Lakshmi wants to know how, given that the various schools of Indian philosophy contradict one another, they can all be said to derive their authority from the Vedas. I’ve often wondered the same thing.

My guess is that the Vedas act like the centre of gravity of the sphere of Hinduism.
If you remember your physics, you’ll recall that the earth’s gravitational force can be thought of as being exerted from the single point at the centre of the earth, the centre of gravity. This is an illusion of course. There is no massive object at the centre that is doing the pulling. The force of gravity is in fact being exerted by the entire earth.

I think the analogy applies to the Vedas and Hindu philosophy. The Vedas were compiled over a period of 1500 years ( from 2500 to 900 BC by conservative estimates) obviously by many people, by a culture that did not have a tradition of writing down stuff permanently. The version that we have now was finally edited by a person called Sakalya. Unless you believe that they were divinely revealed (as tradition requires you to – they are “Shruti” – i.e “heard” by the sages from a supernatural source, probably under the influence of soma!) it is more or less inevitable that contradictions will creep in.
Secondly, the absolute core of the Vedas – the samhitas comprise of mostly religious hymns. They do ?ear a relation to philosophy, but only a tangential one, and more importantly such relation as they bear would be highly subject to interpretation.

The second concentric sphere around the Veda Samhitas are the Vedantic literature – the Upanishads. These are highly mystical stories, which often have great philosophical significance.

Then come the great schools of Indian philosophy. I won’t go into them – follow the link for that. It is fascinating to find that such questions were even raised in those times. But please note that the various schools fiercely debated one another, and some of them claimed the “authority” of the Vedas. I guess that they did it to bolster their own reputation, but I also suppose that in the process they ended up enhancing the authority of the Vedas themselves. Think of it. Then, as now, very few people actually read the Vedas. So if a profound philosophy is put forward with the humble disclaimer that what the philosopher is doing is only interpreting and clarifying what is already written in the Vedas, wouldn’t the authority of the Vedas themselves rise in your eyes?

The tradition has continued till date. The Bhagavad Geeta summarises the major schools of philosophy, and is called the “Fifth Veda”. Sankara, Madhva, Ramanuja all claimed to be capturing the “true essence” of the Vedas, as were the Arya Samajis and the present-day purveyors of Vedic Mathematics.

I don’t mean to belittle the Vedas. They did contain the seeds of our philosophy. Vedic literature like the Sulvasutras contain the beginnings of Mathematics, and the Samaveda is said to be the beginning of music. They were great achievements for their time, but they also contained errors. The year consisted of 360 days during the Vedic period. The Sulvasutras set a value of 3 for pi. Later day astronomer Bhaskaracharya deduced that the earth rotated on its own axis and moved around the Sun. Our mathematicians also came up with better values for pi in later periods.

I just want to point out that the achievements of Indian philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers were achievements in their own right. They did not come about by cracking some secret code that was present in the Vedas, but by thinking for themselves.

BTW, I am really happy that the Vedas are vague and subject to interpretation. Otherwise they would have been rigid like the Quran and Hinduism would have been a very different religion.

I am typing all of this from memory, so I might have made a lot of factual errors which I’ll be happy to correct if you point it out. But my guess is that it won’t affect my main point.