Has adi sankarar commented anything on the hymns of devaram or the thirumuraigal?
Sir,
I feel the tirumurai and tevaram came into fame during the glorious days of the Chola dynasty only, i.e., the 10th. century or thereabour only. AdiSankara lived much earlier and secondly, he was a Namboodiri in essence and has cited from sanskrit scriptures only. he has not referred even to Srimadbhagavatham and so there are some who say that this Srimadbhagavatam is a later concoction to project Krishna as the supreme god.
Permit me to record my views on the original post for this thread also.
I am a follower of santhana dharma and the following are just my questions and i m not in any way hurting the sentiments or being offensive to any one or the great acharya.
1. Sankara starts his bhaja govindam and says worship o govinda and he says rules of grammar will not help in the last stages of life. Does he say we can all leave our karma and just keep chanting the name of god?. As a brahmin there are some karmas which need to be performed and god will be happy only with that right. A master will be happy only with the servant doing the work correctly and he wont be happy with the person who always sings his praises.
Sir,
Some scholars are of the view that many, many items have come to be called as the kritis of Sankara but they are not works of Adisankara. Sankara did not emphasize bhakti at all in his most important bhAShyas, but this bhajagovindam and its legendary origin have somehow been incorporated into Sankaravijayam. But all the available sankaravijayams are much later than Sankara's time and have been written when Sankara had passed on from being an ordinary ascetic with a pseudo-buddhistic philosophy to be spread, into a very avatAra of Lord Siva. So, we can entirely dismiss bhajagovindam from any serious discussion about Sankara's views.
AFAI have read, heard eminent orators and understood, Sankara recommended only "nididhyAsanam" as the method for acquiring BrahmajnAnam; but He said that the veda and Dharma-prescribed Karmas helped a man to acquire the competence to do the necessary "nididhyAsana" and helped in knowing the Brahman.
1. In his Sharadha Bhujanga priyashtakam: Sankarar says Puras Thungabadram:Where is Goddess Sharadha? In sringeri or in Kudali? Remember only the tunga flows in sringeri and the tunga and badra join in kudali and there is mutt in kudali which has a sankaracharya. Welcome to Srimad Jagadguru Sri Kudali Shringeri Shankaracharya Mahasamsthanam
Here again, I think we cannot proceed on the basis that the literal meaning of "purastungabhadrAm" must hold and hence Sarada is not in Sringeri. The koodali matham has its lineage details from the year 1546 only and that appears to me to be a very important point. Secondly, bhadrAm can be translated as auspicious and purastungabhadrAm can mean the auspicious tunga in the front.
1. Did Sankarar curse the entire people of kerala for not coming to the funeral of his mother and that the 2 families who came and stood near the feet and the head are still called by a particular name?.
At least the Namboodiris of Kerala do not believe that Sankara cursed them; as regards other castes, I am not aware, but considering the social set up which seemed to have existed in Kerala, other castes would not even be allowed near Namboodiri areas and so, there is no prima facie reason to doubt an intelligent monk like Sankara cursing all of them, especially when he knew that even as a boy he and his mother were subject social ostracization based on some doubts about his paternity.
But, for reasons which are not quite clear to me, Namboodiris (at least some whom I have known) make a ritual of something like cutting the corpse (with some darbha grass, the corpse is sort of cut by a mime action) and I was told that this is to show remorse for having compelled Sankara to cut his mother's body, etc.
1. Any records of sankar visiting the mylapore kapaliswarar temple? He has visited the thiruvottiyur temple and installed a sri chakra there. Still the pooja for vaduvidai amman is done by a brahmachari namboothiri
No idea, sir.
