SrI VijayIndrar and Appayya DhIkshidar

[Anand V. Hudli]

On Fri, 6 Aug 1999 16:18:06 -0400, Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at BRAINCELLS.COM>
wrote:


>Here's another one.  In Swami Sanatanadeva Udasins' (The Udasin sampradaya
>mixes Advaita Vedanta with elements of Sikhism) introduction to the
>Gudarthadipika of Swami Madhusudan Saraswati on the Gita, he says that
>after the publication of the Advaitasiddhi, Vyas Tirth sought to refute it
>and he became a student of the great Madhusudana.  After a while he had
>learned enough of Advaita to be able to write his rejoinder, Nyayamrt.
>Madhusudan congratulated him on his effort and Vyas Tirth is said to have
>replied that it was only through his teachers grace he was able to write
>the work.
>
 This story if it occurs as described above is provably inaccurate.
 First, VyAsatIrtha did not study under MadhusUdana for the simple
 reason that MadhusUdana refutes nyAyAmR^ita the work of VyAsatIrtha
 in the advaitasiddhi! Unless MadhusUdana had a divine vision of what
 VyAsatIrtha would be writing in his nyAyAmR^ita, this would be
 impossible. And vyAsatIrtha would have had to study what he himself
 was supposed to write in the nyAyAmR^ita and then proceed to write
 the same!!

 The other story I have heard which is more credible, if you may,
 is that vyAsatIrtha's student rAmAchArya studied under MadhusUdana
 and wrote the nyAyAmR^ita-taraN^giNi. MadhusUdana having examined
 it said that he would not like to write a refutation of his own
 student's work. So he asked his student's student, brahmAnanda, a
 much younger man, to refute rAmAchArya.


>Now this story may be just as much a "fairy tale" as the other I don't
>know.  But far from being insulting or disrespectful, I think these
>stories show the great esteem the great scholars and saints are held in
>even by people who disagreed with their teachings.

  I disagree. It is possible to be respectful to scholars of
 other schools without concocting "tall tales" that show how they
 were defeated in debate but were still "gracious" in defeat.

 Any mature person of any school should be in a position to
 appreciate and respect scholars of other schools based on the
 reputation in their own schools. There is no need to invent
 fictitious events to do this.

 I am not saying no relations ever existed between advaitins and scholars
 from other schools. For all we know, there could have been debates/
 discussions between Vijayindra and Appayya. And they may have ended
 with the standard result : "we agree that we disagree on major issues."
 No problem with this. Why make one a loser and the other a winner?
 Doing so only puts a sectarian twist to the whole thing and puts the
 credibility of the whole thing in question.

>
>Just because they disagreed vehemently with each other in debates, doesn't
>mean that thinkers of the calibre of Appyaya Dikshita or Raghavendra were
>unable to get along in real life.
>

 True.

 Anand