Questions on Buddhism (was Re: [Advaita-l] Re: gauDapAda and Sankara)

[Ramesh Krishnamurthy]

Namaste,

On 02/08/06, Lakshminarayana <narayana_kl_71 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> but an analogy might help here. brahman is the
> substratum of the world just as a rope is the
> substratum of an illusory snake. The substratum can be
> considered to be the ground on which the universe is
> superimposed.
>
>
> > But what is brahman?
>
> If I can really answer this question to your (or even
> my) complete satisfaction, then probably I would not
> have been here in this list.

Of course:)) But I am trying to intellectually understand the concept
of the substratum. Maybe the usage of the word 'substratum' is what
causes the confusion.

This topic has actually come up many times on this list. Over the last
few months, I have read all the relevant posts in the archives and
obtained some interesting insights. But there is a lot of ground yet
to be covered.

The one post that I found most illuminating was the following by Rishi
Lamichhane on 3rd March, in which he equates the vedAntic mithyA to
the shUnya of the bauddha-s.

http://lists.advaita-vedanta.org/archives/advaita-l/2006-March/016758.html

In his post Rishi-ji provided the following link to an article by
Swami Dayananda Saraswati (of Arsha Vidya).

http://www.avgsatsang.org/hhpsds/pdf/Samadhi_One.pdf

There is a sequel to the above article at

http://www.avgsatsang.org/hhpsds/pdf/Samadhi_Two.pdf

On reading Rishi-ji's post (on 3rd March, 2006),  I immediately
downloaded the above articles and read through them. They are indeed
amazing.

After that, I was expecting a flurry of discussion on the
mithyA-shUnyatA relationship but unfortunately it never happened.
Perhaps now is the right time for us to take this up. I wonder whether
scholars like Mahadevan have said anything about this. Overall, it
appears that most scholars have tended to focus on the
brahman-shUnyatA relationship and not really bothered about mithyA &
shUnyatA.

Swami Dayananda Saraswati's explanation of mithyA is also very
illuminating. But so far, I have only been able to appreciate it as a
stand-alone article i.e. I have not been able to link it up with the
rest of advaita-vedAnta (ajAtivAda et al). Also, apart from Swamiji's
article, I have not come across this explanation anywhere.

I would request our members to ponder over this.

Ramesh