Re: Why Should I learn Dvaita / Advaita / Vishitadvaita / etc
One thing I can say with my new 'experience' reading Vishishtadvaita Vedanta is that 'it is definitely not for the average reader' and that includes me. Or another way to put it, one must have true interest in Vedanta itself (and not merely an intellectual curiosity to know what is Vishishtadvaita like myself). I read through about 40 pages of introduction just to understand the difference between Iswara, Cit and Acit. Then I skipped a lot many pages (nearly a 100 pages) on 'what is knowledge' and related topics because I couldn't understand head or tail anything in it, was too boring and for every VA implication, there were atleast 10 pages dedicated to refuting the other schools of thought as Nyaya-Vaisesika, Buddhism, Charvaka and Advaita. Now I am into the 'doctrine of jiva' and after a real honest struggle, I understood that according to Vishishtadvaita, 'effort' is a special state of 'knowledge', and the knowledge itself is an attribute of the Jiva, who thus serves as the substrate for effort. Thus he (jiva) becomes the 'doer' and the 'karta' and thus also becomes the 'bhokta' or the 'enjoyer' of his deeds. And that, the results of the enjoyment (of pain or pleasure) make modifications to the attributive knowledge, because as we reiterate the point again, the effort was a special state of the attribute of knowledge and thus the jiva becomes immutable in Vishishtadvaita.
Now I am on to reading about 'free will' next, and I can say I gleaned the above knowledge after reading really with hard focus and going back and forth between paragraphs and all I have decided is to repeat my skip this and that/read with focus that which sounds/arouses my intellectual curiosity mode to read the rest of the book.
Will this process yield me with an understanding of Vishishtadvaita? I guess I have to re-read the book several times or go through several works from different sources to answer that.
So finally, the conclusion is, "it is not for the average reader".
jai hanuman gyan gun sagar jai kapis tihu lok ujagar
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