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Vedas and Gurbani. Whats the truth and what is not?


13Mirch
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13Mirch, there is some personal homeworkrequired now. Thanks to N30Singh who gave the hint.

go to the website http://www.srigranth.org, search for Veda, there are countless search results over there, click on the link view shabad/pauri/sloak, as just 1 line listed having the word "Veda" does not give the essence of the whole Shabad. Try to find Katha of that shabad on the website N30Singh gave above.

I have a conclusion but keeping my comments reserved :).

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  • 3 weeks later...

If I want to write an article, a post on all this. Which points should I address. How do I categorize my article?

Heres what I think I should do:

1.) Intro-What are the Vedas.

2.) History of Vedas.

3.) Sikh perspective on Vedas.

4.) Commen misconceptions regarding Sikhi and Vedas.

5.) Guru Sahib on Vedas.

6.) Shabads rejecting Vedas.

7.) Shabads approving vedas.

8.) Explaining what these shabads actually mean.

9.) Vedas in Sikh history.

10.) Conclusion- Did Sikh Gurus derieve teachings from Vedas or not. Is Sikhi a Vedic faith?

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13Mirch,

No offense veer but it requires more than reading few sikhitothemax translations of gurbani on vedas or reading knee je r k reactions articles on overall gurbani/gurmat position on Vedas. Overall gurmat view is also more than "hearing what you want to hear'. It takes people 20-30 years of studying gurmat before they can write a paper on theological and gurbani/vedas/vedant/atma-paratma topics and you want to do article right away on these topics..peace of advise- get yourself in learning mode than preaching mode..leave the preaching mode to senior gurmukhs from taksal/samparda gyanis etc. .

I am sure you will find half baked answers from online but if you wish to get full unbias view on gurmat/gurbani position on vedas your best bet is start listening to sant gyani gurbachan singh ji bhindranwale katha on all shabad related to vedas from gurmatveechar.com. Go through each shabad which points out veda/vedas and start noting down gurmat position held in each shabad and go through each gurmat position held than at the end compare all various gurmat position held regarding vedas and after carefully anaylizing each position held by gurbani on vedas then come up conclusion on overall position in Gurmat.

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13Mirch,

No offense veer but it requires more than reading few sikhitothemax translations of gurbani on vedas or reading knee je r k reactions articles on overall gurbani/gurmat position on Vedas. Overall gurmat view is also more than "hearing what you want to hear'. It takes people 20-30 years of studying gurmat before they can write a paper on theological and gurbani/vedas/vedant/atma-paratma topics and you want to do article right away on these topics..peace of advise- get yourself in learning mode than preaching mode..leave the preaching mode to senior gurmukhs from taksal/samparda gyanis etc. .

I am sure you will find half baked answers from online but if you wish to get full unbias view on gurmat/gurbani position on vedas your best bet is start listening to sant gyani gurbachan singh ji bhindranwale katha on all shabad related to vedas from gurmatveechar.com. Go through each shabad which points out veda/vedas and start noting down gurmat position held in each shabad and go through each gurmat position held than at the end compare all various gurmat position held regarding vedas and after carefully anaylizing each position held by gurbani on vedas then come up conclusion on overall position in Gurmat.

I am taking your advice. I am taking all of it. But can you explain something to me?

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But can you explain something to me?

Yes sure...I can try but ultimately you should go directly to the source- dhan dhan dhan sri guru granth sahib maharaj and dhan dhan dhan sant gurbachan singh ji bhindranwale who did katha of sri guru granth sahib ji 35 times to cover its depth..!!

