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By the Advaita reckoning,9 the UMS is composed of 555 sutras, each a succinct statement which is nevertheless likely to imply and expect a massive contextualization if it is to make sense. Sutras mark arguments about a variety of issues and texts which, to the unaided reader, are often only obscurely encompassed by the sutras themselves, which are notoriously difficult to interpret. Although they offer some indications of topic and argumentation, they articulate fully neither the issues at stake nor the conclusions to be drawn.10 From the beginning sutras necessarily functioned only in the context of (oral, then written) commentary. The multiple, layered commentaries, composed in relation to the stark and simple sutras, preserve for us the opportunity to trace the stages of their development of the sutras' meanings. Earlier articulations of the meanings of sutras, inevitably incomplete, are taken advantage of as indications of ways of proceeding in yet further statements of those meanings. Their intentional incompleteness also requires that the contemporary reader become involved in an ampler oral, or written, explanatory discourse, i.e., in commentary; they invite the reader to become part of a conversation which is available in the Text before us, but never definitively presented in any commentary. |
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Since these permanently provocative sutras are marked off in groups which serve as loci for argument and inquiryas adhikaranasand since these adhikaranas are the practical units of debate, we must turn to these in order to say anything more about the reception of sutras in traditional and contemporary settings. |
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Though it is possible for one sutra to constitute an adhikarana, an adhikarana is usually several sutras grouped in order to define the boundaries of a potential exegetical argument about a problematic upanisadic text or texts. The UMS Text is divided into almost 200 adhikaranas.11 |
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