Aurobindo about Advaita

[Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian]

Swaminathan Madhuresan <smadhuresan at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

> In the past, giving importance to one person is singularly missing.
> We have no inscriptions at all mentioning either Sankara or
Ramanuja.
> Take Huge temples, Big books - hard to tell who made them. Opposite:
A pencil
> sketch of Matisse or Van Gogh gets 100 graduate school theses.
> The West insists on who did what and when? I would think
> they gave Sankara a spectacular rise in 19th and 20th century
careers.

Are you talking about this universe or some parallel universe? :->. Mr
"Madhuresan", how many papers/studies about sha.nkaras history  have
you read? Can you quote 5? My guess is that you can't quote even one.

There is just _one_ inscription relating to sha.nkara. It's found in
Cambodia. It is related to Sivasoma, the royal guru of Indravaman I.
Sivasoma is described as the disciple of sha.nkarabhagavat and the
inscription is dated circa 878CE. See C. Sivaramamurti , Bhagavatpada
Sri Sankaracarya for details. There is even a photograph of the
inscription. BTW, the distinction and significance between the names
sha.nkarabhagavat and sha.nkarAchArya has been discussed by Hacker.
This is with regard to manuscript colophons, but can be applied here
also as an obvious extension. This is also one of the first articles
anyone with even a _modicum_ of knowledge about sha.nkara/advaita
would have read.

In sha.nkaras times association of advaita monks with kings does not
seem to have been common.  Sha.nkara's own writings emphasize
nivR^itti and living in forests. Strong associations with kings
started later, during Vidyasa.nkaras times (~1100s), due to Muslim
conquests. So, it's not very surprising that not many inscriptions
have been found in sha.nkaras name.

Mani has already debunked your claims with respect to Ramanuja. Kindly
do some background research before perpetrating your myths/wishful
thinking in this scholarly forum. Reducing the number of
hotmail/yahoo/what-have-you accounts that you maintain may improve the
situation. Thank you.

Rama