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audience the position that neither the authority nor meaning of texts depends on the potentially unreliable authors to whom they are attributed. Such moves toward systematization always remain intrinsically performative: the meaning(s) of texts and the purpose(s) of (ritual) actions converge; the ascertainment of right meaning entails a gradual ascertainment of what one ought to do; argumentation always retains its ''memory" of ritual practice and its rationale, its spatial and temporal valorizations, and truth retains its spatial and temporal identity. |
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Advaita discourse is modelled on this Mimamsa paradigm. Though claiming to be a step beyond Mimamsa, for the most part it acts in continuity with its admitted predecessor; if it introduces some concepts and practices incompatible with Mimamsa and claims also to supersede it, even these claims are made according to the norms of Mimamsa thinking. Though Advaita argues at length that knowledge is not an action, and that "to know" cannot be necessarily consequent upon "to do," in its emphasis on meditation and the textual path to knowledge, in its modes of exegesis, in its recognition that knowledge is gained gradually through an engagement in the texts which are the subject of exegesis, and even in its treatment of the final realization of Brahman as an event,
31 it shares the Mimamsa concern for performance. Though Advaita may appear much more philosophical than Mimamsa, its articulation of theory and doctrine resides within the confines of Mimamsa's practical emphasis; it too keeps all theoretical and doctrinal pronouncements rooted in textual knowledge, and so persistently orients the understanding reader back into a world of practice. |
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As Uttara Mimamsa, Advaita extends the Mimamsa practice of reading to a new set of texts. It is most importantly in this sense that it is "after" Mimamsa. Extending the Mimamsa practice to include the upanisads, it reads those texts in a Mimamsa fashion, as expressing knowledge of Brahman, the all-inclusive and encompassing reality, and as showing how that knowledge is to be enacted in order to culminate in union with Brahman. Though Mimamsa's refusal to take into account texts like the upanisads is strongly contested by Advaita and other Vedanta schools, Advaita is nevertheless most fruitfully thought of as an |
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