[Advaita-l] nAsadIya sUkta in the taittirIya brAhmaNa - part 3

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

A further clarification about tamas and tapas. In the Rgveda too, this
verse does have tamas in the first half. The word tapas occurs only in the
last quarter.

The Rgveda reading is in line with the taittirIya upanishad vAkyas that
say, "sa tapo'tapyata. sa tapas taptvA. ..." and also with the role of
tamas in the manifestation of visRshTi.

tama AsIt tamasA gULham agre .... tapasas tanmahinA ...

In fact, if we take this "nAsad AsIn no sad AsIt" along with CU "sadeva
saumya idam agra AsIt," TU "asadvA idam agra AsIt, tato vai sad ajAyata,"
"satyaM cAnRtaM ca satyam abhavat" and apply the gItA, "nAsato vidyate
bhAvo nAbhAvo vidyate sataH," "na sat tan nAsad ucyate," everything about
 advaita vedAnta's philosophizing on sat, asat, sadasadvilakshaNa,
anirvacanIyatva etc is right there in the Sruti and smRti.

Best regards,
Vidyasankar


On Mar 11, 2017 2:52 AM, "Venkatraghavan S" <agnimile at gmail.com> wrote:

Namaste Sri Vidyasankar,

Thanks for the observations. In particular, the variation in the reading in
the taittiriya to tamasah instead of tapasah is interesting from a vedanta
perspective - supportive of the view of tamas (avidyA) as the jagat upAdAna
kAraNa.