Sankhya vs. Advaita Vedanta

[Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian]

Vivekananda Centre <vivekananda at BTINTERNET.COM> wrote:

>Rama wrote>?!!! Sha.nkara ridicules this kind of sentimentalistic
regard of
>>kapila explicitly.  As a pUrva-paxa argument he states that kapila
is
>>held as a revered sage in some smr^iti texts and hence sA.nkhya
cannot
>>be incorrect. He basically laughs at this and says there is no proof
>>that it could not have been some other person named kapila.
>
>
>Shankara also rushed to his mother when she was on death bed.!!

But advaitins do not use this as a means of some sentimentalistic
regard for sha.nkara. As it so happened sha.nkara made a promise to
his mother and went because of that. That's all. In sA.nkhya theory
kapila-s word is "gospel", but for advaitins it is not.

>Do not underestimate the contribution of Kapila to this evolution of
>spiritual thinking of ancient India.
>
>Love Shankara as much as you like but do not throw mud at others you
are
>unable to understand.

?! Not to sound churlish, but you seem to have not followed my mail at
all. advaita does not say the same thing as sA.nkhya. How does this
become "throwing mud" at kapila? Of course in your  world view, Newton
said the same thing as Einstein and of course classical mechanics says
the same thing as quantum mechanics I presume. So if someone says that
Newtonian mechanics is inferior to QM, does it mean he is slinging mud
at Newton?  I suggest that you read texts by sha.nkara and see what he
says about sA.nkhya. I gave some references, why don't you look them
up? Also see the bR^ihadAraNyaka vArttika, where Suresvara very
carefully argues against sA.nkhya.

Thanks for pointing out that I don't understand sA.nkhya. I accept
that I am not a sA.nkhya yogAchArya, but I definitely know that
sha.nkara is against it (proved by the references by me and Shrisha
Rao also).

Rama

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