Swami Shivapadananda on Sankaracharya and Ramanuja

SWAMI SHIVAPADANANDA

DAILY READINGS

Selected from Mother Radha's recordings of Swamiji.

Day 485 and 486

(combined for continuity purposes)

Don't you see that when you sit for meditation post-nasal drip starts? [Swamiji imitates a cough] All that is just an excuse. A fiction of the fictitious mind.

In spiritual life you find most people give up wife and wealth for the sake of God. You find that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu did that in later years and Buddha also. The only one who never did that was Sri Ramakrishna. He took Sri Sarada Devi with him to the same dizzy heights of spirituality. [Picture above of Holy Mother's little room in the Nahabat at Dashineswar – now a shrine.]

Swami Vivekananda says that we are not travelling from error to truth but from lower truth to higher truth, to the highest truth, until we reach the Absolute truth. An example of this is given to us: When a photograph of the sun is taken from many miles away it shows the sun as a ball of fire but if you go close to the sun there will be no picture of the sun at all – just light – the Absolute. Like this we are travelling from the relative truth to the Absolute truth.

Sankaracharya realised that Absolute truth is supra-personal. Later on Swami Vivekananda explained that this was indeed the highest philosophy, the highest realisation; yet it was only good for a few people because it needed qualification. To realise this we have to give up the idea of the body – and yet we know that ninety percent of humanity is conscious of the body. Thus Sankaracharya philosophy is no good for them. The stepping-stone came in the realisation of Ramanuja.

Sankaracharya's philosophy was being preached when Ramanuja stated that: ". . . Truth is the quality belonging to Brahman." It was actually Sankaracharya's philosophy that inspired this thought. In other words, Ramanuja discovered that part which Sankaracharya, for the time being, had not given.

First is the
quality, but the quality and the possessor of the quality become One.
Ultimately you will find they are not two. You may say God is happy but
you cannot say He is sad – He has no sadness in him.

Ramanuja
went on to say that, like the pomegranate, it is one fruit but still
there is separation in it. There are many seeds – but one fruit. You
cannot take away one seed and still say it is a pomegranate.

Take
a piece of cloth. If you pull the threads out, where is the cloth? Just
like that the body and mind, the world and God, are interwoven. One
depends on the other. The soul depends on the Eternal Lord. They are inter-dependent.

Sankaracharya
said: "A drop of water falling in the ocean becomes one with the
ocean." Later on, when you reach that level, you will find out why
Sankaracharya shows us (through his reasoning) that: Though there is
unity and yet individuality, in reality this individuality has become
One, has become Brahman. Sankaracharya's philosophy is the highest.

The
saint, in his realisation of oneness with God, says, "I have found that
One from which we have all come and from which even this world has been
projected." That is the Absolute, the highest.

"Whilst
we are dependent on different or individual bodies, we are parts of God
and yet we do not become one with Him," said Ramanuja. That too can be
contradicted through different arguments – but we do not have to go
through that here.

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