The Udayavar Kainkarya Sabha is planning monthly discourses, in the Triplicane Parthasarathy temple, Chennai, to celebrate Ramanujacharya’s 1,000th year. The first discourse was by M.A. Venkatakrishnan, on Ramanujacharya’s Vedartha Sangraha . Of the nine works that Ramanujacharya wrote, Vedartha Sangraha was the first. It was in fact a discourse that he gave in Tirumala. The title can be translated as ‘Essence of the meaning of the Vedas.’ Although the word ‘Veda’ is used in the title, the work is, in fact, about the Upanishads. “There is nothing peculiar about this, because Upanishads are simply sections of the Vedas,” said Venkatakrishnan. Jaimini wrote a Sutra for what is called the Karma Kanda section of the Vedas, but the Brahma Kanda is more important from a philosophical standpoint and Vyasa wrote Brahma Sutra on the Brahma Kanda portion.
For a person to be recognised as the founder of a philosophical school of thought, he had to write commentaries on Upanishads, Brahma Sutra and Bhagavad Gita. While Ramanuja wrote a line by line explanation of Brahma Sutra and Gita, he did not do this for the Upanishads in his Vedartha Sangraha . Instead, he gave a concise explanation of the important Upanishadic statements. Vedartha Sangraha begins with refutations of the arguments of rival schools, like Advaita, the school of Bhaskaracharya, and of Yadava Prakasa. (This Yadava Prakasa is not to be confused with Ramanuja’s teacher). After the refutations, Ramanuja set forth arguments to justify his interpretations. But why did he begin with arguments against rivals? Not so difficult to see why he did so, said Venkatakrishnan. If you want honey, you have to first smoke out the bees. Likewise, before laying down your thoughts, you have to demolish the arguments of the opposition, which is what Ramanuja did.
Ramanuja posed seven questions to those who interpreted the statement ‘Ekameva advitiyam’ as indicating the absence of anything other than Brahman. Nothing else is satya, was the argument of those who claimed that the world was illusory. Venkatakrishnan explained a few of Ramanuja’s questions. Those who posit the theory that nothing is satya except Parabrahman, say that jnana is obtained by reading the Sastras. So Ramanuja asked if the Sastras were real or not. If they were real, then we now have two entities - Brahman and the Sastras, and so the argument that there is only ‘One’ and that there is nothing else gets destroyed. If the answer to the question is that the Sastras are false, then how can something that is false give you jnana?
The Vedas have statements that speak of bheda (several), abheda (One) and bhedabheda (several and One). In Ramanuja’s philosophy, all three are reconciled. They are not seen as contradictory but as complementary.
There is a Bhoothathazhwar paasuram about Tirumala, in which the Azhwar says that a male elephant in Tirumala picked up a bamboo with two holes, dipped it in honey and offered it to the female elephant.
Venkatakrishnan said it was possible to interpret this paasuram in the context of Ramanuja’s presentation of Vedartha Sangraha in Tirumala. One could say that with divine foresight, the Azhwar was, here, comparing Ramanuja to the male elephant. The two holes in the bamboo were bheda and abheda srutis. Ramanuja dipped this bamboo in the honey called ghataka srutis (mediating texts) and gave his sishyas the Vedartha Sangraha .
With this ingenious interpretation of Bhoothathazhwar’s paasuram, the discourse came to a close.