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minimal discussion which characterizes the (early) Mimamsa defense of authorlessness (apauruseyatva),
44 Advaita shifts attention from authors to the way in which texts "in themselves" mean and have a significance which is not fruitfully defined according to the apparatus of authorial intent.45 In both Mimamsas texts are recognized as possessed of clues sufficient to communicate their significance, and thereafter to indicate what needs to be done in response to the implications of that significance. To read properly is to notice these clues, in accordance with the rules which regulate their ordering and evaluation, and to respond properly in further acts, including those of further reading and writing. The result is what can be legitimately be called a construction of texts' meaning from the "Text itself;" this occurs not because the Text is active and the reader merely an obedient receiver of its commands, but rather because the expectations imposed on a reader by the Text and the results which accrue due to the education of the reader in the process of reading cooperate to compose the locale within which reading transforms the reader into the proper, educated knower of the truth of Advaita; the point of the Text is to ensure that this transformation occurs. The meaning of Advaita is inscribed in the complex whole of the Text, its layers of text and commentary, and to this whole the thought of Sankara is only a single, albeit primary, contributor.46 |
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Comparative work is fruitfully understood as a disciplined encounter with the "surface" of the studied tradition, its evident, legible texture and with all that is implied by that textuality. The resultant engagement opens upon a widely disseminated field of language, in which the comparativist is educated, and so in small, expected but also unpredictable ways begins to share the Advaita discourse. We are thus better positioned to take seriously the commentarial project in its full expanse as more than a series of efforts to specify what was articulated clearly somewhere in Sankara's mind; we are therefore more likely to be educated through our study of the Text. In Chapter 2 we will specify the texture of the Advaita Text, and the kind of accessibility that is thereby made available to the skilled reader. |
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