Nisargadatta Maharaj

[Jaldhar H. Vyas]

[forwarded message from Bhadraiah Mallampalli <vaidix at hotmail.com>]

The statement "Those who know only scriptures know nothing. To know is to
be." deviates from Sri Sankara's approach.

According to Sri Sankara, three qualifications are needed for establishing
the truth: only 1. It must be logical (to the extent logic itself works) 2.
It must be verifiable by experience (to the extent sense organs can be
relied upon) and 3. It must be agreeable to the scripture (to the extent
there is no contradiction within the scripture itself as in case of creation
stories). The clauses in parantheses have been mentioned by Sri Sankara
elsewhere.

Even in science, one has to use logic, do the experiment to confirm, and
check the records of Royal society, NASA etc. As Veda was already perfected
and no challengers were seen till date, we have no choice but to look for
agreement with scriptures.

To say that experience alone is sufficient creates a dualism - scriptures
are bad but experience is good, when in reality both are needed along with a
third one - logic. I also see some lax attitude to logic among new agers,
mostly driven by a democratic feeling "I have my way you have your way".
This is nice for beginners but some time in future people have to meet and
verify that they all see the same reality.

It is possible Sri Maharaj may have been misquoted. It may just be a
metaphor meant for people who had already achieved some level of
enlightenment.

Sri J Krishnamurti's statements also appear to contain some dualism, where
one set of words (present, love etc) are "good" and another set of words
(past, future, thinking etc) are "bad". While it is true that for a person
who has transcended memory and hope (ref. Ch.U.7) past and future are
meaningless, the word present becomes equally meaningless. Love is
meaningless when there is no second object to love.

Even in poetic works of Acharyas meant for bhakti/vairagya one can find
several alankaras like nindastuti, virodhabhasa etc, which can very well
lead to a lot of confusion if intepreted literally.

Best regards
Bhadraiah

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