Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is remarkable that this barbarous and immoral worship, though looked at askance except in its own holy places, is by no means confined to the lower castes. So far as theology and metaphysics are concerned, these defences are plausible. The Śakti is identified with Prakṛiti or with the Mâyâ of the Advaita philosophy and defined as the energy, coexistent with Brahman, which creates the world.
Śaṅkara's teaching is known as Advaita or absolute monism. Nothing exists except the one existence called Brahman or Paramâtman, the Highest Self. Brahman is not intelligent but is intelligence itself. This must not be misunderstood as a blasphemous assertion that man is equal to God.
For Asia, and perhaps for the world at large, Buddhism is more important but on Indian soil it has been vanquished by the Vedânta, especially that form of it known as the Advaita. In all ages the main idea of this philosophy has been the same and may be summed up in the formula that the soul is God and that God is everything.
This is no worse than many other explanations of the scheme of things and the origin of evil but it is not really an explanation. It means that the Advaita is so engrossed in ecstatic contemplation of the omnipresent Brahman that it pays no attention to a mere by-product like the physical universe. How or why that universe with all its imperfections comes to exist, it does not explain.
All Śivaite philosophy is really based on this last and teaches the existence of matter, souls and a deity, manifested in a series of phases. In Kashmirian Śivaism Vedântist influences seem strong and it even calls itself Advaita. It is noteworthy that Vasugupta, who discovered the Śiva-sûtras, also wrote a commentary on the Bhagavad-gîtâ.
Just as in the Advaita he who has the true knowledge sees that he himself and everything else is Brahman, so for the Mahayanist all things are seen to be Nirvana, to be the Dharma-kâya.
The earliest known work in which the theory of Mâyâ and the Advaita philosophy are clearly formulated is the metrical treatise known as the Kârikâ of Gauḍapâda.
They are said to tolerate the worship of Śivaite deities and of the lingam in their temples and their ascetics dress like Śaivas. Madhva travelled in both northern and southern India and had a somewhat troubled life, for his doctrine, being the flat contradiction of the Advaita, involved him in continual conflicts with the followers of Śaṅkara who are said to have even stolen his library.
Word Of The Day