[Advaita-l] Svarita in RV and YV (was Re: SRI SUKTAM - Meaning)

[Sundaresan, Vidyasankar (GE Infra, Water)]

>It is option 2. I am not for consoling myself that we are adhering to
>pratishakhya rules exactly, by twisting plain sUtra texts. For one, it
>makes no sense to do this, and the second thing is it would completely
> invalidate the namudiri recitation which is quite different from the
>other recitation. Surely two quite different recitation modes cannot
>be faithful to the prAtishAkhya. Things can change and it is allowed. 

Come on, I would be the last person to even think of twisting the plain
sUtra text! But what I see in the sUtra-s of the taittirIya prAtiSAkhya 
is provision for various options regarding svarita. I think one can
trace
a context-dependent application of each rule within a given recitation
tradition and talk of how it adheres to the prAtiSAkhya or otherwise. I
will get into some details in a separate post. 

Re: pada pATha etc from the Rgveda and yajurveda, my observation is
merely the following. The practice of selecting Rk and yajus verses from
various places to form one composite sUkta should be distinguished
from what is original to the known samhitA of these veda-s. There is
material that is common to both vedas and there is material that is
unique to one or the other. In cases where the original sources of the
verses that go into making a sUkta are known, one has to be careful
not to mix up the two, that is all. This is precisely because there is
so
much similarity in the content and the tones used in recitation. Of
course, the practice of traditional reciters has to be the guide, and
one cannot rule out the possibility of lost branches of each veda being
the source for some of the verses that are known today, without being
part of the corresponding samhitA.

However, in these cases, the recitation tradition is itself very careful
about keeping them demarcated as such. For example, in the course
of reciting the rudra praSna, a line "namas te astu bhagavan ..." is
inserted in between the 1st and 2nd anuvAkas. However, this is
omitted in the pada, krama and other pAThas, because it is not part
of the taittirIya samhitA. Consequently, during kramArchana, which 
uses the krama version of the text, this line is omitted. So, there is a
good deal of fidelity that is maintained in various ways by the oral
tradition in these textual matters.

Vidyasankar