Vedic Religion

[Ravi]

I some very basic questions. Kindly address it.

1) What makes a religion vedic?

        It was mentioned twice in the recent past that few vaishNava
traditions pay mere lip service to veda-s. Then how can one honestly
call it vedic? Please explain.

        The four veda-s have many shAkA-s which it was pointed out recently
that many were lost and inaccessibe at the present time(question 2)!
When we do not know what constitutes the entire corpus of veda-s how
can one claim to be vedic? One of those shAkA-s might have had
principles which say Islam follows expounded in it with allah-upanishad
(there was a news article about something like allah-upanishad few
years back!!)

2) How can the lost veda-s be reclaimed if there are no mantra
draShta-s at this age. It was pointed out recently that tradition holds
that there are no more mantra draShta-s (or something to that effect).
Making such an assumption seems very unfair and unreasonable to me.


3) Some of the mantra draShta-s were women, at least I know of apAlA
whose mantra is used vedic wedding ceremony and oocurs in rig veda (I
read this in a book called vivAha mantrArthangal by one balasubrahmania
aiyar). Her mantra is addresses to Indra where she offers the juice of
somalatha to him. Does this not indicate that women can chant veda-s?
If not why?


4) If veda-s are required for self-realization, then  is it the entire
set or few sentences in them would be regarded as adequate? If latter
is the case, then the religions which share those few sentence and
abide by them are quite adequate to achieve realization. If it is
entire set, anyway we dont have it!

My intentions are not offend any one. I sincerely hope to learn, I am
sure that Anand, Jaldhar, Rama, Vidya and others may have answers for
these questions.

With best regards,
Ravi

AUM shrImAtre namaH


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