[Advaita-l] On the date of Adi Shankara

[Jaldhar H. Vyas]

On Mon, 4 Jan 2010, Michael Shepherd wrote:

> You guys who claim to be Advaitins but behave as if you've never heard of
> Sanatana Dharma, should drop this racial discrimination..
>
> Someone with an Englsh name who's not called David Frawley, John Grimes or
> Dennis Waite comes on the site, and you behave as if it's free licence for
> Raj-bashing.. Get a life !
>

Michael, calm down.  I think I see what you are getting at with the 
dramatist comparison but you've got to admit it is open to 
misinterpretation.  And I don't think those who see it as an attack would 
react differently if a brown person said it.  (There is an unfortunate 
tendency nowadays to make colonialism a scapegoat for everything but 
that's another story.)

What this shows more than anything is that we cannot afford to be 
thin-skinned in this type of forum where we don't have the social cues of 
face-to-face conversation.  Readers, do not rush to judgement.  Michael 
has been posting regularly here for some time now.  Does it make sense 
that he would suddenly start attacking Shankaracharya in some insidious 
Abrahamic plot?  And writers, please be aware your audience is large and 
varied.  Try not to be ambiguous.  (Easier said than done I know.)  The 
internet unfortunately does not allow much room for nuance.

> I asked for specific information about the shastric illuminations on
> saakshin. You distorted the question in order to insult me. I didn't get one
> helpful answer, which would have related its use in Advaita Vedanta to that
> in Samkya and Dvaita Vedanta, and helped me understand the precise use of
> the term -- which some commentators simply take as a synonym for atman..
> Well, is it or isn't it ?

Fwiw, I flagged that question to answer later but I have a huge backlog at 
the moment.  Didn't we cover some of the same material when you asked 
about the term kutastha some time back?

-- 
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at braincells.com>