[Advaita-l] [advaitin] Works of Sri Vidyashankara
Sunil Bhattacharjya
sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 2 01:55:51 CST 2017
Dear Vidysankarji and the members of the advaita group,
Wish you all a happy new year.
Regards,
Sunil K. Bhattacharjya
--------------------------------------------
On Sun, 1/1/17, Vidyasankar Sundaresan <svidyasankar at gmail.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] [advaitin] Works of Sri Vidyashankara
To: "Sunil Bhattacharjya" <sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com>
Cc: "A discussion group for Advaita Vedanta" <advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org>, "Venkatraghavan S" <agnimile at gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, January 1, 2017, 7:46 PM
Dear
Sunilji,
I have engaged in discussions with you long
enough to work out how your doubts arise and when the very
same doubts become conclusions.
In my very first response to you on this
thread, I had drawn your attention to the works of Dr
Kunjunni Raja, Dr V Raghavan, Prof Sengaku Mayeda and
others. In particular, I will reiterate that you should
familiarize yourself with Mayeda's in-depth and
comprehensive analysis of the authorship issue. Questions
about style and substance have been answered more than
satisfactorily in his articles. Prof Karmarkar's stance
about the authorship of gItAbhAshya has to be ultimately set
aside. Of course, that will prove to be uncomfortable for
your theses about the gItA of 745 verses and about the dates
of Sankara and the maThas.
As for SrI viyASankara, please note that all
the old major SakhA maThas of Sringeri have the term
vidyASankara pAdapadmArAdhaka in their titles. There is no
rule that every notable guru in maTha history should have
written commentaries. And there is no rule that a notable
author should have presided over a maTha.
It is very easy to ask questions. It requires a
lot of patience to get to the answers. In the process, you
have to keep an open mind and be ready to give up
assumptions and preconceptions whenever necessary.
I'll stop here. I have no desire to dig
back into the claimed vs actually documented histories of
various institutions. I have already said much about them in
the past and don't see any need to repeat myself.
With happy 2017 wishes,
Vidyasankar
On Jan 2, 2017 12:46 AM,
"Sunil Bhattacharjya" <sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com>
wrote:
Dear
Vidyashankarji,
I think you have not known that my doubts about the
authorship of the Bhagavadgitabhashya by Adi Shankara, arose
only after I came to know about Prof. Karmarkar's
analysis. It looks as if due to prejudice many have not
cared to read the paper of Karmarkar. So there is no case of
force-fitting, and it was only the open way of examining new
information.
Good that now I find that the general opinion is that Sri
Vidyashankar had not written any text. But there must be
some reason why both the Kudali Sringeri and the Sringeri
mathas have the grand Vidyashankar temples in their
premises, but similar honour to the other post-AdiShankara
pontiffs are miising.
Regarding Nava Shankara or Abhinava Shankara, it was Shri
Pathak who got the three page document on that according to
which this Nava Shankara was born in 788 CE. Shri Pathak
published a paper on that. It is interesting to see that the
Sringeri matha also claimed the date of their first
mathadhipati from that time. This probably gave an
impression to some scholars like Udaivir Shastri that the
Sringeri math was established by this Abhinava Shankara.
Abhinava Shankara, for your kind information is one of the
pontiffs of the Kanchi Kamakoti matha.
As regards Shri Niranjan Saha's paper I wrote back to
him in private as he asked for a review of his paper. I am
yet to hear from Shri Saha.
I don't condemn the mathas other than the Sringeri
matha, and I also look with an open mind at what others are
saying, even if they differ from the opinion of the
Sringeri, for which I have great respect. I wish I belonged
to the inner circle of the Shringeri matha, so that I could
have helped the matha to undo the wrongs the historians had
done to that matha.
Regards,
Sunil KB
------------------------------ --------------
On Sun, 1/1/17, Vidyasankar Sundaresan <svidyasankar at gmail.com>
wrote:
Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] [advaitin] Works of Sri
Vidyashankara
To: "Sunil Bhattacharjya" <sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com
>
Cc: "A discussion group for Advaita Vedanta"
<advaita-l at lists.advaita-
vedanta.org>, "Venkatraghavan S" <agnimile at gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, January 1, 2017, 9:54 AM
Dear
Sunilji,
In general, if you want to answer questions of
textual and historical import, you have to have a more
solid
basis first to ask questions, not just some doubts and
hunches. Secondly, you should try not to force fit data
to
preconceived conclusions.
It looks like you are determined, somehow or
the other, to come up with a different author for the
gItAbhAshya than Adi Sankara. So, in your estimation,
it
must be anybody else, either an entirely mythical and
non-historical abhinava Sankara or the historical
vidyASankara who has traditionally not been known to
have
written any texts at all.
Our list member, Niranjan Saha, has already
shared with you, by private email, a very recent paper
surveying the academic scholarly output regarding the
authorship of the gItAbhAshya. Please read it with some
care.
I don't understand why you would throw out
both the tradition that says that this bhAshya is by
Adi
Sankara and also the bulk of the modern scholarship
that
concludes that this traditional attribution is right.
Instead, you are basing your argument upon a solitary
paper
that is now quite outdated, along with a highly
speculative
attempt at reconstructing history. The entire exercise
is
very strange indeed!
