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tion of a comparative context, we are eventually required to extend our knowledge of the contexts of the two texts, to put the selected texts in perspective, so as to be better able to know precisely how the similarities and differences operate in relation to the larger patterns of each system. We need to know more of the immediate textual contexts, but also of the larger projects of the Uttara Mimamsa Sutras and Summa Theologiae, of the historical and literary background of the two texts, etc. In its farthest reach, this process of proper contextualization implies a reexamination of the entirety of both theological traditions and of all that is relevant to them; it becomes an infinitely extended process, in which the texts in question become ever more specified as their context is more broadly articulated, as each discovery is complicated and further questions continually raised. Only at the ever receding horizon does one attain the ideally final, completed context in which one can finally decide if the systems are commensurable or not. Of course, every well-fashioned inquiry is challenged in this fashion, and prudent scholars always manage to impose limits on their research. |
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The point rather is that careful attention to the similarities and differences between two texts in order to discover their truth compels the comparativist into an increasingly demanding encounter with the Texts in which the truth of comparison is inscribed. As in Advaita itself, the comparative project discovers within its confines an enduring tension between its Text and its truth, the persistent concealment of its truth in the complexities of the compared Texts. As in Advaita, too, the resolution lies ultimately in the ability of the properly educated and accomplished comparativist, who is able to renounce comfortable presuppositions and convenient shortcuts to truth. It is that comparativist who can make the required series of sound judgments about what matters, about which further questions to ask and which to leave aside for the moment, about where the truth of comparison finally lies. But before taking up more extensively these questions of truth and reader, however, let us explore several other aspects of the practice of comparison. |
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