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tion of that person within the legitimating structures of the Brahmanical life. |
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The main features of this analysis are already in place: on the one hand, the person who seeks liberation departs radically from the confines of ordinary Brahmanical life, and is by definition beyond prescriptions and expectations; at the same time, however, the right kind of person, the proper Advaitin who is engaged in the Text within its ritual location, is the only one who can achieve this radical freedom. In the following overview of the simultaneous prescription and description of the seeker I restrict my attention to UMS III.4, of which the description of this seeker is the primary topic. |
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1. Expectations about the Person Who Will Renounce |
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The careful and orthodox legitimation of the completely free person begins in a spare but decisive form in UMS III.4.1-17, where the knowledge found in and gained through the upanisads is identified as pertaining to the "human goal" (purusa-artha) and not as subordinate to the "ritual goal" (kratu-artha). The independence of knowledge is thus ensured: knowledge is utterly free, neither dependent on nor subservient to any of the lesser goals which comprise the range of orthodox religious practice. |
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However, this insistence on the independence of knowledge relies on the Mimamsa description of how two measures for the cohesion of ritualthe goals of the performer (purusa-artha) and the finality of the rite itself (kratu-artha)relate to one another.
52 In PMS IV.1.1-2, Jaimini distinguished between the human goal and the ritual goal. The former was characterized as the perspective of the "pleasure" (priti) of the performer (purusa),while the latter was characterized as the perspective of the wholeness and integration of the ritual (kratu), irrespective of connection with the performer's pleasure. The human goal characterizes a ritual from its performer's viewpoint, the ritual goal from the viewpoint of its internal coherence. The two perspectives are generally juxtaposed without the identification of one as superior to the other; they exist in the same time and |
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