FW : Adi Shankara's Three Sins

Once, Adi Sankara went to Benaras and prayed to Lord Viswanath there
and asked specifically for three of his sins to be excused. The
disciples who followed Sankaracharya were surprised and were wondering
what those three sins for which he was seeking pardon were.

Sankaracharya then explained the first sin in the following words. He
addressed the Lord and said that knowing fully well that the Lord is
omnipresent and all powerful, he had undertaken the journey all the
way to Benaras to have the Lord's Darsan as if the Lord was present
only in Benaras. This, according to Sankaracharya, was the first sin.
The significance of this is that his practice was contrary to what he
already knew.

His second sin was that after recognising the Lord as one whose glory
cannot be described or as one whose infinite nature cannot be
described in mere words, he had attempted to describe him in a string
of words and thus had ignored what he had already known about the
Lord.

His third sin was that having recognised that the human body is the
temple of the Lord and having recognised that the body is made of five
destructible elements, he had not put this knowledge into practice.
The Jiva that lives in the body is indestructible and if studied
carefully, we come to the conclusion that one who resides in the body
has no birth and has no death and has neither attachment nor
detachment.

He realised that the almighty is residing in him as the Atma and yet
he undertook the long journey to get the Darsan of the almighty in a
place external to his body. This was his third sin. Knowing that the
Lord is in him, he has committed the sin of undertaking the journey to
see the Lord.