Sruti Smrti

About this stotra

In this verse, there is a statement of fact: Sri Sankara is srutismrtipurananam alayam. A shrine, a temple, is called alaya. Also any place where a sacred thing is kept is an alaya. Books are sacred, so a library is called pustakalaya. Sri Sankaracarya is an alaya of sruti-smrti-puranas. Sruti is all the Vedas, the karmakanda as well as the last portion of the Vedas known as Vedanta. Since sruti has come down to us through the rishis, there is no authorship (apaurusheyatvam), whereas, smrti has authorship. The kalpa-sutras are a development of the statements of the smrti, written by people who had a status similar to the one the rishis enjoyed. They knew about rituals, values, dharma, etc. All the dharma-sastras come under smrti. Even itihasa is called smrti. It is a combination of history and poetry, unlike Indian history, that is half history and half fiction! The purana appears on a bigger canvas. Its topic is entirely different. It talks about Bhagavan's avataras. There are 18 puranas. All these together abide in one shrine that is Sri Sankara. He is the upadhi in which the entire subject matter of the sruti, smrti and puranas is enshrined, and is therefore called srutismrtipurananam alayam. Suppose, there is a living person who is an embodiment of all this vast knowledge but is maunibaba, a person committed to silence, not talking or writing, what would we get? There would be no way for us to learn anything from him. Maunibabas are always respected in our country. If Sri Sankara had been such a maunibaba, he might have had many devotees and one or two generations of those devotees might have remembered him. However, we definitely would not be celebrating his jayanti. Sri Sankara was not only an alaya of all-knowledge, but also an alaya of karuna, a person of great compassion through which he was able to reach out to others. It was Sri Sankara’s compassion, which made him what he was. Let us see how.
Sri Sankara taught his disciples who were with him, but he also made sure that the teaching came down to posterity through his writings. In those days, writing was not an easy job. There were no typewriters; there were no laptops, or even paper and pens. Sri Sankara had to do all his writing on palm leaves, and every copy was handwritten. There are hundreds of such manuscripts in India today, in spite of so many of them having been burnt or lost. They are enshrined in the homes of the people who have them. I do not think there is any culture other than Vedic culture that accords so much value to learning, whether it is scriptural or temporal.
Sri Sankara wrote extensive commentaries, bhashyas, on the Isa, Kena, Katha, Prasna, Mundaka, Mandukya, Taittiriya, Aitareya, Chandogya and the Brhadaranyaka Upanisads. All these bhashyas were written to include purvapaksas, objections and arguments, and the unfolding of the siddhanta, the main purport. When writing bhashyas, first, you have to give the anvaya, comprehensive meaning. After that, you should defend this analysis against any other possible meaning, or any other meaning given by somebody else. If one person thinks in one way, there will always be another person who thinks differently. People say that there are different schools of thought. When you are dealing with the reality, it has to be dealt with exactly as it is. There cannot be different schools of thought in arithmetic because one plus one can only be two. How can there be 'schools of thought' in understanding Isvara? But there were people who looked at Isvara differently. Sankara valued them all and discussed in detail leaving nothing to be desired.
You can give people the freedom to hold their ideas. There is nothing wrong in that, but there is no way of reconciling what is right with whatever is wrong. What is right is right. There is nothing to reconcile. A wrong thing has to be stated as wrong and understood as such. The other person has the freedom to hold a wrong idea. That is understandable. However, you cannot accept this wrong idea just because he is a nice person. You cannot have a charismatic approach in dealing with realities.
Thus, we can imagine the enormity of effort in writing all this on palm leaves. How much compassion Sri Sankara must have had for the spiritual upliftment of humanity, that he wrote all these books, and finally, the Brahma-sutra-bhashya. It is no ordinary feat. This is the proof of his compassion. Therefore, he is called srutismrtipurananam alayam karunalayam.
Namami bhagavatpadai sarkaram lokasankaram. I salute him whose name is Sri Śankara. Śam karoti iti Śankarah. Śankara is he who grants mangalam, an auspicious end, the grand finale to the winding journey of a jiva. The jiva's history has to end. When will it end? Each birth is like yet another sheet of paper in a set of loose sheets that can never be bound together. It is endless; there is always a next birth. It is always an unbound book. The one who brings about that mangalam is Sankara Bhagavatpada, who is likened to Bhagavan. Unto him, my namaskara.
Excerpt from the book 'Prayer Guide' by Swami Dayananda Saraswati