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3. From Truth outside the Text to Truth after the Text |
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The Advaitins insist with great energy that reality is worth knowing, that it can be known truly, and that this knowledge is accessible beyond, through, and after words. One may eventually step beyond texts, but texts form the pathway, along which one progresses toward knowledge of the world as it really is. Advaita resists efforts to dig beneath and behind its Text, as if to uncover the simpler objective truth of which Text is "really" expressive, or "really" talking about. |
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Essential to the genius of Advaita is the care with which it inscribes the truth of the Text within the Text, making it available, but only to those who commit themselves to the long process of becoming the kind of persons who read properly. However one might finally comprehend the truth of Advaita, and however one might thereafter choose to speak of Brahman's position vis à vis the Advaita texts, that truth occurs in an understanding of Brahman located in the Text, acquired through reading and rereading and not apart from these activities. Though Brahman is neither a fiction (as might be a character in a novel) nor a textual production (as might be a ritual vis à vis the texts which accompany it), Advaita's truth about Brahman does not exist outside its texts, but only after them. Each of Advaita's claims about Brahman or categorizations of it is a practical facilitation of the reader's course toward the event of a final truth elicited through the act of reading; the Text makes possible a definitive comprehension of the truth of Brahman through the particular ways in which it regulates the reader's appropriation of the Text itself. |
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For these reasons I remain skeptical about efforts to extract from the Advaita texts a set of conclusions or propositions, either as proposed by the Advaitins themselves, or as summarized by ancient or modern compendium-makers, or as rephrased in modern philosophical expression. Though often drawn from appropriate sources, such systematizations frequently replace the Text with its meaning(s), with encapsulated, useful statements of what it really meansand thereby apparently enabling |
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