[Advaita-l] Advaita-l Digest, Vol 91, Issue 5

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

> > Although Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission are legally and
> > financially separate, they are closely inter-related in several other ways,
> > and are to be regarded as twin organizations. Please see above the vision
> > and mission of Ramakrishnan mutt. From this it is clear that neither are
> > they supportors of Sringeri or any other Mutt. Many say Shankarcharyas

As I mentioned before, the connection is one of initiation lineages, not at an
institutional, legal, financial or administrative level. Ramakrishna came to be
known as Paramahamsa, which is a traditional saMnyAsin category. There
are numerous accounts of his life available online and in print. Tota Puri, a
daSanAmI saMnyAsin, was one of his gurus, and as per the daSanAmI
tradition preserved in the various north Indian Akhadas, Puri, Bharati and
Sarasvati are three saMnyAsin surnames invariably assigned to the Sringeri
Matha. Of course, in the Sringeri lineage itself, we also see the presence of
Aranya and Giri in the past and especially Tirtha in recent times.
 
> > teachings traditionally are represented by four or five mutts ( But most
> > scholars who have written well on advaita over the past thousand years or
> > more have not explicitly stated in their works that they have any direct
> > connection with these mutts though many may have).
 
Well, whether you pick up a copy of pancadaSI from the 14th century or the
vivekacUDAmaNi bhAshya from the 20th, or svArAjyasiddhi from in between,
you will never see any internal reference by the authors of these works that
they were also maThAdhipatis!
 
Also, please note that there are more than a hundred maTha-s, of varying
ages, that provided the institutional framework to sustain the sampradAya
of saMnyAsa and advaita scholarship. svArAjyasiddhi, for example, was
written by an author named gangAdharendra sarasvatI, a name that often
occurs in the lineage of the Swarnavalli Matha, which is not one of the 
four or five institutions that are more widely known.
 
Regards,
Vidyasankar