electrobas.blogg.se

By mere Sankalpa, it is said that Sankaracharya gave all knowledge to him. Hearing this, all other disciples were wonderstruck.

They thought Giri was an illiterate person not knowing Sanskrit and incapable of composing anything. At that time, he was singing this song glorifying the greatness of his teacher Sankara. Then the disciple came bringing the clothes and drying them. Sankaracharya did not say anything but kept waiting. It seems that Sankaracharya wanted to humble them and also Sankaracharya was pleased with the devotion of Giri who was serving him. At this, another shishya, Padmapada pointed to a wall and said that teaching Giri would be the same as teaching this wall (a dumb object). He however did not start the lesson saying he was waiting for Giri to come back from his chores. One day, Giri was washing his Guru’s clothes, when Adi Shankara sat down to begin a lesson on Advaita Vedanta. Giri was a hard-working and loyal servant of his Guru, Adi Shankara, though he did not appear bright to the other disciples. Adi Shankara accepted the boy as his disciple.

Per the Mādhavīya Śankaravijayam, when Adi Shankara was at Sringeri, he met a boy named Giri. It seems that they looked down upon Thōtakacharya because he could not grasp the Shastras well. The other disciples like Padmapada, Sureshwara, Hasthāmalaka etc were great in scholarship. According to the story, Thōtakachārya was a very dull disciple of Sankaracharya. Thōtakacharya is given as an ideal example for a disciple who gets everything merely by the grace of the teacher.

The poem’s meter is anapestic tetrameter, with four feet of unstressed-unstressed-stressed syllables (laghu-laghu-guru characters) per line, and four lines per stanza.This work is called Thōtakāshtakam because it consists of eight verses ( ashtakam) and it is written by Thōtakachārya, one of the famous disciples of Adi Sankaracharya. Literally, it means a rhyme of eight (Sanskrit: aṣṭa) verses ( ślokas) composed by Toṭaka. The Toṭakāṣṭakam was composed by Giri (an enlightened disciple) in praise of his Guru Adi Sankara.