On 6/17/2014 1:07 PM, [email protected] [FairfieldLife] wrote:
From my minimalist way of understanding, Shyam Ranganathan is
suggesting, as he did in his translation and commentary of the Yoga
sSutra that Purusha = Person indeed does have "Agency" according to
the great philosopher Maharishi Patanjali.
"The Sankhya Karika appears to state that it is nature that brings
about freedom, while Patañjali’s view seems to be that it is persons
that are the explanation of freedom (I write about this in my
introduction to my translation). The relevant points of comparison are
the Sankhya Karika 17, 44–45, 62–64, where the person is
described as irrelevant to the process of liberation, and Yoga Sutra
I.21, IV.18, and IV.29 where persons and their self improvement are
treated as instrumental to liberation . . ."
http://indianphilosophyblog.org/2014/03/07/moral-standing-and-yoga/
"irrelevant to the process of liberation" sayest the Sankhya Karika
"persons and their self improvement are treated as instrumental to
liberation" sayest the Yoga Sutra
Letting go for a moment (or two) everything you've read, thought and
talked about, concentrated on, contemplated . . . and based on your
Person(al) experience of tens of thousands of hours of meditation,
what sez you?
Do Purusha(s) = You have agency regarding their/Your realization,
enlightenment and liberation?
Or as the Sankhya Karika and Vedanta suggest, from my understanding,
Purusha, Person, Pure Awareness,
is but the observer with no capacity to act at all.
And what did Maharishi have to say?
>
In commenting on Bhagavad Gita, Maharishi has brought our attention to
the existence of the gunas, whose concern is action, which, in every
case, is the result of the interplay of three constituents born of
nature - eternal becoming, termed prakriti in the Gita. Rajas, sattva
and tamas - these three propensities regulate the state of action and
are relative to each other and to all that exists in the phenomenal
world. That is, nature, which is everything, is subject to the law of
causation - cause and effect. It is the gunas, without exception, that
govern all action-reaction in the material world, according to the rishis.
However, Maharishi has also called our attention to the fact that
nature, governed by the three gunas, is entirely separate from the
transcendental field - the field of Being, termed Purusha in the Gita.
Work cited:
"On the Bhagavad Gita"
By Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
II., v. 45, p. 126 VI., v. 1, p. 384
>
