Nature of Consciousness

[Anand V. Hudli]

On Thu, 29 Jul 1999 10:03:55 -0700, Sankaran Panchapagesan
<panchap at ICSL.UCLA.EDU> wrote:


>Thanks for the clarification on the reasons behind the arguments. I think
>this point about avoiding circularity in the argument has already been
>mentioned in the list archives. I am presently under the belief that the
>existence of a God, omniscient or otherwise, cannot be proved and is to be
>accepted only on faith, i.e., faith in the Sruti. I have a suspicion that
>that that arguments for unauthoredness, however ingenious, are going to be
>circular. I understand now that unauthoredness is required to validate
>Sruti as a pramANa. Also, I am not sure why unauthoredness of a text
>should also imply infallibility. (human author --> fallible, but not
>necessary that no author --> infallible?). But Ramakrishnan has said that
>he'll write about it in a later e-mail, and I am interested in learning
>about them.

 The best way to understand why the Vedas are unauthored, in my
 opinion, is to accept that the sounds contained in the Vedas correspond to
 eternal truths. Since the Vedas contain eternal truths, these cannot
 be "invented" by some author human or divine, but can only be
 "discovered." You don't say, "Columbus invented America" but
 say "Columbus discovered America." America was existing even before
 Columbus discovered it. In a similar way, the eternal truths or sounds
 of the Vedas were only discovered by the ancient Rishi's endowed with
 extra-ordinary vision. The sounds of the Vedas do not depend on any
 author human or divine to come into existence. These sounds, however,
 can be passed from generation to generation by means of an oral
 tradition. That is why the Vedas are called shruti; they are heard,
 not just read like an authored work.

 Anand
 passed