Spiritual Import of Religious Festivals :Ch-4. Part - 13.

Chapter-4. Swami Sri  Adi  Sankaracharya - The Genius ( Sankara Jayanti ) :

 Part-13.


It sometimes happens that children interfere with the transistor and spoil the whole music which the parents had tuned.

This happened in the case of the followers of this great reformer, who began to interpret his teachings in their own way – even as it also happened with the followers of the Vedas, who interpreted the Mantras in their own way and landed themselves in ceremonialism, ritualism and mechanised sacrifices.

That the world is only an idea, and that the gods do not exist – which was one of the predominant teachings of the Buddha – received special emphasis in certain schools of Buddhism.

And Buddha's philosophy did not end with the death of Buddha.

It continued, but in a ramified form, not as a single stream.

It ramified itself into four streams at least – the Vijnanavada which taught that internal ideas manifest themselves as external objects, the Vaibhashika which held that really existent external objects are directly perceived, the Sautrantika which contended that the perception of external objects is entirely determined by the processes of internal ideas, and lastly we had what has been called Nihilism, Sunyavada, or the Madhyamika doctrine which was the view of there being nothing at all in reality.

Swami Krishnananda

To be continued  ....