The Vedas are more a record than an interpretation of religious experience. While their authority is final, that of the expression and the interpretations of the religious experience are by no means final. The latter are said to be Smriti or the remembered testimonies of great souls. These interpretations are bound to change if they are to be relevant to the growing content of knowledge. Facts alone stand firm, judgments waver and change. Facts can be expressed in the dialect of the age.
The relation between the vision and its expression, the fact aid its interpretation, is very close. It is more like the body and the skin than the body and its clothes. When the vision is to be reinterpreted, what is needed is not a mere verbal change but a readaptation to new habits of mind. We have evidence to show that the Vedas meant slightly different things to successive generations of believers.
On the fundamental, metaphysical, and religious issues the different commentators, Sankara, Ramanuja, and Madhva, offer different interpretations. To ascribe finality to a spiritual movement is to bring it to a standstill. To stand still is to fall back. There is not and there cannot be any finality in interpretation tradition which has to learn (sravana), an intellectual training through which we have to pass (manana), and an ethical discipline we have to undergo (nididhyasana).
To begin with, we are all learners. We take our views on the authority of a tradition which we have done nothing to create but which we have only to accept in the first instance. In every department, art or morality, science or social life, we are taught the first principles and are not encouraged to exercise our private judgement. Religion is not an exception to this rule. Religious scriptures are said to have a right to our acceptance.
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The second step is logical reflection or manana. To understand the sacred tradition we should use our intelligence. ‘Verily, when the sages or rishis were passing away, men inquired of the gods, “who shall be our rishi’ they gave them the science of reasoning for constructing the sense of the hymns.
Criticism helps the discovery of truth and, if it destroys anything, it is only illusions that are bred by piety that are destroyed by it. Sruti and Smriti, experience and interpretation, scripture and logic, are the two wings given to the human soul to reach the truth. While the Hindu view permits us to criticize the tradition, we should do so only from within.
It can be remolded and improved only by those who accept it and use it in their lives. Our great reformers, our eminently original thinkers like Sankara and Ramanuja, are rebels against tradition; but their convictions, as they themselves admit, are also revivals of tradition. While the Hindus are hostile to those who revile their tradition and repudiate it altogether, and condemn them as avaidika or nastika, they are hospitable to all those who accept the tradition, however critical they may be of it.
The authoritativeness of the Veda does not preclude critical examination of matters dealt with in it. The Hindus believe that the truths of revelation are justifiable to reason. Our convictions are valuable only when they are the results of our personal efforts to understand.
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The accepted tradition becomes reasoned truth. If the truths ascertained by inquiry conflict with the statements found in the scriptures, the latter must be explained in a way agreeable to truth. No scriptures can compel us to believe falsehoods. ‘A thousand scriptures verily cannot convert a jar into a cloth.’
We have much in the Vedas which is a product not of man’s highest wisdom but of his wayward fancy If we remember that revelation precedes its record, we will realize that the Veda may not be an accurate embodiment of the former. It has in it a good deal of inference and interpretation mixed up with intuition and experience. Insistence on Vedic authority is not an encouragement of credulity or an enslaving subjection to scriptural texts. It does not justify the conditions under which degrading religious despotisms grew up later.
The Vedic testimony, the logical truth, must become for us the present fact. We must recapture something of that energy of soul of which the Vedas are the creation by letting the thoughts and emotions of that still living past vibrate in our spirits.
By nididhyasana or contemplative meditation, ethical discipline, the truth is built into the substance of our life. What we accept on authority and test by logic is now proved by its power to sustain a definite and unique type of life of supreme value. Thought completes itself in life and we thrill again with the creative cxpcriencc of the first days of the founders of the religion.