[Advaita-l] [advaitin] The Bhashyas of Adi Shankara

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 2:21 AM, Sunil Bhattacharjya <
sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Dear Sri Venkataraghavan,
>
> It seems you do not read all mails. One member of the Advaita group wrote
> that according to the guru-parampara of the Kanchi kamakoti math,  Abhinava
> Shankara who was born in Chidambaram, was a pontiff of the Kanchi Kamakoti
> math.  It is thus clear that  Pathak thought the Sringeri to have been
> established by this Abhinava Shankara, because the Sringeri math also
> claims that it was established in 788 CE.
>

I think it is time for me to let this go, but only after pointing out that
your claim about what Pathak thought about Sringeri matha's establishment
is an utter lie. His paper says nothing of this sort. You have no evidence
in his paper to make any inference about what he must have thought or not
have thought. Let me reiterate - Pathak is talking about the date of NONE
OTHER than Adi Sankara, the one who established various maThas, the one who
learned to recite all the Vedas by the age of 8 and all the other SAstras
by the age of 12 and wrote his bhAshyas on vedAnta by the age of 16, the
one who was born in kali year nidhi-nAga-ibha-vahni (counting from the
traditional Aryabhata calculated beginning of kaliyuga).

It is extremely appalling, Sunilji, that people like you feel the need to
disclaim every once in a while that you have great respect for the Sringeri
lineage and then you also turn around and make such bombastic conclusions
that reveal a great deal of distaste, if not outright enmity or hatred for
the well documented history of that lineage. Sorry, no amount of
disclaimers will change the real picture of what you think and how. It is
obvious that for all your purported interest in historical research, you
would much rather have your fanciful and speculative mythologies than an
impartial evidence based evaluation of historical sources. You are doing a
tremendous disservice to yourself and to others.



> It seems that you have not read Karmarkar's paper in full, otherwise you
> would have seen under what condition,according to Karkmarkar, the Bhagavad
> gita bhashya could have been composed by Adi Shankara. I have also
> mentioned in my book why Adi Shankara could not have written the bjashya on
> the Original Bhagavad Gita and that he had to write the bhashya on the
> vulgate version.
>
>
So now you do indeed accept that the gItAbhAshya was written by Adi Sankara
and that it was on the vulgate version of 700 verses. If you do so, then
all your arguments that the gItAbhAshya may have been written by abhinava
Sankara or by vidyASankara, that this abhinava Sankara must have been the
one born in 788 AD, etc etc are utterly meaningless. You cannot have it
both ways, don't you see?

Best Regards,
Vidyasankar