[Advaita-l] Recommended Vedanta-bhashya in Tamil or Hindi

[Siva Senani Nori]

Dear Shyam
   
  As Sri Ramesh indicated the books of Gita Press are pretty good. They have published Vivekachudamani and Aparokshanubhuti with Hindi translation. The ordering procedure is slightly cumbersome (you first send them a DD, and then they will sea-mail the books to you in USA), but the prices are negligible. And, as Sri Ramesh pointed out, the translation retains many of the original words, but then, the original words - say adhyAsa or titIksha - are best properly understood with the help of a dictionary, or a book like vedanta-paribhasha-kosha.
   
  My experience with Ramakrishna Math books in Telugu is that they are translated twice - once from Sanskrit to English and then from English to Telugu. Though I have not found anything as different as the round-trip translation of "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" (from English to Russian to English, it finally read: the vodka is good, but the meat is stale), the sentence structure in Telugu was odd at so many places betraying the double translation. I don't know it they do this with Hindi / Tamil as well.
   
  Apart from these two, those from Motilal Benarsi Das and Chaukambha are generally of good standard. On the authority of my teacher, Sri B. V. L. Narayan Rao, formerly of Wisconsin University, three Hindi translations of Sankaracharya's Brahma Sutra Bhashya by Sri Satyananda Sarasvati; Swami Hanuman Das; and Sri Vishnu Brahmachari (I had not noted the publishers' names) are supposed to be the better ones amongst those available in the market.
   
  And then, we have the religious institutions - Sringeri Math, Kanchi Math, and Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam - who have published many prakarana granthas in Tamil. Some TTD books in Telugu are of exceptionally high quality (in scholarship, production values, and treatment), others not so. I did not have occasion to read many Telugu books of Kanchi or Sringeri mathas, except for one on the discourses of Kanchi Paramacharya, which was lovingly done.

  Regards
  Senani

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