On Jun 1, 2009, at 1:23 AM, Randy Meltzer wrote:
--- In [email protected], Vaj <vajradh...@...> wrote:
Vaj,
Again you make the statement that the tradition is not Shaivite.
On what basis are you saying this? Have you been to Jyotir Math?
Have you been to Guru Dev's ashram in Allahabad?
It would seem not. Because if you had been there, it would be
obvious. Even the sandalwood tilak on Guru Dev's face is shaivite
style, not vaishnavite. The vaishnavites always wear their tilak
in a vertical style. Shaivaites always horizontal.
Where did you specifically find out that the shankaracharya order
is vaishnavite? Please mention specifics?
Bhaja Govindam is not a good argument. In India many people sing
that.
Next, you will be telling me that the Kedarnath temple in the
Himalayas is a Vaishnavite temple.
And the again I will state for the record that Shankara is a name
of Shiva. Anyone in India knows that. But perhaps you are right
and I am wrong. I guess my 16 trips there taught me nothing.
Yes, I did say it again. I'm not going to lie. But at the same time,
I've seen the same thing with numerous people associated with Vedic
and puritanical Hindu movements.
I spent a good amount of time involved with the Shankarcharya of the
south and got to observe the inner workings close enough that I'm
familiar with their workings. The Smartas are very inclusive, so they
do not reject Shiva but they are not a Shaivite line. Being basically
Brahmin, they have their version of history, told from their point of
view.
Yes, Shankara is a adjective of Shiva and some people do even
consider Shankara an incarnation of Shiva. Of course some Shaivite
lines also consider him a demon and destroyer. There are even tantric
works attributed to Shankara which believers believe to actually be
by Adi-Shankara. Historians however recognize that these come from a
later date than Adi-Shankara.
What some people aren't aware of is that orgs like the Shankaracharya
while essentially deriving from Upanshadic thought and the Vedas,
they also amalgamated a certain number of other sects which was part
of a trend whereby older sects were brought into the newer Vedic
ones. Really by the time of Shankara, the amalgamation of what was
left of Vedic religion had already developed a symbiotic relationship
with earlier forms of ecstatic religion like Shaivism. For that
reason you can go to many Hindu temples and for one purpose they'll
do a Vedic rite, for another they'll do a tantric one. But it's a
sanitized, ritualized presentation of Shiva set in a puritanical
religion.
The original Shaivite gnosis was an ecstatic religion of the
countryside, on the fringes of society. It's most recent revival
would have been around time of Christ with the Shaivite saint
Lakulisha who was considered the 28th avatar of Shiva. His followers
considered him the last of the avatars mentioned in the Puranas. Most
of these lines were oral, that is they were not written down and if
they did, most existed in Dravidian languages.
The Shaiva gnosis of Lakulisha was to last about a thousand years. A
period of invasions by the Hun and the adherents of Islam put a stop
to Shaivisms expansions. The Brahmans for a long, long time
represented the dominant intellectual class began to gradually take
over the various philosophical and scientific conceptions of the
Shaivites. Utilizing a crafty exegesis, this essentially Vaishnavite
Brahmanism(puritanical, hierarchical city religion), dominated by a
wealthy merchant class, tried to connect Shaivism to a mythical vedism.
So that how Puritanical Vaishnavite leaning hierarchical city
religions incorporated ecstatic occult fringe religions into their
growing power base. Or I should say, that's it in a nut shell, given
off the cuff. It's the classic story of the religion of the city vs.
the religion of the countryside. The city-merchant class, Vaishnavite
puritanical ones take on the "pagans", borrow their techniques and
rites, putting them into their own new language, Sanskrit, and then
suppress and destroy the original source documents. From the time of
Shankara and to the present a religion emerged, named Vaishnavism,
based mostly on Jainism but linked to the cult of Vishnu. Many Jains
converted to this new Vaishnavite religion and it grew greatly in
popularity during the time of the invasions. Many of the popular
ideas associated with India: reincarnation, karma and Vedanta, come
from this Vaishnavizing-Jainist trend.
Of course if you hear this story from the Brahmin side, you'll likely
get a very different story, but it sounds like the one you probably
already heard.
