[Advaita-l] [advaitin] Works of Sri Vidyashankara

[Venkatraghavan S]

Namaste Sri Sunil,
The logic below is speculative at best, if there are specific philosophical
or incontrovertible pieces of historical evidence to dispute Shankara's
authorship of the the Gita, kindly present them.

Going by untested propositions such as Vedanta deSika being a student of
VidyAshankara etc., one cannot come to definitive conclusions. Even if it
were true, that does not reconcile with Vedanta Desika pointedly naming his
pUrvapakshi in several occasions as Shankara and his philosophy as
Shankaramatam. If indeed he was referring to VidyAshankara here, why would
he not mention him by his full name even once?

Your second argument that had VidyAshankara not composed a gItabhAshya,
vidyAraNya would surely have composed one, does not hold any merit. How
does vidyAraNya not writing a bhAshya on the GIta, have any bearing on
authorship of the existent bhAshya at all? VidyAranya did not write a
bhAshya on the Brahma SUtra either, based on this can we say that the
Brahma SUtra bhAshya was composed by VidyAshankara?

Your third argument is that had Shankara written a bhAshya for the Gita,
yAdavaprakAsha would have no reason to compose one after him. The
attribution of yAdavaprakAsha as an advaitin is in the vishishtAdvaitin
tradition, which must be tested. Are there extant works of yAdavaprakAsha
to determine if he was an advaitin, or if this was simply a hagiographical
attribution by vishiShTAdvaita scholars?

Regards,
Venkatraghavan

On 28 Dec 2016 6:45 a.m., "Sunil Bhattacharjya" <
sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com> wrote:

Namaste,

I feel that as Sri Vedantadeshika himself was a disciple of Sri
Vidyashankara in Kanchipuram, he would have certainly valued Sri
Vidyashankara's   bhashya on the Bhagavadgita, even though he might have
shafted later on to Sri Ramanujacharya's camp, Secondly had Sri
Vidyashankara not composed an advaitic version of the Bhagavad Gita
bhashya, we would certainly have had a bhasya by the eminent Sri Vidyaranya.

Secondly the order given by Vedantadeeshika as follows need not necessarily
have been in the quoted chronological order. The chronological order could
have been   पिशाच - रन्तिदेव - गुप्त  - यादवप्रकाश -  शङ्कर - भास्कर -
नारायणार्य -  यज्ञस्वामि -  प्रभृतिभि:, If Adi Shankara would have composed
the Bhagavadgita bhashya there was no need of Sri Yadavaprakasha to write
another bhashya on the Bhagavad Gita bhashya.

Would you kindly help us by quoting  the exact words / concepts in  the
Ramanuja-bhashya, which can prove that the  Shankara's bhaṣya preceded
Ramanuja's  bhāṣya and that Ramanuja-bhashya indeed refuted
Shankara-bhashya of the Bhagavad gita specifically and that what Sri
Ranujacharya wrote was not a general refutation of Adi Shankara's advaitic
views.

Regards,
Sunil KB