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not apart from it. One reaches wordlessness through words, after them, according to them. |
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The extent to which these prescriptions bind the fully liberated renunciant as well as the seeker of renunciation is not entirely clear. One can argue that while Badarayana fully intends to establish the restrictions which govern the life of the liberated renunciant (while still alive) as well as that of the seeker, Sankara perhaps limits the domain of these prescriptions to the latter. But even for Sankara, the domains would not be merely juxtaposed, since the unrestricted liberated statetheoretically possible at any timeoccurs in practice only after the seeker's disciplined submission to the rules of the search. Just as the ineffable truth of Advaita occurs in practice only after a thorough appropriation of the Advaita Text, the state of life in which one is completely free from restrictions occurs only after the inner appropriation of those restrictions. The elusive and ever-receding moment of transformation, where one "leaps" from a life governed by rules to a life in which rules are impossible, from a life of renunciation as a means to knowledge to renunciation as the event of knowledge, is a tension which finds no systematic resolution in the Text. It is only in the realized Advaitin, who reads and does everything correctly, that liberation from inscription, description and prescription can occur, that the brahmajijñasin becomes brahmajña. |
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V. Advaita Elitism And The Possibility Of The Unauthorized Reader: Finding A Loophole |
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Truth is the event of true discernment, the subtle ability to sort things out and see them as they are. Skilled reading is the practical school of this learning, and perfect reading culminates in perfect discernment. The perfected competence of the properly determined reader always hearkens back to his (or her) original capacity and desire, which cannot be produced, and yet it depends on his (or her) proper training by the proper people. In its simplest version, Advaita sees knowledge as a pure consciousness not bound by words and in no way a form of agency; its truth is simply the utterly liberative knowledge of Brahman. |
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