Jonathan Chadwick wrote: > Richard, you make some good points. But I don't think Mahesh Yogi > would ever make the claim he surpassed his teacher. > A person doesn't let thier followers call you the "Maharishi" for nothing. And you must think a lot of yourself if you take it upon yourself to be God and appoint a King of the World and all his ministers.
> Personally I think he sees himself as a sort of Saint Paul in > relation to Jesus, if you will pardon my Christian reference: > much lower on the spiritual pecking order but he happened to be > a right person to get the job done. > Maybe so. I've pointed out previously that the mere possession of the Jyotirmath property in the succession dispute has no great bearing on who the real Shankaracharya is. If it were, Vasudevanand would prevail hands down, since he's in possession of most of the Jyotirmath property. In fact, it's a title that's at stake in the dispute. In this sense the dispute reaches a moot point because in fact there's no evidence that Shankara established any mathas at all - it's just a mythic tradition. So, if the devotees on the ground in India believe that Vasudevanand is a Shankaracharya and revere him as such, and Vasudevanand looks and acts like a Shankaracharya, and he is assumed to be the successor to Guru Dev, and no material evidnce is presented to the contrary, then Vasudevanand probably is a real Shankaracharya. >From what I've read, the current Shankarachaya of Jyotirmath, Vasudevand Saraswati, has a really big tent at the Ardha Kumbha Mela at Allahabad this year - he's far more popular up there than the Swami Swaroopanand. Another point concerns the fact that Guru Dev probably spent only a couple of months at Jyotirmath in his whole life, so there's probably never been a "Clerk of Jyotirmath" anyway. From what I've read, Mahesh Yogi worked out of the Shankar Math at Allahabad.
