[Advaita-l] Anantaa vai vedaah

[Balasubramanian Ramakrishnan]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 10:08 PM, Raghav Kumar <raghavkumar00 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Namaste Siva Senani garu, Shri Lalitaalaalita ji and all other friends
>
> Thank you for your very meticulous effort in giving us these valuable
> quotations from the mUlaM and the two bhAShyam-s.
>
> The question was - is "anantA vai vedAH" (taittiriya brAhmaNam 3rd aShTakaM)
> only a gunArthavAda or can it be taken literally. I know full well the
> limitation of intellect in arriving at a final conclusion. But in favor of
> "Vedas are infinite", the following points come up
>

That's an interesting question.

The arthavAda is the praise that the knowledge of the sAvitracayanam
is equal to the knowledge of all the vedas, the arthavaada is not on
the "anantaa.h" characteristic of the vedas. The text says
"avi~jnaataan **iva* darshayaan cakaara". The parable is that the
mountain was so big and at such a distance, that it's size could not
be comprehended by the human intellect, although not "infinite" in the
mathematical sense of the word. Bhaaradvaaja with 75 years of study (3
lifetimes, 1 lifetime = 25 years) in comparison had mastered portions
in comparison to the large mountain, was 3 small lumps of mud. So as a
practical matter, the sentence can be taken literally.

There is an parallel adage in Tamil "kaRRatu kallaLavu, kallaatatu
malaiyaLavu", although not applied to the veda in particular.

Rama