[Advaita-l] Apoureshyatva - Faith or Logic?

[Rajaram Venkataramani]

For brevity, I am not quoting other's post in my response. The belief that
Vedas were unauthored pre-dated Jaimini. He himself refers to quite a few
earlier writers such as Badarayana, Badari, Atisayana, Karsanaji, Atreya,
Asmarthya, LakutAyana and KamukAyana in support of his system. He was only
defending the then existing belief that Vedas were apaureshya. He does give
arguments against paureshytvam because that was held by certain schools
including nyaya who thought Vedas were produced by god and others who
thought it was the opinion of rishis. But negating paureshyatvam (based on
unknown authorship and the contingency of destruction of created entities)
is not the only thing that he does. He gives positive arguments to support
eternality of word and it's meaning based on the theory of language. This
scheme is followed by Kumarila Bhatta, Sabhara and Prabhakara also though
they differ on details and elaboration.

They don't argue that Vedas are some kind of special words that have self -
validity or that only words in Vedas have self - validity. They argue that
all words have self-validity as they produce understanding including new
words, which are nothing but composites and modifications. They explain how
convention etc. produces understanding with regard to Vedas. They explain
how words are different to the medium, effort to produce them and heir
meaning. With slight differences, Prabhakara and Kumarila, explain why
Vedic sentences, not just individual words, are eternal like any individual
word is. We can only go by tradition as to what they considered as vedic
sentences. However, our redefinition of what constitutes Vedas cannot
affect the corpus of apaureshya texts that they defended as apaureshya.
Their scheme does not call for faith if you consider the times they lived
in. It gives the aspirant of their time both postive proofs and counters
against opposite views and 98% of their arguments stand even today. Their
arguments need to be rejigged today, in my opinion, only because we cannot
say languages and  did not evolve.

On Friday, June 29, 2012, Bhaskar YR wrote:
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