On the Authenticity of Prose Writings Attributed to Śaṅkara

Abstract

Śaṅkara is traditionally considered the author of an exceptionally large number of works. Indological scholarship has attempted to filter out some of these works within traditional philological and historical frameworks. Many were, however, taken for granted to be authentic, and no serious research into their authenticity has been conducted. This paper attempts a computational stylometric approach to establish the authenticity of prose commentaries attributed to Śaṅkara. The General Imposters (GI) framework appears to be the most suitable existing method developed for the purpose of verifying authorship. The GI calculates the statistical distance between certain texts’ features and estimates whether the disputed text is closer to the candidate author than to a set of texts that may not have been composed by him. The paper also presents a machine-based method for separating the words and resolving the sandhi in the Sanskrit text, crucial for the procedure. The success rate in verifying authors of undisputed texts appears to be acceptable enough to proceed to the next step, where 18 prose commentaries traditionally attributed to Śaṅkara are subjected to the GI verification procedure. The result conforms to the most conservative assessments of Śaṅkara’s authorship; GI verified the authenticity of the commentaries on the principal Upaniṣads (with the exception of the commentary on the Śvetāśvataropaniṣad) and on the Bhagavadgītā. Besides these, commentaries on the Nṛsiṃha-(pūrva)-tāpanīyopaniṣad and the Adhyātmapaṭala were, rather unexpectedly, also successfully verified as genuine works of Śaṅkara.