[Advaita-l] SRI SUKTAM - Meaning

[Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 1:03 PM, Sundaresan, Vidyasankar (GE Infra,
Water) <vidyasankar.sundaresan at ge.com> wrote:
>
> Re: the description of svarita, I am personally only familiar
> with the taittirIya prAtiSAkhya. It seems to me that what is
> practiced orally can be understood quite well with respect to
> what that text says about the svarita, but it requires a small
> adjustment of how one understands the prAtiSAkhya itself.
> That is a separate and highly involved issue though, so I won't
> get into it here.

I'll quote some of the relevant sUtras later. Not sure what you mean
by "small adjustment". But in summary: the svarita is supposed to be
udAtta in pitch in the beginning and reach the anudAtta tone at the
end. The prAtishAkhya is very firm about this - there are no two ways
of understanding this (uccair udAttaH, nIcair anudAttaH, samAhAraH
svaritaH, etc). The tribhAshya-ratna very clearly agrees and explains
this in no uncertain terms as starting with udAtta and ending in
anudaatta as the accepted method. Also, the tones are not for pure
vya~njanas - which is very obviously violated in the current
tradition. And not a single sUtra is to be found anywhere
differentiating any hrasva and dIrgha svaritas! Another very obvious
violation is the definition of pluta. It is supposedly 3 times the
hrasva. In the actual taittirIya texts there are symbols for time
units of (2) (3) and even (4) - but these have no connection with the
length of the hrasva - but are treated as independent "long" time
units. There are many more.

More later,

Rama