Teaching Tradition of Advaita Vedanta Archive

Swami Dayananda Saraswati :: Radha :: Sri Vasudevacharya :: Disciples

Sri Vasudevacharya (Michael Comans, Ph.D.)

"Sravana (listening) means understanding the meaning of the statements [of the sruti] directly from the mouth of the guru. For some people who are of the highest calibre, this is sufficient by itself...In the case of the sentence tat tvam asi," the words tat and tvam are not merely synonyms, for each word conveys its own meaning: the word tvam refers to the ego and the word tat refers to Brahman, Being Itself. The two words are made explicitly co-referential by the verb asi and it is this co-referentiality that creates the difficulty in understanding the sentence and also becomes the key to unlocking the meaning of the sentence."--Sri Vasudevacharya

In 1979, after several initial trips to America, Swami Dayananda began a residential course in Vedanta at Piercy, California for approximately forty students. The teachings lasted until July, 1982. As a youthful Indologist at the University of Sydney, Sri Vasudevacharya journeyed to the International House on February 07, 1979 to receive the blessings of Swami Dayananda. It was there that Swami Dayananda explained that the mahavakya "'tat tvam asi, that thou art, cannot be considered an advice because the teacher doesn't say "you will be that"..the moment I say "you will be that" I become a consultant...a teacher never advises. A teacher always unfolds what is." Upon submitting a Master's thesis to the University of Sydney wherein he concluded, quoting Swami Dayananda to support his point, that the entire fraternity of a popular 19th century missionary movement were incapable of fulfilling their mission, "Vivekananda and his gurubhais were insufficiently trained to present their culture in the depth warranted by tradition," Sri Vasudevacharya, a native of Australia, journeyed to Piercy to further his studies in Vedanta. Following his return to Australia, Sri Vasudevacharya earned his Ph.D. under the guidance of the renowned Dutch Indologist Professor J.W. de Jong at the Australian National University. Sri Vasudevacharya has an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Sydney (1981) and a Ph.D in Classical Indian Philosophy from the Australian National University (1987). After a long career as an academic, which included instruction of Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy in the departments of Religion and Indian Studies at ANU and occupation of the prestigious Chair of Indian Studies at the University of Sydney, Sri Vasudevacharya is now dedicated to sharing his knowledge with the community of Sydney. He teaches Vedanta and Sanskrit at his Vedanta Kutir in Stanwell Park and has taught throughout Australia under the auspices of Brahma Vidya-Centre For Vedanta Studies for more than twenty years.

In addition to our private classes on the Kena and Mundaka, Sri Vasudevacharya also taught a number of Upanisads for the community of New South Wales throughout 2004-2005. Excerpts from Isa, Prasna, Aitareya (an Upanisad contained in the Rg Veda forming the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters of the second Aranyaka of the Aitareya Brahmana), and Taittirya Upanisads have been archived. In 2004 Sri Vasudevacharya taught chapters one and ten from the voluminous Pancadasi of Vidyaranya and several of these classes have also been selected. The Pancadasi, composed in the fourteenth century, contains a total of fifteen chapters (pancadasa-prakarana) divided between three quintads: viveka-pancaka, dipa-pancaka, and ananda-pancaka: chapter one consists of 65 verses and chapter ten contains 26. As Sri Vasudevacharya notes, however, "...In the fourteenth-century text Pancadasi, we find a mixture of Vedantic and Yogic ideas". Indeed, "the Pancadasi is an early example of a Vedantic text which is consciously making room for classical Yoga." Since the cultural politician and Vaisnava hagiographer Vidyaranya is often located squarely in the 'Vivarana,' then, we must admit that a school is an abstraction. In a remarkable accomplishment, moreover, Sri Vasudevacharya has composed a Sanskrit treatise entitled Advaitapratibodha "with the intention of conveying the vision of the truth". Sri Vasudevacharya's classes commence with group chanting and conclude with satsang.

