[Advaita-l] Debunking Drishti-Srishti Vada and Eka Jiva Vada - part 1

Aditya Kumar kumaraditya22 at yahoo.com
Sat Jul 22 11:12:05 EDT 2017




Madhusudana Saraswati, at the very first invocation to his Gudarthadipika says:

भगवत्पादभाष्यार्थमालोच्यातिप्रयत्नतः । प्रायः प्रत्यक्षरं कुर्वे गीतागूढार्थदीपिकाम् ॥ १ 

He has at the very outset said that he is lookig into the Śānkara bhāṣyam with great effort shed light on almost each letter (word) of the Gita's deep meaning. 

When such is his commitment to Shankara's bhashya, it is only strange that such allegations are made against MS.   

A : Even the Devil quotes the scriptures. I am obviously not implying that MS was a devil or he had malicious intent! I am just saying that this proves nothing, specially when there are other empirical evidence present. 

Can any specific instances from the MS's commentary be shown to substantiate the above claims?
 A : Please refer to Appendix III from the book 'Siddhantabindu' Eng translation by P M Modi.

Shankara's bhashya-s are full of instances of  explaining maya/avidya/unreality of the world on sound logical terns.  Those who have not studied the bhashyas under the guidance of traditional Acharyas alone make such claims as above.  
A : Sir, I have already mentioned what Shankara says in BSB 2-2-29 : Unreality established with reasoning like : 1) unreal like dreams or 2) Completely asat like hare's horns cannot be accepted. Only abheda Srutis are a proof of it. In other words, unreality cannot be proved by any stretch of logic. Why else would Anirvachaniya khyati stand aprt from asat/atma/a-kyati. 

regards
vs  
 
 However, it is clear that whenever the logic fails or reaches it's limit, they inevitably rely on the Sruti statements of abheda nature. When eventually, you had to rely solely on sruti, what was the need to explain it solely from a logical point of view? In doing so, both these persons have stretched the illustrations beyond it's application and used the same as proof. This is same like various schools of Buddhists. 




   


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