Antiquity of advaita vedanta (was : an open letter to all)

Sankaran Panchapagesan panchap at ICSL.UCLA.EDU
Wed Jun 21 17:37:21 CDT 2000


Hi Nanda,

> Regarding Anandagiri : Incase you're not aware, Anandagiri, is not a
> "reliable" author according to some sources. Else Shankara would've
> been a Tamil Brahmin and the matham at KAnchi would've been the
> original matham.

I thought I'd save Vidya some time and quote from his web page:

>From http://lists.advaita-vedanta.org/avhp/sankara-vijayam.html:

anantAnandagirIya Sankaravijaya - In my opinion, this work is very
unreliable. To begin with, it is a very late text and all available
versions seem extremely corrupt. The author of this text identifies
himself as anantAnandagiri. Many scholars mistakenly identify this text
                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
with that of Anandagiri, the TIkAkAra, probably due to the misleading
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
similarity of their names
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

>From the same page (earlier than the above quote):

"AnandagirIya Sankaravijaya - This work is not available today, although
according to many secondary sources, it must have existed at one time. It
is attributed to Anandagiri, the 13th century author of well-known TIkAs
to SankarAcArya's bhAshyas. One 19th century author, who wrote a
commentary to the mAdhavIya refers to Anandagiri's Sankaravijaya as bRhat
Sankaravijaya in one place and as prAcIna Sankaravijaya in another place.
It seems clear that this text was considered to be old (prAcIna) and huge
(bRhat). However, as it is no longer extant, the quotations attributed to
this text are not very trustworthy.

--
bhava shankara deshikame sharaNam

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>From ADVAITA-L at LISTS.ADVAITA-VEDANTA.ORG Wed Jun 21 20:07:07 2000
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Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 20:07:07 -0400
Reply-To: List for advaita vedanta as taught by Shri Shankara
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To: List for advaita vedanta as taught by Shri Shankara
        <ADVAITA-L at LISTS.ADVAITA-VEDANTA.ORG>
From: Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian <ramakris at EROLS.COM>
Subject: Re: Antiquity of advaita vedanta (was : an open letter to all)
Comments: To: List for advaita vedanta as taught by Shri Shankara
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I am sorry to see this discussion on the list. Personally, it's
deja-vu for me. I can very well understand Anand's feelings, old
listmembers may remember the controversies a few years back. I hope I
am not embarrassing Anand Hudli by saying this, but his posts (and
Vidyasankar) are the main reason I think this list is still worth
subscribing to. Unfortunately, the quality has gone down considerably
in the last one year mainly due to a few posters. As seen in the
recent posts their ignorance of advaita is only matched by their
arrogance. Of course ignorance by itself with a willingness to learn
would be no problem.

Another problem with this is that the time which could be spent by
someone writing useful stuff is spent correcting misconceptions
propogated wilfully by a few people. I had to write multiple posts in
the past  in some situations, with considerable waste of time.
Clearly, Anand's time has been wasted in this thread. I am still
hopeful that these pernicious elements will have only a passing
effect. I am still waiting for the nonsense to die down so that I can
start some (I think) useful threads.

Rama

--
bhava shankara deshikame sharaNam

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