[Advaita-l] [advaitin] Asked of Chatgpt: "Are there any definitions or descriptions that depict a positive ignorance in Sankara's commentary on the Brahma Sutras or classic 10 Upanishads whether in context or otherwise?

[Kuntimaddi Sadananda]

Dennis - Greetings

 

So, what is your understanding ofavidya - Is it bhaava ruupa or abhaava ruupa? Just curious.

 

Question: The ignorance of the ropedoes it lead to the projection of a snake based on partial knowledge or themind, ignorant of the rope, projects a snake based on prior knowledge ofsimilarities in the perceived objects? 

 

What is the common experience ofeveryone? Does the moola avidya differ from avidya of the rope? 

 

Just a question.

 

Hari Om!

 

Sada

Sada 

 

    On Wednesday, July 3, 2024 at 06:43:48 AM EDT, dwaite at advaita.org.uk <dwaite at advaita.org.uk> wrote:  
 
 
The problem with AI on the Internet is that it is only looking at, analyzing and summarizing the views that it finds on any given topic. Sages such as Gauḍapāda and Ṥaṅkara are not contributing an awful lot to the discussions these days. Most of the material tends to be from lots of seeker-Advaitins like ourselves who don’t always have the ‘correct’ understanding! This understanding / misunderstanding comes from many sources, not least of which are the various post-Ṥaṅkara authors who vastly complicated the subject with their convoluted interpretations!

  

I tried asking a question of AI (on a different topic) well over a year ago and posted the result at https://www.advaita-vision.org/q-527-experiencing-brahman/. And I have since been using it for more mundane things, such as learning how to use my new camera! It can certainly be very useful indeed for such things. And the ability to ask specific, personalized questions and get very targeted replies is excellent. 

  

But – and it is a very big BUT – this is how I summarize the situation in my latest book on ‘Finding a teacher’:

  

“At the time of writing (March 2024), however, these are still not very reliable. The problem at present, presumably, is that they assume that the consensus of expressed opinions on the vast number of websites must be correct. Unfortunately, there are clearly very many teachers and bloggers adding inaccurate material every day! And one of the problems of AI would seem to be that this will be self-propagating.”

  

Asking for specific quotes from śruti or Ṥaṅkara goes a long way to helping avoid this problem. Unfortunately, I realized in the ‘Confusions’ writing that one cannot always rely upon the Sanskrit translations being accurate. Writers naturally endeavor to put quotes into readable English. In doing so, there is an unfortunate and almost inevitable consequence of doing this in such a way that the result reflects their own understanding of what was said. And I found that a completely literal translation often showed that the results were misleading, if not actually wrong!

  

Here was my own view on the question of mithyājñāna:

  

“Ṥaṅkara obviously had a total grasp of Sanskrit, including its grammar and construction. Unlike any academic today, he actually lived with the language and was a pre-eminent user of it, as evidenced by his prose and poetry writings. He was perfectly well aware of the fact that a word such as mithyājñāna could be split in two different ways, and I suggest that this was precisely why he used it! It will be explained below that one of the ways to understand adhyāsa is as a ‘mixing up’ of real and unreal. In the rope-snake metaphor, there is ‘false knowledge’ of a snake and ‘false ignorance’ of a rope. I suggest that Ṥaṅkara uses the word mithyājñāna as a clever literary device to convey this sense and that the word therefore is a synonym for adhyāsa.”

  

Best wishes,

Dennis

  

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