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appropriation of them.
7 They thereby maintain a certain ironic detachment from their own formalizing activity, assuring textually that knowledge can never be adequately communicated by its texts: texts serve their proper function when they call into question their own reliability and adequacy. |
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The uneven and demanding texture of the upanisads prompts responses of two sorts. First, the claims and reorientations achieved by the upanisads raise questions that they do not entirely answer, and it is important to examine how Advaita preserves and extends the communicative project of the upanisads by working out a teaching about Brahman, the world in relation to Brahman, and a position regarding alternative views of the world. This aspect of Advaita, its "truth," will be taken up in Chapter 3. |
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Second, Advaita takes into account the presystematic and performative nature of the upanisads, and we must examine how Advaita retains and inscribes in its presentation of the upanisads the ironic, self-conscious and self-critical, upanisadic style, how it, like the upanisads, resists the reduction of texts to the presentation of already and completely achieved meanings. To this analysis I now turn. |
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III. The Organization Of Upanisadic Knowledge In The Ums |
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In the following paragraphs I discuss several key components which structure the Text: 1. the individual sutras, which by their laconic and minimalist expression indicate from the start that the Text inherently requires commentarial expansion; 2. adhikaranas, comprised (usually) of multiple sutras, as the literary and discursive units which set the parameters within which commentary occurs and Advaitic knowledge is accomplished; 3. padas, comprised of multiple adhikaranas, made coherent by strategies such as connection (samgati), coordination (upasamhara),harmonization (samanvaya)and (occasionally) by the utilization of siddhantas as generalizable rules for reasoning; 4. finally, the division of the whole into four adhyayas. |
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