Hinduism, Veges etc.

[Guest guest]

Dear Hupa Ram-Das-ji,

 

" My original question brought into the scene, the fact that Hinduism

except for Vedanta is really base superstition. Somebody on here

recently was even saying that Sankara was an incarnation of Siva for

godsake. Religion is about manipulation and being on the inner

exploitive groups. Why do you think Sankara incarnated? And even he in

the face of base superstition had to pay lipservice to it. "

 

I think it is more charitable to say that Shankara is superstitious

than to say that he was against superstition but was so weak that he

had to pay lipservice to it anyway. In any case, how exactly are we

going to maintain that Vedanta is less superstitious than the Yellama

cult?

 

Shankara, for instance, says that Shudras do not have adhikara to

study the Upanishads because upanayanam mantras for Shudras are

lacking in the Vedas (and the Vedas explicitly bar Shudras from

performing yajnas) and because smriti (ie: manu smriti) prohibits it

very clearly. Is this superstition or is it something else? Shankara's

pramana here is scripture and it just happens that Shankara and his

school believes in a certain set of scriptures as being authoritative.

If this is the case, why is it more superstitious for someone to hold

the Yellama cult as authoritative than to hold Vedas and

Dharmashastras as authoritative? This is a major epistemological

proble, I think.

 

Either we have to accept that Shudras are not entitled to study the

Upanishads (meaning they should not) or we have to reject

Shankaracharya's position (and also the manu-smriti). Even if we

reject Shankaracharya's position here, we would still either have to

reject the Vedas as apaurusheya or accept that Shudras are not

entitled to perform yajnas. If we have to consider both Shankara and

the Vedas as fully fallible, then how do we know what to accept at

all? Basically none of what Shankara says can be independently derived

through logic (and Shankara is clear about this), so what determines

what we accept and what we don't? Just a matter of our raga-dvesha, it

seems.

 

In any case, this is obviously a very serious problem

epistemologically (unless one can easily accept that Shudras are not

entitled to study the Upanishads, but I am sure a lot of us find this

difficult to accept) if we want to accept " Vedanta. " I hope you have

some neat solution to this problem!

 

Regards,

 

Rishi.