[Advaita-l] Sringeri and Kanchi - same incident?

[Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian]

[I have been wondering whether to write this mail, and actually
discarded it the first time, but anyway here goes]

I looked at the link below. It was interesting and well written. But
then Mr Ra Ganapati is a professional writer. But the writer is either
unaware or forgets to mention that when the then kuDali Acharya
visited Madras in the 30s, the same Sri Candrashekharendra Sarasvati
Swamigal himself commented in gatherings that the kuDali Acarya was
the real Sringeri Acharya. This angered the devotees of the Sringeri
Mutt greatly. But Sri Candrashekhara Bharati Swamigal did not even
bother to respond, which only shows his greatness and detatchment.

Now this kuDali swami was such an ardent advaitin that he had lost all
sense of duality. So much so that he thought that the printing press
in his maTha was the same as the printing press in the government mint
:-). He was implicated in a forgery scandal and later committed
suicide. Consequently, the kuDali-is-the-real-Sringeri story died for
a while. But wait, it resurfaces in the 1970s in Dr Veezhinathan
thesis on the so-called Anantaanadagiri Sankara Vijayam, where Sankara
established a maTha "Sringeri samiipe". Note this is like saying that
the California Governor resides near Los Angeles, whereas quite
clearly any tolerably reasonable man would just say that he resides in
Sacramento. Of course Dr Veezhinathan has received (and still
receives) lots of honors and grants from the Kanchi Matha. But wait,
the story doesn't even end there. Even in the latest web-site
www.kanchi-sathya.org, there is a statement from the current kuDali
Swami, and he is quoted by the web-master as the kuDali-Sringeri
Sankaracarya. A perfect example of the adage "the more things change,
the more they stay the same".

We can focus on commonalities, but also cannot sweep major differences
under the carpet. Ignorance can be blissful, but only for a short
while. Just my $0.02.

Rama

On 6/17/06, jagannathan mahadevan <jagannathan.mahadevan at gmail.com> wrote:

> There are other statements in the Kanchi website that reflect more
> positive notes in terms of identifying similarities. Please see link
> below.
>
> http://www.kamakoti.org/souv/5-59.html