Read in the light of the Manual, on which it partially depends, Śaṅkara the Missionary
emerges as a work that not only establishes a new interpretive trajectory from the vijaya
literature, but also symbolically transforms the sacred geography of the hagiographies.
Mādhava’s Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya, as we have seen, begins and ends in the heavens; yet, its
narrative draws together the sacred pilgrimage sites and four “quarters” of the Indian sub-
continent. The new narrative offered by Chinmayānanda and his collaborators, in turn, begins
and reaches its climax in India; yet, its narrative strategically extends these quarters outward to
all humankind, shifting the requisite pilgrimage and conquest inward to the mind and intellect of
the enquirer. It is telling that, in its 1978 edition, Śaṅkara the Missionary’s frontispiece displayed
a map of Śaṅkara’s India and its fifth-to-last page carried an image of the BMI Chart. Taken as a
whole, the work enacts a narrative shift from one map to the other and, with this shift, effects a
conceptual translocation of the tradition. Śaṅkara not only emerges as a missionary in this text.
He is also the herald of a new era of human history. His conquest must now reach from India to
countless other territories the world over, by means of a cluster of disciplines and practices
symbolized by the BMI Chart and oriented toward the inner, psychological geography of each
and every living being.
Conclusion
One text obviously cannot carry the weight of transforming an entire religious tradition. It
would be misleading to conclude from the preceding analysis that Śaṅkara the Missionary
created a new reality where none had previously existed. Its strategy of interiorization is not, in
and of itself, an innovation in Advaita tradition: Śaṅkara himself certainly employed comparable
interpretive strategies in the eighth century (see, e.g., Suthren Hirst, pp. 83-85; Forsthoefel,
Knowing beyond Knowledge, pp. 39-42). The fiery Vivekānanda had, as well, much more
recently invoked the language of both religious nationalism and spiritual conquest to characterize
the relationship between India and the West (Hacker; Halbfass, pp. 231-38; Masih, pp. 147-48,
218-20). His Ramakrishna Mission, along with the followers of Ramana Maharishi, Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi and not a few other modern Advaitins, also highlighted contemplative experience
as a way of relativizing social boundaries of nation, religion and class (Rambachan; Sharma;
Forsthoefel, “Sage of Pure Experience”). First published in 1978, 25 years after the founding of
the Chinmaya Mission and some 85 years after Vivekānanda’s famous addresses at the Chicago
Parliament, this slim volume may therefore be best understood as reflecting and consolidating a
series of transformations already underway in the broader development of the Advaita tradition
and already manifested in works like A Manual of Self-Unfoldment, in the continual
performances of jñāna yagñas and lecture tours, in the founding of religious and cultural centres
in India and throughout the world, in the weekly meetings of small study groups, in individual
practices of chanting and meditation and in ubiquitous schematic aids like the BMI Chart.
Śaṅkara the Missionary offers a small window into this much wider movement, as well as
effecting a kind of narrative intervention to guide, circumscribe and conceptualize its further
development in a way specific to the teaching of Swami Chinmayānanda and the Chinmaya
Mission.
On one possible reading, this intervention functions to “re-place” the tradition and its
core practices so as to retain their connection to a particular geography, while also facilitating
their free travel and symbolic replication in other places and times, as articulated in Jonathan Z.
Smith’s influential 1987 study, To Take Place. Smith identifies, as his primary example of such
re-placement, the Christian transposition of the sacred sites of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre
to sacred moments of the liturgical year in the fourth century CE (pp. 85-95). With the BMI
Chart in mind, we might also turn to another, rather different example from Christian history:
namely, the famous twelfth-century labyrinth design in the pavement of Chartres Cathedral. As
interpreted by Daniel K. Connelly, this early labyrinth does not offer a mythic representation of
Theseus and the Minotaur or of Jesus’ descent into the underworld, as other art historians have
contended; rather, it represents a specific response to the loss of Jerusalem as a pilgrimage site in
1187.22 Connelly writes:
Performing . . . scripted spaces of the labyrinth, enacting its turning and twisting course
until finally reaching the center, encouraged participants to reflect upon their
perambulations as a micro-journey to the city of Jerusalem by engaging them in well
known and widely practiced mechanisms of meditational exercises. The labyrinth
pavements thus provided a metaphoric access to the Holy City at a time when physical
availability had been dramatically curtailed (p. 309).
On the one hand, then, the labyrinth offered a metaphorical and contemplative map for the
pilgrim who was prevented from making the journey to Jerusalem. On the other, as Connelly’s
belabored argument itself well attests, the connection between the original and the copy, between
the pilgrimage route and its symbolic representation on the floor of Chartres, could become
attenuated and forgotten. Eventually the labyrinth gains a life of its own. So too in Smith’s
analysis the ritual connection between Jerusalem and Christian liturgy becomes “increasingly, an
object of fantasy,” until, in Ignatius of Loyola’s 1535 Spiritual Exercises, it is thoroughly
interiorized (pp. 116-17).

