[Advaita-l] Doubt the liberator

[Raghav Kumar Dwivedula]

Namaste Praveen ji
Thank you for your response to the OP.

There is one other angle which comes to mind which attests to the important
role of a *teaching tradition* in advaita vedAnta, rather than just a
*doubting tradition* of advaita vedanta.


In the case of conventional communication there is the possibility of
'cumulative error'. As in Chinese whispers. As in

*Chinese whispers* is the British term for the game known as *telephone* in
the United States and other Anglophone countries.[1]
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers#cite_note-Blackmore-1> It
is an internationally popular children's game
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_game>.[2]
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers#cite_note-OED-2>Players
form a line, and the first player comes up with a message and whispers it
to the ear of the second person in the line. The second player repeats the
message to the third player, and so on. When the last player is reached,
they announce the message they heard to the entire group. The first person
then compares the original message with the final version. Although the
objective is to pass around the message without it becoming garbled along
the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up
happening. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement
announced by the last player differs significantly from that of the first
player, usually with amusing or humorous effect. Reasons for changes
include anxiousness or impatience, erroneous corrections, the
difficult-to-understand mechanism of whispering, and that some players may
deliberately alter what is being said to guarantee a changed message by the
end of the line.
The game is often played by children as a party game or on the playground.
It is often invoked as a metaphor
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor> for
cumulative error, especially the inaccuracies as rumours or gossip spread,
[1] <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers#cite_note-Blackmore-1>
or,
more generally, for the unreliability of human recollection or even oral
traditions <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition>."


If someone were to extend the above kind of logic to even a written
knowledge tradition like vedanta  as it is transmitted down the ages, what
would we say?
How does the teaching tradition of advaita preclude such errors from
screening in?

Presumably because firstly the accuracy of vedic mantras being transmitted
in gurukulams is astonishingly error free.

Secondly the knowledge of pratyagAtman is ever-new and is aparoxa, so it's
not some descriptive objectives knowledge which Adi Shankara had in mind
that is being taught; rather each teacher has again and again renewed his
contact , his own anubhava GYAnam, his immediate self-evident knowledge of
the self, which is nondual and corresponds 100% with that original aparoxa
GYAnam which makes this advaita knowledge svasaMvedya (known to oneself
without mediation ) . So there is no entropy in communication down the ages
which would have led to cumulative errors in the knowledge as it gets
passed down the generations. That is why we say all debate within the
advaita tradition such as bhAmati vis-a-vis vivaraNa etc., boil down to
merely pedagogical  differences , i.e., two Advaita acharyas discussing
which is the better way to teach advaita to students.

The role of questioning and doubting is encouraged and accepted as part of
mananam.

 In fact the modern scientific tradition has more underlying assumptions
and convenient beliefs ('axioms') than even Advaita vedAnta.

Om

On Mon 23 Jul, 2018, 12:59 PM Praveen R. Bhat via Advaita-l, <
advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> wrote:

> ​Namaste,
>
> Without getting into the argument pointwise, let me just try to make a case
> from an observation of the subject line itself which reads as "Doubt the
> liberator". Does this subject line mean:
> --express doubt about the liberator,
> --doubt itself is the liberator or
> --doubt leads to a person becoming a liberator?
>
> All three meanings or even more are possible grammatically and by
> extension. Who is the authority on interpreting this well?! Is it the OP
> and someone who the OP explains what his vivakSha was or it can be any Tom,
> Dick and Harry, who can analyse, discarding OP's explanation as well as of
> his students? The answer is hopefully clear. Of course, it may *appear*
> ridiculous after a few centuries that "free-interpretation" of even this
> thread done by anyone may not be right, but only by those whom the OP has
> taught, even by those interpreting variously among his own successors,
> especially when it is not a single sentence but several works.
>
> Kind rgds,
> --Praveen R. Bhat
> /* येनेदं सर्वं विजानाति, तं केन विजानीयात्। Through what should one know
> That owing to which all this is known! [Br.Up. 4.5.15] */
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