Questions on the history of Advaita

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

On Thu, 8 Aug 1996, Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian wrote:

> > the Mandukya upanishad. And Sarma just present Madhva's interpretation as
> > the right one, without comparing it with the advaita position critically.
>
> Not very surprising! However, the comparative analysis of the various
> interpretations will no doubt be coloured by the views of the interpreter :-).
>

I guess if a judgment were to be made about which school represents the
first 27 Karikas most faithfully, the interpreter's own view will
influence it. But it is not impossible to just do a comparative study of
Sankara's commentary and Madhva's commentary to see where they differ and
where they agree. This does not seem to have been done by anybody. If you
or I were to do it, we might be accused of being prejudiced towards the
advaita view, but if someone from outside any Vedanta tradition were to
do a purely textual comparison, it may be possible for the biases to be
ironed out.

S. Vidyasankar