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tic scholarship. Imaginative processes involve standards for judging interpretations and rules that can be followed well or badly . . . They depend, for example, on the interpreter's sensibilities, they may evoke rather than demonstrate, and they produce inventions . . . these inventions have the power to give a new form to our experiences. The imaginative redescription produced challenges our normal experience of the contemporary worlds in which we live and of the often distant worlds we study.
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Though Yearley's work is not explicitly theological, it contributes to a model for comparative theology. It too operates in the same back-and-forth movement between particularity and theory, and is unwilling to surrender either of these; it too depends on the educated imaginative act of the comparativist (comparative theologian) who is transformed by the process of comparison and thus enabled to compare sensitively and to make sense out of particular acts of comparison. |
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Nevertheless, the present book differs in several ways from Yearley's. First, though practical and ethical considerations are essential to the Advaita material I will be considering, a wider range of epistemological, ontological and cosmological claims are prominent, and all of these involve refinements of reasoning which are distinguishable from ethical judgments and discourse. I will be more concerned than Yearley to trace the path back and forth from practical to secondary theories, and to assess the practical role of the latter within Advaita and in regard to outsiders who may read Advaita and potentially be claimed by it. |
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Second, Advaita invests heavily in the interpretation of texts, and develops its practical theories through the reflective practices of exegesis. It dwells within a world of texts; though it ventures beyond texts, it does so only through and after them, while justifying these excursions only on textual grounds. Advaita's textual investment has compelled me to focus more narrowly than Yearley on the problem of how believers compose, read, and teach their own religious and theological texts, and how outsiders who are believers in another tradition are to read and write about other communities' texts in relation to theirs, adjusting the margins of both in the process. |
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