Best regards,
Vidyasankar
On Jan 1, 2017 2:29 AM,
"Sunil Bhattacharjya via Advaita-l" <advaita-l at lists.advaita-
vedanta.org>
wrote:
Namaste
Venkataraghavanji,
Thank you for your mail. may I request you kindly to send
me
a photocopy of T.K. Gopalaswamy Aiyengar's paper
titled "BhAskara on the
Gita" presented at the GIta SamIkshA conference held
in
Tirupati on March, 1970.
Would you think that Abhinava Shankara, another very
famous
avatara of Adi Shankaracharya, could have written the
Bhagavadgita bhashya, if and when all evidences confirm
that a fresh bhashya on the Bhagavadhita was needed to
be
written by Sri Vidyashankara to refute Sri
Ramabujacharya's Bhagavadgitabjashya, as one
advaitic
bhashya was already therein Sri ramanujacharya's
time.
This will be satisfy the objection that language style
of
the Bhagavadgitabhshya was different for Adi
Shankara's
other bhashyas.
Tthe Bhagavadgitabhashya does not have 745 verses, even
though the Gita press edition of the Mahabharata
clearly
shows that the Bhagavad Gita had 745 verses. One
possibility
is that Sri Vidyashankara had just to refute only the
version with 700 verses on which Sri Ramanujacharya
wrote
his bhashya. But if any one before Sri Ramanujacharya
wrote the advaitic bhashya on the Bhagavadgita, then
the
question as to why the 45 verses were omitted still
stands,
Regards,
Sunil KB
------------------------------ --------------
On Sat, 12/31/16, Venkatraghavan S via Advaita-l
<advaita-l at lists.advaita-
vedanta.org> wrote:
Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] [advaitin] Works of Sri
Vidyashankara
To: "A discussion group for Advaita
Vedanta"
<advaita-l at lists.advaita-
vedanta.org>
Date: Saturday, December 31, 2016, 10:06 AM
Namaste,
One thing we can use to determine objectively
if Shankara bhagavatpAda
wrote the gIta
bhAshya, or if it was a later advaitin in his
tradition,
is
to see if there is any evidence from
other commentators that are
chronologically
proximate to him.
It is
widely accepted that BhAskara, a bhedAbhedavadin, who
is
said to have
lived around c. 800 AD
("BhAskara the VedAntin", Daniel Ingalls),
is
a
close contemporary of Shankaracharya. BhAskara
quotes Shankara's brahma
sUtra bhAshya
quite extensively in his own bhAshya to this
prasthAna.
BhAskara, in turn, is quoted by VAcaspati
Mishra in BhAmati. Therefore, he
must have
lived between Shankara's and VAcaspati's
lifetimes.
Now turning to
the question if there are any references to
Shankara's
gIta
bhAshya in any of BhAskara's works.
Unfortunately, not too many surviving
works
of BhAskara are available to us. Thankfully, there
are
some
fragments
available from his gIta bhAshya (9
chapters of his gIta bhAshya are
published
by the Benares Sanskrit University, edited by Dr.
Subhadropadhyaya, 1964).
In the few fragments of the BhAskara gIta
bhAshya available today, there is
one
interesting comment he makes when commenting on sloka
2.21:
वेदाविनाशिनं
नित्यं य
एनमजमव्ययम्
।
कथं स पुरुषः
पार्थ कं घातयति
हन्ति
कम् ॥ २१ ॥
These are Shankara's words in his
commentary to the bhAshya:
हेत्वर्थस्य
च
अविक्रियत्वस्य
तुल्यत्वात् *विदुषः
सर्वकर्मप्रतिषेध
एव
प्रकारणार्थः
अभिप्रेतो भगवता*
।
Turning to BhAskara, he
quotes Shankara in the bhAshya to the same verse:
अत्र क्लेशभीरव:
केचित् स्वमतं
भगवत्यारोप्य
वर्णयन्ति *विदुष:
सर्वकर्मप्रतिषेध
एव
प्रकरणार्थोSभिप्रेतो
भगवता* इति.
In commenting on this verse, BhAskara
criticises Shankara's bhAshya by
saying
that Shankaracharya is simply attributing his own
views
onto
Lord
Krishna when he says "in this
context, Krishna's view is that for the wise
person total renunciation of karma is
prescribed".
Its quite
clear here that BhAskara is quoting Shankara's
gIta
bhAshya
verbatim. Given that BhAskara also
quotes Shankara in his Brahma sUtra
bhAshya,
we can conclude that the Shankara that wrote the gIta
bhAshya must
have lived at the same time as
the Shankara that wrote the brahma sUtra
bhAshya. A reasonable simplification to make is
that it is indeed the same
person.
(The above references to
BhAskara's bhAshya and his quotation of
Shankara's
bhAshya are from T.K.
Gopalaswamy Aiyengar's paper titled
"BhAskara
on
the
Gita" presented at the GIta
SamIkshA conference held in Tirupati on March
1970. The proceedings of the conference have
been published by Sri
Venkateswara
University, Tirupati. It is available in electronic
form
at
archive.org)
Regards,
Venkatraghavan
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