North American members of the Chinmaya Mission and other modern Vedānta
movements are not presently barred from making pilgrimages to the great sites of Śaṅkara’s
legendary dig-vijaya, 23 and an image like the BMI Chart cannot be read in any straightforward
way as a symbolic representation of India. Nevertheless, as a distillation of the Advaita “science
of reality,” this chart—along with the network of teaching activities, meditative practices and
study groups in which it is mutually implicated—stands as both an extension of the sacred
geography of the vijaya literature and as a permanent challenge to it. Śaṅkara the Missionary
might therefore, on a second reading, be interpreted as a specific response to this challenge. It
may represent less an attempt to free the tradition from its geographical limitations than an
attempt to re-root these comparatively new “supra-locative” teachings and practices in the sacred
geography from which they sprang. How is this done? By re-telling a deeply traditional
narrative in a dramatically original way. If, from one point of view, Śaṅkara the Missionary
traces a journey forward from the Vedic age to an Era of Contemplation, it also traces a journey
backward from this new Era to its origin in the land, culture and scriptural traditions of ancient
India. The key linking term of this dynamic, translocative movement, both forward and
backward, is “The Śaṅkara” and his triumphant conquest.
Within the interpretative frame Śaṅkara the Missionary provides, the great eighth-century
teacher’s dig-vijaya perhaps cannot and should not be understood merely to reach new lands
beyond the traditional “quarters” of Bhārat. These quarters must themselves be made to move,
outward and inward, by means of a new mythic narrative and a new map of the tradition. In this
transformed religious locality, North America, Europe and indeed the whole world will
eventually find their place in Śaṅkara’s India, even as India re-discovers itself in a renewed,
interior and eminently transportable geography of the mind.

References
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Padmanaban, 1985-6.
Patchen, Nancy. The Journey of a Master: Swami Chinmayananda: The Man, the Path, the
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Smith. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1931, 1970.
Śaṅkara the Missionary, rev. ed. Mumbai: Central Chinmaya Mission Trust, 1998.
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Sawai, Yoshitsugu. The Faith of Ascetics and Lay Smārtas: A Study of the Śaṅkaran Tradition of
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der Universität Wien, 1992.
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Tweed, Thomas A. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 2006.

________. Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami. New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Tweed, Thomas A. and Stephen Prothero, eds. Asian Religions in America: A Documentary
History. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Williams, George M. “The Ramakrishna Movement: A Study in Religious Change,” in Religion
in Modern India, ed. Robert D. Baird, 3rd ed, pp. 55-85. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers,
1995.
Notes
1
See Bader, pp. 325-29 and Sundaresan, pp. 109-11, 160-63n3. In addition to Chinmayānanda’s
interpretation, Bader notes the various appropriations of the hagiographical portrait by Swami
Vivekānanda and Jawaharlal Nehru, whereas Sundaresan focuses the more scholarly
appropriations of Sengaku Mayeda, Karl Potter, Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, and Swami
Śivānanda.
2
Granoff adopts the Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya of Mādhava as her principal example of this shared
pattern, and Śaṅkara’s victory tour is commonly viewed as the first of the renouncer’s dig-
vijayas. It is nevertheless possible, as Sax suggests (p. 48) and Sheridan develops at some length,
that Śaṅkara’s hagiography may actually be modeled on those of great Vaiṣṇava saints,
particularly the great thirteenth-century Vedāntin Madhvācārya, who definitively rejected
Advaita and polemicized against Śaṅkara himself.

3
We do not claim, in this essay, to offer a comprehensive account of this contribution, much less
of the broader development of Advaita in the modern era. For broader treatments of the
foundation and history of the Chinmaya Mission, see Patchen; Chidānanda and Ramani; Masih;
and Shiveshwarkar, pp. 172-92.

4
In his Discourses on Mundakopanishad, for example, Chinmayānanda paints the following
dismal portrait of the situation:“The disintegration of the Vedic culture has culminated in the
present-day decay and disaster wherein the large majority of Hindus are still seeking their spirit
through the by-lanes of superstition and false beliefs, through foreign ideologies and Western
religions, through putrefied institutions and social festivals, while the indolent priest-class, who
have the sanction to make a thorough study of the Scriptures and practise them exclusively, such
as the Brahmins and the Sannyasins, also came to neglect the Life Divine and the Scripture
dealing with it. In short, these are days when we can call ourselves a ‘Hindu’ only by the
sanction of a long tradition. The entire world of non-Hindus in Hindustan are today waiting to be
converted to the true Hinduism!”

5
This is one of a series of unnumbered illustrations between chapters five and six in Chidānanda
and Ramani (pp. 126-27). In the illustration, the Sanskrit dig-vijaya yātrā is glossed more
generically as “Global Tour”; as we shall see below, the authors of Śaṅkara the Missionary will
translate precisely the same phrase more literally as “triumphant tour and conquest,” as we have
done here.
6
In the authorised history (Chidānanda and Ramani, p. 20), we find the following: “In June 1953
the second jnana-yagna, the first to be held in Chennai, ended. Some devotees wanted to form a
forum for study and discussion of Vedantic subjects. They got together to create an organization.
Their idea was to name it the Chinmaya Mission. Accordingly they wrote to Swamiji at
Uttarakashi. In his reply Swamiji said, ‘Don’t start any organization in my name. I have not
come here to be institutionalised. I have come here to give the message of our ancient sages,
which has benefited me. If it has benefited you also, pass it on.’ They replied to Swamiji that the
word ‘Chinmaya’ only meant true knowledge and that, as seekers of Truth, they were naming the
organization the Chinmaya Mission. The word ‘Chinmaya’ need not be understood as connoting
Swamiji’s name. Swamiji relented at last.” Interestingly, one of the initiators of this movement
toward greater institutionalization was Natarajan Iyer, who later, as Swami Dayānanda, would
depart the Mission to found his own, much looser federation of Advaita teaching centres under
the title Arsha Vidya. See the further account of this development in Fuller and Harriss.
7
Further examples appear throughout Chinmayānanda’s writings, as he purported to wrest the
wisdom of the tradition away from those he dismissively associated with the “priest caste.” He
writes, for instance, that “. . . we also get hundreds of pundits, erudite in their scholarship and
perfect in their knowledge of the Vedas. They could give us readily the exact word-meaning of
any portion of the scripture and give learned discourses on any chapter or verse. And yet, they
cannot serve the world as Teachers, leading and guiding their generation, and bringing even a
pencil of light into their lives’ darkness. These pundits, though learned in Sruti, are not educated
in the culture of the Upanishads” (Discourses on Mundakopanishad, p. 56).

