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xx] Dialectical criticism against the Sankara School 305 There were others, however, who strongly criticized the views of Madhva, and Mahācārya's Pārāśarya-vijaya and Parakāla Yati's Vijayīndra-parājaya may be cited as examples of polemical discussions against the Madhvas. The Śrī Vaisnavas also criticized the views of Bhāskara and Yādavaprakāśa, and as examples of this the Vedārtha-samgraha of Rāmānuja, or the Vāditraya-khandana of Venkața may be cited. But the chief opponents of the Sri Vaisnava school were Sankara and his followers. The Sata-dūṣaṇī is a polemical work of that class in which Venkațanātha tried his best to criticize the views of Sankara and his followers. The work is supposed to have consisted of one hundred polemical points of discussion as the name Sata-dūşaņi (century of refutations) itself shows. But the text, printed at the Srī Sudarsana Press, Conjeeveram, has only sixty-six refutations, as far as the manuscripts available to the present writer showed. This printed text contains a commentary on it by Mahācārya alias Rāmānujadāsa, pupil of Vādhūla Śrīnivāsa. But the work ends with the sixty-fourth refutation, and the other two commentaries appear to be missing. The printed text has two further refutations--the sixty-fifth and sixty-sixth-which are published without commentary, and the editor, P. B. Anantācārya, says that the work was completed with the sixty-sixth refutation (samāptā ca Šata-dūşani). If the editor's remark is to be believed, it has to be supposed that the word Sata in Sata-düşani is intended to mean “many" and not “hundred.” It is, however, difficult to guess whether the remaining thirty-four refutations were actually written by Venkata and lost or whether he wrote only the sixty-six refutations now available. Many of these do not contain any new material and most of them are only of doctrinal and sectarian interest, with little philosophical or religious value, and so have been omitted in the present section, which closes with the sixty-first refutation. The sixty-second refutation deals with the inappropriateness of the Sankara Vedānta in barring the Sūdras from Brahma-knowledge. In the sixty-third, Verkața deals with the qualifications of persons entitled to study Vedānta (adhikāri-viveka), in the sixty-fourth with the inappropriateness of the external garb and marks of the ascetics of the Sankara school, in the sixty-fifth with the prohibition of association with certain classes of ascetics, and in the sixty-sixth with the fact that Sankara's philosophy cannot be reconciled with the Brahma-sūtra.
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