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Re: Shankara's view on the three states (was Re: Lots .. )
Sankar Jayanarayanan wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
A much more sophisticated analysis of gauDapAda is found in "Early
Advaita Vedanta - The Mahayana Context of the Gaudapadiya Karikas" by
Richard King of Stirling University, Scotland. This book was published
in 1995 by SUNY, Albany. The author is an acutely sharp philosopher
himself, and makes some of the most pertinent observations among all the
literature that I've read on gauDapAda to date.
>From Vidhusekhara Bhattacharya and B. N. Krishnamurthy Sharma to authors
of the present day, almost everybody interested in Vedanta has something
or the other to say about gauDapAda. Some authors postulate that there
were more than one gauDapAdas, the last one of them being the guru of
govinda bhagavatpAda and also the author of the AlATaSAnti prakaraNa
(book IV) of the kArikAs. If this is true (not that I agree with it
completely), then the problem does not arise, although of course it will
be argued that it is precisely this 4th book that is very "buddhistic"
and supposedly could not have been composed close to Sankara's own time.
Crucial to all these claims is the date of Sankara himself. All earlier
authors have worked with a more or less fixed date of 788 CE for
Sankara. However, internal evidence from Sankara's most important works
shows that he could have lived in the latter half of the 7th cent.
itself. This is corroborated by a tradition in the "Kongudesa Rajakkal"
that Sankara was born in the 14th year of the reign of Vikramaditya of
the Chalukya dynasty. According to K. A. Nilakanta Sastry, this
Vikramaditya ruled between 655 and 684 CE. The same tradition is also
preserved in the Sringeri records, without specifying the dynasty of
this Vikramaditya.
If this late 7th cent. date is correct, then Sankara moves closer to the
latest date that scholars have postulated for gauDapAda. Also, it is not
as if Buddhism had completely disappeared three centuries before
Sankara. In the late 6th cent., there lived a fairly important Buddhist
philosopher named Bhavaviveka. The times of the more famous Buddhists
like Chandrakirti and Dharmakirti is not far removed from Bhavaviveka's
time. Hsieun-Tsang visited India in the early 7th cent. and studied at
Nalanda University. Buddhism can hardly be said to have died out in this
time. Thus this particular objection to making gauDapAda the actual
paramaguru of Sankara vanishes into thin air.
As for the "Buddhistic" nature of the kArikAs, and the specific use of
the AlATacakra by gauDapAda, please see
http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~vidya/advaita/pre-sankara.html, where a more
detailed discussion is given. Briefly, gauDapAda gives a very vedAntic
twist to the Buddhist metaphor, and borrows nAgArjuna's dialectical
technique to make advaitic conclusions.
Finally, Sankara's salutation to gauDapAda is in the context of the
kArikAs. bAdarAyaNa's sUtras are subject to multiple interpretations,
and Sankara is well aware of that. There were the divergent
interpretations of the sUtras given earlier to him, by people like
bodhAyana and bhartr.prapanca. On the other hand, the gauDapAdIya
kArikAs land you squarely in advaita. No other interpretation of them is
possible. Besides, it is not uncommon to exalt one's own teachers above
other ancient ones and even Gods. madhusUdana sarasvatI praises Sankara
and sureSvara as having established vedAnta (by which he means advaita,
of course) in a better fashion than the sUtrakAra himself, in the
concluding verses of his siddhAntabindu. But this reverence for Sankara
did not prevent him from differing with Sankara on interpretations of
some of the brahmasUtras. Similarly, Harihara and Bukka, founders of
Vijayanagar, praise vidyAraNya as being superior to brahma, vishNu and
Siva themselves, in one of their early inscriptions. But they did not
build temples where vidyAraNya was worshipped; their temples were only
for the Gods. What is said in course of praSasti need not be taken very
literally. It is not a solid foundation to make statements, one way or
the other, about the people involved. The best that can be said is that
those being eulogized, lived before, or contemporaneously with, those
doing the eulogizing.
S. Vidyasankar
