your bridge home
The Great Arguments
Whirl a burning stick in the dark and you see a circle of fire. Nothing was ever created, and nothing is destroyed when it stops.
Gaudapada's argument is that nothing has ever happened.
Not that the world is bad, or fleeting, or an illusion in the loose sense people mean when they say life is a dream. Something much harder: that nothing has ever come into being at all, and that this is demonstrable.
The doctrine is called ajativada, non-origination, and Gaudapada is the man who set it out.
Very little. He is dated somewhere between the early sixth and the seventh century CE, and even that is arrived at backwards, from Shankara, whose teacher Govinda Bhagavatpada is presumed to have been Gaudapada's own student.
Shankara calls him Paramaguru, the highest teacher. Whether that means an actual line of transmission, teacher to teacher to teacher, or something looser and more honorific is debated; Karl Potter among others has raised the question.
So the founding figure of classical Advaita is a man about whom we know essentially one thing: that he wrote a book.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.