8
As a “Science of Perfection,” Chinmayānanda claims, the tradition is accessible and pertinent
to all people in all situations (e.g. Vedanta, vol. 2, pp. 462-4; Discourses on Prasnopanishad, p.
15; Kindle Life, p. 2). He blames a mixture of foreign influences and bad education for the
distorted readings of the Hindu tradition as either superstitious or irrational, writing that, “unlike
the Semitic religions, Hinduism is not a rigid text-book of commandments and orders,
declarations and revelations, but our sacred lore is a text-book of scientific facts and it has the
healthy instincts of a growing tradition. . . ” (Discourses on Aitareya Upanishad, p. viii).

9
Though Kuruvachira recognizes that much of the growth of Hinduism in Europe and North
America is directly connected to patterns of Indian migration, he does not clearly distinguish
such immigrant communities from those who come to these Hindu practices from a background
in other religions. Hence, much of what he documents as missionary activity in the West would
be better classified as “internal” mission, directed at those who would already nominally identify
as Hindu.
10
See also the discussion in Hummel, pp. 93-111, 165-68. The original use of the “import,”
“export” and “baggage” categories can be found in Nattier.

11
Mathew (Saffron Mission, pp. 250-70) similarly differentiates between the initial self-
presentation and the full vision of TM.

12
According to sources within the movement, Chinmayānanda envisioned the VHP as a Hindu
correlate to the World Council of Churches. Masih notes that he eventually “dissociated himself
from the VHP because he did not agree with some of the principles of ideologies of VHP”
(Masih, p. 275). The authorized history explains Chinmayānanda’s motivation as a response to
letters from disciples in foreign countries alerting him that the immigrants there lacked exposure
to India’s heritage; the VHP’s main objective was to “consolidate and strengthen the Hindutva
movement” (Ramani and Chidānanda, p. 38). However, as the VHP became increasingly
politicized, the Chinmaya Mission dissociated itself from it. Though Swami Chinmayānanda
later condoned the destruction of the Babji Masjid in Ayodhya by forces of the Sangh Parivar in
1992, he continued to distance himself from the VHP itself. See, for example, the interview in
Chinmayānanda, “‘Temple Should Be Built.”

13
The movement from place to place is, moreover, structured as a kind of pilgrimage from West
to East and return to a sacred centre, beginning with Australia, moving through the Americas,
Europe and Asia to rest in India and, finally, in Utarakashi, where Chinmayānanda received his
instruction in Vedānta from Swami Tapovan.

14
Except where otherwise noted, all citations of Śaṅkara the Missionary refer to the 1998
revised edition.
15
See the discussion in the 1978 edition, pp. xiii, p. 6; and the 1998 edition, p. 4. Hereafter, the
ŚDV is cited directly in the text. We have consulted both Tapasyananda and Padmanaban, the
latter of which includes both Sanskrit and English texts. All quotations come from
Tapasyananda, though we have made small modifications in the translation.

16
Both the traditional ascription of the Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya to Vidyāraṇya and its early date have
been challenged, due primarily to its apparent literary dependence upon other hagiographies,
especially the Śaṅkaravijaya of Vyāsācala, the Śaṅkarābhyudaya of Rājacūḍāmaṇi-Dīkṣita, and
the Śaṅkarācāryacarita of Govindanātha. See the discussion in Bader, pp. 17-70; Dazey, esp. pp.
239-40, 403-404; and Clark, pp. 148-51. Sundaresan (pp. 132-48) has, in turn, challenged these
textual criteria and argued for an earlier date.

17
Bader (pp. 288-306) and Clark (pp. 128-33) discuss the ongoing dispute between the claims of
the Śṛṅgerī and Kañcīpūram maṭhas for primacy in the Southern quarter of India. Śaṅkara the
Missionary (p. 83) addresses the issue by including the Kañcī maṭha in the list, albeit without
assigning it to one of the four great disciples.

