This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Adi Shankara did not found Vedanta. That distinction belongs to Badarayana, the author, sometime around the first century BCE, of the Brahma Sutras, the terse aphoristic text that first organized the teaching of the Upanishads into a systematic school. What Shankara did, roughly eight centuries later, was write the interpretation of Badarayana's sutras, along with commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita and the principal Upanishads, that became so authoritative it is often mistaken for the origin of the tradition it actually only systematized. The Stanford Encyclopedia's entry calls him the most authoritative philosopher of Advaita Vedanta and credits him with the earliest complete commentary on the Brahma Sutras that survives, which is a different and more precise claim than calling him the founder of Vedanta itself. Advaita, nondualism, is Shankara's school within the larger Vedanta tradition that Badarayana's text opened up. Other Vedantic schools, including Ramanuja's qualified nondualism a few centuries later, read the same Brahma Sutras and arrived at sharply different conclusions, which only makes sense if the sutras themselves, and not Shankara's reading of them, are the tradition's true foundation.
What Shankara actually systematized was a demanding metaphysics built on the identity of atman, the individual self, with brahman, the single nondual reality that the entry describes as transcending both individuality and empirical plurality. Atman, on his account, is not a personality or a soul in any ordinary sense but pure non-intentional consciousness, and the entire world of distinct, plural, changing things, including the individual person who seems to be reading these words, occupies an in-between ontological status that Shankara's tradition calls maya. The Stanford entry is careful on this point, since maya is not simply unreal, in the way a mirage is unreal, but indeterminable, neither straightforwardly identical with brahman nor straightforwardly something else, a category Western metaphysics has no exact equivalent for.
The scholarly record around Shankara turns out to be considerably less settled than the finished doctrine suggests. The entry notes real disagreement over when he lived at all, with proposed dates for his life ranging across more than a century, roughly 700 to 820 CE, a spread that would be extraordinary for a figure of comparable stature in most other philosophical traditions. Compounding the problem, hundreds of texts carry his name, and the entry states plainly that most of these were likely composed by later authors working in his tradition and attributing their work to its most prestigious name, a practice that leaves scholars sorting an authentic core from centuries of accumulated attribution. Even within the philosophy scholars do treat as genuinely his, later Advaitins split over how to read him, particularly on the nature of avidya, ignorance, with the entry recording a real dispute over whether ignorance properly belongs to the individual self or, more paradoxically, to brahman itself, and how that ignorance relates to maya. There is also live disagreement over whether the cosmogonic, world explaining theories that later Advaita commentators built up should be read back into Shankara's own texts at all, or whether that is a later systematization imposed retroactively on a thinker whose own writing was more austere. The result is a figure whose authority is enormous and whose textual record is, on close inspection, considerably harder to pin down than the tradition built on his name.