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Vedanta is an attempt to formulate systematically one's understanding of what is of universal philosophical interest in it."
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Certain themes in Advaita Vedanta do indeed become more immediately, apparently accessible if one abstracts them from their scriptural context: there is an ultimate, nondual self; self-knowledge alone is ultimately liberative; sorrow is due to wrong understanding. Judging by the appearances of what seems to make sense, one can be said to engage in Advaita through a consideration of such claims. But it would be a mistake to isolate these themes and mistake the sum of them for a full understanding of the Advaita. We cannot infer from a successful recognition of reason's distinct role that we have immediate access to Advaita's full meaning. |
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Quite the contrary: essential to Advaita is its claim that reason is not the universal link, the complete and adequate bridge. Reason does not operate independently in Sankara's Advaita, though it has a distinctive function; this distinctive role occurs within, and not apart from, exegetical and scripturally-formed thinking; it operates properly when exercised by properly educated, literate persons.40 Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 2, the literary and rhetorical characteristics of the Advaita texts make them by design unsuitable for replacement by a summation of their main ideas or the abstraction of their main themes. This is so even if the Advaitins themselves submitted the upanisads to constructive readings; as we shall see, the systematizing activity of Advaita has written into it safeguards for the permanent location of those systematized meanings in exegesis, not liable to extraction and independent use.41 |
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The task then is to seek an additional point of entrance into Advaita for those who are not believing Advaitins, if we decline to privilege reason and to make some version of philosophical thinking the universal, transcultural bridge. This book intends in part to measure the extent to which the scriptural (textual, exegetical, commentarial) practice of Advaita provides another and theologically more helpful accessibility, in which we can take advantage of the dynamics of reading and so construct a pedagogy which enables the nonbelieving reader to become a partially literate reader of Advaita. In the following chapters I |
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