श्रीकर भाष्यम: The Srikara Bhashya-Being The Virasaiva Commentary on The Vedanta-Sutras (Set of 2 Volumes)

By - C. Hayavadana Rao

THOUGH the existence of Sepatipanditacharya's Bhashya on, the Vedanta-faras of Badaraya.na has been long known, it has not so far been available in print. An incomplete Telugu edition was published many years ago but this is the first time the whole text is offered in the Devanagari script. The circumstances under which this edition has been undertaken have been set out at some length in the Introduction that follows and it is needless, therefore, .to say anything further on that head here, except to state that it is entirely due to the public spirit and liberality evinced by the Mysore Lingayet Education Fund Association that it has at all been possible.

The publication of a work of this kind, a well-known commentary on the Manta-Sutras, raises the question whether there is any utility in making ancient works of this kind available to the general public. The criticism has been offered suggesting that there are systems of philosophy which though they have not yet passed away, still " drag on their barren life, a fixed monotony of centuries " and the specific instances offered are " the schools of Brahmans and Buddhists and Confucians, who have drained off the life-giving words' of their ancient masters into labyrinthine canals and stagnant pools. There in the over teemed East is the limbo of unchangeable systems preserved from the fertilizing breath of change by a universal inertia. "1 That the East has been prolific in producing systems of thought may be admitted, but the suggestion that the systems have proved "stagnant" or have been overtaken by inertia" cannot, perhaps, be easily demonstrated. Faint echoes of the criticism above refer-red to have been heard now and again, repeated or reflected, in the remark that commentators in India have been content to build up their own systems of thought, profound though 2 Presidential Addresses at the Indian Philosophical Congress, 1930. See in this connection Das Gupta, History of Indian Philosophy, and I. 63. A similar charge of sterility can be preferred against contemporary Western philosophy. "The scoffer may pretend," remarks Professor Wolf, after offering an account of recent and contemporary philosophy," that all these philosophies are little more than the reminiscences, of the thought of past ages. He may, take to pieces all these philosophical tapestries (from Haeckel to Smuts, ranging from 1834 to 1934) and show that they are mainly a patch-work of scraps derived from Heraclitus or Parmenides, Plato or Aristotle, Descartes or Spinoza, Locke or Leibniz, Kant or Hegel, Schelling or Schopenhauer. And he may reiterate the oft-repeated charge that there is no progress in philosophy. Such disparagement, however, would be unwarranted, even if we admit some of the points on which it professes to be based. After all, the whole history of civilization is so short that it has been described as a provincial episode when measured in terms of terrestrial time, to say nothing of cosmic Untie. And of this provincial episode ', the whole history of philosophy is but a single aspect, which only emerged about twenty-five centuries ago and has been• more or less smothered more than half the time. Moreover, the problems of philosophy are peculiarly difficult to answer in a manner that may command general consent.

For they do not lend themselves to the kind of empirical verification which secures something like general agreement in the sciences. In fact, as soon as any group of problems becomes amenable to empire. cal verification, it forsakes its parental philosophic home, and sets up as a separate science. In this way, philosophy always remains the limbo of 'highly speculative questions, which it is very difficult to answer satisfactorily, but which most intelligent persons find it equally difficult to suppress. And since times do, change and, we change with them, each age needs at least a re-statement of old problems and old solutions in terms best adapted to its own habits of thought or speech. An excessive straining after originality, or the appearance of originality, may do more harm than good. A knowledge of the history of one's subject is probably a universal requisite, but especially so in the case of philosophy. For of philosophy it is particularly true that all history is contemporary history." (A. Wolf in An Outline on Modern Knowledge, Chapter XIII, on Recent and Contemporary Philosophy, 589.) What Professor Wolf says in regard to modern Western philosophy may, if it's is seems verbal, be said of Indian philosophy.

they are, "only as appendages to the Vedas and Upanishads". Remarks like these miss the main point that the Vedas and Upanishads enshrine philosophical thoughts far too fecund to be allowed to rust away. They simply refuse to die. Philosophy is yet philosophy whether it is found in the Vedas or in the Upanishads or even in the mathematical formulae in which Spinoza, of all modern philosophers, set it. Philosophy, whether in the East or in the West, has emerged from religion as often as it has entangled itself in its meshes, and the intermingling is not to be regretted if it has helped in the elucidation of truth.