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Vidyasankar Sundaresan (vidya@cco.caltech.edu) wrote: : 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. : 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. : 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. : It is not upto us to classify parts of one text as Sruti and other parts : as smr.ti. based on our own predilections. Dear Vidyasankarji: Thank you for your followup post. You are right about the classification of shruti and smR^iti. What I wrote is from a practical point of view. I respectfully differ on the suggestion about the necessity of 'dry scholarship'. As I understand, the religion was neither invented by the scholars nor are they the keepers of the religion. Scholars only do the svAdhyAya-GYAna-yajna, that is their way of worship. The religion comes from God, and it is He who keeps it in shape (yada yada hi dharmasya... ). The religion is entirely Divine, including the worshipper and the worshipped (brahmArpanaM brahmahavi ... ). I do not see any room for 'dry scholarship' in yoga (religion). On the other hand, scholarship is an useful pursuit. It helps us to focus our attention, and prepare us in our spiritual lives, but eventually, we must go beyond the shastras (shabdabrahmAtivartate). Nevertheless, I am curious about what your complete views are on the shruti and SmR^iti classification, please educate me about this. With best regards, Dhruba.
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