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

[Ananta Bhagwat]

You are well come to jump in the fray :)

Unfortunately mine and Sri Jaladharaji's world views are different. I find advaita's spirit is in inclusiveness and not in the exclusion. Whatever may be the back ground of Sri Vivekananda, for him advaita vedanta was the ultimate expression of Hinduism. His whole life was epitome of advaita without differentiating between cast, creed, and class. For me advaita is not only ghatApatAdi Sastra but transcends beyond that. The person for whom you-me difference is over, who believes in the unity of all human kind is advaitin. On that criteria I am not sure even our earlier AcArya-s can test positive. On that criteria perhaps vivekananda is the only advaitin. I have read enough about advaita (all bhAshya-s of Sri Sankara and rAmanuja, other books of Sankara or attributed to him, texts of Radhakrishnan, Dasgupta, n-number of gItA bhAsya-s, and yes, Vivekananda too :) The spirit of advaita transcends all that! It is the principle of unity but not homogenization.
 See gItA XIII.27 and 28 to understand true advaitin.

Incidently I have also read AV for the fun element (its black magic and all that :) It do not know if it is neo-vedAnta or any thing else. I take it is as spirit of inclusion of veda-s who give a place to common beliefs. It is part of Ignorance which one has to remove to see jnAna. That way even veda-s become aveda-s when real Knowledge dawns.

By saying all these I am not undermining the SAstra, I am only saying there is much more to advaita than SAstra-s or its rigid interpretation.

ananta
 

----- Original Message ----
From: Praveen <bhatpraveen at gmail.com>
To: A discussion group for Advaita Vedanta <advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org>
Sent: Friday, May 16, 2008 2:21:01 PM
Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] The Evolution of Advaita from Sankara till Date

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 */
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