Sri Narasimhan, I went over your mail. You say that it is important and necessary to stick to one's sampradayam. Well, although I agree to that, I would like to point out the danger in bindly following so. To be human is to question. Question anything and everything!! "Why are we here?? what am I doing here?? This family of mine, are they eternal?? what happens to me after death?? what is God?? What is my relationship with him?? Why is there soo much suffering in the world?? Why am I suffering...?? and on and on........ Even though one is born a SriVaishnava, it doesn't qualify him to be any special. Well, in a sense, yes, but lets not get into that. Let me not remind you of the present day condition of SriVaishnavism. Temples being dilapidated and uncared for, people going after materialistic pursuits like anything, ofcourse lets not forget the meat-eating, smoking, drinking Iyengars. Why did we deteriorate?? What happened?? The answer is simple. We stopped questioning. Our religion has become ritualistic. We have nobody preaching to us about the greatness of our SV religion. All our elders are caught in the "Cricket fever" or busy comparing their material status with their kin (my Grandson is in the US!! My daughter is going to Singapore for a vacation!!), with totally no idea of the doctrines of Sri Ramanujar or MM or even forget the concept of Prapatti, my cousins don't even know who their acarya is!! (Let me add this: one of the Bhattar at Sri PArthasArathy Temple chants, "Om Sankaraya namah" for "Om SaNkarshanAya Namah") Let me get personal. I am born in a Thenkalai Iyengar family. Kidambi Vamsam. None of my relatives, be it my dad's side or my mom's side know anything about SriVaishnavism. Zilch, nada. Well, we can't blame them as well, it is a struggle to make a good living in the modern period. But nobody has even thought about devoting a little bit of their time or effort for the sake of "soul search" or learning about the Sampradaya. Well, I used to have the "Chichi" on, thanks to my dad, who'd forcefully make me wear the chichi mark on my forehead. That too stopped when I started growing up. I became a hardcore atheist. I hated God for the concept of death, the miseries that mankind suffers, what kind of a god will punish people?? I hated God. But I tell you what, those were not happy days. Once, I happened to meet some Gaudiya Vaishnavas. I spoke to them for more than 1 hour, and their conviction and faith and logic was unbelievable!! And mind you, they are devoted to the same perumal that the SVs are!! Also, the greatest advantage of the GVs is their books. Awesome books, which just explain even the highest Vaishnava philosophy like spoonfeeding. Books like, "Science of Self discovery", "Perfect Questions Perfect Answers" etc, and ofcourse the famous "Bhagavad Gita as it is". Even to this day if you realize, ISKCON books are the best to attract ANYONE (be him westerner, Indian, whatever) to the Vaishnava fold. We cannot discredit the achievements of Srila Prabhupada, the founder of ISKCON. Amazing books, well we might differ philosophically at the fundamental level, but still his books only increases one's convicion and love for Perumal (be it KRishna or Rama or NArAyaNa, perumal is perumal). Well, in my case my love for the 4000 has made me stick on to the TK sampradaya. But think of the innumerable westerners or even the "non-Iyengars", who are not born in the SV fold, isn't ISKCON the best thing that could happen to them??I am a TK today, I love Ramanujar and MM today, MAINLY BECAUSE OF ISKCON. I can give it in writing. They might differ from us philosophically, but they celebrate Sri Ramanujar's Apperance day every year by visiting SriPerumbudur, none of my relatives have ever cared for his ThirunNakshathiram. Being loyal to one's Sampradaya is laudable indeed, but it becomes dangerous when one starts to belittle other sampradayas. I got a book called "A dialogue on Hinduism" by a SV scholar. With all due respects to him, I could not even proceed after 5 pages. It lacks the simplicity of any of ISKCON's books. Infact if you conduct a poll among all the SVs in the US who are interested in their Sampradayam, I can say that more than 80% will thank ISKCON for helping them understand their Sampradaya. Believe me, I myself know of many such cases. With respect to Sri Sita as being "Maya" or Real, I just intented to know about the difference in philosophies, not to belittle one or the other. Kindly forgive me if I had said anything thats appears offensive to your kind, blessed self. Dasan, Kidambi Soundararajan. Lakshmi Narasimhan <nrusimhan@xxxx> wrote: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!! Yahoo! Groups Sponsor azhwAr emberumAnAr jeeyAr thiruvadigalE saranam Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online, calculators, forms, and more [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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