[Advaita-l] Re: Advaita-l Digest, Vol 1, Issue 24

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

>prAkrtAnAm cha indriyANAm abhAvAt sarvEndriya-vivarjitam |

atra tu sarvANAm indriyANAm abhAvo bhagavAn prakhyApayati. "prAkRtAnAm" iti 
bhavataH viSeshaNam kimartham? indriyANy a-prAkRtANi santi va?

>But, Its indriyas are not made out of Prakrti. It is untainted by Prakrti
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Where do you get that from? And "not tainted by prakRti" is different from 
the intended complete absence of prakRti and its effects. No indriya-s, 
period, that is what Sruti and smRti say. That is the whole point of the 
"sarva" in the term sarvendriya-vivarjitaM. Any indriya is an effect of 
prakRti. Nowhere in Sruti do you find any statement to the effect that 
brahman created indriya-s for itself separately. That is the whole point of 
bRhadAraNyaka's statement, "na pretya saMjnAsti re".

>Here again,  I don't see any contradiction.  Thus,  I don't need
>adhyArOpa-apavAda to understand Geetha 13.14.

Well, you don't see a contradiction because you assume something about 
indriya-s that are not made out of prakRti. If you do not make that 
assumption, you need to understand the verse through adhyAropa-apavAda.

As for ajAyamAno bahudhA vijAyate, if you accept that in essence brahman is 
ajAyamAna, then you have already accepted the intended apavAda. You may not 
accept that the bahudhA janana is an adhyAropa, but that is another story.

Taking the sentence by itself, without referring to any other text, there is 
a problem of logic - one cannot postulate two contradictory attributes of 
the same thing at the same time and in the same place. adhyAropa-apavAda is 
the technique deliberately adopted by Sruti, in order to use words to go 
beyond words, and in order to use our mental constructions to go beyond the 
mind. After all, brahman is that "yato vAco nivartante aprApya manasA saha". 
Yes, it is a pedagogical technique, which is meant to provoke the listener 
to think. On the other hand, if you make extra assumptions, then well, you 
are replacing adhyAropa-apavAda with those assumptions.

Vidyasankar

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