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make it possible to consume that truth, or to excise it from its contexts, reducing it to one more thing a reader may care, or not care, to know; it would also undercut the Advaita teaching on the ineffability of Brahman and the Text which is supposed to be the vehicle of the communication of Brahman. |
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If the truth is posterior to the Text, achieved after and through it, then the Text must be seen both as a place where the expenditure of time and energy is likely to be fruitful, and as a place which yields fruit only to the person willing to invest in it, reading skillfully toward a moment of accomplishment, realization. Anyone can approach the truth, but almost no one will make, or be able to make, the effort required for that approach: that there actually is a truth to Advaita becomes evident only in the event that there in fact happen to be authorized and accomplished readers. In this chapter I turn my attention to this required reader of the Text, the Advaitin as student (jijñasin, Uttara Mimamsaka). |
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Though signalling in advance that privileged moment when insightful reading is finally accomplished by the reader, the tension between truth and Text also has a more immediate, practical expression: its features are delineated in the requirement of competence (adhikara), inscribed by Advaita into its Text as the measure for the training of proper ones and as the barrier against improper readers and improperly trained ones. As Vedanta philosophy, Advaita insists upon a universal and unrestricted knowledge available to all knowers. As Uttara Mimamsa, it links the accomplishment of this knowledge to the act of the competent knower who achieves knowledge in discriminate reading. |
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Great importance is invested in identifying that reader, who is inscribed within a set of intellectual and social expectations that deliberately exclude most potential readers. Only the right kind of people can benefit from Advaita; such people are marked off by the Text which, by its demands regarding competenceits self-regulating prescriptions, its difficultyensures that the "Advaita event," pure realization, can occur authentically and without any constraints whatsoever. Though Advaita on occasion presents itself as Vedanta, thoroughly and nonideologically available in self-knowledge, it is always also Mimamsa, available only to a privileged group of educated upper-caste men: |
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