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night sky, the light of the awareness of Brahman illuminates the seeker's mind, and consciousness is gradually uncovered. This light is refracted in the words of the Veda and Advaita; by careful listening to these words, each as it were a ray of Brahman, our understanding of the upanisads is gradually clarified. Just as the tide is raised by the moon, Appaya Diksita suggests, critical reflection on what one understands gradually uplifts the mind; just as the eye gradually finds its way to the moon and no longer notices just its rays, the mind gradually traces the path from the words of the text to their source. Expertise in textual knowledge enables the reader to excel in meditation, and contributes to its fruition, as the images, "realities," and the exigencies of interpretation converge harmoniously. The process of textual, verbal knowledge is effective against the strongest of resistances; to know the text is to make progress toward the liberation the text announces.
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The commentaries are the communally remembered and passed down wisdom of this pedagogy, the extant form of generations of experience in reading and understanding texts, the accumulated insights of the Advaita tradition into the upanisads, Badarayana and Sankara. We are thus guided by the commentaries' initial pronouncements about themselves to engage in a larger Text, one written after, around, and upon Sankara's Bhasya; we read "up" through his thought through a luxuriant commentarial elaboration that grew over generations. We appreciate his importance maximally by learning to be good readers, able to trace later commentarial words back to his; to master this complex commentarial tradition is to become educated in Advaita. |
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3. Advaita as Uttara Mimamsa: The Purva Mimamsa Paradigm |
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The thesis that Advaita ought to be interpreted as a commentarial tradition is a helpful aid in the initiation of a comparative theological project; but the broader validity of the thesis becomes evident if we recall that Advaita has traditionally been known as the "Uttara [Later] Mimamsa," and thus as heir to the Mimamsa tradition of ritual exegesis.29 |
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