[Advaita-l] Pramanas - Sruti vs. Anubhava

[Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian]

On 5/1/07, Siva Senani Nori <sivasenani at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dear Sri Ramakrishnan
>
> First and foremost, let me appreciate your excellent paper. I admire the forthright way in which you said SSS is wrong, and then took on the onerous task of writing this paper, which is profound, very well organised, scholarly, and presented using very nice-looking fonts. I did not understand the Paper fully in my first reading, and found that an iterative approach works best, but that reflects my situation rather than the paper.

Regarding the fonts: I have used LaTeX along with Charles Wikners skt
font series. There are some issues with either the skt.exe program, or
how it links with LaTeX itself in terms of setting out the fonts.
Sometimes it spews out some garbage instead of regular letters, in
spite of the fact that the *.tex program compiles properly. This
problem seems to occur more frequently if there are very long lines in
the *.skt file. For example, if you use XEmacs to input the *.skt
file, there are no automatic carriage returns after a certain number
of characters, unless you choose that option. This creates a problem
for the skt.exe program (not sure why). Also, not sure if anyone
noticed that I have suddenly used roman transliteration to quote
Sureshvara on anubhava in my footnote (elesewhere it's in Devanaagarii
for all quotations). The reason is that if I use the sktf font option,
I get garbage. But if I use sktx (roman transliteration), everything
is fine. It is really weird! In spite of some minor glitches like
these, I prefer Wikners font, since IMO it has the best vedic svaras +
samyutaaxara support.  Of course I might be doing something wrong, but
can't see anything because I get the proper output by changing from
sktf to sktx. If anyone has ideas on this, please let me know.

I use cygwin and use the ps2pdfwr to convert the *.ps file to *.pdf. I
also use MikTex, which has the type1 fonts of the skt series
(necessary to generate good pdfs). You can install the type1 fonts
yourself from the CTAN web-site also. BTW, I have also developed a
cool Perl script (sorry for bragging, but I am quite pleased with
this) which will take a Vedic *.skt file and convert it into different
levels of "pratishakhification" for printing out. What I mean is, the
way you should pronounce the text is laid out very explicitly in the
Taittiriiya Pratishakhya. Most of it is ignored by usual texts like
the RK Mutt publications, but scrupulously followed by the old
grantha-script publications. Of course some of the syllable
reduplication is not viable to be printed out as it will be too
confusing to read, and the grantha texts expect you to know those
rules. However, I have made this possible, for research purposes. I'll
try to get this finally ready within the next month or two. You can
see a small result in my web-site, the rudra-suuktam. Compare it with
how it would come out in normal publications. The suuktam is in the
Level 1 of Pratishakhification, fit for publishing. I have not
included the Level 2 yet. I am still making sure that I got all the
stuff properly in Level 2 in the Perl script.

> * I appreciate your gesture in replying out of turn. Please note that I did not discuss the nature of avidyA because that section was clear to me. As to summaristion of your views, I thought the operative part of your rules was that one should follow all of them, if ** one expects a reply from you **. Without meaning to be disrespectful, I did not expect a reply from you - rather, I was expecting persons like Sri Bhaskar to respond - and so did not bother about following the rules. If one were to follow your rules even to refer to your paper, I have no hesitation in saying that notwithstanding the tremendous respect I have for your scholarship, I would neither read your paper nor refer to it.
>

Not sure if you realize it, but the avidyaa issue is the most
important for SSS and his followers. That takes the focus of many of
SSSs writings. Folllowers of SSS cannot admit he is wrong on avidyaa,
that will obviate most of the SSS corpus of writings.

Rama