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48. It is useful if one wishes to segment the Text, so that it parts might be conveniently moved around and treated in an order more amenable to another modes of interpretation. Deussen's important and influential System of the Vedanta is perhaps the first such reordering which utilized the identified divisions into pada and adhyaya. |
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49. I discuss this important sutra in Chapter 4. |
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50. This is so even if, as Potter (1982) and Sawai (1986) have correctly pointed out, Sankara defends the possibility of a "sudden leap" into liberative knowledge, without any specific preparation. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the sudden leap marks that ideal (and ever receding) point at which one resolves the tension between Text and truth, knowledge as practice and knowledge as pure consciousness; in theory, the resolution may occur at any moment, though in practice great skill is required to make the leap. |
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51. Edward Said's reflections on "beginnings" are helpful background here, particularly his "meditation on beginnings," (1985, pp. 29-78.) |
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52. Such rules are known in the the Advaita and other sastras as paribhasas;they regulate the reading and use of the text of which they are a part. Chakrabarti (1980) is a helpful introduction. |
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53. Similarly, Sankara's famous prologue on superimposition (adhyasa)themistaken, disastrous identification of the self (atman) with the phenomenal and changing worldcan be read either as a distillation of the Text into the real underlying issue, the problem of epistemological error or as propaedeutic to the ensuing Text. By the former interpretation, it is the long-desired and welcome apprehension of the "real" underlying problem which had for generations been gotten at indirectly, clumsily, gradually, in the upanisads and interpretation of them in the UMS, the problem of a mistake, a confusion of identity, which has profound cosmological and spiritual results and which, once one has come to a proper understanding of it, can be investigated and resolved philosophically, with increasingly diminished need for the scriptural accoutrements with which the whole issue had previously been adorned. By the latter and more apt interpretation, it can be taken as a "final"thought last, placed firstclarification of why it is that a proper understanding of scripture, the achievement of knowledge, can lead to that salvation desired by the Advaitins who meditate their way through the Text: because the problem confronting humans is a "mistake," an erring which has happened but which need not have happened, and so which can never be provided with a predictable metaphysical underpinning, the response to it is legitimately a practical one, a correction in the way one thinks. Attention to superimposition informs |
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