[Advaita-l] Apaurusheyatva of Vedas.

[Raghav Kumar]

Sree Vidyasankar ji has very lucidly explained svataH-prAmANyam etc

SrI sadAnandaji,  namaskAramulu
i think you have got your answers from his post regarding the nature and
implication of svataH-prAmANyam of *any* of the pramANa-s.  But just for the
record...

You wrote earlier : "You both seem to accept that pratyaksha is validated by
itself ...but (actually) pratyaksha is validated by transaction with
karmendriyas " I think you can now see that this is not the case. - pratyaxa
or any other pramANa is indeed validated by itself.

To start with, *every pramANa* is assumed to give valid knowledge whether
pratyaxa or sabda. There is no difference. No extra assumptions are made by
sabda which are not made by pratyaxa. That is the meaning of
svataH-prAmANyaM. Then in each specific case, the conflicts and
corroboration between pramA gained from different pramANa-s will either
validate or invalidate the specific pramA leading to more refined and
processed knowledge. That is a different story.

In the example you gave:

1. "I preceive an apple, therefore there is an apple out there"
- svataH-prAmANyam of the "eye" is employed here to generate the pramA that
"There is an apple out there because I see it".
2. "I reach out with my hand-karmendriya to touch it and I don't feel it" -
At this point, another pramANa called arthApatti (with tvag-anupalabdhi,
'absence of touch') which also enjoys svatah-prAmANyam comes into the
picture and we conclude that it was just a holographic projection. The
arthApatti (with tvag-anupalabdhi)  was "Had there been an apple I would
have felt the touch of it", invalidates the first pramA. This was what Vidya
ji called parataH-*apramANyaM*

Each pramANa is self-validating and has the power (in-principle) to
invalidate any of the others in specific cases. In the example above, if the
eye-pratyaxa employed in step 1 is not acknowledged as having
svayaH-prAmANyam, we will not even bother to lift the hand-karmendriya to go
and check it out.

The prAmANyam of pratyaxa is no more and no less strong than the prAmANyam
of any of the other 5 pramANa-s. How the interaction between the pramANa-s
plays out is a matter for peer review and personal expriences / conclusions
reached from past analysis about how to privilege one pramANa over another
in certain conflict cases. There is no catch-all rule that pratyaxa or even
sabda is always right in case of a conflict. (As in bhAShyakAra saying
shruti-shatenApi...etc, sometimes sabda-pramANa has to budge and be
reinterpreted.)

I understand that what you meant was that - in the case of pratyaxa, many
other pramANa-s can quickly be brought in to operation and the we can
attempt to validate or invalidate the original pramA.

Om
Raghav