[Advaita-l] Anantaa vai vedaah

[Rajaram Venkataramani]

On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 8:20 PM, Vidyasankar Sundaresan <
svidyasankar at hotmail.com> wrote:

> In a general sense, the word veda, as a noun form related to the verb vid -
> "to know"
> - can be seen as encapsulating every single element of human knowledge. In
> a different
> day and age, perhaps this attitude would be unexceptionable. However,
> making assertions
> about the unfolding of any and every kind of human knowledge from veda
> mantras, and
> that too at a vyAvahArika level is fraught with problems, especially in
> contemporary times.
> It should be seen as nothing more than arthavAda - stuti of knowledge in
> general. Given
> the weakness of social and ideological support for the transmission
> tradition today,
> combined with the motivation from multiple quarters to generate new texts
> aspiring to
> be called veda, I would urge a huge note of caution about pressing this
> point.
>
In times, when the second most popular yoga teacher is Shilpa Shetty (the
first being Baba Ramdev), it is not possible to agree that sarvajnatvam is
possible. It may be contradict one's personal experience but sarvajnatvam is
quite possible through yoga. Madhusudana quotes Patanjali Yoga Sutra to say
that one who realizes the difference between Purusha and Buddhi gains
rulership over all hings and knowledge of everything. Giving that up as
well, one attains liberation. There are different means of gaining different
knowledge including all given in P.Yo.Su.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/yogasutr.htm  If you go to Kapilash and
cross over forests guarded by ferocious wolves, there are Siva Yogis who
live on fruits and mountain spring water. Folks like that may be able to
tell how experientially valid these claims of Patanjali are.

It is true that by knowing that One being, one knows everything because all
this is nothing but that. This however does not mean that there can be any
obstacle to particularized knowledge for a jnani who is free from all
limiting adjunctions. If there is an obstacle to any knowledge, phenomenal
or transcendental, then he is definitely different from Him who is That.