Antiquity of Advaita Vedanta

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

nanda chandran <vpcnk at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

>Yup, no doubt about it. But it should be understood that neither does
>the Self in Advaita stand for the "self" as normally understood and

There is one important thing to remember. Our usage of Roman script allows
us to write Self/self, Atman/atman, Brahman/brahman, and make a distinction
between such members of a pair. Neither in Indian/Tibetan/Chinese/Japanese
scripts, nor in spoken language, is such a distinction possible. That in
itself can lead to lots of misconceptions.

>C'mon, Vidhya I thought you were more knowledgable than that. The four
>noble truths is simply : That life is suffering; suffering is caused
>by desire; to overcome suffering one must let go of desire; and the path
>which leads to overcoming desire. Where does the four noble truths even
>mention momentariness?

It follows as a corollary, in the Buddhist schools. But yes, you are right
- the doctrine of momentariness is not directly part of the four noble
truths in Buddhism.

>I'll not agree to this "great thinkers" and obiesence to them. It is ironic
>that this is the attitude in the supposed age of reason. Contrast this with

It is not that one should blindly follow anybody else. What I am arguing
for is that those who have transmitted the tradition need to be given due
weight when they make particular statements about such things as we are
debating. Without very solid arguments, we cannot throw out all the
accumulated evidence from so many people, who have all been great brains,
based on our own reading of the texts those very people wrote. Yes, once
you take all this into account, you can find out where people disagree with
one another, even within a tradition, and you can apply your own reason to
make sense out of it. But in cases where there is broad agreement about
something, that is an indication of how the tradition has progressed, and
it must be taken seriously.

Vidyasankar

--
bhava shankara deshikame sharaNam

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