[Advaita-l] Veda-s & its apaurusheyatva

[Jaldhar H. Vyas]

sorry I did not get a chance to respond to this earlier.

On Tue, 1 Sep 2009, Bhaskar YR wrote:

> praNAms
> Hare Krishna
>
> One of my cybernet friends, expressed his observation on vedas'
> aparusheyatva.  I'd like to get the clarification on this from the learned
> prabhuji-s of this forum.  Here is his observation :
>
> // quote //
> What puzzled me was that the veda also had intimate knowledge of the
> names,culture,topography etc of a very small place in the universe called
> bhArata-varsha. This was proof to me that veda was "authored" by Indians!
> Had it been unauthored and eternal, it will likely not show affinity
> towards India will it? Why do you think veda has no names like John and
> Peter? Why do you think it makes no reference to places such as Europe and
> Africa? Why do you think it talks of ganga and sarasvati and not of Nile
> or Amazon which are even bigger rivers? The proper nouns in the veda are
> specific to our culture and it is the proof that it is not eternal and
> unauthored. Veda as knowledge is eternal but as a text it appears to be a
> divinely inspired content in accordance with place and time in which it
> was revealed. If veda were to be revealed in another galaxy in another
> planet how will they make sense of the names
> in it? Obviously, if the veda is revealed there, its spiritual content
> will be the same, but not the textual content.

compare with scientific laws.  gravity, relativity etc. are "unauthored" 
yet they are expressed in terms belonging to a particular culture like E, 
g, etc.  There is no reason we couldn't say OM = ma cha squared but we 
don't.  In fact science is largely responsible for the continuing rapid 
expansion of the English language accross the world.  Yet despite this you 
can't make arguments such as e.g. Q was not originally a letter of the 
latin alphabet so any formulas containing it are invalid.  Or Isaac Newton 
was prejudiced against Indians therefore gravity doesn't apply in India. 
(He wasn't as far as I know, this is just an example.)  It is this kind of 
second-guessing of the meaning of the Vedas that the doctrine of 
apaurusheyatva is trying to prevent.  That names are similiar to laukika 
names is not relevant.  You have to call them something and these were the 
names at hand.


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