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yet occurring within various adequate environments; it skillfully balances the considerable activities of learning, including those of reading, with an irreducibly simple moment of realization. But, as we shall see below, what is characteristic of Advaita is not these nuanceswhich may be inevitable in any analysis which attends to the practicalities of how knowledge comes aboutbut rather its utilization of them in order to balance an insistent identification of the knowledge of Brahman as absolutely simple with a highly specific set of expectations about how one goes about knowing, and who the skilled knower is. |
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UMS IV.1.1-2 addresses again the tension between the purely cognitive understanding of knowledge and the practical, textual location of knowledge, and this time the focus is even more specifically on texts. The purvapaksin argues that if texts are of any salvific use at all, they will immediately, upon first reading, tell us what Brahman is, and will therefore immediately have their liberative effectif they are ever going to have it. If they are not immediately effective, no amount of repetition will bring about this proper understanding and effect. |
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Sankara's two versions of the siddhanta
9 show how texts which enjoin meditation presuppose progress from an initial introduction to a text through a potentially prolonged process of meditation, to a final, true knowledge. In general, "repetition may be resorted to even where the instruction occurs only once; a repeated instruction indicates repetition as a matter of course." (UMS IV.1.2)10 In regard to the problematic issue of the relation between texts and the knowledge of a Brahman which is neither temporal nor extended in "moments" of knowledge, the siddhantin observes that it is a simple fact known from ordinary experience that one moves from an incomplete and vague knowledge to an increasingly precise knowledge; this requires no special justification: "It may also be argued that reasoning and [attention to a] text can [on a first effort] only produce a knowledge of the general features of the object, but not so of its special features . . . Since the latter more intimate knowledge is what removes ignorance, repetition serves that purpose." (UMS IV.1.2)11 |
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