[Advaita-l] Scholarly Article on Why Vedas are Valid

[Kalyan K]

Namaste Vidyasankar-ji,

>indra, agni and varuNa are not supposed to be worshipped in temples anyway.

Please tell me why you say that Indra, Agni and Varuna are not supposed to
be worshipped in temples.
Please use vedas for justifying this.

As far as I know, only brahma (chaturmukha) is not supposed to be worshipped
(though this doesn't come from the vedas).

>However, every time somebody gets married in front of a fire, using the
veda
>mantra-s, every time a child is named using a vaidika ritual, every time a
>cremation is done, the major and minor gods of the veda are worshipped.

It is true but it also shows that the worship of the vedic gods is
occasional in the present age.


>That may be so, but on the flip side, do consider that even after Alexander
and
>his army came all the way into north-west India, no one, either on the
Greek side
>or on the Indian side, thought of the gods of the Greeks as being
essentially the
>same as the deva-s of the veda. For the Indians, the Greeks were yavaNa-s
and
>they were alien avaidika people, while for the Greeks, the Indians were
distinctly
>alien too. The world had to wait for about 2000 years after Alexander, for
the
>idea to emerge that the ancient Greeks had a lot in common with the vaidika
>heritage of India.

>The point I'm making is that if ritualistic Indians have changed a lot from
the age
>of large rAjasUya-s and aSvamedha-s, that is something that has been
intrinsic to
>the religious and ritual reality of the said people, not something that was
imposed
>on them extrinsically.

If you go by one of the theories (Aryan Migration theory), then Indra and
many other vedic gods themselves have Indo-European (external) roots rather
than purely Indian roots. I am not advocating that this theory is correct,
but it is one of the possibilities.

Further, even if we assume that the AMT is incorrect and the major vedic
gods have purely Indian roots, it is still a matter of fact that vedic
culture penetrated the southern parts of India at a later date as compared
to the northern ones.

It is not also the case that foreigners were always treated as permanent
aliens. Some have been welcomed into the vedic fold too. For example, even
though the Kushanas were originally from outside India, we find that some of
the later Kushana Kings have converted to Hinduism (which would have been
possible only with the consent of the brahmanas at that time).

I sometimes feel that people became more rigid during the middle ages as
compared to the ancient ones.

Regards
Kalyan