The Advaitin's comments.

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Dear friends,

A lovely reply was posted to the same question (regarding 'weird

texts' and 'scriptures of doubtful authority') that I had asked on the

Dvaita list long time back. I am posting the relevant section of the reply.

 

> wants to split sandhi in the chhAndogya statement " AtmAtatvamasi "

> (usually given a non-dualist meaning) as AtmA - atattvamasi (Atman,

> that thou art NOT) he quotes some weird text called the brahma-tarka!!

> In other places he quotes an unknown text called parama-upanishhad!

>

***********

> > Recently, at a book store, I came across one book - which talks

about

> > Gaudapada Karikas and related issues. Unfortunately, the page I

flipped

> > talked about the various " non-existant " shrutis that our Acharya

uses.

> > Moreover, the author mentions Appaya Dikshita's

Madhvamatavidhvamsana as

> > source of such arguments. This really upset me.

> > The only argument I could see in our favour was that none of

contemporaries

> > cribbed about it. Stalwarts like Trivikramapanditacharya could

not have

> > converted, if they weren't convinced about the sources.

> > But then, Appaya dikshita himself is (considered) a major

scholar. How can

> > he miss on this small point?

> > Are there any other arguments which support the usage of such

aprasiddha

> > shrutis?

 

Sure: try this one for size -- one of the many `aprasiddha-shruti'-s

quoted is the parama-shruti, a.k.a. the paramopanishhad.h. This may have

been from the ekAyana-shAkhA (as B.N.K. Sharma suggests), but is currently

not widely available (although of course we cannot rule out the possibility

of a copy lying squirreled away in some musty unsorted

collection). However, this text has been accepted as valid by past

Advaitins (even those who never converted): the `sarva-darshana-sangraha' of

Sayana quotes from it in the `pUrNpraj~na-darshanaM' chapter; Sridhara Swami

quotes from it on his own in his Bhagavata commentary; and in response to

the nyAyAmR^ita's quote of a verse from the parama-shruti,

Madhusudana Saraswati accepts it in toto and attempts to offer an

alternative explanation for the same. It taxes one's credulity too highly

to accept that all these Advaitins could have lacked the guts to call

Madhva's bluff when he presented them with (alleged) quotes so overtly

hostile to their most cherished theories, such as for example:

 

yathA paxI cha sUtraM cha nAnAvR^ixarasA yathA |

yathA nadyaH samudrashcha shuddhodalavaNe yathA |

yathA chorApahAryau cha yathA puMvishhayAvapi |

tathA jIveshvarau bhinnau sarvadeva vilaxaNau ||

 

-- which is so congenial to Madhva's theory that `tat.h tvaM asi' is

a statement of difference because only differences are illustrated in the

nine examples given alongwith (as he puts it, `sthAnanavake.api bheda eva

dR^ishhTAntAbhidhAnAt.h'), that he could not possibly have " made to order " a

better authority. Incidentally, Vachaspati Mishra, the commentator on

Shankara's BSB, accepts that the illustrations show only difference, and

Madhusudana Saraswati attempts to evade the issue by saying that the

illustrations have no significance re the question of difference vs.

identity, which is an odd thing to say, and which also fails to answer the

anticipatory objection of Madhva's commentator: `na hi anyat.h pratij~nAya

anyatra dR^ishhTAntAbhidhAnaM upapadyate' (it would not be proper to state a

certain tenet and then give illustrations showing something else than

it) which has not been answered by Madhusudana Saraswati's

commentators or any other Advaitins till date.

 

I am purposely not repeating the standard arguments on the subject

of untraced sources, which you can find laid out in some detail in the

" History of the Dvaita School " in various places, especially near the

beginning, and again under the chapter/section on Sri Vijayindra Tiirtha.

<deleted>

 

The only case I personally am aware of where a " lost " text is known

to exist, is that of the bAshhkala-mantropanishhad.h, also

known as the `bAshhkala-shruti', which is quoted from

(`avachanenaiva provAcha', etc.) in a few places, and of which a manuscript

is available at the Adyar Library, Madras.

 

> uninterrupted tradition from the time of AnandatIrtha! appayya dIxita

> was a scholar who lived in the 1500s and made contributions to many

.......I think it was a century later than that.

 

Regards,

Krishna