[Advaita-l] Māyāmatram etc

[Shrisha Rao]

El oct 17, 2011, a las 4:11 a.m., subhanu saxena escribió:

> However Ramanuja is not always exact in his quotes so his
> attribution to Gaudapada’s Karika as Sruti cannot be received with 100%
> confidence. For example in his bhashya on Brahma Sutra 1.1.31 he fuses 2 quotations
> into 1 : tadhaitat pashyan rishir vāmadevaḥ pratipede aham manur abhavam sūryashchāham
> kakṣeevān rishir asmi vipra. He has
> fused here a rigveda and brihadaranyaka quote. 

I would hesitate to make a sweeping accusation against Ramanuja, and at the least do not believe the instance cited is to be considered a mistake, however, because the BU's अहं मनुरभवं सूर्यश्चेति is indeed a pointer to the longer text of the RV, according to all scholars.  In contemporary editions the material from the two sources would be offset with a comma or at least a daNDa, but manuscripts and older publications do not require this, and classically well-trained scholars are quite capable, in my experience, of parsing text correctly even in the absence of punctuation.

> As stated above, Madhva considers
> all of chapter 1 the Agama Prakarana in the Karikas to be Sruti, quoted by
> Varuna. His sole authority for this odd belief is the Garuda Purana which is
> said to contain the following verses:
> 
> pramāṇasya pramāṇam cha balavad vidyate mune ।
> 
> brahmadriṣṭānato mantrān
> pramāṇam salileshvarah ।
> 
> atra shlokā bhavanteeti chakāraiva
> prithak prithak ॥

There are a large number of manuscripts of the माण्डूक्य even now in various manuscript libraries (e.g., Tanjore) which give the extant of the same as 16 prose passages + 29 verses, and there are also commentaries in that fashion (e.g., by Kuranarayana of the Ramanuja tradition) besides quotations of individual verses or parts thereof as श्रुति.  It is hardly a matter resting on this Puranic quote.  The purpose of said quote is to answer the question of why the prose passages, which is itself श्रुति and thus completely authoritative, should cite verses in support.

> With regards
> the Vivekachudamani shloka, this is seen as further evidence as to why this
> work is not an original work by Shankaracharya, the author of the
> bhashyas.  

I believe so by Hacker and contemporary Indologists, but I am not so sure about the classical tradition.  There is also a vicious circularity in the argument, though -- first the verses are rejected as not being श्रुति because Sankara has not cited them (आप्तकामश्रुतेः in his BSB under 2-1-33, his VC, his VSN commentary, etc., be damned!), and then they turn around and reject the VSN commentary, the VC, etc., as not Sankara's because the verses are cited in them as श्रुति.

Regards,

Shrisha Rao

> Subhanu