[Advaita-l] brahma satyam jagan mithyA

[S Venkatraman]

Namaste Shastriji,

I refer to the following statement from your reply to Shri Siddhartha
Reddy's query on the captioned subject:

"Your statement that maya has two powers and is a bhavarupa is correct"

I have the following questions on it:

1. Is this not the very statement that provided a handle for Shri Ramanuja's
attack on advaita? I understand bhavarupa as meaning a positive entity. So
if Maya is a bhavarupa, Brahman's swarupa as advitIyam is vitiated and
questions such as locus of maya arise. Are not the different post-shankaran
theories in defence against arguments such as these?

2. I am told that Shankara himself in his expositions on advaita avoided the
above pitfalls. If he did so by remaining silent on them as some seem to
suggest, that does not appear to be a strategy that Shankara would have
employed. What was Shankara's own theory on Maya and Avidya?

You have hinted that replies to such questions may be available in Appayya
DIkshadars "SiddhAnta lesa sangraha". I don't think the book is that easily
available. So may I request you to provide me with your own clarifications
on the above questions?

Many thanks and praNAms,
Venkat

On 8/27/06, S.N. Sastri <sn.sastri at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Aug 23 A. Siddhartha Reddy wrote:
> I have a few questions on the tenets of advaita vEdAnta vis-a-vis
> the tattva bOdha (attributed to shaN^karAchArya) and the vEdAnta sAra (of
> sadAnanda, translated by Hiriyanna).
> -------
> Your statement that mAya has two powers and is bhAvarUpa is correct.
>   The vikshepa sakti of avidya continues to operate even for the realized
> person and so he continues to see the world as we do. But the difference
> between us and him is that we take the world to be real and experience
> joys
> and sorrows but he is not affected by them.