18
In the 1998 revised edition (pp. 80-101), this discussion appears in chapter six, after the
summaries of Śaṅkara’s works in chapter four and the more symbolic reflections on the four
disciples in chapter five.

19
Like many other modern Vedāntins, Swami Chinmayānanda attempts to dispel any image of
Vedanta as world-renouncing or socially irrelevant. For him individual transformation is

necessary precisely because new dispositions will bring about a changed world. Speaking about
the self-realized, he argues that “[t]hese devotees, ever praying in the sanctum sanctorum of their
own hearts, for the welfare of all, move about in society. . . They know it not, but it is their
presence which sanctifies the places, glorifies action and lends authority to the scriptures. It is
not because of their place that a man becomes great, but the places are made holy because of
men who have occupied them” (Love Divine, p. 131). This emphasis is particularly marked
whenever he speaks of specific religious figures: “These unique ones—a Buddha, a Christ, a
Sankara, a Vivekananda—who have blessed the world, and it is only they who have influenced
and moulded the human character into its nobility! . . . The very destiny of man is directed thus
by their mere presence. The mental and intellectual behaviour of the entire world becomes
thereby improved, for, improved individuals create an improved world” (p. 127). In Kindle Life,
he draws a similar, direct trajectory from the individual to society: “a nation is built by the
individuals comprising it and when each individual in the society or nation puts forth his effort in
the direction indicated in the Scriptures and reconstitutes his personality, then that society or
nation grows dynamically, permeating peace and glory to one and all. Let us, therefore, awake,
arise, and rebuild ourselves and our nation!” (p. 22).

20
This emphasis comes out most clearly when Swami Chinmayānanda speaks to children and
teenagers. He writes, for instance, that “the youth must grow in strength to lift the world around
them out of the ruts of its present-day sophisticated incompetency and civilized sorrows into a
more benign era of culture, of peace, of progress” (Art of Man-Making, p. 194).

21
In a 1968 letter commending the “self-mastery” offered by Advaita as a response to Western
materialism, for example, Chinmayānanda insists that “[t]he symptoms are obvious: You are a
people who have no control over your passions, who live in an atmosphere of hatred and mutual
incrimination, who are sinking into tribal levels, despoiling your culture and shattering your
civilization” (quoted in Patchen, p. 234). A Western ‘rights’ culture is elsewhere contrasted with
Indian ‘duty’ culture, in terms that deliberately recast a well-known Christian parable: “a
materialistic civilization is built upon the sands of acquisition and appropriation, while a spiritual
culture is a Temple raised upon the rocky foundations, such as the spirit of renunciation and
sacrifice” (Discourses on Prasnopanishad, p. 16).

22
We are particularly grateful to Forrest Clingerman for drawing our attention to this article.
23
In fact, the Chinmaya Mission has made a significant claim to root itself even more firmly in
this sacred geography by locating one of its major research and publication divisions, the
Chinmaya International Foundation, on the grounds of what is believed to be the birthplace of
Śaṅkara and the ancestral home of his mother Aryambā, in the small village of Edakkattuvayal
outside of Ernakulam, Kerala (“Adi Sankara Nilayam”).

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Locklin and Lauwers, “Rewriting the Sacred Geography of Advaita,” page 1

REWRITING THE SACRED GEOGRAPHY OF ADVAITA:

SWAMI CHINMAYĀNANDA AND THE ŚAṄKARA-DIG-VIJAYA

Chinmayānanda famously invoked the medieval hagiographies of Ādi Śaṅkarācārya as

rooting it firmly in the land and culture of India.

Chinmayānanda (1916-93) appealed to the hagiographical portraits of the eighth-century

inherent tensions of Advaita Vedānta as a global religious movement.

and a host of other opponents of the Advaita teaching.2

Chinmayānanda used the well-known hagiographical narrative of Śaṅkara’s conquest to set an

distinctive contribution to the ongoing transformation of Advaita.3

imaginative translocation of the Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya narrative.

