[Advaita-l] SRI SUKTAM - Meaning

[Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Sundaresan, Vidyasankar (GE Infra,
Water) <vidyasankar.sundaresan at ge.com> wrote:

> Similarly, in the composite navagraha sUktaM, the last
> verse sacitra citraM ... is from Rgveda and should be
> chanted as candraM rayiM puruvIraM ... and NOT as
> candra(g) rayiM ...In this case, most people recite it
> correctly!

I would like to disagree here.

My book from Sringeri, compiled by Anantarama Dikshitar, former
AsthAna vidvAn of Sringeri gives this as chandraGm .. etc. I myself
chant chandragm rayim in private (as I was taught), but the other way
in public since most people have used mantra pushpam to learn the
sUktam. The correct procedure is what is taught by the guru and not
what is traced back to source texts. This procedure of tracing
everything back to source texts is a Western notion - the Indian idea
is quite different.

> As a last note, for Bhaskar, svara-s do not change, per
> se, between Rgveda and yajurveda. That is, an udAtta
> sound is udAtta in both, an anudAtta sound is anudAtta
> in both and a svarita is svarita in both vedas. What varies
> is only the style of reciting the svarita in special cases
> (with long vowels, or with visarga at the end of a sentence).
> These are codified in the respective prAtiSAkhya texts
> and maintained with fidelity by recitation experts.

As per pANini or any of the prAtishAkhyas, there is nothing called
dIrgha svarita. It is known purely from tradition. Not only that - the
definition of the svarita in these texts have no connection to how
they are chanted by the sampradAyavits even in the hrasva case. So
it's important to follow a guru who is a sampradAyavit. I am
submitting a paper to the next Vedanta conference on the dIrgha
svarita in which I compare the Tamil yajur and Rg traditions and a
preliminary comparison with the Nambudiri yajur style. The latter is
drastically different from the Tamil yajur tradition in terms of the
dIrgha svarita, apart from other things. I'll make the study available
when I get done with it.

BTW, apart from the case of the svarita, there are a whole number of
artifacts in traditional chanting either not found in the prAtishAkhya
texts, or are outright contradicted by them.

Rama