[Advaita-l] Priority of Pramana based on Knowledge Domain

[Ramesh Krishnamurthy]

On 14 September 2012 19:35, Rajaram Venkataramani <rajaramvenk at gmail.com> wrote:
> RV: Nice and clear. So, laukika pramanas show that humans evolved 200000
> years ago. Does it negate the jnana created by smrti sastras that Brahma
> created Svayambhuva Manu millions of years ago at the start of krta yuga?

Response:
I am not sure what is it that you are trying to get at. Surely you
don't think of svayambhuva manu etc as historical facts, do you? And
then you also have cases such as shiva-bhagavAn cutting off ganesha's
head and replacing it with that of an elephant, the samudra-manthana,
dakSha's sacrifice, etc. These conceptions can be interpreted in
different ways and various meanings can be drawn out of them, from the
superficial to the profound. But surely we aren't going to think of
them as literal historical facts, are we? Our ancestors weren't
morons.

Most of us would have had some exposure to paurANika literature since
childhood. At least, I never had any doubts on this count and at no
point did I think of these conceptions as historical truths. By this I
am not suggesting that they are "false", only that their truth value
does not lie in their historicity.