A Collection from Sankara’s Commentaries on the Prasthana Traya

This book is a humble attempt to help the research students or scholars quickly find out the sources of valuable references cited by the world-renowned Advaita proponent Sri Sankaracharya in his commentaries on the three main pillars of Hinduism, well-known in Sanskrit as the Prasthana-traya.

About two thousand five hundred of memorable and important sentences have been carefully culled from the Prasthana-traya commentaries to build up the text portion of this book. On scrutinizing the sentences collected it can be seen that there are chiefly three trends in them, viz. 1) inferential 2) illustrative, and 3) definitive. The opponent’s views have been avoided in this collection since the purpose of the book is to highlight only Sankaracharya’s views. However, in a few rare cases, where the opponent’s argument contains some inherent truth universally accepted, that portion has also been included in this work, albeit with special reference.

This book covers fourteen chapters containing the whole gamut of the Prasthana-traya, namely, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and the Vedanta-Darsana or Brahma sutra. The Upanishads in this book comprise twelve major ones, namely, Isavasya, Kena, Prasna, Aitareya, Katha, Mundaka, Mandukya, Tattiriya, Svetasvatara, Chandogya and Brihadaranyaka respectively.