[Advaita-l] Sankhya and Yoga can give Moksha?

[Sunil Bhattacharjya]

Namaste,

1)
While Kapila (one of Lord's avataras) taught the theoretical portion as 
to how the free Purushas became bound and that a knowledge of that would
 make the purushas free, there came the Yoga from Dattatreya (another 
avatara of the Lord) to give the practical way of realising the truth. 
Patanjali at a later date was only a compiler of the Yoga aphorisms.  
Equipped with the knowledge of Sankhya and Yoga, the sages in the past 
(including Lord Buddha) had the Vedantic Jijnasha as to what happens to 
the freed purushas.  Lord Buddha said that  he was only retelling the 
ancient knowledge. Adi Sankaracharya also obviously wanted to tell the people not to 
think of Sankhya as the end of the road yet he  did not devaluate the
 role of Sankhya. How could he? His criticism of Sankhya  has to be taken 
in that spirit only. Sankhya (Samyak 
khyati) is the Viveka khyati of Yoga and it  means an 
intellectual approach. The role of Sankhya in reaching the Advaitic 
goal cannot be ignored. That is why the Svetasvatara upanishad  (6.13) talks about Sankhya and the and Bhagavad Gita says as follows:

ध्यानेनात्मनि पश्यन्ति केचिदात्मानमात्मना ।
 अन्ये सांख्येन योगेन कर्मयोगेन चापरे 

 The Bhagavad Gita starts with Sankhya and later on proceeds to Vedanta for the obvious reason.


2)
Secondly coming to Jayamangala, itends as follows.

इति श्रीमत्परमहंसपरिव्राजकाचार्य श्रीगोविन्दभगवत्पुज्यपाद् शिष्येण
श्री संकर भगवता कृता सांख्यसप्रतिटीका समाप्ता

This means that Mamahopadhyaya Gopinath Kaviraj, despite his being a very great Bengali scholar, could have been  wrong in saying that Jayamangala could have been. a Buddhist text.

Regards,
Sunil KB

________________________________
 From: Vidyasankar Sundaresan <svidyasankar at hotmail.com>
To: Advaita List <advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> 
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2012 12:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] Sankhya and Yoga can give Moksha?
 

sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> Sankara must have been aware that the Sankhya terminology is not always
> the same as the Vedic / Vedantic terminology and that the Tanmatra of
> Sankhya is the same as Sukshma-bhoota of Veda/Vedanta. Moreover
> Sankara was an authority on Sankhya also and his Jayamangala is the
> best proof of that.

The author of the commentary named jayamangalA was named Sankara,
but please bear in mind that through the history of Sanskrit writing, there
have been thousands, if not millions, of authors named Sankara. There is
no reason at all to believe that the author of this sAMkhya commentary
was the same as the advaita teacher Sankara bhagavatpAda.

Gopinath Kaviraj's publication of jayamangalA is perhaps the only one of
this text and the editor has
 argued forcefully that the author is the same
as the one who wrote a commentary on vAtsyAyana's kAmasUtra, also
called jayamangalA. Other scholars have opined that the author of the
jayamangalA was probably a buddhist and almost all of them express an
opninion that this commentary on the sAMkhyakArikA is of little value.

Actually, if you read through the set of links to posts made in the second
half of 2006, on the Yoga and Advaita Vedanta thread, you will see a lot
of references from the major prasthAna traya bhAshyas, which will tell
you exactly how Sankara bhagavatpAda addresses sAMkhya and yoga.
There is no need to speculate from dubious texts when you have direct
evidence from seminal texts. 

Vidyasankar
                          
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