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or otherwise. Since rituals and their designated performers are formed and finished entirely within a world constituted by the Veda, the search for another, anthropological basis on which to found competence or lack thereof would be pointless.
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The same presuppositions and positions remain operative in Advaita: competence is restricted to conscious, intelligent beings, and whoever lacks the desire for the promised resultsnow, the results of meditationis not competent to undertake the action of meditation. One must have the physical and mental capacities required, e.g., well-functioning senses, the ability to remember, the will to concentrate, etc. |
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But by the same process of gradual exclusion, this broadly defined competence is gradually restricted to the twice-born malesjust as the Veda is interpreted to indicate. One might have expected the dynamics of knowledge and access to it to function rather differently in Advaita, which is distinguished by the fact that Brahman is not, like ritual, a construct of texts, but rather a real though posttextual reality. One might rightly expect that deities, and humans of all castes and both genders,41 would be potentially competent students of Advaita, just by virtue of intelligence, an inherent ability to know. Nevertheless, the Advaitins remain very much Mimamsakas, constricting their audience by the demands and expectations of reading as a skilled, cultured practice, as they concede competence to the gods but deny it to sudras. |
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The reason the gods might appear incompetent is that they do not receive the sacred thread in the investiture ceremony (upanayana) and do not study the upanisads in the approved fashion with a proper teacher. Knowledge must come in the right way, one might argue, and no amount of impressive divine knowledge should matter, unless it has been gained in the right way. Sankara disposes of this objection swiftly: ''Nor can it be said that they are barred by the scriptures about the investiture with the sacred thread; for investiture is meant for the study of the Vedas, and to [the gods] the Vedas get revealed spontaneously." (UMS I.3.26)42 |
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According to Vacaspati, the fact of this "spontaneous revelation" does not free the gods of a need for the Veda, to which they have their own manner of access: |
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