Vedānta I: Śaṅkara
Vedānta I: Śaṅkara
Lesson 11 found three Vedāntas reading one terse text. Lesson 46 explained why that was inevitable. This lesson opens the commentary that made one of the three dominant.
Lesson 46 set the two openings side by side — athāto dharma-jijñāsā and athāto brahma-jijñāsā — and noted that the tradition calls them the prior and the later inquiry, as though they were two stages of one programme.
Śaṅkara's very first act as a commentator is to loosen that.
He takes atha to mean ānantarya, immediate sequence, rather than adhikāra, qualification. And then he asks what must precede. For dharma-inquiry, he says, prior Vedic study is required by rule. For brahman-inquiry, what is required?
Month 1
Vedānta I: Śaṅkara
Month 2 · Lesson 50. Lesson 46 said a sūtra cannot be read without a commentary. Here is the most influential one — and its author's argument against the previous lesson's school is four lines long and hard to answer.
4 min
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