Swami Chinmayānanda the Missionary: Locating the Chinmaya Movement

tradition, world-teacher (jagad-guru) and world-conqueror (dig-vijayin).

The Chinmaya movement emerged from Swami Chinmayānanda’s vision of a broad

of materialism, national disintegration, oppressive organized religion and general spiritual

establishment of more permanent institutions. Through a relatively open-ended process, the

teaching in a number of places, including A Manual of Self-Unfoldment, published in 1975 by the

In his foreword to this work, Chinmayānanda describes its content as a “Science of

psychologists” (pp. 4-5). He then turns, in subsequent chapters, to a systematic analysis of

‘stilled’ or ‘quietened,’ there is a stage of ‘contemplative-ness’ reached. The mind-intellect, in

becomes self-evident!” (p. 178).

Swami Chinmayānanda’s presentation of Advaita philosophy in terms of science,

number of other prominent modern Vedāntins, including Swami Vivekānanda, in order to

translate the ancient Upaniṣadic teaching into a quintessentially modern—and stereotypically

example, Chinmayānanda fiercely denounced the corruption of Hinduism by the “selfish,

service of a distinctively Advaitin ideal of pure, contemplative rationality.8 It may perhaps be no

Unfoldment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, allusively locating the work’s ‘method’ alongside

As we have already noted, Swami Chinmayānanda is by no means unique, either in his

should be situated within a still broader interpretative trajectory: namely, a distinctively

Brahmanical history of conquest and absorption—“Aryanization” or “sanskritization”—which

The history of Saffron mission in the last century-and-a-quarter is the story of an

spirituality and culture (p. 301).

“sanskritization” as but one of several missionary strategies adopted by those invested in

also overseas, especially in the West” (pp. 39-40).9

In drawing such a conclusion, Kuruvachira echoes a number of earlier studies, including,

universal theological formulations—transforming Hindu tradition from a mere “ethnic religion”

documented, it would be difficult to ascribe such a transformation to “Hinduism” as a whole.

language of a “science of being,” interiority and special techniques of meditative practice.

“a full-fledged incarnation of a multinational Vedantic Export Religion,” firmly rooted in the

tension and even betrayal on the part of some followers.

The case of Swami Chinmayānanda is specifically different from that of Maharishi

movement. This would, it seems, considerably reduce the possibility of misunderstanding or

“Universal Chinmaya” or “Chinmaya throughout the Entire World”—is structured and

punctuated by further such maps, interspersed with descriptive accounts of Swami

worldwide Chinmaya Mission—further schematic maps, we might say, of the whole

of Śaṅkara’s legendary vijaya and beyond.

Jonathan Z. Smith and Charles H. Long, Tweed has suggested that

among many first- and second-generation migrants to symbolically move between

homeland and new land (pp. 94-95).

continual, imaginative movement between them.

prescribe how we move across” (p. 78).

traditional boundaries of Advaita through continuous itinerant travel, through a well-integrated

of his legendary dig-vijaya.

Śaṅkara the Missionary: Retelling the Śaṅkara-dig-vijaya

major sections: 1) A synthetic narrative of the “Life” of Śaṅkara in four chapters; 2) a

narrative (see figure 1).

has no place in the Mission’s prescribed Scheme of Study. As an expression of

In form, Śaṅkara the Missionary consists of a creative re-presentation of Śaṅkara’s life

is traditionally identified with Vidyāraṇya, the renowned fourteenth-century “Śaṅkarācārya” or

Jains and other so-called “controversialists” (7.59—15.174). It concludes in the mountains of

eminent symbol of Indian unity. In 1968, for example, he proclaimed:

Chinmayānanda attributes the “national disintegration” he witnesses in India to a lack of

echoes and intensifies these themes of national revival. He writes: