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Eighteen accounts of what is real, each set out in its own terms and each with its own page.
All World Views Does God Exist?The Smarta Tradition stream of the Hinduism timeline.
Streams: All of Hinduism Shaivism Shaktism Vaishnavism Smarta Tradition Hindu Reform Movements Arya Samaj ISKCON
Forest teachers and their students compose the early Upanishads, turning from the sacrifice to the knowledge of atman and brahman; the texts become the philosophical foundation on which every later school of Vedanta builds its reading.
Across centuries of composition, the Mahabharata grows into the largest epic of the ancient world, the war of the Bharata cousins carrying law, kingship, devotion, and doubt inside one vast story; Krishna's counsel and Shiva's appearances stand within it side by side.
Valmiki's Ramayana tells of Rama, the exiled prince whose conduct embodies dharma, and of Sita and Hanuman; Rama's standing as an avatar of Vishnu, present in the epic's framing books, makes the poem a charter of Vaishnava devotion.
On the field of Kurukshetra, Krishna teaches the warrior Arjuna the paths of action, knowledge, and devotion; set inside the Mahabharata, the Gita becomes the most commented and most carried scripture of Hindu life, read by every Vedanta school as one of the three foundations.
Patanjali gathers the discipline of yoga into aphorisms on stilling the mind's turnings; the Yoga Sutras become the charter text of one of the six classical schools and, much later, the reference point of the global yoga movement.
Shankara teaches Advaita, the non-duality of atman and brahman, writes the standard commentaries on the Upanishads, the Gita, and the Brahma Sutras, and is remembered as the organizer of monastic and temple orders across India.
Tradition holds that Shankara founded monasteries at the four quarters of India, Sringeri in the south, Puri in the east, Dwarka in the west, and Joshimath in the north; their lineages anchor the Smarta monastic order and teach Advaita to this day.
Appayya Dikshita, the great Smarta polymath of the Tamil country, dies after writing across Vedanta, poetics, and Shaiva devotion; his works model the Smarta ideal of learning held inside devotion to Shiva.
Ramakrishna's disciple Vivekananda carries Vedanta to the West, founds the Ramakrishna Mission for service and teaching, and calls India to strength through its own spiritual inheritance; his short life sets the pattern of the modern Hindu teacher.
