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tiny in order to verify that Brahman is their single true topic, and so to facilitate the practice of meditation by providing it with a coherent, intelligible foundation in scripture as properly understood. |
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But the project of harmonization is not merely propaedeutic to the process of meditation; it also has the secondary and (increasingly) significant effect of regularizing the content of the upanisads, homogenizing their explorations and stories and experiments into an informative "metadiscourse" about Brahman. It therefore opens the way for a digestion of the upanisads into the "best of the upanisads," a distilled, useful body of information about an existent reality. Once it is understood that the extratextual Brahman is the uniform and coherently described topic of the upanisads, a larger process of formalization and abstraction is under way, and it becomes possibleas an opportunity and a temptationto use the texts merely as initial occasions or starting points for an ever more independent consideration of Brahman. This shift to knowledge about Brahman, extrapolated from the texts as their meaning, is the beginning of Advaita as Vedanta philosophy. |
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The challenge for the Advaita as Uttara Mimamsa, however, is to defend and take advantage of the posited homogeneity of the upanisads without replacing them with their abstracted content. Harmonization, like coordination, must be preserved as a practice, while yet being allowed to achieve the result of making coherent the diverse meanings present in the upanisads. Likewise, the contemporary reader is advised not to mistake harmonization for a simple statement of what UMS I is about, but instead to be aided by it in constructing an overview of the Text, to appreciate it as a practical tool which helps make coherent Advaita's reading of the upanisads; harmonization, like coordination, structures a unified approach to the reading of texts, without obviating the need actually to read them. |
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4. Adhyaya and the Organization of the Whole |
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The preceding comments on connection (samgati), textured reasoning (nyaya), coordination (upasamhara) and harmoniza- |
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