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Just as adhikaranas resist abstraction and summation, the connections among them cannot be set forth as a predictable logical development. The reasoning for each step in the sequence lies imbedded in the details of each adhikarana. The connection, written implicitly into the pada as we find it, becomes clear only when one adhikarana in all its complexity is read after another in all of its complexity, when both are understood and reread in light of one another. |
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The connections among adhikaranas are articulated by various rationales. A second adhikarana might be said simply to extend a first, either by a continued focus on a single text, or by the application in an almost identical situation of the same rule; the topic of the text considered in one might be taken as suggesting a similar topic or implication to be taken up in the next; a second might be perceived as extending to a new set of circumstances a principle established in the first, with appropriate adjustments in the rules accommodated to the first set of circumstances; a second might be seen as a counter-example or exception to the first; in some cases, an odd clue or verbal echo suggests an educative digression into seemingly unrelated issues. |
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When the pattern of connections among the adhikaranas of a certain pada becomes clear in the attuned minds of properly educated readers, they gradually accomplish a comparable progression in their understanding, acquiring a sense of the overall project of a pada within the UMS; this in turn becomes a step toward understanding the whole, and toward comprehending Sankara's project and the accumulated wisdom of the later commentators. Yet this literate comprehension continues to elude ready summation: the person interested in Advaita still has to replicate the process, to keep reading Advaita, for the sake of a further production of insight. There is thus a Textually inscribed coherence to the whole which remains performative, produced through reading and, as the following examples may suggest, otherwise virtually unintelligible. |
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Despite the problems of summation, it may be helpful to introduce by way of example a simplified rendering of the perceived logic behind one series of adhikaranas, from UMS I.1.12 to I.1.31
31 Let us first recall from above the upanisadic texts |
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