non-reality of free will

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

On Fri, 9 May 1997, Jonathan Bricklin wrote:

[..]

> I take it that he does not agree with those
> Hindu authorities who identify the Vivarana with Shankara.
>

I don't have Jonathan's original post any more, and this is excerpted from
Jaldhar Vyas's recent response to it.

A quick clarification. If the idea is that Vacaspati Misra's Tattva
Vaisharadi belongs to the Vivarana school, that is wrong on two counts,
the first being that the text is a work on Yoga.

Vacaspati Misra's sub-school of advaita is called the bhAmatI school,
named after his commentary to Sankara's brahmasUtra bhAshya. The vivaraNa
school takes its name after prakASAtman's vivaraNa to padmapAda's
pancapAdikA, which in turn is an incomplete commentary on Sankara's
brahmasUtra bhAshya.

Vacaspati is famous for having composed excellent texts on a number of
darSanas, including nyAya, yoga, sAmkhya and vedAnta. In each of his
texts, he is extremely faithful to the school he is writing about. Thus,
in his nyAya work he expounds the concepts of prAg-abhAva (an effect is
not previously existent in the cause) and svata: apramANa, parata: pramANa
(no cognition is self-valid, but it is validated by another cognition). In
the vedAnta works, he takes the exact opposite view, and argues that an
effect is in fact pre-existent in the cause, and that every cognition is
self-valid, and can only be invalidated by another cognition.

Even within advaita vedAnta, Vacaspati Misra might well have supported
different kinds of views on certain issues. He wrote a work called
tattva-samIkshA, which is a commentary on Mandana Misra's Brahmasiddhi,
and he might have well been faithful to Mandana's line of thought in this
work. Unfortunately, this work is no longer extant and is known only
through quotations in other later texts.

Vidyasankar