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Mimamsaka in order to do something new and different from the Purva Mimamsa. |
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Though indirect, Advaita has a real (though not total) dependence on skilled reflection on ritual performance; consequently, there is also a real (though not total) practical identification of the Advaitin student with the Mimamsaka student. If one is not the heir to the skills entailed by Mimamsa's reflection on ritual, one can desire Brahman but not perform brahmajijñasa properly, and so will be unable to satisfy one's desire. This is so even if one concedes, as a point on an ever-receding horizon, the possibility of an immediate realization in a totally uneducated person. In every case short of that ideal, to be a Vedantin without being a Mimamsaka is a fruitless identity. The true Advaitin is a careful reader of texts and the articulator of a truth of Brahman out of and after texts. |
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Two positions thus reach expression simultaneously: on the one hand, Advaita originates solely in the pure and mysteriously originated desire to know, a desire which cannot be fixed in any frame of reference, nor guaranteed by any sort of preparation, and which is satisfied by Brahman alone, not by the knowledge of anything else; on the other hand Advaita is also a specific, privileged enactment of that desire, a well-defined skill and activity which is learned in a certain proper fashion. As desire, Advaita is unconditioned and unprecedented; as practice, it simply extends the older practices and pedagogy of Mimamsa to new material. In the next section, we shall examine how these tensions combine to define the Advaitin as a skilled reader of texts who only thereafter becomes entirely free. |
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2. Authorizing the Reader: The Prerequisites of Knowledge |
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Advaita's emphasis on the textuality of knowledge entails the identification of a competent readership, comprised of those skilled enough, or able to become skilled enough, to engage in reading the Text with the sophistication it demands. The necessarily original and requisite desire to know and the path toward its satisfaction are situated as posterior to a sophisticated ability to read "like a Mimamsaka." |
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