ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes a story consisting of a brilliant narrative (including suspense, humor, and even implicit erotica) and a sharp statement about self-identity and the body, with a new emphasis on self-knowledge. The story occurs in the hagiographies narrating the alleged life-story of Sankara. Jonathan Bader, author of Conquest of the Four Quarters: Traditional Accounts of the Life of Sankara, who studied eight of these hagiographies, all in Sanskrit, composed between the fourteenth and the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. The chapter focuses on one of the hagiographies which aspire to narrate Sankara's life-story, namely the Sankaradigvijaya (SDV), which Bader dates between 1650 and 1800 CE, and writes that it brings together skillfully material from several earlier hagiographies. Drawing on Potter, it provides distinction between the two Sankaras, the philosopher and the protagonist of the hagiographies. The chapter argues that the hagiography works as a 'narrative interpretation' of a philosophical position.
