How can we trust the Vedas when many Vedic texts have been destroyed and incomplete knowledge is harmful?

From: Shubham

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Any other questions? Aspects of the spiritual world.
So, overall, if we see the Vedic body of knowledge, more than 90% of that is relating with material world. It is about karmakanya, about how one can improve one’s lot in the material world, through dharma, artha, kama. And, the transcendental aspect has two parts.
There is the jnana part, and then there is the bhakti part. Jnana part is in the Upanishads. The bhakti part is in the Puranic scriptures, especially Krishna and Bhagavad Gita like that.
So, yes, a significant number of the Vedic scriptures have been destroyed. And, these are primarily the scriptures, or the books, that refer to the karmakanda part. And that is why, we may feel that, say, when we hear that Ravana was travelling in a plane, made of flowers, Pushpaka, and there was no tail of smoke trailing him.
As we see when modern aeroplanes fly, we may think that it is mythological. But it is not mythological. Rather, the technology for that, and the knowledge for that technology has been lost.
Of course, there is Vimana Shastra even now, and that gives some indications of how things might have worked at that time. But it is not comprehensive, and certainly not exhaustive. So, a lot of the material knowledge has been lost.
And because this material knowledge has been lost, many aspects from the Vedic literature are today dismissed as mythology. However, because the transcendental scriptures, the Upanishads, and especially the transcendental Puranas like the Srimad Bhagavatam, because they were not particularly considered threatening, because they were essentially talking about transcendental matters, so, they have stayed safe. The Srimad Bhagavatam, Srila Jiva Goswami explains in his Tattva Samyarbha, that it has maintained its integrity since the time it was written by Vyasadeva.
And, if we look at the Bhagavad Gita or the Srimad Bhagavatam, they, if we understand them through the Acharyas, then they give us a coherent world view in themselves. So, what we have lost to some extent is the knowledge of how to live materially better, or live materially in a harmonious way, and to tap the technologies that are not harmful to nature. Many of the modern technologies have a destructive effect on nature today.
So, that sort of material knowledge has been lost. But the spiritual knowledge, because it has been preserved in Parampara, Now, in the Parampara, in the spiritual traditions, to the spiritual universities, the books that were considered the most important were preserved. And they were preserved at all costs, no matter what the risk.
So, because of this, the scriptures have, the important scriptures which talk about devotional wisdom, the spiritual transcendental wisdom, they were understood to be important in the Sampradayas. But, they were not considered especially a threat by the invaders, and that’s why they have survived. And their survival is seen in two ways, one by the ongoing living potency of those books, if we try to live according to them, and also according to the overall coherence of their message if we study them under guidance.
And, yes, we might be able to recover by research some of the material technology, but much of the material technology is irrevocably lost. So, it’s not in the sense of incomplete knowledge, in the sense that if we have a mathematics book with some equations missing, then we can’t make head or tail out of the book. But the Vedic knowledge is not like that.
As I said, the Bhagavad Gita, Srimad Bhagavatam, they have a coherent philosophy. And if we study it, we can understand that coherence. So, it is incomplete in the sense that the material knowledge is, especially the material technological knowledge, material sociological knowledge, will be lost.
But as far as the path of transcendence is concerned, that knowledge is still available to us. So, therefore, Ishwara Prabhupada focused not so much on the revival of the Indian knowledge systems, which is something becoming popular today in India, because of nationalistic fervor. There’s nothing wrong in it.
But Ishwara Prabhupada did not focus primarily on that. Ishwara Prabhupada focused on the acquirement of transcendence by the cultivation of bhakti. So, in the yogic texts, for example, there are various siddhis talked about.
One of the siddhis is to walk through walls. Ishwara Prabhupada, an actor of devotion, says that actually these mystical attainments and the attainments through technology of, say, penetrating through a mountain using a tunnel, they are not much different. They are basically processing of matter using some sort of knowledge and its application.
So, for a devotee, there is not much significant difference between mystical accomplishments and material technological accomplishments, because both are dealing with the material world itself. So, that knowledge we may not have. And that’s why some people may feel that India was technologically primitive in the past.
But it was not. There was technology of a different kind. And that knowledge is lost.
But the spiritual aspect of the knowledge is still available. And that’s what Ishwara Prabhupada told us that we should focus on. And India’s unique gift to the world is that it can offer the spiritual wisdom, which is in and self-complete in its coherence of wisdom and its potency in application.