[Advaita-l] Re: gauDapAda and Sankara

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

>
>A person named Nandakumar Chandran used be a member of this forum, but
>he does not seem to be active now. Anyway, I found these writings by
>him while browsing the net:
>

Ramesh, it has been many years since the discussions on Buddhism with Nanda 
Chandran happened on this list. A number of our list's original members will 
remember that we allprobably emitted more heat than light in this regard. I 
notice a link to one old post of mine in the svabhinava.org URL that you 
cite. This was probably a spill-over discussion on the IndicCivilizations 
list in Yahoo, but as I don't even remember my Yahoo groups user id and 
password any more, I have no way of checking what I wrote then.

Personally, if I had to do this Buddhism related discussion all over again 
(something that I woud not look forward to at this juncture), I would 
probably say things a bit differently. However, I would still disagree 
completely when Nanda Chandran concludes, "Buddhism never died in India, but 
survives in the form of Advaita Vedaanta, which represents the best of both 
the great traditions - Buddhism as well as the Vedic religion."

I also do not accept that there is something called "the Indian 
mind/intellect" as opposed to say "the Chinese/Japanese/Sri 
Lankan/Laotian/... mind/intellect" and I have learned not to get into 
inconclusive debates where one party keeps speculating, with sentences 
filled with"must have been" and "should have been" as opposed to firm fact 
and logic. So I am loath to reopen the old discussion anew. A search of our 
list archives for threads on Buddhism and Advaita should pull up all the 
relevant older material. Our list has a much wider membership base now, so 
rather than revisit an old discussion with a former member of this list, I 
would look forward to reading fresh perspectives from some of our newer list 
members.

Regards,
Vidyasankar

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