[Advaita-l] Vidyaranya and vedanta deshika.

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

> 
> I heard a story that Vidyaranya ,Vedanta Desika and Akshobhya muni were
> classmates in Kanchi
> 
> regards,
> Sarma.

Great, now Akshobhya Tirtha also graduated from the imaginary stellar class? :-)

These kinds of stories keep growing, but I have seen hardly any literary or historical
evidence for them. Vedanta Desika was clearly someone who lived in or near Kanchi,
but Vidyaranya and Akshobhya Tirtha were definitely not.

The other day, I was randomly browsing through webpages and came across a story
that the author of the amarakoSa was a king who once started burning all the books
in his kingdom and that it was Adi Sankaracharya who convinced the king not to burn
his own amarakoSa. People with fertile imaginations are highly capable of coming up
with stories like these. I haven't seen this story in any of the Sankaravijaya-s, but who
cares for Sanskrit texts anyway nowadays, except to cast doubts upon their value?

I'm waiting for the day when someone starts trying to fix a date for Adi Sankara based
on some speculative date for the amarakoSa, or tries to fix a date for the text based on
what they are sure is the final fixed date for Adi Sankara. Facts are rather dry and
unimportant for the romantic mind that appreciates such stories and takes them as
factual. As for logic, forget it ...
 
Regards,
Vidyasankar