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

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

Dear Sunilji,


The only person making any accusations here is you! None of your previous
mails to the list on this topic have been blocked. As you are well aware,
we do not actively block individual posts on our list. I was merely asking
you not to let your imagination run wild.


There is no reason for any of us to speculate about the health reasons for
Prof Sukhtankar passing away on the morning of his fourth lecture. There is
no reason to trivialize the painstaking effort of scholarship that went
into the preparation of the critical edition of the Mahabharata and to call
it a folly that ended in the cardiac arrest of its chief editor. That said,
the core issues for us as vedAntins (at least for me, personally) are not
about the critical edition but about the pATha of the gItA accepted
traditionally. As much as you are convinced that there should be 45 more
verses, the fact remains that the various vedAnta sampradAyas accept the
700 Sloka gItA on which we have commentaries. In spite of variations in
readings and interpretation among the various schools of vedAnta, the text
of the gItA itself is quite standard across all the sampradAyas.


I think we are at an impasse. It's curious how nowadays many of us think we
know so much more than both the traditional repositories of our knowledge
and also critical scholars who have spent years of careful study with
original manuscripts. I also find it very curious how you seek to connect
textual questions about the mahAbhArata, the gItA and the bhAshya on it in
very unnecessarily complicated ways to abhinava Sankara, vidyASankara,
Sringeri, Kudali and Kanchi Mathas. Sometimes, the simplest answer is the
best fitting solution to such problems. Sometimes, the question itself is
ill-posed and there is no need to look for complex solutions to fit a
wholly imaginary problem! Most of us can see that the doubts about the
authorship of the gItAbhAshya, raised by Dr. Karmarkar and revived by you,
fall under the second category. They have been addressed in the subsequent
scholarly literature and


I'll just conclude with reiterating that no one is trying to forcefully
shut down your views. All I'm doing is to ask you to be objective, consider
other evidence, reconsider your assumptions and to resist the tendency to
run away to far conclusions on the basis of shaky evidence.


Best regards,

Vidyasankar



On Jan 5, 2017 8:41 AM, "Sunil Bhattacharjya" <sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com>
wrote:
>
> Dear Dr. Vidyashankar,
>
> Your accusation is based on your imagination. Have you read the text of
the four lectures Of Dr. Sukhtamkar and also the mention in that book that
Dr. Sukhtankar passed away just before the fourth lectiure was to be
delivered?  Have you alsp read what the editor had written?
>
> If you believe that the Critical edition is the correct edition all other
editions are wrong, I have nothing to say. I am sure you will not allow my
this mail to appear in the advaita forum, like you blocked my last few
mails.
>
> Sincerely,
> SKB
> --------------------------------------------
> On Wed, 1/4/17, Vidyasankar Sundaresan <svidyasankar 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>, "Venkatraghavan S" <agnimile at gmail.com>
>  Date: Wednesday, January 4, 2017, 4:02 PM
>
>
>
>  On Jan 5, 2017 1:00 AM, "Sunil Bhattacharjya"
>  <sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com>
>  wrote:
>
>  >
>
>  > Dear friends,
>
>  >
>
>  > Mahabharata did say that  the Bhagavad gita had 745
>  verses and Lord Krishna was attributed 620 verses etc. I
>  have  never changed my statement and only given the detail
>  about the number of verses attributed to Lord Krishna in the
>  second mail.
>
>  >
>  The point is, this is not supported by all mss
>  traditions. And as has been pointed out, we have the
>  testimony of an older commentator that a verse giving the
>  number of Slokas in the gItA is NOT present in a very
>  important transmission of mahAbhArata manuscripts - gauDair
>  na paThyante.