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Can Mantras be Injunctions

  Can Mantras be Injunctions? The source of most Vidhis are from the Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and maybe Upanishads. The Samhita texts are a collection of mantras to be chanted at a ritual, and often don't have injunctions that command a person "do this" or "don't do that" or "one should do this". Often they are prayers, spells, eulogies, and even stories or statements of reality. That being said, Vedic mantras are quoted in law digests as evdience for a certain practice, so it begs the question, can we construe injunctions from Vedic mantras?  For the prupose of this article, mantras exclusively refer to Vedic mantras of the Samhitas.  The Jaimini Mimamsa Sutras start by describing the oppenent view that the Mantras are useless in that they have no meaning, The sutras then go on to declare that they do have meaning like any sentence with subject, object, and verb [1]. Those meanings are as follows [2]. 1) Description of the procedure while it is being...
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Married Women's Right to Vedic Study

 Married Women's Right to Vedic Study The debate of the right of women to Vedic study is contested, and I am yet to write an elaborate blog on it. However, in the meantime, I noticed that assuming the conservative view, there is a loophole that allows for married women to undergo Vedic study. The prohibition for women (and Shudras) to undergo Vedic study comes from their lack of Upanayanam, or the sacred thread. That is it. It has nothing to do with chakras or male and female energies or any of that esoteric nonsense. All restrictions that you find in the scriptures, such as Bhagavatam 1.4.25, on Vedic learning and chanting OM is because they have no sacred thread, but not of those are a reason to deny them the sacred thread. After all, Preclusion of the Effect is Not Preclusion of the Cause . Thus all we have to do is establish whether women have Upanayanam (it is near impossible to establish this for Shudras). This topic deserves a longer article, so for now, I am going to wri...
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Casteism in the Bhagavad Gita?

  Castesim in the Bhagavad Gita?  I have seen people trying to say that the Bhagavad Gita is promoting casteism, which is ironic because out of the 18 chapters of the text, only 10 or so have remotely anything to do with caste, and that too they don’t say anything about them being immutable or mutable or whether to beat lower castes up for minor offences and such. Anyway, in order to tackle this we need to go verse by verse and perform the requisite exigesis. While doing so, I will be using my hermeneutical principles of Hinduism, which you can read about here:  https://bharatasamskriti.blogspot.com/2024/03/new-hermeneutical-principles-for.html The main thing I want to establish is  Episodic Contextualization  and Reality Based Contextualisation. We must in interprate  the words of the Bhagavad Gita in light of the larger story and setting that it is found in, as well as in the social and historical realities of that time.  Duty as a Kshatriya Bhagavad...
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