The earliest known work in which the theory of Maya and the Advaita philosophy are clearly formulated is the metrical treatise known as the Karika of Gaudapada.  This name was borne by the teacher of Sankara’s teacher, who must have lived about 700 A.D., but the high position accorded to the work, which is usually printed with the Mandukya Upanishad and is practically regarded as[185] a part of it, make an earlier date probable.  Both in language and thought it bears a striking resemblance to Buddhist writings of the Madhyamika school and also contains many ideas and similes which reappear in the works of Sankara.[186] On the other hand the Lankavatara Sutra which was translated into Chinese in 513 and therefore can hardly have been composed later than 450, is conscious that its doctrines resemble Brahmanic philosophy, for an interlocutor objects that the language used in it by the Buddha about the Tathagatagarbha is very like the Brahmanic doctrine of the Atman.  To which the Buddha replies that his language is a concession to those who cannot stomach the doctrine of the negation of reality in all its austerity.  Some of the best known verses of Gaudapada compare the world of appearance to the apparent circle of fire produced by whirling a lighted torch.  This striking image occurs first in the Maitrayana Upanishad (VI. 24), which shows other indications of an acquaintance with Buddhism, and also in the Lankavatara Sutra.

A real affinity unites the doctrine of Sankara to the teaching of Gotama himself.  That teaching as presented in the Pali Pitakas is marked by its negative and deliberately circumscribed character.  Its rule is silence when strict accuracy of expression is impossible, whereas later philosophy does not shrink from phrases which are suggestive, if not exact.  Gotama refuses to admit that the human soul is a fixed entity or Atman, but he does not condemn (though he also does not discuss) the idea that the whole world of change and becoming, including human souls, is the expression or disguise of some one ineffable principle.  He teaches too that the human mind can grow until it develops new faculties and powers and becomes the Buddha mind, which sees the whole chain of births, the order of the world, and the reality of emancipation.  As the object of the whole system is practical, Nirvana is always regarded as a terminus ad quem or an escape (nissaranam) from this transitory world, and this view is more accurate as well as more edifying than the view which treats Brahman or Sunyata as the origin of the universe.  When the Vedanta teaches that this changing troubled world is merely the disguise of that unchanging and untroubled state into which saints can pass, it is, I believe, following Gotama’s thought, but giving it an expression which he would have considered imperfect.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 163:  Translated by Schiefner, 1869.  Taranatha informs us (p. 281) that his chief authorities were the history of Kshemendrabhadra, the Buddhapurana of Indradatta and Bhataghati’s history of the succession of the Acaryas.]