[Advaita-l] Vedas are not apauresheya according to the Vedas ?

[Rajaram Venkataramani]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 9:51 PM, Sunil Bhattacharjya <
sunil_bhattacharjya at yahoo.com> wrote:

>  Dear Shri Rajaram,
>
> Excuse me if I am blunt to ask you if you have missed some mails in the
> recent past. Sometime back I remember to have posted a verse from the Veda
> where it was shown that the ancient ones had their jijnashas and on
> contemplation they found the answers. Once an eternal truth is discovered
> is there any need for everybody to rediscover that? I think not. The wheel
> need not be reinvented again and again. The ancient sages were not
> gullibles to have accepted the revelations blindly. The question of pramana
> of the revlations were sorted out before incorporating them in the Veda. No
> intelligent person questions them the way no intelligent person questions
> whether atomic fission is possible or not. Having checked through their own
> contemplation thye ancient sages accepted the revelations and they became
> part of  the Veda. In order that the posterity remembers the the original
> discoverers of the Vedic truths or eternal laws, the names of the
> respective rishis have  been tagged to the hymns. That is the story of the
> way the revelataions came to  us in the form of the Veda.
>

RV: According to the Vedas, there is repeated re-discovery of the same
Vedas cycle after cycle.

>
> So also the Vedas were called apaurusheya to indicate their eternal
> status.
>

RV: apauresheyatvam has nothing to do with nityatvam. Nyaya school
considers the vedas to pauresheya but nitya. Mimamsakas consider Vedas to
be apauresheya but nitya. Advaita Vedanta considers Vedas to be apauresheya
but not nitya (in the sense of being a vastu) because Vedas have origin at
the the of creation like any other created entity such as space. Advaita
Vedanta considers Vedas to be nitya in the sense of that the same
jnanapravaham or flow knowledge is there in every cycle of time.

>
> BTW, are you raising this issue of the aparusheyatva of the Veda only in
> the Advaita list or you are raising the same in the Visishtadvaita list or
> the Dvaita list or the other Vedic lists. If you are doing it only in the
> Advaita list would you mind telling us, why you are trying to do this
> particular favor to the Advaita list only ?
>

RV: I also discuss this in my blog where members from other schools of
thought including nirishvara sankhya and atheistic scientists can express
their views. I also discuss with scholars from all schools of thought
privately  - for example with my teacher of gaudiya vaishnavam. So it is
not a "favour" that I extend to advaita list alone on account of my birth
in a smartha family. If there are good (traditional) scholars in other
lists like Subrahmanian, Vidyasankar, Jaldhar etc. to name a very few, I
will learn from through listening, discussing or debating. Often, I find
lists lacking in scholarship or openness to discuss views opposed to their
established beliefs but if you know others who are wise, please let me
know.