The Question of the Importance of Samadhi in Modern and Classical Advaita Vedanta

Review of Jivanmukti in Transformation: Embodied Liberation in Advaita and Neo-Vedanta

Three Different Sampradayas (Traditions) of Vedanta

Aligned with his teaching activities as a Vedanta acharya and guest lecturer at various scholarly and religious institutions throughout Australia, Sri Vasudevacharya is author, translator, and commentator of a number of books related to the Advaita tradition. He has also published a number of articles on Vedanta in scholarly journals, including Journal of Indian Philosophy, Indo-Iranian Journal, and The Voice of Sankara, as well as texts on Hinduism for Oxford University Press that are currently used by secondary students throughout Australia and entries on Advaita Vedanta for Routledge Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy. Sri Vasudevacharya’s latest work is (2000) The Method of Early Advaita Vedanta: A Study of Gaudapada, Sankara, Suresvara and Padmapada. We agree with the Indologist and Postcolonial critic Richard King as written in a review submitted to our archive, "[t]his is a well-written study, providing an overview of early Advaita that will be a useful resource for scholars and postgraduate students in the field of Vedanta studies." Moreover, this work is not only a contribution for pious devotees "seeking to develop their own spirituality within the Advaita tradition", it also represents a groundbreaking achievement in the context of academic hegemony and previous scholarship of Advaita. As University of New Mexico Indologist John A. Tabor predicts in the Journal of the American Oriental Society (123:3), this text has not only "become the standard reference on early Advaita, replacing the studies of Deussen and Nakamura", but "it will also be the focus of considerable debate for years to come". In 1996, Sri Vasudevacharya produced a translation and commentary of Srutisarasamuddharanam, a treatise written by Totakacarya, a direct disciple of Sankara, which has been published as (1996) Extracting the Essence of Sruti: The Srutisarasamuddharanam of Totakacarya. Sri Vasudevacharya's translation is largely based upon the Sanskrit manuscript editions published by Sri Vani Vilas Press and Anandashrama. Critical editions provided by Kailas Ashram and the Bhandarkar Research Institute [No. 127 of 1902. 1907] were also consulted. In an appendix, Sri Vasudevacharya has compared the editions of Vani Vilas and the Ananadashram and marked the preferred variants of the two. As noted on the first page, this text is offered "To Swami Dayananda Saraswati Who Brings The Traditional Teaching Of Advaita Into The Modern World." In the Foreword, Swami Paramarthananda, a disciple of Swami Dayananda from Madras, recommends the text to all students of Vedanta. Dr. Andrew O. Fort, reviewing the book in the Indo-Iranian Journal, praises Sri Vasudevacharya's translation as "highly competent, if not inspired." According to Fort, Sri Vasudevacharya "lucidly explains important points and is very solidly grounded in the Advaita tradition." Fort goes even further and suggests that Sri Vasudevacharya knows "other Hindu darsanas well, including Purva Mimamsa, Nyaya, Vaisesika, as well as Jaina and Buddhist views." In all of this, Fort claims, "Still, he does not range far from traditional interpretations." Though we have not found opportunity to reprint Dr. Fort's review, we do thank him for offering it to our archive. We have, however, published Sri Vasudevacharya's review of Fort's Jivanmukti in Transformation: Embodied Liberation in Advaita and Neo-Vedanta, [previously published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands, (2000) in Indo-Iranian Journal 43: 50-54]. In his study, Fort exposed the far-reaching effects of modernity and even discovered hindrances pervading the 'center' of India. Reviewing Fort, Sri Vasudevacharya praised him for this task of "dealing with the much revered Sankaracharya of Kanchi, Candrasekhara Saraswati, who occupied an important position in South Indian religious life from 1907 until his death in 1994." Elsewhere in the review, Sri Vasudevacharya complains that Fort should have also tracked down the Divine Life Society of Rishikesh, founded by Swami Sivananda (1887-1963), a "quintessential Neo-Vedantin," and the Chinmaya Mission of Swami Chinmayananda (1916-1993). Sri Vasudevacharya thinks a critical account of these two Indian saints is long overdue. This is no doubt true, especially since the Divine Life Society has created a new religious movement they simply hyphenate as 'Yoga-Vedanta'. Chinmayanada, of course, suffered from what is perhaps best diagnosed by Swami Dayananda as 'vasana-ksaya confusion', a syndrome which presupposes that the atma has become a jiva and, in turn, must be liberated through the exhaustion of vasanas ("mental impressions"), accomplished by any variety of yoga. Vedanta Shala has also archived ‘The Question of the Importance of Samadhi in Modern and Classical Advaita Vedanta’, an article published by the University of Hawaii (1993) in Philosophy East and West 43/1: 19-38, and an unpublished article on three different traditions of Vedanta.