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16
The Pañcarātra
[ch. texts also support the admission of such an omnipotent and omniscient God. It is this God who, on the one hand, created the Vedas, directing the people to the performance of such actions as lead them to mundane and heavenly happiness, and on the other hand created the Pañcarātra literature for the attainment of the highest bliss by the worship of God and the realization of His nature. There are some who deny the legitimate inference of a creator from the creation, and regard the Vedas as an eternally existent composition, uncreated by any divine being. Even in such a view the reason why the Vedas and the consonant Smrtis are regarded as valid attests also the validity of the Pañcarātra literature. But, as a matter of fact, from the Vedas themselves we can know the supreme being as their composer. The supreme God referred to in the Upanişads is none other than Vāsudeva, and it is He who is the composer of the Pañcarātra. Further, arguments are adduced to show that the object of the Vedas is not only to command us to do certain actions or to prohibit us from doing certain other actions, but also to describe the nature of the ultimate reality as the divine person. The validity of the Pañcarātra has therefore to be admitted, as it claims for its source the divine person Nārāyana or Vāsudeva. Yāmuna then refers to many texts from the Varāha, Linga and Matsya Purānas and from the Manu-samhitā and other smrti texts. In his Purusaninnaya also, Yāmuna elaborately discusses the scriptural arguments by which he tries to show that the highest divine person referred to in the Upanişads and the Purāņas is Nārāyaṇa. This divine being cannot be the Siva of the Saivas, because the three classes of the Saivas, the Kāpālikas, Kālamukhas and Pāśupatas, all prescribe courses of conduct contradictory to one another, and it is impossible that they should be recommended by the scriptural texts. Their ritualistic rites also are manifestly non-Vedic. The view that they are all derived from Rudra does not prove that it is the same Rudra who is referred to in the Vedic texts. The Rudra referred to by them may be an entirely different person. He refers also to the various Purāņas which decry the Saivas. Against the argument that, if the Pañcarātra doctrines were in consonance with the Vedas, then one would certainly have discovered the relevant Vedic texts from which they were derived, Yāmuna says that the Pañcarātra texts were produced by God for the benefit of devotees who were impatient of following elaborate details described in the
