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Dhruba Chakravarti wrote: > > > Dear Friends: > > I read your articles with interest. Scholarship aside, there is a very > practical side to this issue. The SBG is both a shruti and a smR^iti. This is neither here nor there. What gets classified as Sruti may be a matter of dry scholarship, but every religion needs its dry scholiasts if it is to survive as any recognizable entity. > > The strongest proof of its being a shruti is in the opening verses of the > chapter 4. It is clearly stated that the yoga, the uttamam rahasyam, the > shAshvata-dharma that is described in the SBG, comes from God Himself. > Sanjaya can not be credited with authorship. Au contraire, the statement that the SAsvata-dharma was declared by God Himself does not serve as proof that the Gita is Sruti. In fact, one rigid criterion of what is Sruti is that Sruti is not a creation of ISvara. I purposely don't want to use the word God here. There is no easy escape from the system of pUrva mImAmsA if one wants to adhere to the Sruti-smr.ti classification. Of course, if you want to relax criteria and declare all "good religious books" to be Sruti, then you must be prepared to rebuild the basic foundations of all of Hinduism. You must also be prepared to impose restrictions on which religious books are "good" and which are not. For example, would the kaula and vAmAcAra tantras also be considered "good"? If yes, what is the meaning of "good"? If not, why not, when they claim to have been declared by Siva Himself or the Devi Herself? That said, no one credits Sanjaya with authorship of any part of the Gita. Krishna's words are just a statement of the fact that Krishna is the jagadguru, the teacher of the world. For that matter, a lot of Agamas state that they were declared by Siva in a conversation with Parvati or by Vishnu in a conversation with Narada or someone else. These Agamas are considered to be smr.ti, even though they were declared by God. Let us give the traditional scholars some credit for their classifications. The criterion that a smr.ti has to be in accordance with Sruti in order to be valid, helps to reject a number of texts of doubtful provenance. > > The SBG has its verses of smR^iti too. For example, verse 9.32. > > The ground rule to determine the shruti and smR^iti parts is this: the > shruti is timeless, imperishable, while the smR^iti is laws or > observations on society and is perishable. In character, the SBG is > mostly shruti. > smr.ti is more than just laws and observations on society. smr.ti is a generic term that includes a wide variety of texts of different kinds, of which the law-books are only one portion. The requirement that a smr.ti has to be in accordance with Sruti in order to be valid, ensures that all valid smr.tis are mostly Sruti "in character". That still does not make these texts Sruti. > The verse 9.32 stands out as a smR^iti verse, as the statement is based > on the lot of women and the shudras at that time. Clearly the society > had degenerated at that time, from the time when women were among rishis > contributing to the vedas, to a time when duryodhana and duhshAsana could > strip droupadi in public and be boastful about it, such that Sri Krishna > was 'kAlosmi lokakshayokR^it.h pravritto'. It is meaningless in todays > society too. > It is not upto us to classify parts of one text as Sruti and other parts as smr.ti. based on our own predilections. Regards, S. Vidyasankar
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