INTRODUCTION
In this folder you will find students' notes taken at the daily classes that the Guru gave in the last years of his life, when he was studying the Saundarya Lahari. These notes and the structural diagrams that go with them, as noted down by various students, make up Saundarya Lahari Notes .
The notes have been copied exactly from the original and only edited to the extent of introducing punctuation etc., e.g. "the", "and" etc., as well a few clarifications, such as correcting "Kama" to "Kama (Eros)". Where there are gaps or illegible passages, they have been left as they were - we do not wish to introduce any of our own subjective interpretation into what the Guru actually said.
These notes were taken over the period from 1969 to 1973, when the Guru died, and give an idea of the development of his thought on the Saundarya Lahari.
There are often several variant translations and structures for individual verses. While the version of the verses and commentaries given on this website are final in the sense that they are the text that the Guru decided to present to the world, he often said and also wrote in his commentary that any metalinguistic that is, purely verbal, presentation would always be inadequate. Shankara's work could only be explained by using to the full the possibilities of video technology etc. As we have pointed out elsewhere, the Guru also stated repeatedly that when one was using structural language, one could never reduce the dynamisms to something static and fixed: " If you try and pin it down, you get a chair or a table and it does not dance". So it can help one's understanding of the subtleties of this work to study all the different ways that the Guru looked at this text over the years.
It can also be of great help to study the sections of notes on other subjects than the Saundarya Lahari. These cover erotic mysticism and structuralism in the works of Kalidasa, which have a close relationship with what is found in Sankara's work. Various other subjects are dealt with; the Darsana Mala of Narayana Guru, and such diverse subjects as the Quran and Bergson's views on the Theory of Relativity. All of these, apart from their intrinsic interest, can be of great help in understanding the structural methodology used throughout this work. We must emphasise again that structuralism is a methodology not a dogma. If it stops being a tool of research and becomes a doctrine it is useless.
The Guru said structuralism was like looking at the world through the cross-hair sights of a machine gun. Everything you looked at, you saw with the horizontal and vertical of the gun-sight superimposed. Science is a process of abstraction and generalization. Structuralism is the highest level of abstraction and generalisation. The Guru stated that it is the highest function of the human mind.
ED
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