Our śāstra says, acintyāḥ khalu ye bhāvāḥ. Beyond your perception, beyond your sense perception, don't try to understand it by argument and logic. Then how to know it? Know it from the person who knows it. That is knowledge. Just like we are trying to get knowledge about the soul, not by experiment, but we are trying to understand from the words of Kṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇa is the authority. So He says, in the beginning, dehino 'smin yathā dehe kaumāraṁ yauvanaṁ jarā (BG 2.13). We can . . . Kṛṣṇa says, and we can think over it and ponder over it. Then we come to conclusion. And the other process, Vedic process, is:
- yasya deve parā bhaktir
- yathā deve tathā gurau
- tasyaite kathitā hy arthāḥ
- prakāśante mahātmanaḥ
- (ŚU 6.23)
Our process is descending process. We are not trying to understand by the ascending process. Inductive or deductive. We accept the statements of the Vedas. Therefore we haven't got to make much effort to understand the thing. Veda-vacana. Śruti, śruti-pramāṇa. There are three kinds of evidences: direct perception, and evidence from the Vedas, and evidence from history. Aitihya. Pratyakṣa, aitihya, śruti. Three kinds of evidences.
So pratyakṣa and aitihya is neglected. According to our Vedic system, śruti-pramāṇa, if it is statement, the statement is there in the śruti, in the Vedas, then we accept. We have got a society in India, they call veda-pramāṇa: "We cannot accept without it is not mentioned in the Vedas." That's a . . . that's nice. But there is another class, who are described in the Bhagavad-gītā by Kṛṣṇa Himself: veda-vāda-ratāḥ. They are simply unnecessarily fight on the basis of so-called Vedic knowledge. Vedic knowledge must be understood from the guru. That is injunction. They defy that. They . . .
The Vedic injunction is . . . Kaṭhopaniśad. Tad-vijñānārthaṁ sa gurum eva abhigacchet (MU 1.2.12). You . . . to understand the Vedas, you must approach a guru. Otherwise, you cannot understand. Just like it is forbidden that without becoming a brāhmin, nobody should read Vedas. Because he cannot understand. Unless one is qualified brāhmin, unless one has approached another qualified brāhmin who knows, there is no question of understanding Vedas. Just like Max Mueller translated Veda. What does he know about Veda? Such kinds of translation, understanding, is useless.