Some remarks on Swami Sri Satchidananendra Saraswati's notes on the Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya of Sankara

     

The Adhyasa-Bhashya, even while resting on the

sure and solid ground of the Upanishadic revelation,

does not refer to a single quotation as its authority.

All the statements here, are supported by reason

and universal intuition.

(Page 11 of his analysis of the Adhyasa Bhasya or the Preamble to Sankara’s commentary on the Brahma Sutras)

Swami S.S.S. does not do justice to the aim of the Preamble by applying a like intellectual rigor to the text. He simply repeats what is said as though it were a matter of faith or holy writ. He thereby fails to get the force of the aporia which is at the centre of the mystery of perception or in the words of Chalmers ‘the hard problem of consciousness. I add of course that Chalmers has his own subtle take on this problem, the peculiar self centred aspect of awareness which is withal of a public object. In the usage of Vedantic epistemology, the vritti/mental modification is my vritti even though the upadhi/form of limitations is an independent entity. To scry the innards of that much explicated ‘hard problem’ would take me very far away from the world of 9th.century India. How far? Perhaps back to the world of 4th.century Greece and the intense excogitations of Plato and Aristotle on the nature of mind. Sankara touches on the problem of universals in his chapter on what he calls ‘Vedic Words’ in the commentary on the Brahma Sutras. I’ve looked at that in a previous post some years ago but in the time elapsed since then my nous may have moved a cog.

….there is no reason why the original Bhashya beginning with (sk) should not be taken to mean what it literally amounts to, - that all human procedure, is due to a misconception (pg.50 SSS comm)

Very good indeed that may seem to be so to those who have emerged out of Plato’s cave into the blinding light of the One, the True, and the Good. Other mortals may give thanks that their incarnation has the possibility of transcendence and that buried in the everyday world of awareness is the key to liberation. On what is awareness based? What makes perception possible or what the translator of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra’s ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’ calls ‘perceptuality’? This is the key that you search for that is all the time in your pocket. Irony as an attitude can be taken too far. Sankara stresses that until you are ripe your motto must be ‘Satyam vada, dharmam chara’ - speak the truth, follow dharma.