[Advaita-l] 'Shankara Vijaya History' by Sri Vidyasankar Sundaresan

[Raghav Kumar Dwivedula]

Typo  - हाइड्स = hides


On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 at 12:37 PM, Raghav Kumar Dwivedula <
raghavkumar00 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Subbu ji
> I read the following in it in the article sent by you.
>
> “Paul Hacker (1978: 478-80) …. concludes that Sankara did not establish
> any mathas at all. He proposes that it was Vidyaranya who established the
> Srngeri matha in the fourteenth century and either originated or greatly
> popularized the tradition of affiliating the DasanamI orders with the four
> amnaya mathas. Hacker sees this as part of Vijayanagara politics in the
> fourteenth century, basing his postulate on his reading of the Madhaviya
> Sahkaravijaya that he unquestioningly attributes to Vidyaranya.” (Page
> 114-115)
>
> My comments - As usual Paul Hacker (who हाइड्स his malevolent Christian
> missionary agenda of dismissing modern Hinduism as just a stepping stone to
> Christianity which is the the only path to salvation) thinks all
> post-Shankara Advaita is divergent from Shankara, also ….. yawn….. very
> predictably says Sri Shankara did not establish *any* Mathas  at all. So
> much for his scholasticism on Sankara Digvijaya.
>
> His Christian apologia reduces one’s curiosity in hearing him out when he
> supports SSSS. Maybe a one paragraph chatGPT summary of Hacker’s entire
> life’s work is sufficient to size him up in order to confirm he is
> मूर्खवदुपेक्षणीय:
>
> Another disreputable view is of the well-known Karl Potter who says in
> that article that daśanāmī sannyāsīs’ praxis is antithetical to Sri
> Śankara’s thought. If he ever found himself amongst nāga sadhus, that might
> have changed his mind.
>
> As we can see, a significant quantum of western scholarship (with
> honourable exceptions) is insidious in exploiting fault-lines within the
> Dharma traditions to push its Marxist oppressor-oppressed narratives or a
> Macaulayist missionary agenda of the “white man’s burden” of “reforming”
> and uplifting the heathen idolaters.
>
> On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 at 4:07 PM, V Subrahmanian via Advaita-l <
> advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> wrote:
>
>> This is a well analyzed article of 76 pages:
>>
>>
>> https://archive.org/details/SundaresanShankaravijayaHistory_201706/mode/2up
>>
>> warm regards
>> subbu
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>