Subba Row on Shankara's Date and Doctrine

Tallapragada Subba Row, Boris de Zirkoff · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 24 pages

A question and a long answer. F.W.H. Myers, an English Fellow of the Theosophical Society, had asked about a discrepancy arising from Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism: orientalists date Shankaracharya variously but always after Christ — Barth places him about 788 AD — whereas Esoteric Buddhism makes him succeed the Buddha almost immediately. The reply is by Tallapragada Subba Row, and its central claim is the one repeated elsewhere in this section: that Shankara was born in 510 BC, fifty-one years and two months after the date of the Buddha's nirvana, and so had nothing to do with the persecution of Buddhists.

The file then adds Boris de Zirkoff on the higher sources behind Subba Row's response — the question of where the dating came from, and on whose authority. The last third gathers related material for study: Blavatsky's own replies to the questions put by the same English Fellow arising from Esoteric Buddhism, excerpted from the Collected Writings volume V and edited by Philaletheians, followed by suggested further reading from this series. The companion piece is Hints about the triadic hypostasis of Buddha, which takes the same date and draws from it a different conclusion about the relation between Gautama and Shankara.

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