[Advaita-l] Body is the disease

[V Subrahmanian]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 4:54 AM, Vidyasankar Sundaresan <
svidyasankar at hotmail.com> wrote:

> > From: srirudra at gmail.com
> > Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2014 16:37:45 +0530
> > To: advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org
> > Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] Body is the disease
> >
> > Dear
> > If it is said Jiva is Brahman affected with Avidhya then where was
> Avidhya subsisting?Was it separate from Brahman?How can it be
> independent.?As >per Advaita Brahman is without a second.If Avidhya  is
> within Brahman or part of Brahman what was the necessity for Brahman to
> imbibe Avidhya to >take the position of Jiva?May be my thinking is wrong or
> needs correction.
> > R.Krishnamoorthy.
>



> Looked at in another way, human thought needs at least two things, to talk
> of how other things come into being and go out of being. Given a seed and
> soil, we can understand how a tree comes into being. Given a mother and a
> father, we can understand how progeny come into being. And so on. That is
> why, if we rely on regular human ways of looking at the universe and
> oneself, we can only reach a dualism and arrive at two principles of equal
> reality e.g. sAMkhya - prakRti and purusha. The advaita approach steps
> aside from this. As Sri Chandramouli pointed out, when talking of brahman
> and avidyA/mAyA, it is a vishama sattA, different levels of reality, with
> only brahman being really real.
>

This is very well said.  All the disagreement/questioning/objecting to
relating avidyA to Brahman arises from the thinking that 'Brahman is a
person' and that, a sarvajna.  The very idea of (Brahman) being a person is
rooted in avidyA.  Shankara Bhagavatpada has explicitly stated this in the
preamble to the Brahmasutra Bhashya while talking about the pramAtR,
pramANa and prameya.  That one is a pramAtR, knower, is the fundamental
expression of avidyA.  Advaita does not admit of pramAtRtva to Brahman.
So, the thinking that Brahman is a 'person', whether alpajna or sarvajna,
itself is incorrect.  That is the reason that even admitting of an
omniscient Ishwara, a 'person', is a concession, only to be corrected by
dropping even this admission.

warm regards
subrahmanian.v

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