Neelakantha Chaturdhara (,
IAST
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Brahmic family, Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that ...
: ''Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara'') (also referred as Neelakantha Chaturdhar) was a scholar who lived in
Varanasi
Varanasi (, also Benares, Banaras ) or Kashi, is a city on the Ganges river in northern India that has a central place in the traditions of pilgrimage, death, and mourning in the Hindu world.*
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* The city has a syncretic tradition of I ...
in the later half of the 17th century, famous for his commentary on the
Mahabharata.
[Minkowski]
Nīlakaṇṭha and the Vedāntic ‘Scene’ in Banaras
Life
As with most scholars of pre-modern India, little is known of his life. He was from a
Marathi-speaking
Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmin family that had been established in a town on the banks of the river
Godavari. He moved to Varanasi, where he studied "Veda and
Vedanga, Mimamsa, Srauta, Yoga, Saiva texts, Tarka, and especially Advaita Vedanta" from several teachers, before beginning his literary career.
[ Christopher Minkowski]
Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara's Mantrakāśīkhaṇḍa
The Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol 122, No 2 (April 2002), pp. 329–344 His teachers and mentors at Varanasi, which was then a hub of śāstric learning,
[ included his guru referred to him as Lakṣmaṇārya, and Nārāyaṇa Tīrtha.][ His Vedanta writings were influenced by Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, Nṛsiṃhāśrama, and Appayya Dīkṣita.][
Nilakantha had also composed a commentary on the ]Devi Bhagavata Purana
The Devi Bhagavata Purana (, '), also known as the Devi Purana or simply Devi Bhagavatam, is one of the eighteen Mahapurana (Hinduism), Mahapuranas as per Shiva Purana of Hinduism. Composed in Sanskrit language, Sanskrit by Vyasa, Veda Vyasa ...
Mahabharata commentary
His commentary, ''Bhāratabhāvadīpa'', is the only one that is widely used in Sanskrit studies today.[ His commentary was from the viewpoint of Advaita Vedānta.][
The first English-language translation of the Mahabharata, by the scholarly Kisari Mohan Ganguli, acknowledges the influence of Nilakantha's commentary.
The Clay Sanskrit Library's project of translating the Mahabharata used the version known to Nilakantha rather than the critical edition.
In the recent past, he "has been maligned without warrant" by modern scholars, but his "understandings underlie more than a little of what is in the English language renderings of the epic."][James L. Fitzgerald]
Bibliography
/ref>
References
Further reading
by Christopher Minkowski, ''India Seminar'' No. 608 (April 2010).
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Chaturdhara, Neelakantha
Indian Sanskrit scholars
Mahabharata
Year of death unknown
Year of birth unknown
17th-century Indian scholars
Scholars from Varanasi