Totally geodesic submanifolds of symmetric spaces, III

One purpose of this article is to establish a general method to determine stability of totally geodesic submanifolds of symmetric spaces. The method is used to determine the stability of the basic totally geodesic submanifolds $M_+,M_-$ introduced and studied by Chen and Nagano in [Totally geodesic submanifolds of symmetric spaces, II, Duke Math. J. 45 (1978), 405--425] as minimal submanifolds. The other purpose is to establish a stability theorem for minimal totally real submanifolds of K\"ahlerian manifolds.