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At the conclusion of Chapters 2, 3, and 4 the contemporary reader and comparativist is compelled to stand in an analogously tense and precarious situation. On the one hand, these chapters cumulatively effect a powerful exclusion of access to Advaita through experience alone or knowledge alone; they insist on channeling access through the narrow door of the Text and its rigors, according to the sheer demands of reading it and the elaborately constructed safeguards which determine potential readers. On this basis, we seem to have made it impossible for outsiders, theologians or others, to participate in Advaita. |
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On the other hand, however, this understanding of Advaita and this exclusion of the paths of experience and reason in favor of the Text has been a successful intrusion upon the Text; it is articulated only in the persistent act of (mis)reading the Text, violating its margins, comprehending and then losing sight of its truth, uncompromisingly shaping and reshaping each and every question an outsider might bring to the Text. Though discovering ourselves barred, we have nevertheless insisted on becoming readers of the Text, however inelegant and improperly prepared our reading might be. The ideal of pure Advaita insight is thus revered at the very moment it is violated, as we cross the boundaries of Advaita and intrude upon its inner spaces, thereby beginning to make available to every patient reader of English the Text's power to transform those who read it. Though the truth of the Text may elusively conceal itself behind the complex demands of proper reading, our (mis)reading nevertheless provides a simple rejoinder to that complexity, and so cooperates with the Advaita to express once more its characteristic tension between the complex requirements of reading and the simple event of insight. |
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We are quite far removed at this point from a discussion of the principles of Vedanta philosophy, and we have quite arduously rendered ourselves unready to compare Vedanta theology with Christian theology. We have managed to lose our exteriority to Advaita, and now stand outside neither tradition; we are equipped only for those words which come after the continuing, persevering act of engaged reading. Yet, immersed in this increasing host of interpretive issues which threaten at every |
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