Regarding the Upanishads.- Conflicting logic of tenured Indologists.

Vidyasankar Sundaresan vsundaresan at HOTMAIL.COM
Sat Feb 12 17:09:43 UTC 2000


Vishal Agarwal <vishalagarwal at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

>esteemed Indologists often make blunders. For an Eg. A. B Keith, in the
>introduction of his translation of the Aitreya Aranyaka conjectures that
>Purnaprajna Anandatirtha and Anandagiri were ONE and the same person who
>first wrote an Advaita exposition of the Upanishads and then a Dvaita

Keith said that? Note that Max Weber (The Religion of India) blithely
identifies Madhva with Vidyaranya (usually identified as Madhava).

>VA: The view of the Swami is not new, it is definitely not post Vivekanda.
>I
>do not want to quote the famous words of RV, AV etc., but suggest you to
>read the 'Uddhava Gita' portion of the Srimad Bhagvatam or even the Karikas
>of the Mayavadin Gaudapada himself, where he declares that Advaita has no
>conflict with any other school.

There is a key difference between the avirodha of gau.dapaada and the
"anything goes" purveyors of modern spirituality movements. The former says,

sva-siddhaanta vyavasthaasu dvaitino ni;scitaa d.r.dham |
parasparam virudhyante tair ayam na virudhyate ||

What is this "ayam" that does not enter into virodha? It is only advaita,
and specifically, gau.dapaada's ajaati vaada. This is a meta-creationist
view, and therefore does not come into conflict with any specific theory of
creation. However, gau.dapaada does acknowledge that the other views DO
conflict with one another.

Contrast this with some contemporary authors, who quote everyone under the
sun, in an apparently random fashion. Some of these people tell us that from
Buddha and the Upanishads down to Rajneesh and Timothy Leary, via Sankara
and Ramana and Aurobindo and Krishnamurti, everybody said the same thing.
They perhaps believe this themselves. What a far cry from the incisive
dialectic and penetrating insight of gau.dapaada.

Vidyasankar
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com





More information about the INDOLOGY mailing list