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demands of the reader an attunement to a new set of clues in the Advaita materials, and a rearrangement of what may already be familiar and learned in other ways. We are required to take into account the implications of a textual, as distinct from philosophical, approach to Advaita: how does one read Advaita differently, as an exegetical, commentarial, theological system? In the following pages I identify three shifts which are constitutive of this different reading and which mark the difference which thereafter structures this book: 1. a commitment to the Advaita Text, a shift from "texts" to "the Text," to Advaita as constituted in the entirety of its earlier and later texts, the entirety of the commentarial tradition rooted in the UMS and before that in the upanisads,
42 and consequently an inquiry into how the significance of texts is inscribed in the demands they impose on the intelligent reader; 2. a commitment to truth in, through, after this Text:a shift in the notion of referentiality, away from meanings that are exterior to texts and accessible in textual and other ways, and toward a significance that occurs only after the Text, accessible only to the person who has learned to read, think, understand and write out of, after that Text; 3. a commitment to the reader of the Text: consequently, a shift from a notion of the reader as merely the consumer of established meanings, to a notion of the reader as an actively engaged participant who ''realizes" the Text's significance, in whom that Text's truth can be said to occur. Let us now examine each shift.43 |
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2. From the Study of Sankara to the Study of the Text |
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To name the set of Advaita texts, from the upanisads to the latest of the commentaries, "the Advaita Text," is to insist on the rich integrity of that wholewhich we have already previewed in examining the commentaries' own first wordsand at the same time on the secondary role of alternative images, strategies, appeals and resources for the comprehension of Advaita. As Uttara Mimamsa, Advaita appropriates the corollaries adopted by Mimamsa in keeping with its steadfast textual commitment. Most notably, Advaita too refuses to invest the author with decisive authority regarding right meaning; with the same |
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