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Vedas, are they something we as Sikhs respect or we believe in?

http://www.sikhaware...2520#entry92520

I’ve been asked to comment on the following statement by a prachaarak of AKJ background. Since it is an important clarification I thought I’d make it into a general post. The author is a well read and intelligent person for whom I have great respect. But on this topic I do feel he is somewhat out of his depth, as some glaring errors demonstrate. The full discussion can be seen at;

http://www.tapoban.o...p?1,4508,page=1

From the Nirmala perspective the following statement contains premises that are incorrect. In fact nearly every statement is questionable;

" As long as we don't associate Gurmat with Advaita Vedanta, I am fine with it. Gurmat is unique and nothing in the world comes even near it. To describe Gurmat through the lenses of Vedant or any other worldly philosophy is what I am against. Gurmat can be described through Gurbani, Bhai Gurdaas jee's Baani, Bhai Nandlal jee's baani and by Gursikhs who have lived Gurmat all their lives. Where does Vedant come in picture when talking about Gurmat? The root of Vedant is Vedas and these Vedas have been rejected by Guru Sahib in Gurbani, then what to talk about Vedant?"

The relationship between Gurmat and the Vedas is certainly not as simple as the author makes out. Nowhere in Gurbani are the Vedas ‘rejected’. Indirect knowledge is considered redundant without the Satiguru, but never ‘rejected’. The knowledge within the Vedas is never questioned, only the capacity for individuals to understand its meaning;

Pandit parray vakhannay veda, anatar vastu n jannay bheda

The pandit reads and recites the Vedas but does not know the inner meaning

The quotation doesn’t state the pandit is reading falsehood. The issue here is whether or not Gurmat is nastik or aastik. In common parlance this is used to describe ‘athiests’. This is not the real meaning of the term. Naastik means those who reject the Vedas and aastika are those who uphold it. Therefore Buddhists, Jains, Charvaaks and others are said to be naastik because they reject the message of the Vedas. Sant Gurbachan Singh Bhaindranwale like all Nirmalay maintains that Gurmat is aastika. The teachings conform to the mahavakya (great statements of non-duality) found in the Upanishads within the Vedas. At the same time, Gurmat is svatantar, meaning that it is independent. It is not an explicit form of Vedanta in which its claim to orthodoxy is rooted in its Vedic origins. Traditionally post-Vedantic orthodoxy requires the samprdaya to produce a detailed commentary on the Braham Surtas of Badrayana drawing upon the Upanishads. This is the distinguishing line. For Gurmat the Satiguru is the supreme authority and Gurbani meets the category of ‘unspoken’ revealed knowledge. Since this knowledge is eternal truth, it does not disagree with the mahavakyas. Nowhere in Gurbani is the attribution of Ishvar to the Vedas questioned. It is also worth noting that Gurmat is not the only tradition that has this kind of relationship. The Sri Bhagvata Purana so cherished by vaishnavs, especially gaudiya vaishnavs, takes a similar position at points about the inadequacy of the Vedas to reveal the highest truth, only the saint can assist the bhakta. Yet they are undoubtedly aastika as a tradition.

Returning to the statement above, the author’s second misunderstanding is to contrarily argue that ‘Gurmat can be explained through Gurbani’ which implies that Nirmalay describe Gurmat through some other unrelated conceptual language. The truth is that his statement is a bit like saying that you cannot explain English through English. If the Guru says ‘atma’ you need to know what He is talking about. The fact that the above author in an earlier post mistakes jeev for atma is testimony to the danger of not understanding the conceptual language of Gurbani (rather than Advaita Vedanta). This lack of knowledge is very dangerous. Nowhere does the Satiguru say ‘Jeev is Ishvar’, it is written that Atma and Parmatma are one and the same. Jeev means the ontological condition of being an individuated living being. Ishvar is the supreme being in the theological sense. This is apparent duality. The quotation he cites as evidence for the eternal nature of Jeev is considered by many Nirmalay as one of the more insightful advaita quotations in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji. In fact Sadhu Gurdit Singh bases a sizeable portion of his text Sri Gurmat Sidhantsar to exploring that quotation. Lets have a look at it;

1) Pratam parmatma ka roop which is correctly interpreted to refer to Atma

2) It is then explained that Atma is not affected by time, does not die, does not experience pain, was there at the beginning of time, is within each and every heart, has neither mother or father - these are identical qualities as Parmatma, they can only apply to Braham, and then if there were still any doubt it is written ‘teen guna ek shakti upaya, mahamaya ta kee hai shaaeiaa’ â€" from His shakti the veiling or ‘shadowing’ effect of the three guna mahamaya exists.

