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the inquisitive person to get the "gist" of it without having to invest a great deal of time in the daunting Text itself. |
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The intention of this book regarding Advaita's truth is therefore twofold. On the one hand, it resists the temptation to reduce Advaita to its literary excellences, or to the ever-receding horizon of a completion of the commentarial ascertainment of truth; on the other, it resists the temptation to replace Advaita with a superior text or idea which states its truth more directly and simply than the Advaitins were capable of doing, thereby making the Text superfluous to its own concisely stated meaning. Instead, I seek to trace Advaita's own way of articulating its truth textually, from its preserved and appreciated exegetical basis, and to indicate a way of speaking about that truth which does not abandon its textual basis for the sake of its articulation. This tracing is the project of Chapter 3. |
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4. From Reader as Observer to Reader as Participant |
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My final point follows from the preceding two. The resolution of the tension between the complex constitution of the Text and the posteriority to it of its truth requires an active reader who is involved in a series of demanding choices and judgments according to which the relation of Text and truth occurs. |
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The Vedas and the upanisads, as ritual and metaritual speculations, do not lend themselves to neutral assimilation. Badarayana's UMS, Sankara's Bhasya, and the later commentaries all demand the skillful engagement of a committed reader. No welcome is extended to those who wish to be passive consumers, observers, or merely grateful assimilators of neatly labeled conclusions. The Text is useable and performable, it requires use and performance; continually open to novel engagements which are not entirely constrained by authorial intentions or the measures of an external referent, its significance is intimately connected with what the increasingly literate and skilled reader is able to do with it.
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Key to Advaita, therefore, are not only its carefully composed Text and rigorously post-Textual truth, but also the proper reader who can enact the Text and so become the location of the |
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