Re: Plea for help from 6th grader

Posted By Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian (rbalasub@ecn.purdue.edu)
Sat, 15 Mar 1997 22:41:04 -0500

Mani Varadarajan wrote:

> See the last section of the Upanishad. Look at how much Sanskrit
> there is, and see how many slokas Madhavananda translates.
>
> All the sections describing how to properly prepare one's wife
> for the sexual act are left untranslated. Sankaracharya, on the
> other hand, an honest and faithful commentator, explains every
> single word. Madhavananda's claim to have translated Sankara's
> comments in full is false.

Yes, he leaves it out. However sha.nkara himself does not go into any
detail like the madhu brAhmaNa for example.

> Swami Madhavananda's work is not unusual; it is typical of the
> Vivekananda style.

While the swamiji should have mentioned leaving out some stuff or better
still included this also, I beg to disagree. It's not atypical to see
vaishnavite schools waving their hands wildly when it comes to animal
sacrifices by ad hoc reasonings like not suited for kali yuga etc, when
none of the shruti-s or smR^iti-s say so. The advaitic school and
Vivekananda do not do any such thing. So it's a question of the pot
calling the kettle black. Everyone has some things they don't like which
they try to explain away.

IMO, you are just trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. How a
husband should beat his wife if she refuses to have sex with him is
hardly relevant these days.

Ramakrishnan.
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