3) If we maintain this is still talking about a jeev, this is a jeev that now possesses the same qualities as Braham!

4) The author then states that the man of the Atma is Atma roop. This demonstrates a serious lack of understanding. Atma has just been shown to have nothing attached to it beyond an inherent shakti. The man is made of the treh guna (this is stated in Rag Asa), hence the very idea of turiya. If Braham was accessible to the man, there would be no mention of turiya â€" by definition the transcending of the antakaran. The man is by its nature insentient until it is illumined by Atma. Atma is nirgun, as has been explained above, it is pure consciousness.

In Gurmat, for as long as the Atma is affected by microcosmic ignorance (agyan) then it can never be Ishvar. Only Ishvar can be Ishvar. Yet what underpins both is Atma, non different from Parmatma (as so many shabads maintain).

Thirdly, I maintain that there is a difference between Advaita and Advaita Vedanta. Advaita is non-duality, a philosophical position about being and divinity. Advaita Vedanta is the particular tradition descending from Adi Sankaracharya. As soon as you accept that Atma is nothing other than Parmatma (satchitanand as is written in Jaap Sahib), and that Maya possesses three gunas (which constitutes everything including the antahkaran), then you are taking an Advaita position. It is not uncommon to find scholars referring to the medieval bhakti traditions as Advaita devotional traditions. That is what Gurmat is. The irony is the alternative position presented by the above author may well avoid Advaita but to uphold that; a) jeev an eternal reality cool.gif a sargun form of mukti as eternal residence in a heaven of sorts c) a realm in which Parmatma exists d) although separated somehow from the eternal witnessing jeev e) all attained through bhakti and naam - is word for word the vaishnavism of the Hare Krishnas. What makes Sikhi distinctive is its nirgun credentials. Nirgun, without guna, without defining characteristic and Sarguna meaning with any guna or defining characteristic, deen dyal, patit pavan, nirbhau, etc. Anyone who has studied tatashta lakshana and svarupa lakshana will understand the difference here. Nirguna is accepted across the board through the centuries to be the Braham of truth-consciousness-bliss. Jaap Sahib describes Parmatma in the same terms. There is no division of Parmatma into threefold division with different parts veiled from the jeev atma, as some vaishnav schools do. He is Ek. The author has failed to recognise that metaphors contextualise the non-dual statements making our updesh very ‘chintya’ (conceivable) and far from the troubled philosophy of the gaudiya vaishnav tradition. At various points in Gurbani the Satiguru has explained that a) the Atma by its nature is untouched by the experiences of the individual cool.gif Maya constitutes everything including time and space, our mind and body c) transcending the three gunas is mukti/turiya. Turiya is EXPLICITLY contrasted with the other three states of consciousness. Turiya BY DEFINITION is the ‘annihilation’ or ‘loss of identity’ the author above finds repugnant.

The last statement the author makes is worth picking up on. The fact is that for the last 300 years up to this day, the Sant Mandali of Sikhi has drawn upon Advaita to describe their experiences and their understanding of Gurmat. They didn’t all necessarily study it, but they did recognise its truthfulness. Apart from possibly Nanaksar and those post singh sabha types influenced by their Semitic schooling, I can’t think of anyone who has rejected the traditional understanding of nirguna as has been given above. We have in the panth many many texts (literally thousands) dating from the 18th and 19th Centuries which uphold this stance, this use of terminology. So what does his statement mean? It either means that not one single brahmgyani existed between 1699 and the initiation of Bhai Randhir Singh which corrected everyone OR that all these brahmgyanis chose not to speak out against this incorrect version of Gurmat for all this time! Both are ridiculous and unfounded. With regards to Bhai Gurdas Ji, I feel the author has not studied his Kabit Svayay in which many very interesting quotations are found describing the Advaita position, explicitly describing the dissolution of ‘seer’ and ‘seen’ (duality).

Nb - My second translation and commentary which is now finished goes into all of this in great detail.

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