वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

450 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS.

order, and its sense is said to be conveyed by these letters fol- lowing 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 sphoṭa (i. e., manifester, from sphuṭ), which su- pervenes the aggregate of the letters as soon as they are pro- nounced, and reveals their meaning. Jaimini denies that there are words in the Vedas which denote any transient objects, and as the Vedic words and their sense are eternal, it follows, ac- cording 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 Ṛiṣhis, it does not, we are told, prove those sages to have been their authors, but merely the teachers who studied and handed them down. Bâdarâyaṇa, as inter- preted by Shaṅkarâchârya (I, 3, 26–33), the great leader of the Vedânta School, accepts the doctrine of the eternity of sound or words, but adds that it is the species to which the word be- longs, and not the word itself, that is eternal or indestruct- ible, and, therefore, though the names of deities, like Indra and others, which are all created and hence liable to destruc- tion, are mentioned in the Veda, it does not affect the question of its eternity as the species to which Indra and others are said to belong is still eternal. In short, Vedic names and forms of species are eternal, and it is by remembering these that the world is created by Brahmâ at the beginning of each Kalpa, (Maitr. Up., VI, 22). The Veda is, therefore, the original WORD the source from which every thing else in the world emanated, and as such it cannot but be eternal; and it is interesting, as pointed out by Prof. Max Muller in his Lectures on Vedânta Philosophy, to compare this doctrine with that of Divine Logos of the Alexandrian Schools in the West. The Naiyâyikas, on the other hand, deny the doctrine of the