Jaladhar's remarks

[Dev Thakur]

It's seems to me, that you cannot exclude women or foreigners without
directly contradicting the essence of Advaita.  Also: is it not true that
during the early Vedic period (India's Golden Age), women were given an
almost equal (if not equal status)?

-----Original Message-----
From: Chandran, Nanda (NBC) <Nanda.Chandran at NBC.COM>
To: ADVAITA-L at TAMU.EDU <ADVAITA-L at TAMU.EDU>
Date: Wednesday, January 07, 1998 10:26 AM
Subject: Jaladhar's remarks



>What's the point?  As a woman and a foreigner you are not entitled to
>learn the Vedas anyway. If this swami of yours is telling you otherwise
>you should sue him for malpractice.

When I read this I couldn't help but laugh! Jaladhar, thanks for keeping
humor up on this list and making up for Ramakrishnan's absence.

But guys, is there any reason for the list members to get so worked up about
Jaladhar's statements? Isn't Jaladhar being loyal to the orthodox Vedic
view? After all, the shruti and the smritis are rife with discriminatory (at
least in the current world and context) statements - against women, castes
etc But considering the fact that these texts are millenniums old and that
mankind has progressed a great deal since, can't we have a meaningful
discussion on the relevancy of such thought? For as people as so fond of
quoting, if the Shruti has to be studied it has to be taken and studied as a
whole and not in parts as it suits us.

Jaladhar, even if women and certain people are not eligible to study the
Vedas, what exactly is your problem? No, I don't mean it in a personal way.
Even if they really aren't eligible, they're going to be the losers, so I
guess it isn't anybody else's problem. But I sincerely doubt such thought,
as even Ramana Maharishi took in quite a few foreign disciples and even
Chandrashekara Saraswati didn't think so. And as in Hitopadesha, Hunger,
sleep, fear and sex are common between man and animal. But man differs from
the animal by possessing the faculty of discrimination, the ability to tell
the right from the wrong. So if this is the case, can blindly following such
thought even be right?

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