[Advaita-l] Apaurusheyatva of Vedas.

[Ramakrishna Upadrasta]

namaste Shri Omkar,

I had meant to answer to earlier and had even the relevant excerpts
typed, but here is a short reply.


2011/9/12 Omkar Deshpande <omkar_deshpande at yahoo.com>:
> <<<Search for errors in each. If any one is devoid of errors, go with that. If both have errors, leave them and search third one without that.>>>
>
> What errors do you see in the epistemology where pratyakSha is the foundational pramANa even for shabda (whose validity is not intrinsic but dependent on pratyakSha)?
>


shabda cannot be a result of pratyaxa. It has to be independent of
pratyaxa. Someone else's pratyaxa, whether "normal" or "supernatural",
is not the subject's pratyaxa. Such a pramaaNa becomes a shabda
pramaaNa for the subject, if that someone else is an aapta.

Also, shabda being a case of inference is a vaisheShika model, which
has been rejected by nyAya. Both of these reject the buddhist model,
who reduce the shabda to being a case of memory. As other pointed out,
mImAMsakaa-s extend this further and set a special status to veda
pramaaNa with the apauruSheya status, which really brings in a lot of
punch.


Further, here is a short summary of epistemogies of different schools
by Shri Sastri-ji from V.P. Please have a look.
http://www.celextel.org/summaryofvedantabooks/summaryofvedantaparibhasha.html

He writes that:
<QUOTE>
Sankhya and Yoga - Perception, Inference and Verbal testimony
(Pratyaksha, Anumana and Sabda).
Nyaya - Perception, Inference, Verbal testimony and Comparison
(Pratyaksha, Anumana, Sabda and Upamana).
PrabhakaraMimamsa - Perception, Inference, Verbal testimony,
Comparison andPresumption (Pratyaksha, Anumana, Sabda, Upamana and
Arthapatti).
Vedantaand Bhatta Mimamsa - Perception, Inference, Verbal
testimony,Comparison, Presumption and Non-apprehension (Pratyaksha,
Anumana,Sabda, Upamana, Arthapatti and Anupalabdhi).
The Naiyayikasinclude presumption under inference, but this is
rejected by Vedanta onthe ground that presumption is based on negative
invariableconcomitance (vyatireka-vyapti) which Vedanta does not
admit, sinceVedanta admits only affirmative inference.
</QUOTE>

By the above, listing of "Perception, Inference and Verbal testimony"
shows that they are independent of each other for even saa,nkhya and
yoga. Otherwise, perception would be enough. The same is case for even
nyaaya (and perhaps for dvaita model as well.)

(It is akin to the classes of sense of touch being independent from
sense of hearing. They cannot contradict each other as they are
ill-equipped to do so. The color of a rose cannot be inferred from its
smell. The comparison is weak because both are in pratyaxa, but the
example shows the independence of each pramaaNa.)

namaste
Ramakrishna