Gentoo studies

[Shrisha Rao]

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian wrote:

>  Vidyasankar Sundaresan <vsundaresan at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

> >It is not clear to me that "understanding" (if not accepting) the
> notion of
> >apaurusheyatva will greatly affect the dating of Vedic texts.

It would make the question meaningless --

> >What is a few thousand years here and there in timeless eternity?

Precisely.

> Exactly what I was wondering too. How does  "apaurusheyatva" help in
> Vedic philology? It is of relevance in understanding only later
> vedAntic thought.

Is it?  I'm not sure.  That would seem to presuppose that
`apaurushheyatva' is a concept invented by Vedanta (which cannot be so
because we know of earlier references).  Also, the Vedas themselves
partition texts into `jAta+vedAH' on many occasions; the `jAta' or "born"
texts, i.e., the authored ones, are to be treated differently, as a class,
than the "Vedic" ones; the study of language as relating to the latter
cannot, on this account, be the same as that relating to the former.  Of
course, the whole `jAtavedAH' split may be bogus, a clever fraud, etc.,
but that is not in evidence -- only in the case of the Vedas does one have
to take recourse to nirukta and other devices, and no one, as a rule, has
ever had a complete handle on them, as they themselves proclaim.

Regards,

Shrisha Rao

> Rama