Re: ARTICLE : Shankaracharya and the Bhagavat Purana

Posted By Mani Varadarajan (mani@be.com)
03 Dec 1996 11:15:59 -0800

Ramakrishnan wrote:
> Much research on it has been done by various scholars. Here's what Prof.
> George Hart, Prof. of Tamil studies (?) in UC Berkeley had to say on sct.
>
> ___________ begin
>
> One of the most intriguing contributions of the Tamil area to Sanskrit
> is the Bhagavatapurana. It is pretty universally agreed that it was
> written by a Tamilian and that it is filled with motifs and themes from
> the Divyaprabandha and other Tamil literature. [...]

> [...]
>
> There are also some books on this subject, which I haven't had the chance to
> read due to lack of time.

A very interesting book is Viraha-Bhakti, by Friedhelm Hardy.
The author discusses the origin of emotional Krishna bhakti
as found in Tamil culture. The poetry of the Alvars (Divya
Prabandham) is treated in detail, along with the influence
of this corpus of hymns on the Bhagavata Purana.

The author makes several strange and unsubstantiated conclusions,
but overall, the work is quite a marvel of research.

Mani
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