Srimathe Ramanujaya Namaha >If someone says it is the "maya" sita,then it has the touch of >Advaitham. I disagree to this to quite some extent. This is purely subjective and is based on the perspective. Once again, I guess, Shri Soundararajan has told us the story of the Gaudia Vaishanavas that he had heard, but, I guess he didn't tell us the intent behind or the audience that the Gaudia mutt targets at. Saying "maya" Sita may look like advaitic philosophy only if seen from the philosophical perspective. When it comes to philosophies, Ramayana/Mahabharatha are definitely referred to, but not to substantiate any hypothesis but only to assist, in the path of substantiating the appropriate hypothesis i.e it is easy to explain to people by explaining some examples, although, the hypothesis is being proved only from explanations that are profound in logic and would stand alone without these examples. I request someone to clearly post on what the Gaudia mutt has to say on this subject and I feel it is not right on our part to even analyse on this unless we understand the appropriate intent as this might immediately give a wrong impression about another tradition / school of thought. There are various levels of the audience/people to whom different philosphies are targeted at. A four year old boy would not understand if we say god manifests in five forms i.e para, vyuha, vibhava, archai and antharyami. We need to take him to the temple and say that lord looks like that and make him BELIEVE that. And then later on as he believes and then starts analysing, based on further learnings, that, there are different forms of the lord. As we all know, the buddhists(nastikas) were thrown out mostly by the advaitic philosophy (credits to Sankara) and the advaitic philosophy was left as it is pretty much to a large extent except for the places where Shri Ramanujar refuted Sankara/Bhaskra/Yadavaprakasa/Prabhakara incorrect/advaitic views. That is why he still called it as Advaitam, but a variant of it i.e Vichista-Advaitam. We say that, advaitam preserved the theism (There is a popular anecdote "advaitam protected the paddy from the stones"). And then Vichista-Advaitam preserved the original intent of the vedic scripts i.e the shareera-shariri bhava i.e the perfect explanation of the jeevatma/paramatma relationship and their appropriate swaroopams and hence popularly known by the phrase -"Vichistadvaitam protected the rice from the paddy". Probably the Gaudia mutt addresses the foreigners i.e non indians:) For them, it might probably make sense to propagate a good image of Sita, otherwise, people would suspect her purity up-front. For example, Valmiki clearly says that Ravana touched Sita and held her hair and grabbed her and took her away. But, Kamban does not say this. He does not want to project Sita as impure for the readers up- front. The intent is not to use his creativity and hide the historic event, but to make the appropriate message reach the appropriate audience. So people at the atheist level may have to go through these kind of things to first believe god exist or whatever and then as they believe they get more interested and try to find out the correct information and get into the next inner circle and so on and finally get into the innermost. For those who are already born and brought up with the Ramanuja Sampradaya, there is no need to even listen to any other sampradayam. For ex, I wouldn't even bother to attend a meeting/lecture from ANYONE else other than from those great leaders from our sampradayam and this is what, to my knowledge, is expected of every sincere follower of Shri Ramanuja Sampradayam and hence I don't even have to analyse on any other stories of other sampradayams. When such a question arises to whether those stories are right or not, the first thing that we need to ask ourselves is, do we understand our sampradayam at the first place? Did we try to learn it from an acharyan or at the least, read the books written by one of them? If not, dear devotees, let us start with that rather than even trying to analyze other sampradayams. As Smt Nappinnai rightly put it, we should start reading the articles posted by our leaders like Shri Chinna Jeeyar swami, Velukkudi swami and so on and stop listening to others until we complete our feat of learning our own sampradayam to the best extent possible. For us who are born and brought up in Shri RAmanuja Sampradayam this is all we need to follow: "Puruvacharyargal podham anuttanangal Kooruvar vaartthaigalai kondu neer theri Irul tharuma nyalatthe imbamuttru vaazhum Therul tharuma desikanai therndu" - Upadesa Rattina Malai Yatheendra Pravanam Vandhe RAMYA Jamataram Munim Adiyen Ramanuja Dasan, Lakshmi Narasimhan PS: BTW, I attended the Rama-Sita Thirukkalyana mahotsavam today (saturday) in the Lemont(Chicago) Shri Ramar Temple - that was based on the Shri Rama Navami. Thanks to the lord, for making me go there and giving me an oppurtunity to attend the entire function which was, to say the least, a wonderful treat for the eyes. I just cannot explain it in words, but for those who missed it, my regrets!!
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