[Advaita-l] Eternal Loka

[rajaramvenk at gmail.com]

Dear Sri Ramesh, bhakti is an upanishadic concept including abheda bhakti. The purva mimamsa stress on karma cannot undermine that. Even in satya yuga, paramahamsas  worshipped lord hamsa with omkara - so says bhagavatham. 

No one is questioning whether jnana removes ajnana - of course it does. But the point is whether moksha is the ultimate goal or akama bhakti. We see that there is a class of devotees who do akama bhakti and  are superior to those who desire moksha out of the ignorant notion that I am bound. 


Best Regards
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

-----Original Message-----
From: Ramesh Krishnamurthy <rkmurthy at gmail.com>
Sender: advaita-l-bounces at lists.advaita-vedanta.org
Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2012 16:33:22 
To: A discussion group for Advaita Vedanta<advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org>
Reply-To: A discussion group for Advaita Vedanta
	<advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org>
Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] Eternal Loka

On 2 November 2012 03:49, Rajaram Venkataramani <rajaramvenk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Regarding Sri Ramesh's response on the impossibility of bhakti in abheda
> state, please note that bhakti in abheda state is what Sridhara,
> Madhusudana and the author of Sivanandalahari say - not me. So, if you
> think bhakti iss not possible in abheda state, please ask them.


I have explained this point any number on this list in discussions
with you. If you still insist on misunderstanding it, I can't help it.

Anyway, I'll try once more. First of all, your expression "abheda
state" is inappropriate. You will never find me using such an
expression. abheda/advaita is not a state. It is the truth of all
states.

Secondly, I have never said that a mukta cannot have bhakti (in the
sense of a devotional relationship with a deity). What I said is that
such bhakti is not mokSha as per advaita-vedAnta. A relationship,
however loving/pleasing, cannot be the basis of mukti.

<<We don't see karma glorified as superior to jnanam anywhere.>>

This is not true at all. Historically, a heavy emphasis on bhakti is a
rather late phenomenon in the Astika tradition. In earlier layers of
texts, the debate is essentially between karma and j~nAna. For the
mImAMsaka-s, the very purpose of the veda lies in karma. The veda is a
pramANa and hence generates j~nAna, but this j~nAna largely serves us
to inform us about various kinds of karma (means and ends) and goads
us into performing certain kinds of karma and avoiding other kinds of
karma. In that sense, j~nAna becomes subservient to karma, which alone
is the purport of the shruti. This emphasis on karma was carried over
into many early vedAntic schools, resulting in various kinds of
j~nAna-karma-samuchchaya based systems, all of which assign a very
high place, sometimes higher than j~nAna, to karma.

The works of sha~NkarAchArya, sureshvarAchArya, etc often go into
great detail in addressing these systems. For the advaitin, j~nAna
alone is the mokShopAya. but karma has an important role in preparing
the mind for j~nAna. In this way, the advaitin reverses the
mImAMsaka's order of priority between karma and j~nAna.
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