[Advaita-l] tradition as pramana

[Satish Arigela]

>From: Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at braincells.com>
>So my conclusion is the negative view of the Buddha in puranas has a lot firmer 
>base in "tradition" and >deserves to given a lot more weight than the negative 
>view of Shankaracharya in puranas.

I would conclude the same. So we do not have a disagreement on what purANa-s say 
about buddha & Adi shankara.

What I was trying to point out is that, the view of the purANa on a matter need 
not be taken as an absolute unquestionable truth.

The purANa might say that hiraNyAkSha rolled(just picking some random example of 
old ideas) the Earth like a mat...because of a perception in the older world 
that the earth is flat. Of course holding to the purANic view on this matter 
would be completely absurd. Likewise there is a possibility that the purANa can 
be mistaken on some secular issues or about a minor historical detail like in 
this case about some detail regarding the buddha. On such matters one should try 
to validate(if one wants to find out) what the purANa says by other means.

On a related note, though the purANa is never meant to be like a historical 
record, many purANa-s do have some useful historical data which matches 
with archeological data etc and they are fairly consistent.