[Advaita-l] Apoureshyatva - Faith or Logic?

[V Subrahmanian]

'Unauthored' is a commonly accepted word for this.

subrahmanian.v


On 6/30/12, Sunil Bhattacharjya <sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dear friends,
>
> I was just thinking about a good English word for Apaurusheyatva and feel
> that the word "uninvented" may be a good contender for that. For example,
> Newton discovered the laws of gravity but not invented them as these laws
> are eternal. Can I request the learned friends to comment on it and / or
> suggest if they have any better word in mind?
>
> Regards,
> Sunil KB
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>  From: Rajaram Venkataramani <rajaramvenk at gmail.com>
> To: A discussion group for Advaita Vedanta
> <advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org>
> Sent: Friday, June 29, 2012 12:00 PM
> Subject: [Advaita-l]  Apoureshyatva - Faith or Logic?
>
> 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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