[Advaita-l] Sankhya and Yoga can give Moksha?

Vidyasankar Sundaresan svidyasankar at hotmail.com
Wed May 2 08:27:03 CDT 2012


> 
> Quote
> "Gopinath Kaviraj's publication ... argued forcefully that the author is the
> same as the one who wrote a commentary on vAtsyAyana's kAmasUtra,
> also called jayamangalA."
> Unquote
> 
> It is perplexing how Gopinath Kaviraj could think of the "Jayamangala" commentary by Yashodhara (nowhere said to be a buddhist) on the Kamasurtra to be a Buddhist text while the popular  Buddhist "Jayamangala" gatha (extolling the virtues of Lord Buddha) has been ignored while arriving at the above conclusion.
> 

Once again, let me repeat, Gopinath Kaviraj did NOT say that the author of
jayamangalA was a buddhist. OTHER scholars said so and I have left them
unnamed here, because their names do not particularly matter. I don't know
how to be any clearer about this. Anybody with access to the internet can
find out details of who these other scholars were, through a google search.
 
> 3)
> To my knowledge the Advaitins have not questioned the genuineness of the Gaudapadabhashya of the Sankhyakarika nor any advaitin scholar found anywhere any adverse comment on that Gaudapadabhashya by Adi Sankaracharya. Probably we can take it as "maunam sanmatilakshana". If the latter is the case then it appears to me that it may not be impossible that Adi Sankara could have  written the "Jayamangala" on Sankhyakarika. May be some scholar would like to compare the Gauadapadabhashya of Sankhyakarika with Jayamangala.
> 

People have done so, and also compared jayamangalA with vAcaspati's
sAMkhyatattvakaumudI, and they have invariably found jayamangalA to
be a fairly middling text and of little consequence. That is a prime reason
to doubt the colophon in the printed publication, attributing the text to our
Sankara bhagavatpAda.
 
> 4)
> Adi Sankara most probably was aware of the Sankhya scholars (due to their own inadequacy) trying to establish the supremacy of Sankhya over the Vedanta in the same way the followers of Madhvacharya have benn trying to establish the superiority of Dvaita Vedanta over the Advaita Vedanta, for several centuries. So he put them in proper place. However the fact remains that Vedanta takes over at the stage the Sankhya leaves and that is the true spirit of Indian philosophy. I should  not expect that all the scholars of Indian philosophy would agree with me on that. 
> 
> 
> One thing the scholars should keep in mind that the terminology of Sankhya and Yoga is not necessarily the same in every respect. I have mentioned earlier about the "Tanmatra" of Sankhya being the same as the  "Sukshma-bhoota" of Vedata.  Yoga's Ishvara with the vachaka of "Om" is none but the Apara-Brahmana and so also the phrase "Ishvara Asiddha' of Sankhya is not any different from "Brahman is Anirvachaniya".
> 

Please see http://lists.advaita-vedanta.org/archives/advaita-l/2008-June/020316.html
- an old posting of mine, quoting verbatim what Sankara bhagavatpAda says in one
place (gItAbhAshya 18.19) about sAMkhya.
 
Vidyasankar 		 	   		  


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