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Ramanuja List Archive: Message 00063 Apr 2003

 
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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!!



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