Page 588 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

PRIMITIVE ARYAN CULTURE AND RELIGION 369

by Dr. Muir, one who reads the di_cussions of these writers
cannot fail to be struck " with the acuteness of their reasoning,
the logical precision with which their arguments are presented,
and the occasional liveliness and ingenuity of their illustrations. "*
They all bear witness to the fact that so far as tradition went,-
an unbroken tradition of great antiquity,-there was no
remembrance of the Vedas having been ever composed by or
ascribed to any human author; and taking into consideration the
learning ·and the piety of these scholars, their testimony must be
regarded as an unimpeachable proof of the existence of such a
tradition, which was considered ancient several centuries before
the Christian era. But though a tradition whose high antiquity
can be so well established deserves to be seriously considered in
our investigations regarding the character of the Vedas, yet it is,
after all, a negative proof, showing, it may be urged, nothing more
than no human author of the Veda has been known from times
beyond the memory of all these ancient scholars. Jaimini,
the author of Mimamsil. Sutras, therefore, further deduces { I,
1, 5) the eternity of the Vedas from the relation or connection
between words and their meanings, which he holds to be eter-
nal (autpattika) and not conventional. A word is defined to be
an aggregate of letters in a particular order, and its sense
is said to be conveyed by these letters following each other in a
definite succession. But Grammarians are not satisfied with this
view, and maintain that the sense of a word is not expressed by
the aggregate of its constituent letters which are transient, but
by a certain ·super-sensuous entity, called sphota { i. e. manifester
from sphut), which supervenes the aggregate of the letters as soon
as they are pronounced, and reveals their meaning. Jaimini
denies that there are words in the Vedas which denote
any transient o~jects, and as the Vedic words and their sense are
eternal, it follows, according to him, that the Vedas are self-
demonstrative, or that they shine, like the sun, by their own light,
and are, therefore, perfect and infallible. If particular parts of the
Vedas are designated after some ~.i~his, it does not, we are
told, prove those sages to have been their authors, but merely
the t~achers who studied and handed them down. Badaril.yana,
as interpreted by Shapkaracharya (I, 3, 26-3j ), the great leader
of the Vedanta School, accepts the doctrine of the eternity of
• Muir, 0. S. T., Yo!. III, p. sS.
A. 24