Questions on History of Advaita

[Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian]

Swami Vishvarupananda wrote:

> >procedure and the philosophy behind it, if there is any interest in this
> type
> >of thing.
>
> Yes, indeed, this would be very interesting, especially the philosophy
> behind it.

I'll try to write up some stuff on this. This pUjA is a nitya karma (daily
ritual) for householders. However not many people do it these days. The rules
for this are somewhat elaborate, though only at the first sight. It becomes
kind of natural when one actually does it. When my father taught the rules and
their significance to me, he did so quoting the relevant authorities (mainly
smR^iti texts and also some purANa-s). However I didn't bother to memorize
these passages and only remember the rules themselves. So my article will not
contain any of these quotations.

There are only a few books available on this pUjA. The best I have seen is
published by R.S.Vadhyar and sons, a famous publisher from Palghat. The book
is called nityAnnikam and rules for this pUjA are also given in that book. I
don't know if they are still in business. There is also a book published by
the Sringeri Mutt. Another very good publication containing quite a few
details not in these two books was published as a commemorative publication
during the kumababishekam of some temple, by a learned pandit of the Kanchi
shankara mutt. My article will be based on these 3 publications.

> P.S.: I am using a different mail program this time. After what you
> mentioned about unreadable characters attached to my mail, I asked many
> others, whether they had similar problems with my mail, but except for one
> nobody seemed to notice anything unusual. Perhaps it is an incompatibility
> of our programs?

There seems to be no problem now. Perhaps you were using Eudora or some such
package and and sending attachments with it, which would have been
incompatible with my UNIX system. I also read the digest version. Maybe that
created the problem.

Ramakrishnan.