ABSTRACT
Some Western scholars claim Gaudapada as a Buddhist saint, their main argument being that at the beginning of Karika, he adores the ‘superman’, whom they identify with Buddha. Gaudapada, like all the other saintly philosophers of India, points out the way to illumination within one’s own soul. To Gaudapada, the first historic philosopher of the system of Vedanta, and the expounder of its nondualistic aspect, no definite date can be assigned. There is a tradition that Samkara, who lived in the seventh century ad, met Gaudapada and received his blessing. Samkara, in his commentary on the Mandukya Upanisad, makes obeisance to Gaudapada as his guru’s guru. Gaudapada contends that the waking and the dreaming states are equally real and equally unreal. They are real only in a relative sense, and so they are unreal as compared with the transcendental, in which there is identification with the Reality, the unchangeable Self.
