[Advaita-l] BrahmaGYAna and jIvanmukti - 2 (TheCaseof YAGYavalkya)

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

>yes, that means the context of these episodes are not to prove whether
>yAjnavalkya is a perfect/imperfect brahmajnAni but something else...Hence,
>undue stretching of yAjnavalkya's behaviour to prove his status of Atma
>jnAna is totally unwarranted here I believe...

Not completely. All svAmI vidyAraNya is doing is to use this "episode" from 
Sruti to teach a very traditional message, namely that sannyAsa as a stage 
remains to be formally adopted even by a brahmavit. He goes on to 
characterize this as vidvat sannyAsa. We cannot get a full biography of 
yajnavalkya from the upanishat, but this does not stand in the way of 
interpreting the few incidents that are related in the Sruti.

>
>Sri VS prabhuji :
>
> >question remains for the readers that whether yAGYAvalkya finally 
>realized
> >his true nature & became jIvan mukta or not??  and also we have to accept
>
>As a brahmavit, yAjnavalkya had already realized his true nature.
>
>bhaskar :
>
>prabhuji, being a brahmavit yAjnavalkya has become brahman itself is it
>not??...coz. shruti itself assures brahmavit brahmaiva bhavati...shruti
>never categorizes two types of brahmavits like perfect/firm and

A full-fledged gradation may not be explicit, but is implicit in Sruti. If I 
remember right, muNDaka upanishat has a verse that refers to a 
brahmavid-varishTha. I'll check and post later.

We can understand what JMV says by the following mathematical analogy. In 
order to clearly explain the states of avidyA and of jnAna, the two are 
sharply contrasted in Sruti and in the primary commentary texts. For the 
sake of convenience, let us denote avidyA as zero and jnAna as infinity. But 
it is not as if the dawn of brahmajnAna always defines a step function 
between zero and infinity. This case is in fact very rare. For some people, 
it may be like a sharp spike or a pulse of variable width, that only gives a 
brief glimpse of infinity. For others, there may be an exponential approach 
and for yet others, it is an asymptotic approach towards infinity, both of 
which are well explained in the various discussions of krama-mukti. What 
svAmI vidyAraNya is doing is to explicate the various approaches.

Best regards,
Vidyasankar

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