shaMkara - 5 1 2 - 2 1 5 - vaishaaka shukla panchami

[Vivek Anand Ganesan]

--- "ShrI Ravisankar S. Mayavaram" wrote:
> I had the opportunity to listen kaanchi periyava's talk
> on
> shankara jayanti on internet from the kaanchi kamakoTi
> www page.
> This talk is in Tamil and a very interesting one. I was
> fascinated by the sweetness of his voice and the humorous
> style.
> In this talk, he gives one of the interesting reason for
> why the
> name shankara was given to our achaarya.
>
> It seems that it is a tradition in kerala that the day in
> which
> the person is born is used to determine the names. This
> is now
> prevalent only among the kings (like chittirai thirunaaL,
> svaati
> thirunaaL, muula thirunaaL, vishaaka thirunaaL), but in
> the past
> was followed by many.
>
> Sanskrit has a tradition of using shloka-s to convey even
> things
> like vaidya, jyotisha, mathematics, dictionaries. To
> represent
> maths with letters, they had a conventions which is
> called
> kaTapaya rule. That is 9 letters begining from ka are
> numbered
> sequentially, 4 from Ta, 5 from pa and 8 from ya. And the
> acharya
> goes on to quote many things and also give an analysis of
> a
> shloka giving age of shankara as 32.
>
> Coming back to topic, shankara was born on vaishaaka
> shukla
> panchami. vaishaakam is 2 month in chaandramaana system.
> There
> are two pakshams, and shukla is 1st paksham, and panchami
> tithi
> is the 5th one. The number we get is 2-1-5. There is
> another rule
> in using the letters for numbers, that is, one has to use
> in the
> reverse direction while interpreting. Now we have to
> decode 5 1
> 2.  starting from ya, 5 will denote shaM; starting from
> ka 1 will
> denote ka; and starting from ya 2 will be ra. So we get
> shankara.
>
> I have not done justice to the 20 minute talk. Please
> listen if
> you have access to the site with Real Audio player
> (mostly I
> don't, as I work on a old SGI machine) and if you know
> Tamil.
>
> Another place I have seen an interesting analysis of
> numbers and
> names is the lalitaasahasrnaama bhashyam of shri
> bhaaskararaya
> (translation). But I do not remember the details now.
>
> jaya jaya shankara
>
> Ravi
>
> --
> bhava shankara deshikame sharaNam

Thank you very much.  This is fascinating information.

-Vivek.

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bhava shankara deshikame sharaNam

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