Rewriting the Sacred Geography of Advaita: Swami Chinmayananda and the Sankara-Dig-Vijaya

Abstract

In the short treatise Śaṅkara the Missionary, the modern Vedāntin Swami Chinmayānanda famously appealed to 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 invoked the image of the eighth-century sage to authorise their 20th-century movement. More than this, they charted what Thomas Tweed has recently described as a ‘translocative’ identity from and for the Advaita tradition, effectively rationalising its emergence as a global religion while also re-rooting it firmly in the land and culture of India. According to this vision, the universal message of Advaita, addressed to all persons in all times, nevertheless comes to full expression in a dynamic, ongoing historical movement with its unique fulcrum and privileged disclosure in Śaṅkara's victory tour.

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