[Advaita-l] About Yajnavalkya of BAU

[Shrisha Rao]

On Sun, 25 Jul 2004, Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian wrote:

> At least from the point of view of advaita and the puurva miimaa.msaa,
> the stories related in "sruti are NOT historical events and are meant
> for only purposes of illustration. So this whole discussion is moot
> from an advaitic standpoint.

Everyone agrees that the chief purpose of the narrations of episodes in
the Vedantic literature is to illustrate metaphysical concepts rather than
convey history, but there is no hint of rejection of their historicity in
the *classical* Advaitic literature, even when they make fantastic claims;
for example, see Sri Sankara's remarks concerning the Nachiketa-Yama
episode in his Katha U. commentary, or his sUtra commentary under
`smaryate.api cha loke'.

Regards,

Shrisha Rao

> Rama