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Re: Shankara's view on the three states (was Re: Lots .. )
>
> >I am aware of Sankara's views on the difference between the waking & dream
> >states :-). Actually, the author of the Vivekachudamani seems to club the
> >dream and waking states together, which is why many doubt if the author is
> >indeed Sankara (which is the traditional view).
>
> If this is the reason they doubt the authorship of vivekachuuDaamaNi then they
> better learn something more about advaita, before examining the works of one of
> the stalwarts of advaita. The upadeshasaahasrii and the gauDapaada kaarikaa are
> accepted as genuine works and shaMkara _clearly_ adopts the ajaata vaadi
> position. I hope you saw my previous post on this.
I don't know much about the actual position of advaita, but I came across
that in atleast two books.
I even came across a journal claiming that Gaudapada is not the Guru of
Samkara's Guru, Govindapada, but actually someone much earlier! One reason
for the claim was that Samkara salutes Gaudapada as the one who extracted
the correct meaning of the Vedas, but shouldn't that be Badarayana? Another
reason was that Gaudapada's Karika is so Buddhistic that many arguments in it
are identical to Nagarjuna's, which is more probable if Gaudapada was
influenced by Buddhism. But it is known that Buddhism perished sometime
before, so Gaudapada probably wrote that at a time when Buddhism was prevalent,
which was about three centuries earlier.
This quote is from "the encyclopaedia of Indian philosophy" editted by
Karl H.Potter(page 335).
quote--
Vivekachudamani
This is a sizable work, extremely popular among advaita adepts. Ingalls argues
that it is not genuine Samkara since it propounds theories not found in
Samkara's unquestioned works. For example, "the author of Vivekachudamani makes
an absolute equation of the waking and dream states after the fashion of
Gaudapada. Samkara may liken the two to each other, but he is careful to
distinguish them. Again, and most decisive of all, the Vivekachudamani accepts
the classical theory of the three truth values, the existent, the non-existent
and that which is anirvachaniya...Now, Paul Hacker has pointed out that when
Samkara uses the word anirvachaniya, he uses it in a sense quite differently
from that..."
Hacker, interestingly enough, finds reason to affirm the genuineness of the
work on the basis of colophons, but Mayeda, like Ingalls following out the
criteria Hacker proposes elsewhere, holds it to be spurious.
--unquote
But the Vivekachudamani comes under the section "Samkaracharya"!!
>
> Ramakrishnan.
-Kartik
