[Advaita-l] Re: yoga and vedanta

[venkata subramanian]

ya sorry, it was Sri Jnanananda Bharathi Swamigal.    

Vidyasankar Sundaresan <svidyasankar at hotmail.com> wrote:
Not to make this thread a debate between followers of Swami Saccidanandendra 
Saraswati and others, but a few clarifications are in order.

Various points of difference between SankarAcArya and sureSvarAcArya have 
been touched upon in previous mails by others. The point I wish to make is 
the following. In our tradition, a Sishya need not follow a guru to the 
letter. In the brahmasUtra bhAshya, SankarAcArya does accept that all people 
are eligible for AtmajnAna, but throughout his works, he leads one to infer 
that only brAhmaNas can formally take up saMnyAsa as a means to brahmajnAna, 
nobody else. sureSvarAcArya points out in the vArttika that all dvijas are 
traditionally allowed to take up saMnyAsa, not just brAhmaNas. That being 
the case, even between a direct guru-Sishya pair, it should not be 
surprising if madhusUdana sarasvatI, who came many centuries later, differs 
on a few points from SankarAcArya. It would not be right to use that as a 
reason to cast doubt on madhusUdana as a proper representative of SAnkara 
siddhAnta.

Regarding tradition and the mandana - sureSvara issue :- R. Krishnaswamy 
Iyer's name after saMnyAsa was Jnanananda Bharati, not Jnananandendra 
Sarasvati. What the then Sringeri Jagadguru, Swami Saccidananda Sivabhinava 
Narasimha Bharati, said about this is only that maNDana is a title, not a 
first name. This is referred in P. P. Subrahmanya Sastri's foreword to S. 
Kuppuswamy Sastri's edition of the brahmasiddhi, first published from Madras 
University in 1937. Moreover, nowhere in any of the Sankaravijaya-s is it 
mentioned that the maNDana miSra who became a saMnyAsin after debating with 
SankarAcArya was the same maNDana miSra who wrote brahmasiddhi. In fact, all 
that is said in the vijaya texts is that maNDana was steeped in the path of 
karma and that he upheld the pUrva mImAMsA view in his debate with 
SankarAcArya. It is nowhere described as a debate between the brahmasiddhi 
variety of advaita and the SAnkara bhAshya variety of advaita.

As for the yayA yayA bhavet pumsAM verse, the intent is the following. Each 
of the prakriyA-s referred to by different advaita AcAryas over the 
centuries has a clear basis in Sruti. There is not even a single vAda that 
is Sruti-virodha. That is how madhusUdana sarasvatI reconciles the different 
prakriyA-s, by reference to sureSvarAcArya's Sloka. That it originally 
referred to the various prakriyA-s within Sruti does not invalidate the fact 
that one can logically apply the same Sloka to the different prakriyA-s 
within the advaita tradition too.

Vidyasankar

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Thanks & Regards,
Venkat.

Sadgurubhyo Namah.
		
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