[Advaita-l] Dr Mani Dravid

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

Dear Sri Devanathan,

 

Apart from the opinions of Shri Mani Dravid with respect to

the pancapAdikA and the Holenarsipur school, and apart

from whether he is pro-vivaraNa or anti-bhAmatI, I think

you are overstating the case about trivRtkaraNa. This is

clearly an ativyApti here. Have you read my paper in

Philosophy East and West, titled "What determines

Sankara's authorship - The case of the Pancikarana"?

 

An impartial reader of that paper is free to disagree with

my conclusions about how to decide the authorship of a

text attributed to Sankara, but if he is really impartial, he

has to give up this baseless dispute about pancIkaraNa vs.

trivRtkaraNa. I have shown, with extensive quotations and

discussion, that the bhAshyakAra gives equal weight to

pancIkaraNa in the chAndogya bhAshya. The sUtra says

trivRtkurvata, because the vishaya vAkya there is from the

chAndogya. The bhAshyakAra does not need to say anything

about pancIkaraNa in the sUtrabhAshya, because the sUtra

is not about the process of trivRtkaraNa per se, but about

that brahman who sets it into motion.

 

However, in chAndogya bhAshya, where the subject matter

is the process of trivRtkaraNa itself, the bhAshyakAra feels

it necessary to add an explanatory statement about

pancIkaraNa also. He does not say that pancIkaraNa is

wrong and trivRtkaraNa is right, but he says that a samAna

nyAya applies to both. Unless you are going to argue that

the Sankara who wrote the chAndogya bhAshya may have

been different from the one who wrote the sUtra bhAshya,

you cannot say that Sankara endorses only trivRtkaraNa.

 

I have read the relevant portions of bhAmatI too, and I don't

see vAcaspati miSra having a preference for trivRtkaraNa over

pancIkaraNa anywhere. As far as I can see, bhAmatI does not

even bring up pancIkaraNa, just as the sUtrabhAshya itself

does not touch upon it. However, an argument against a

concept based upon silence with respect to it is not at all

valid. After all, the same bhAshyakAra does say that an

equivalent logic applies to pancIkaraNa in a different text,

and I would imagine that such a scholarly and widely read

author as vAcaspati miSra would have surely known about

it before he even started writing the bhAmatI.

 

Please do let me know if I may have missed some reference in

the bhAmatI in this context.

 

Vidyasankar

 


 
> Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 07:26:50 +0530
> From: sathvatha at gmail.com
> To: advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org
> Subject: [Advaita-l] Dr Mani Dravid
> 
> Hari OM~
> Shri Ramakrishnan ji and Shri Subramanian ji,
> 
> As far as I know Shri Mani Dravid is an ardent follower of the Vivarana
> tradition. He is opposed to the Bhamati prasthana. He has written few papers
> lamenting the limitations (so-called) of Bhamati. I have spoken to him on
> few crucial issues on Bhamati and Vivarana differences. In my view I
> strongly subscribe to Vacaspati's views on Mula-avidya-tula-vidya
> bifurcation and the avidya-(jiva)asraya theory upon which the internal
> differences in Advaita is largely based. Vacaspati's classification on the
> two-fold avidya 'anirvAcyAvidyAdvividha' is more logical and convincing and
> i insist that it ought to be read with Kalpataru and Abhoga. Further with
> regards to the metaphysics, Trvrtkarana is clearly endorsed by the
> Sutra-kara with full Sankara-sammati as found in the bhasya. The so-called
> Suresvara tradition as promulgated by SSS taking full-rights n patent can
> mean nothing to Sastraic scholars. SSS is not a tradition per-se but just an
> offshoot of non-Pancapadika movement.
> 
> With Narayana Smrti,
> Devanathan.J
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