[Advaita-l] Interesting URL

[Praveen]

praNAm all,

Hari Om, Krishnamurthy-ji,

This is purely an FYI kind of mail.

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 11:35 AM, Ramesh Krishnamurthy
<rkmurthy at gmail.com> wrote:
> IMHO, one of the practical problems of the so-called neo-Vedanta
> (Swami Vivekananda onwards and all the modern teachers including the
> luminaries of the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam) is that it has tended to
> detach the advaita tradition from the karma-kANDa and the
> mantra-shAstra in general. They might emphasize the 4-fold
> qualifications etc but what about the methods to achieve them.

Although you do bring out many valid concerns in your mail, may I
humbly submit a new thing
that came to my notice recently? I didn't know much about Arsha Vidya
Gurukulam (nor do I
know much now). However, last week I had an opportunity to visit a
small village called Neelkod
nearby my native place here in Honnavara, Karnataka, to have darshan
of Swami Dayananda
Saraswati. Perhaps, to the surprise of many people, he was here to set
up a school on sAma veda
shAka. And I got to learn that the respected Swamiji is trying to
revive and retain shakas from all
the four Vedas that have a risk of being extinct due to less
followers. In addition, vedangAs are also
to be taught here, in a traditional gurukula method wherein the
brahmachAri stays in the ashram.
(with the only difference being that the student gets a month's
vacation each year. Modern schooling
is also a part, btw, to meet parents' concern that the child might
face livelihood problems later!)

This may be a less-known fact about the institution. AFAIK, there are
quite a few veda pAthashAlas
being established by various institutions, both traditional and
not-so-traditional, in order to revive the
almost lost tradition.

In summary, there is still hope for those concerned about saMpradAyA.
May I also recall here the
incident about a gentleman grihasta visiting the Kanchi paramAchArya
and offering to donate to
support the vedAbhyAsa of one student? paramAchArya replied that the
gentleman would just
need to send his own child for vedAbhyAsa instead and there will be no
need for a donation! To
clarify, I myself fall outside this value-system since I didn't learn
my own vedashAkhA (yet?).

gurOrarpaNamastu,
--praveen
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