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But in its complexity as Uttara Mimamsa, it thoroughly inscribes this truth in the Text and designates knowledge as the accomplishment of right reading, in order to ensure that some at least might realize the truth. |
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In turn, this right reading is qualified by all that right reading entails, including the identification of skills, approved pedagogical settings, and approved behavior for those who are reading and for those who have read. Thus, while the universality of Advaita's truth is available to all, it is mediated through the tightly restricted and ever more technically articulated confines of the Text. This curious convergence of knowledge and text, availability and constraint, is the defining characteristic of Advaita: truth, skill in reading, and competence are mutually determining concepts, each confirming yet also contesting the boundaries established by the other. |
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This tension is deeply imbedded in Advaita; it is productive of the massive achievement of the system as Text and truth, and it constitutes the temporal-spatial rendering of the truth of Advaita in ways that, over a range of topics from the requirement to read to the specification of how the person who has finished reading is supposed to act, are increasingly complex, specific, demanding and exclusive. The positive intention of Advaita is to ensure that its truth be actualized in at least a few people, by providing at least for them the maximal education, and in a fashion that promises maximal fruitfulness. Yet by severely restricting and intensely preparing an elite audience for this knowledge, Advaita in practice severely limits its own universality. Its barriers of difficulty, demands on time and energy, and more direct exclusions of the "wrong kind of people" make it formidable, local, defensive; actual competence is extended to just about no one. Expectations regarding the reader are thereby intensified to the highest degree; only in the rare, right reader who carries out the project of reading properly and with perseverance is the supersession of the tension between Text and truth finally achieved. The transition from Uttara Mimamsa as practice to Vedanta as simple knowledge is never a given; it must occur, and occurs only when the proper person comes along. |
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