Yajnavalkya
June 18, 2008
Earlier in May we had a series of yagyas that featured the Shukla Yajur Veda. What you see above is an image of Yajnavalkya, the rishi who cognized this Veda. The story is that he had a fight with his Guru and Yajnavalkya’s guru got so mad that he demanded that Yajnavalkya give back all the knowledge that the guru had given him. So, Yajnavalkya vomited up all the knowledge! The guru’s other disciples turned themselves into partridge birds and gobbled up the knowledge.
Then Yajnavalkya went off, determined not to have any more human gurus and he did very long severe penence to Surya Bagavan who eventually came to him and gave him all the knowledge of Yajur Veda but in a slightly different form. So in the image above you see Yajnavalkya teaching with the Sun at his head. There were 14 disciples and there were 14 sections or sakas to the Veda that he received from the Sun. Unfortunately all but two are lost now.
If you want to learn more about Yajnavalkya…and he was quite an interesting character….listen to podcasts #70 and #71.