[Advaita-l] aruNa prashna & upanishad chanting in evening

[Balasubramanian Ramakrishnan]

The taittiriiya aaraNyakam clearly states "graame manasaa ... uta
vaaco ta tiShTan uta vrajan uta shayaano (!!) adhiiyiitaiva
svaadhyaayan tapasvii puNyo bhavati" etc (2.12). Sayana in his
explanation takes the literal view that svaadhyaaya can be done
sitting, standing, lying down(!!) .... The shatapatha braahmaNam has
very similar verses. The thrust of the yajus is that svaadhyaa however
done will result in "tapasvii puNyo bhavati". How do we reconcile this
explicit statement with other sources claiming "should be done in the
morning" etc? In the spirit of aanarthakya, either a) it refers to the
case when the chanting is done with a particular result in mind or b)
in order to get the best benefit, one has to be concentrated in mind
and so on. In this case time and other niyamas like taking bath will
help make the mind one-pointed, at least for the vast majority. So
such statements are an arthavaada for making the mind one pointed to
get the maximum benefit, and not an injunction against chanting vedas
whenever one can.

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Vidyasankar Sundaresan
<svidyasankar at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Your comments below are extremely surprising, to say the least. From the very beginning,

Sorry, but your surprise is very surprising to me, to say the least
:-). You do remember that there are supposed sampradaayavits who
became that by dint of their own "midnight study" of 1200 year old
texts. So the mindset is very clear, is it not? If multiple
things/ideas can coexist inspite of some "text" (forget the fact that
the interpretation of the said texts may be wrong in the first place),
that opens a whole new can of worms - I hope the implication is clear.

Rama