[Advaita-l] [advaitin] Works of Sri Vidyashankara

[Sunil Bhattacharjya]

Namaste Venkataraghavanji,

Thank you for your mail. I received a copy of  T.K. Gopalaswamy Aiyengar's paper entitled "BhAskara on the Gita" presented at the GIta SamIkshA conference held in Tirupati on March, 1970. Thank you anyway. 

1)
You consider the examination of authorship of  Shakara (also called Nava Shankara) as unnecessary and called it hypothetical. You dismiss Prof. Karmarkar's peper to be of no substance, even without reading it.  Did  prof Gopalaswamy refute the arguments of Prof. Karmarkar ?  I think you have taken decision too early.

2) 
You have written 
Quote
“In any case, factual, objective evidence of BhAskara quoting Shankara verbatim will outweigh weaker, subjective proof such as language differences. Language differences could be due to a whole host of reasons:it is a common occurrence that same author may use different writing styles at different times, sometimes within the same text, a different person may have transcribed what may have been Shankara's lectures on the gIta to his shishyAs etc. We need not assume straight away that a different person wrote it.”
Quote
May be you predecided the issue,without even reading Karmarakar's paper.

3)
You think that the 745 verses in the original Bhagavad Gita is interpolated. Have you read that text or it is just a prejudice

4)
You also wrote
Quote
If Bhaskara quoted Shankara, there is no doubt that Shankara bhAshya preceded his and by consequence, Sri Ramanuja's. So the basis for your objection - that it could have been 700 verses as a response to Ramanuja - is invalid.
Unquote

If that is the case, it could be that Shankara (Nava Shankara) wrote the Bhashya before Bhaskara.

Regards,
Sunil KB
--------------------------------------------
On Sun, 1/1/17, Venkatraghavan S <agnimile at gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] [advaitin] Works of Sri Vidyashankara
 To: "Sunil Bhattacharjya" <sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com>
 Cc: "A discussion group for Advaita Vedanta" <advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org>
 Date: Sunday, January 1, 2017, 1:18 AM
 
 Namaste Sunil
 ji,
 On 31 Dec
 2016 8:58 p.m., "Sunil Bhattacharjya" <sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com
 > wrote:
 Namaste Venkataraghavanji,
 
 
 
 Thank you for your mail. may I request you kindly to send me
 a photocopy of  T.K. Gopalaswamy Aiyengar's paper
 titled "BhAskara on the
 
 Gita" presented at the GIta SamIkshA conference held in
 Tirupati on March, 1970.
 
 https://archive.org/download/
 gitasamiksa014825mbp/ gitasamiksa014825mbp.pdf
 
 
 
 
 Would you think that Abhinava Shankara, another very famous
 avatara of Adi Shankaracharya, could have written the
 Bhagavadgita bhashya, if and when all evidences confirm
 that  a fresh bhashya on the Bhagavadhita was needed to be
 written by Sri Vidyashankara to refute  Sri
 Ramabujacharya's Bhagavadgitabjashya, as one advaitic 
 bhashya was already therein Sri ramanujacharya's time.
 
 This is a hypothetical question that
 involves the acceptance of several unproved assertions, so I
 would rather not answer.
 This will be satisfy the objection
 that language style of the Bhagavadgitabhshya was different
 for Adi Shankara's other bhashyas.
 
 You still have not shared what these
 differences are, so we cannot examine this. Please bear in
 mind that Prof. Karmarkar's paper (which I have only
 seen references to, but not the paper itself) that denied
 the authorship of Gita bhAshya to Shankara was published in
 1958, before the newly discovered BhAskara bhAshya was
 published (1960), so he could not have known about this
 piece of evidence when he wrote what he did. 
 In any case, factual, objective
 evidence of BhAskara quoting Shankara verbatim will outweigh
 weaker, subjective proof such as language differences.
 Language differences could be due to a whole host of
 reasons: it is a
 common occurrence that same author may use different
 writing styles at different times, sometimes within the same
 text, a different person may have transcribed what may have
 been Shankara's lectures on the gIta to his shishyAs
 etc. We need not assume straight away that a different
 person wrote it.
 
 
 One possibility is that Sri Vidyashankara
 had just to refute only the version with 700 verses on which
 Sri Ramanujacharya wrote his
 bhashya. 
 In my view that is an impossibility,
 based on what I sent. There is no way BhAskara could have
 referred to ShAnkara bhAshya if Sri VidyAshankara was the
 author - it is a chronological impossibility. Sri
 VidyAtIrtha, or VidyAshankara, lived between 1229-1333 AD
 according to the Sringeri website, whereas Bhaskara lived
 around 800AD.
 
 
 But if any one before Sri
 Ramanujacharya wrote the advaitic bhashya on the
 Bhagavadgita, then the question as to why the 45 verses were
 omitted still stands,
 
 I don't know the answer to that
 question. It could simply be the version of the GIta that
 Shankara had been taught had only 700 verses. It could be
 that he thought that the other verses, if they existed in
 his time, were interpolations. It could be that they were
 interpolations after his time. Why does that disprove
 Shankara's authorship though? Whoever wrote the GIta
 bhAshya, the question would remain. 
 If Bhaskara quoted Shankara, there
 is no doubt that Shankara bhAshya preceded his and by
 consequence, Sri Ramanuja's. So the basis for your
 objection - that it could have been 700 verses as a response
 to Ramanuja - is invalid.
 Regards,Venkatraghavan