[Advaita-l] BrahmaGYAna and jIvanmukti - 2 (The Case of YAGYavalkya)

[Jaldhar H. Vyas]

On Fri, 10 Nov 2006, bhaskar.yr at in.abb.com wrote:

> Further, this yAGYAvalkya's episode triggers one more doubt in my
> mind...we, vaidika dharma followers firmly believe that vEda-s are
> apaurushEya...but going by *real life incidents* in shrutis, we are forced
> to believe that these incidents have really taken place at some point of
> time & *after* that somebody else has accounted in the bruhadAraNyaka
> shruti....dont you think prabhuji, by this, the status of aparushEyatva of
> vEda-s become shaky??...
>

Let me just interject for one minute and describe the Mimamsaka answer to 
this question.  They say we do _not_ need to accept that such incidents 
have actually occurred in space and time.  We can reason about them and 
treat them in sequence without making any claim true or false about their 
reality.

For instance based on the Star Wars films, we can say that "Luke Skywalker 
is the son of Darth Vader" or "Luke Skywalker first met Obi-Wan Kenobi 
then later he met Yoda."  Both this statements are true within the context 
of Star Wars and we can make them even though we know Star Wars is a work 
of fiction.

The context of the Vedas is Dharma.  Any statement in the Vedas is only 
meaningful in the sense that it explains a point of Dharma.  It is only in 
the context of Dharma that any point in the Vedas needs to be accepted.

In the case of Yajnavalkya, the point of description of his bad habits is 
as a prelude to his disassociation from those habits.  Yes he liked wealth 
and argumentation at first but later he renounced them.  The bad 
habitsa and the giving up form one unit of meaning, that meaning being 
That sannyasa is superior to wealth and learning.

> The question is can we
> determine the status of a jnAni by his external behaviour??

Yes but we must be careful that we are considering _all_ the behaviour. 
If you see a man in the street with a knife, do you assume that he is 
going to murder someone or that he is going to perform surgery to save 
someones life or that he is going to slice some fruit to eat with his 
friends?  The correct answer would be "I don't know.  Without further 
observations I do not have enough data to make an answer."

-- 
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at braincells.com>