[Advaita-l] The Evolution of Advaita from Sankara till Date

[Praveen]

praNAm all,

Hari Om, Ananta Bhagwat-ji,

Advance apologies for jumping in the middle of the conversation.

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 12:37 PM, Ananta Bhagwat <ananta14 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Read Vivekananda carefully and your opinion will change.

Kindly permit to me to express that you're reading more negativity in
Jaldhar-ji's reply, if not earlier, definitely now.

No amount of reading Sw. Vivekananda (SV) can convince otherwise as to his not
being shAstric, and that is no secret. You too accept that SV was not shAstric
when you say:

>> Well, that is not important!

to:

>> <As you mention it not "shastric and rigid in the representation of
>> non-dual philosophy."  That's important don't you think!>

However, Jaldhar-ji's suggestion when he says the following:
>
>  Continue studying Advaita Vedanta and I
> guarantee you your views will change.

is surely not in the negative sense, but no serious AV student thinks
that being shAstric and rigid (or rigorous as Vidyasankar-ji corrects) in
representing non-dual philosophy is not important.

IMHO, not being shAstric tends to take AV to be neo-vedanta, while not
being rigorous in representing AV literally means anything else would do.

In short, if I have to go learn advaita vedanta (for moksha prApti), I'm
better off going to a shAstric AV saMnyAsi (for me, be it a Ramakrishna
ashram saMnyAsi) than any other who teaches SV's teachings (alone).
I'd be surprised if people think otherwise, except for feasibility issues.

Of course, if this mail upsets you, I apologize but all I intended to do was
to say that there's no need for any of us to get into unnecessary verbal
warfare; we are all here to learn.

Thanks for your patience.

gurOrarpaNamastu,
--praveen
/* Through what should one know That owing to which all this is known!
--Br.Up. 4.5.15 */