[Advaita-l] On the history of Bharathavarsha

[Anbu sivam2]

Dear Sri Vidyasankarji,

I thank you for your response.

If you would like to peremptorily brush aside Dr. Subramanian Swamy as a
politician, of course, it could easily put him in company with those of
secular India of extraordinary moral degeneration and corruption.  It is
sure to generate a derision and possibly it would put him out of our focus
on his view on history. All he was saying was that the Indian history had
been distorted and it has to be set right.  I suppose you are not in
agreement with him.

It may not be out of place to say something about Dr.Subramanian Swamy in
his defense of our beliefs and that of our PuraaNas and Ithihaasas which
have been poopooed as fiction and myth.  *It is to his credit that he boldly
and single-handedly thwarted the attempt of the athiest and corrupt hoards
of the DMK men who had planned to blow up Ramasethu, a bridge of ancience
and about which crores of bhakthas have sung in great piety.  People go
there endlessly to do their tharpaNam for the release of their pithrus.

All dhaarmic Hindus owe a gratitude to Dr.Subramanian Swamy.*

When the same criminal gang took over Chidambaram Natarajar Temple, a
denominational temple run by the Dhikshithar Brahmins that was out of reach
of the secular laws, by wringing a corrupt judge it was Dr.Subramanian Swamy
who took up their issue and faced brutal attack by the rowdy advocates
opposed to the Brahmin community at the halls of the high court of Madras.
When it comes to anti-Brahminism nothing was sacred to the enemies of
Hinduism.   You can ignore Dr.Subramanian Swamy's  contribution but I cannot
ignore that your effort to pit one Matam against another has only
contributed to you being used by the same athiest, anti-Hindu, anti-Brahmin
hoards to denigrate our ancient dharma and its institutions and the Gurus.
I came across how it is used by a Brahmin baiting gentleman by name Arul
Tilak in the following url.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/akandabaratam/message/46407

Is this a worthy purushaartha on your part?

I should point out that Dr. Subramanian Swamy had the blessings of all
Sankaracharyas including the Sannidhaanam at Sringeri whom I hold in great
veneration.

Beside the fact that I am ill-equipped as my life-time has been spent in the
gnaana  maarga and these such as dates were quite frivolous for me, the
reason that I do not want to take up the issue of whether Adhi Sankara was
born at certain point of time was that it would suit an agenda of
denigration of any of our sacred institutions and their Achaaryaas which in
my opinion is gravely ego driven and terribly counterproductive.   It will
not be a tribute to our great sage Adhi Sankata who brought the idea of
Advaitha to the reach of ordinary people.  My attempt has been to discourage
people's pursuit into such mire.

By writing this, if I have hurt your feelings I do sincerely apologize.

With warm regards,
Anbu

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Vidyasankar Sundaresan <
svidyasankar at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> Dear Sri Anbu Sivam,
>
>
>
> Actually, most of us try to keep away from some of these inconclusive
> debates about
> history! It is undeniable that our purANa-s have not been given the
> credence that they
> deserve as a record of what happened in our own country from ancient times
> onwards.
> It is also true that historians can and do differ from one another on how
> to interpret
> known facts and what weight to give to surmise and conjecture where facts
> are not
> available. It may be that the dates currently accepted for the Maurya
> dynasty and the
> Gupta dynasty kings are still open to question and revision. More than a
> politican like
> Subramanian Swamy or a demagogue like P N Oak, I would recommend reading
> the
> publications of K D Sethna, for his dispassionate and highly detailed
> examination of the
> various sources of historical data.
>
> However, none of this is good enough reason to insist that Adi Sankara's
> date has to
> be in the BCE period. When a native source gives a date in the SAlivAhana
> SAka era or
> in the vikrama SAka era or as number of years passed since the kali yuga
> began, these
> dates are extremely easy and clear to interpret. Even before there was any
> discussion
> of Sankara's dates by Western scholars, a Kerala based poet, nIlakaNTha
> wrote two
> kAvya-s on his life, SankaramandArasaurabha and SankarAbhyudaya, which give
> 788
> AD as the date of his birth. Throughout Kerala, the accepted tradition is
> that the Kollam
> era was begun in relation to Adi Sankara's lifetime. There are INDIAN
> sources, dating
> from times when there were no political compulsions behind giving any date
> whatsoever
> for Sankaracharya's life, which give us dates that translate to 788 AD as
> per the current
> common reckoning.
>
>
> To Sri Sunil Bhattacharjya - any acceptance of a conclusion can only come
> after
> direct examination of evidence, whether the topic is philosophy or
> mathematics or
> science or history. Proper historians do not give credence to the supposed
> copper-
> plate inscription of a king sudhanvA because the said inscription has never
> been made
> available for examination. Questions abound - What script was it written
> in? Who
> deciphered it? Was the claimed age authenticated via scientific means of
> dating? If
> so, who did that study? Were copper-plate inscriptions used to record
> donations of
> land and money in 5th century BCE? How many other, independent copper-plate
> records have been found from a similar period? In other regions of India,
> the preferred
> materials to keep records were different at different times. Finally, where
> is this
> sudhanvA record today? Who has it and will he/she make it available for
> investigation?
> There is no convincing answer to a single one of these questions. If this
> issue were a
> hypothetical litigation in a court and you were the judge who had to sift
> through the
> opposing claims of two parties and decide who was right, what would you do?
> How
> would you handle the fact that lawyers for one side keep saying that they
> have some
> evidence that vindicates their claim, but are forever unable or unwilling
> to bring that
> evidence forth and present it in open court?
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Vidyasankar
>
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