DISCUSSION POINTS 2

Namaste ! Srinivas suggested a while ago that I write a summary of the meetings we hold. Because we discuss lots of topics with people raising many questions within two hours of each meeting, it is difficult for me to provide a clean summary. Especially because we often move from topic to topic at a lightning speed. Besides, I am so engrossed in forming my responses that I often do not quite remember everything of import that we considered at a particular meeting. Blame my age too on this. Thanks to Ram, we at least have video recording of almost all our Friday meetings since their inception. This again has relieved in my mind of the necessity of a written summary. Any way, this time I've decided to provide a brief commentary and expansion on some points we discussed at the last two meetings. Below. Some may not be familiar with what we do at the meetings. This post will give them an idea of what happens there. Briefly, all of us in the meetings are encouraged to think and not just listen. This will be obvious from the following. UPANISHADS STUDY GROUP MEETING OF FRIDAY, DEC 12, 2008 At this meeting we focused on the three verses of the Isha Upanishad dealing with vidya and avidya for the first hour and discussed briefly the ideas of Ramanuja, Madhva and Baladeva (proxy for Chaitanya) in the second hour. 1. Vidya-avidya in Isha Upanishad's Spiritual Path Continuing from the previous meeting of the group I again defended my idea of two ladders with the avidya ladder coming first and the vidya ladder following, with the two and a half right phases of avyaya representing the avidya side and the two and a half left phases as the vidya side. This interpretation, following Madhusudan Ojha's Vedic philosophy, neatly explains the sequence of two stages clearly mentioned in the Isha. However, Ram raised a sharp question as to why being absorbed in vidya leads to greater darkness. My answer, which failed to satisfy myself completely, was that those absorbed in vidya know what they are doing and are still unable to get out of it while those pursuing avidya do not know what they are doing and of course are unable to get out of that. At this point we went into Mundaka Upanishad and saw it talking about two vidyas, one higher and one lower. This apparently satisfied everyone and we moved on. Presumably, what satisfied the group was the resolution that those who are into vidya are pursuing the lower vidya, making them engrossed and trapped in a higher level than ordinary. That way speaking, we should also distinguish two or even three levels of avidya. The lowest level of avidya is where a person hurts others to pusue his objectives. The middle level person always takes care to pay a fair price for whatever he consumes. The higher level person begins to accummulate good karma without accepting its rewards. So, one can say that those who are at the lowest level of avidya face blinding darkness and those who are at the lower level of vidya face even more blinding darkness. What needs to be done is move to higher levels of avidya to conquer death and then to higher level of vidya to attain amrita or life eternal (misleadingly translated as immortality, though not by Radhakrishnan who uses the term "life eternal" which is better). Does this appeal to you as an overall meaning of the three vidya-avidya verses of the Isha? 2. Levels of Reality in Shankara and Ramanuja On Ramanuja, we saw the difference between prapatti (cat type) and bhakti (monkey type). But the important point discussed was why Ramanuja is reluctant to accept Shankara's four levels of reality (noumenal, phenomenal, illusory and absurd). For him everything that passes our consciousness is grounded in reality. He would point out the chapter 2 of the Gita where Krishna clearly says that what is real cannot become unreal and what is unreal cannot become real. Thus If the Gita does not admit of four levels of reality and just contrasts reality with unreality, that is a problem for Shankara. On the other hand, Ramanuja would have problem with our intuitive belief that an illusion does not represent reality. This touches on fundamental metaphysical problem of the nature of reality. I cannot possibly go into it briefly but would refer anyone interested to go to the videos of Friday meetings where I developed my MF theory. GITA AND HINDUISM GROUP MEETING OF SUNDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2008 3. The Dualist Side of Krishna The point that occupied our attention the most at the Gita and Hinduism Group's meeting on December 14 in the first hour was that of dvandva being the special manifestation or vibhuti of Krishna, among the various ways compoounds are formed in Sanskrit. In the tenth chapter verse 33 Shri-Krishna seems to be saying that while other compounds seem to subordinate (tat-purusha and avyayibhava) one term to another or go beyond the terms mentioned (bahu-vrihi), dvandva is the one where all terms are given an equanimous equality characteristic of the highest neutral nature of Brahman. As I thought over this, another idea occurred to me which, though, may hurt the feelings of non-dualists among us. It may be worth mentioning because the non-dualists claim to go beyond all feelings. Dvandva represents duality itself and taken beyond the context of grammar it can indicate two-ness which is basic to all compounds as the latter cannot exist without at least two terms. So, two-ness is Krishna's vibhuti! Also refer to chapter 13, verse 19ab of the Gita where Krishna asserts that both purusha and prakriti are without beginning. So much for non-dualism here. Of course there are parts of the Gita where non-dualism has an upper hand. The best resolution of this knotty problem in my view consists in the Vedic philosophy of Madhusudan Ojha which we dealt with in detail through most of our Friday meetings this year and anyone interested is referred to the videos of those meeings. 4. The Buddha's Denial of Self In the second hour of this meeting we talked about the no-self theory of the Buddha. Playing the Devil's advocate as is often my wont, I tried to explain and defend it, to drive home its strengths. But the HIndu ears of the group did not find that music melodious at all. The Hindu in me made me hesitant as well and I ended up saying that Buddhism misses an entire side of the two-sided coin of Vedic philosophy, one side being existence and the other being energy. Let me try to do more justice to the Buddha who, according to our scriptures, is also a full incarnation of God. He can be seen to be making spiritual path sharply delineated. If the Gita's sankhya makes us to focus on the featureless atman without doership, Buddha can be seen separating us from our desires and consequent actions even more radically, cutting out the very idea that there is a self. The denial of the self in Buddhism can be seen to be serving the function of disillusioning us from the grip of our ego by saying that what we intuitively feel, the ego or the self, does not even exist. Gandhi interpreted the Buddha's denial very sympathetically, saying that it challenges us to reduce our ego literally to nothing or shunya. And, if the ultimate spiritual experience is ineffable (neti, neti), why insist that it is of the ultimate nature of some self? Just assume the Buddha's characteristic silence on the matter, indicating the ineffable nature of the ultimate. Too bad the Buddhists themselves after the Buddha tried to vie with the Hindus, concocting various theories of the nature of the Void or Shunya as if it indicated something articulatable. --Ramesh