Of ascetics: Follow-up

oh man! What a misunderstanding. I didn't mean to degrade Kanchi Sankaracharya Jayendra Saraswathi. Not at all. Quite the contrary actually.

I guess if you have done pure Mathematics for as long as I have then you would take the words "reductio-ad-absurdum" for granted too. Its meaning in Mathematics is "proof by the method of contradiction". Basically to prove a hypothesis, you assume that its opposite is true, and then by reducing and simplifying it, you arrive at a known contradiction or absurdity.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to work back from my contradiction to my hypothesis :-)