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sion between the Advaita insistence on the centrality of the Text and its appropriate reception, and its equal insistence on the simplicity and unrestrictedness of its truth. According to the latter, sudras ought to be included; according to the former, they cannot be. Advaita could not be easily freed from this tension, were it to persist as a productive form of textual, liberative knowledge; it is partially on this basis that some modern versions of Advaita recast it entirely as Vedanta philosophy, excising both the tension between Text and truth and the exclusions connected with it. |
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IV The Constraints On Liberation And The Cessation Of Reading In UMS III.4: Description As Prescription |
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In the preceding sections we have traced the "fault line" between Advaita as Vedanta and as Uttara Mimamsa, the series of tensions between the simple and the complex: between purely nondualist knowledge and skilled mastery of the Text; between Brahman as knowable in itself and extratextually, and as available only after the Text; between jijñasa as an inherently free and unpredictable desire, and as a prolonged and patient process of skilled reading that proceeds in a manner tantamount to training in Mimamsa; the identification of the reader as simply an intelligent, interested person, and as the right kind of person, who can in fact be educated in the right fashion. These tensions extend consistently the fundamental tension between the Text and its truth, safeguard that tension against reduction, and describe the kind of person who is able to negotiate, in the singular event of personal realization, the irreducible but productive gap between Text and truth. |
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We turn now to a final instance of this tension between the interior configuration and the exterior constraints of knowledge, by considering the person who is in part and then completely the "product" of the study of the Text, the desirer (jijñasin) who possesses the desire for liberation (mumuksutva)and acts accordingly. Here too we see the uneasy but creative juxtaposition of complete freedom and indescribabilityfor the liberated person cannot be describedwith a thorough inscription/prescrip- |
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