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xvi] Position of the Pañcarātra Literature 15 The very word sātvata indicates a lower caste, and the words bhāgavata and sātvata are interchangeable. It is said that a sātvata of the pañcama caste who by the king's order worships in temples is called a bhāgavata. As a means of livelihood the sātvatas worship images and live upon offerings for initiation and those made to temple gods; they do not perform the Vedic duties, and have no relationship with the Brahmins, and so they cannot be regarded as Brahmins. It is also said that even by the sight of a man who takes to worship as a means of livelihood one is polluted and should be purified by proper purificatory ceremonies. The Pañcarātra texts are adopted by the degraded sātvatas or the bhāgavatas, and these must therefore be regarded as invalid and non-Vedic. Moreover, if this literature were founded on the Vedas, there would be no meaning in their recommendation of special kinds of rituals. It is for this reason that Bādarāyaṇa also refutes the philosophical theory of the Pañcarātra in the Brahma-sūtra.
It may, however, be urged that, though the Pañcarātra injunctions may not tally with the injunctions of Brahminic Smrti literature, yet such contradictions are not important, as both are based upon the Vedic texts. Since the validity of the Brahminic Smrti also is based upon the Vedas, the Pañcarātra has no more necessity to reconcile its injunctions with that than they have to reconcile themselves with the Pañcarātra.
The question arises as to whether the Vedas are the utterances of a person or not. The argument in favour of production by a person is that, since the Vedas are a piece of literary composition, they must have been uttered by a person. The divine person who directly perceives the sources of merit or demerit enjoins the same through his grace by composing the Vedas for the benefit of human beings. It is admitted, even by the Mimāmsakas, that all worldly affairs are consequent upon the influence of merit and demerit. So the divine being who has created the world knows directly the sources of merit and demerit. The world cannot be produced directly through the effects of our deeds, and it has to be admitted that there must be some being who utilizes the effects of our deeds, producing the world in consonance with them. All the scriptural 1 Thus Manu says:
vais' yāt tu jāyate urātyāt sudhanvācārya eva ca bhāruşaś ca nijanghaś ca maitra-sātvata eva ca.
Agama-prāmānya, p. 8.
