If Vedanta is the "national religion" of India and its universalism at the same time, and if its unique combination of spirituality and reason makes it a philosophical religion, it is to Sankara, after the Upanisadic seers, that the credit should go.

Shankara's commentary is "a shining example of comprehensive erudition, patient research and philosophical acumen of the ancient Hindus".

Yes, I am indeed the younger sister of the late President Thomas Sankara. You know, it's really difficult to answer the question you're asking me. The man has so many facets that it's difficult to talk about him so easily. However, one of the great memories I have of him is that of his love for his people. Sankara loved his people more than anything. What helped him in this struggle was because he was free of all possessions and all gain. He was not one of those who loved profit. In our continent today, our leaders want to enrich themselves first before thinking of the people. With Sankara, it was quite the opposite. Material goods were never a lure for him. Sankara died poor. I also retain the image of a leader who wanted change, a brother full of love and humor.

There is no doubt that Sankara before him had set the wheel of inquiry by boldly declaring Advaita as the answers to all the questions posed by different Upanishads. He has tried to synthesize the approach and took up the Brahma sutras of Vyasa as the basic text for study .The Brahma sutras is an extraordinary text. Before Sage Vyasa a very great body of literature has accumulated mainly in the Upanishads, most of the time speaking in one voice about Brahama vidya and at the same time throwing in diverse suggestions It has grown up almost like a banyan tree with overgrown branches. Vyasa by reducing many of these concepts into short and crisp sutras has provided behind each sutra an ocean of knowledge. It is impossible to understand the whole body of knowledge in a unitary way. Sankara brought in a cohesion. He was close to the Vedic ideals in point of time ...

The best-known forest-dweller was the sage Yajñavalkya, whose epoch-making explanation of the Self, the absolute cornerstone of all Indian thought, was in fact a farewell address to his co-wife Maitreyi.

From a scholarly viewpoint, though, I would observe that this disproportionate attention for the Buddha only draws attention to the equally disproportionate non-attention to other great minds in India, such as Dirghatamas, Yajñavalkya and Abhinavagupta. They are passed over in silence. What, the readers have never heard these names? Well, that is precisely what I mean. Not just this book, but most introductory works on Indian religion disregard the most important Hindu thinkers. Dirghatamas was one the earliest and greatest Vedic seers, author of many well-known sayings and similes including “the wise call the true one by many names”; Yajnavalkya was the greatest Upanishadic thinker and originator of the notion of the Self (fundamental also to Buddhism, though adversatively);

To conclude, the Brahmadvaita cf Sankara is not a 'Concealed form of Nihilism', nor is his Atmavada indifferent to enlightened human values, nor his Renunciation of Works a species of escapism. His negations are contextual and relative, not absolute and final. His philosophy is designed to lead man to the fullest self- realization, not to suicidal annihilation. The transcendence of differences only reveals the universal and in finite unity of ground reality. Even though a commonplace, it is worth recalling that Sankara's own life is the standing refutation of the charges of nihilism, metaphysical and socio-ethical, against him.

This philosophical nation par excellence” says Count Keyserling, “has more Sanskrit words for philosophical and religious thought than are found in Greek, Latin and German combined.

It may be concluded that Sankara accepts Yoga as a practical discipline for the realization of Truth and sees no contradiction between Yoga and Vedanta.

I was to slowly discover that Savarkar was a bundle of contradictions and a historian’s enigma. He simultaneously means many things to many people. An alleged atheist and a staunch rationalist who strongly opposed orthodox Hindu beliefs and the caste system and dismissed cow worship as mere superstition, Savarkar was also the most vocal political voice for the Hindu community through the entire course of the Indian freedom struggle.... A feted revolutionary who created an intellectual corpus of literature that inspired the revolutionary movement in India for decades, Savarkar was also a passionate and sensitive poet, a prolific writer and playwright, and a fiery orator. ...The social reformer in him strove to dismantle the scourges of untouchability and caste hierarchies, and advocated a unification of Hindu society.

I was to slowly discover that Savarkar was a bundle of contradictions and a historian’s enigma. He simultaneously means many things to many people. An alleged atheist and a staunch rationalist who strongly opposed orthodox Hindu beliefs and the caste system and dismissed cow worship as mere superstition, Savarkar was also the most vocal political voice for the Hindu community through the entire course of the Indian freedom struggle.... A feted revolutionary who created an intellectual corpus of literature that inspired the revolutionary movement in India for decades, Savarkar was also a passionate and sensitive poet, a prolific writer and playwright, and a fiery orator. ...The social reformer in him strove to dismantle the scourges of untouchability and caste hierarchies, and advocated a unification of Hindu society.

Science was woven into philosophical thought - The study and cultivation of exact sciences in India was a part of search for truth and reality. From Vedic times onwards, investigations into the realm of the spiritual included those of the physical. The whole of the philosophical literature is replete with and based on some of the tenets of science as we understand it today. It has been an unmitigated calamity for India that it were the philologists, both eastern and western, who became the first interpreters to her ancient Sanskrit literature. India's Sanskrit literature came to be interpreted in an apologetic tone and from the standpoint of the western achievements. Some of the sublimities of the Hindu thought, far ahead of the prevailing times, were considered as oddities belonging to primitive past. The great Orientalists were philologists, not philosophers.
India was called the Bharat Varsha, the "country that embraces all in one bond," and she was selected to become the embodiment of that immutable, eternal, law of the universe, Santana Dharma - dharma is that which "holds together" - which makes the universes run in their orbits. It was this principle of dharma, synthesis, balance, harmonious relationship between various forces and factors, between various individuals and groups, that came to be the corner-stone of her civilization." "India has been known as the moksha-bhumi and karma-bhoomi, the Land of Liberty, spiritual and temporal, gained through service of fellowmen. India was not thought of as a bhoga-bhumi, a pleasure-resort for a single life-time allowed to the mortals. India is the only country in the world where civilization has revolved round this fundamental spiritual nucleus, where the greatest concentration of intellect has centered round the basic human problem of existence...
In India, religion became scientific and philosophical; science received religious sanction and philosophic support, and philosophy became religious, with a practical bearing on the problems of daily life. Here lies the secret of India's uniqueness and greatness. India saw Reality as a whole; there was no partition walls in the world of the One. With this universality, humanity and sublime idealism India offered a challenge to time.

In the past couple of centuries, these ideas and other India-derived notions have inspired many great schol­ars, scientists, and literary figures: Hegel, Fichte, Schlegel, Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Shelley, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Thoreau, Emerson, Tennyson, Yeats, A. E. Russell, Edwin Arnold, E. M. Forster, Blavatsky, Romain Rolland, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, C. F. von Weizsäcker, Robert Oppenheimer, David Bohm, and others.

Ancient India gave to to the world its religions and philosophies: Egypt and Greece owe India their wisdom and it is known that Pythagoras went to India to study under Brahmins, who were the most enlightened of human beings.