reposting again

Vidyasankar vsundaresan at HOTMAIL.COM
Tue Jul 31 20:49:04 CDT 2001


K. Sadananda <sada at ANVIL.NRL.NAVY.MIL> wrote:

>True.  Only problem is we do have concerns which are authentic and
>which are not.  The ten is mentioned is only for the fact that  all
>the three achaarya-s refer to them.  Other wise we will end up as in
>Madhva tradition bringing in references that no one else have access
>to or accept as pramaaNa.  That is absolutely unscientific approach.

I know that is a problem, but it seems to me that in debates between
two traditional schools of thought, we have to do the following -

1. give up the modern scholarly idea of what constitues textual
   authenticity and age,
2. use an intersection set (not a union set) of the texts referenced
   by the established authors of the two schools in question,
3. keep out perspectives from a third school of thought.

1 ensures that we tackle the traditions on their own terms.
2 ensures that we have a set of references that has to be acceptable
  to both sides of the discussion. The intersection set between the
  sources explicitly used by Sankara and Ramanuja is definitely greater
  than the major Upanishad texts.
3 ensures that we decompose a complex multi-body problem into simpler
  two-body problems, so to speak. Of course, the debate between dvaita
  and advaita is as interesting as (or perhaps more than) the debate
  between viSishTAdvaita and advaita, but we must remember that there
  is also a debate between viSishTAdvaita and dvaita in the background.


>It is good to know that. Do you have any further details on that
>adviatAmoda text in term of publishers and where it is available etc?

The Comans translation-cum-commentary was published in 1988, by Satguru
Publications, Delhi. There is an earlier private edition of the Sanskrit
original from Bombay, in 1975.

Best,
Vidyasankar



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