An interesting thing about Shankara's take on the "average joe on the street":
MMY's assertion is that householders should use bija mantras isntead of OM. Many people claim that this is a no-no, but it is, in fact, exactly what Shankara said when you take it in the context of the Yoga Sutras' discussion of ishta-devata. In fact, MMY almost quotes that part of the Yoga Sutras in his exposition on TM in the publication that people use to prove that TM mantras are the names of Hindu gods. L. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <vajradhatu@...> wrote: > > > On Apr 11, 2012, at 10:45 AM, Duveyoung wrote: > > > Have you done the necessary work to have clarity about Advaita such > > that you can definitively say that it lacks the axiomatic depth of > > your form of Buddhism? It took me three years of reading about > > Advaita before I really thought I had intellectual grasp of its > > most subtle constructs. I'm relative-to-you stupid so I can't say > > how much scholarship YOU would have to do, but Advaita is not a > > read-it-once-and-now-you-got-it kind of thingie. > > I see the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara as largely a Vedic purist > reaction to the teaching of Nagarjuna, the Buddhist polymath and > tantric master. But even Shankara realized that the average person on > the street would need an approach of some kind to the Advaita nondual > View. Most people just do not have the clarity and the discrimination > to grok the various levels of nondual Vedantic contemplation, let > alone to realize them. Samadhi is one such path, but it's not without > it's own pitfalls. l.
