Dogma

I attended one of the regularly-scheduled 6:00 Saturday evening lectures in English at the Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama in Mysore last night. The advertised topic was Viveka Chudamani, but the speaker, a thirty-something-looking monk named Swami Shree Mohananandaji Maharaj, mostly talked about how interpreting the Vedas is a matter of trying to understand the non-understandable.

I appreciated that, because so much of what I’m trying to grasp while here in India, through yoga asana practice, chanting, Sanskrit study, and just opening my eyes to temples and traditions and different perspectives on the Unknown seems so ungraspable—at least through my familiar mode of reasoned argument and critical intellectual reflection.

The Swami elaborated on the importance of humility when approaching these topics and the requirement of long and serious studies of the Vedas to come to an appreciation of their deep and abiding message.

Again, right on; there is untold wisdom in these sacred texts; a lifetime of study would be required to even scratch the surface of what they have to offer; obviously, the best I can hope for in a couple months is a single ice crystal on the topmost tip of the tippy-top of the iceberg.

Still, this is what I consistently wrangle with: the Vedic texts, as I understand it, are seen to be absolutely authorative; Swami Prabhavananda, in his all-encompassing Spiritual Heritage of India writes, “Even more than the other scriptures of the world, the Vedas make a special claim to be divine in their origin…The authority of the Vedas does not depend on anything external. They themselves are the authority, being the knowledge of God.”

Consequently, all we can ever do is interpret the Vedas; we can never challenge them. This is difficult for me; I want something more in the way of justification for huge claims about the nature of reality and what happens after we die than simply “this book says so.”

Of course, this may simply be because I haven’t studied them enough; maybe by the time I’ve grasped a whole snowflake on that iceberg’s tip I’ll conclude differently.