[Advaita-l] On epistemicity of avidyaa, etc.

[Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian]

I have taken the liberty of changing the subject line.

You have really hit the nail on the head with this one. The point is
that it was SSS himself who had made a big issue about the alleged
exclusive epistemicity of avidyaa. As you can see, he thinks
Padamapaada thinks avidyaa is exclusively ontic [1], and he stakes the
diametrically opposite claim that avidyaa is exclusively epistemic.
Not only that, he has remarked that Padmapaada has started a long line
of "blind" people! So the issue here is  *only* whether avidyaa is
exclusively epistemic. Indeed that's the key issue which needs to be
tackled, and so I have completely ignored the usual boring stuff about
mithyaaj~naana = mithyaa + j~naanaa or mithyaa + aj~naana, etc. I have
used no "controversial" passages, just so that we can tackle purely
philosophical issues instead of going on and on about interpretation
of individual passages.

Rama

[1] That this claim about Padmapaada is wrong should be evident from
Anands series, especially from the clarifications of citsukha. I will
address the issue of Padmapaada in a separate paper. The proof is in 2
parts, the first part is that SSS's interpretation of shankara is
incorrect (which I have tried to present in this paper), and the
second part is that Padmapaada did not "mis-interpret" shankara. The
latter should be available by the end of the year :-).

On 5/2/07, Siva Senani Nori <sivasenani at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dear Sri Bhaskar
>
> What is striking is that there is not much difference between the views of HH Sri Satchidanendra Sarasvati regarding avidyA as presented by Sri Ramakrishnan in the section 2 of his paper and as elaborated by you in your mail. Your post exposes the views of SSS in a way that one moves from one point to the another quite easily and effortlessly; please accept my compliments for such a lucid exposition.
>