Studying and relying on the previous acaryas to help us arrive at correct Siddhanta is not appreciated by empiric scholars. They believe only in “original” sources as the “primary” building blocks of all academic research. But Vaishnavas subscribe to the maxim, “Mahajana yena gata sva panta.” Srila Prabhupada repeatedly referred to the likes of Sridhara Swami, Visvanatha Cakravarti, Sanatana Goswami, Rupa Goswami, Jiva Goswami, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati and others as illuminating various sastric injunctions. I came across an interesting anonymous quotation that tends to support the vaisnava siddhantic method. It goes like this: “It is one thing to purloin finely-tempered steel, and another to take a pound of literary old iron, and convert it in the furnace of one’s mind into a hundred watchsprings worth each a thousand times as much as the iron. When genius borrows, it borrows grandly, giving to the borrowed matter, a life and beauty it lacked before.” Of course I don’t think one can surpass the original or previous acarya. That would make one guilty of the sin of maryada-vyatikrama, which is the impertinent attempt to surpass a greater personality. Nonetheless, for purposes of making sastric reference meaningful and relevant, we are dependent on the mercy of realized souls to explain things to us rightly.
Plagiarism