[Advaita-l] Adhyasa Bhashya - Reflections On Scope And Relevance

[Vikram Jagannathan]

Namaskaram Subbu ji, Sudhanshu ji, Krishnaprakasha ji,

Thank you for your responses. Your responses validate my current
understanding. Since this article would be shared with scholars from other
sampradhayams, I am requesting for additional pairs of eyes to possibly
double-check accuracy and correct representation of mainstream Advaita
siddhanta.

There is a modern popular view amongst others that, restating the 3rd
question from the original thread, Swami Sankaracharya’s Advaita Vedanta as
a whole - and Adhyasa Bhashya in particular - arose primarily as a
pro-Vedic response to Buddhist and Jaina critiques, thereby helping
displace much of those philosophies from India; and that, it is claimed, is
the full scope of Advaita Siddhanta.

This to me undermines the true value of Advaita siddhanta and also
patronizes it in an attempt to reconcile with others.

H. H. Kanchi Kamakoti Mahaperiyaval, in the 3rd chapter of the book Hindu
Dharma, has communicated the following:

Many believe that Buddhism ceased to have a large following in India
> because it came under the attack of Sankara. This is not true. There are
> very few passages in the Acarya's commentaries critical of that religion, a
> religion that was opposed to the Vedas. Far more forcefully has he
> criticised the doctrines of Sankhya and Mimamsa that respect the Vedic
> tradition. He demolishes their view that Isvara is not the creator of the
> world and that it is not he who dispenses the fruits of our actions. He
> also maintains that Isvara possesses the laksanas or characteristics
> attributed to him by the Vedas and the Brahmasutra and argues that there
> can be no world without Isvara and that it is wrong to maintain that our
> works yield fruits on their own. It is Isvara, his resolve, that has
> created this world, and it is he who awards us the fruits of our actions.
> We cannot find support in his commentaries for the view that he was
> responsible for the decline of Buddhism in India.


prostrations,
Vikram


On Mon, Oct 27, 2025 at 9:09 AM Krishnaprakasha Bolumbu <
kpbolumbu01 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Pranamam
>
> To say that “the later acharyas perfected what Shankara only began” is
> really a sectarian statement, not a philosophical one. Each of the later
> teachers — Ramanuja, Madhva, Vallabha, Nimbarka, and others — certainly
> gave their own interpretations of the Brahma Sutras, but always in relation
> to the basic framework of Adhyasa that Shankara had already set. Each of
> them, in one way or another, takes a position on whether adhyasa is real or
> unreal, whether ignorance has a positive existence or is only an absence,
> and whether liberation is based on knowledge or on devotion. In that sense,
> Shankara’s Adhyasa Bhashya becomes the philosophical ground zero for all
> later Vedanta traditions, even for those who disagreed with him.
>
> KP
>