In a
comment that he wrote on one of my recent articles,
What should we believe?, Sankarraman referred to an article on David Godman’s blog,
Swami Siddheswarananda’s views on Bhagavan’s Teachings on Creation, in which David discussed some opinions that Swami Siddheswarananda (former president of the Mysore branch of the Ramakrishna Math and founder of the Centre Védantique Ramakrichna in France) expressed about Sri Ramana’s views on solipsism and the idealistic theory of creation known as
dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda in the third section of an article that he wrote in 1946 for the
Golden Jubilee Souvenir, in which he claimed:
The philosophical outlook of Maharshi tends very often to be confused with that of solipsism or its Indian equivalent, drishti-srishti-vada, which is a sort of degenerated idealism. That Maharshi never subscribes to that view can be known if we study his works in the light of orthodox Vedanta or observe his behaviour in life. [...] (Golden Jubilee Souvenir, third edition, 1995, p. 69)
In his article David explains in his own way why Swami Siddheswarananda was wrong to believe that Sri Ramana did not teach
dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda, and in his comment Sankarraman expressed his own views on this subject and asked me to explain my understanding in this regard, so the following is my reply to him:
Swami Siddheswarananda had genuine love and respect for Sri Ramana, but from what he wrote in the
Golden Jubilee Souvenir it is clear that his understanding of some crucial aspects of Sri Ramana’s teachings (and also of what he called ‘orthodox
Vedanta’) was seriously confused.
Dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda (or
drishti-srishti-vada, as he spelt it) is the argument (
vāda) that creation (
sṛṣṭi) is a result of perception or ‘seeing’ (
dṛṣṭi), as opposed to
sṛṣṭi-dṛṣṭi-vāda, which is any theory (whether philosophical, scientific or religious) that proposes that creation precedes perception (in other words, that the world exists prior to and hence independent of our experience of it). The classic example of
dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi is our experience in dream: the dream world seems to exist only when we experience it, so its seeming existence is entirely dependent on our experience of it. Since Sri Ramana taught us that our present so-called waking state is actually just a dream, and that there is no significant difference between waking and dream, it is obvious that he did teach
dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi-vāda.
