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is knowable from scripture; d. inquiry into scripture is a reasonable endeavor, because scripture is coherent and has Brahman as its single primary topic. |
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The four sutras can also be taken as declarative of knowledge about Brahman, as providing four topics for theological and philosophical analysis: a. Brahman exists, is knowable and worth knowing (UMS I.1.1); b. Brahman is the cause of the world, and is knowable as such (UMS I.1.2); c. Brahman is knowable from scripture (UMS I.1.3); d. the upanisads testify to the primacy and salvific efficacy of knowledge of Brahman (UMS I.1.4). The enormity of the commentaries on these sutrasoften named simply the catuhsutri,"the section of the four sutras"amply shows that they can be taken in effect as "a text in themselves." |
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While this second and more philosophical reading of the inaugural sutras cannot therefore be discarded, it must be kept in tension with, and ultimately subordinate to, the first, regulative understanding of them. The tension between knowledge as skill and knowledge as insight grows throughout the Text, and is ever more finely accentuated. Advaita subsists precisely in that tension: it is both Uttara Mimamsa and Vedanta. There is no necessary contradiction between these sutras as rules for the reader and as statements about Brahman, since, as we shall see in Chapter 3, the latter, positive exposition of knowledge about Brahman is an expected stage and development of the Advaita project of knowledge. Any such development, however, remains later, consequent upon a necessary and persisting engagement in the reading of the Text.
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The reader who wishes to engage the Text properly may therefore be advised to use the map laid out by pada and adhyaya, and the issues spelled out ever more clearly in the initial sutrasin order to read backwards across the map; possibly, for instance, to begin with the practical issues related to exegesis-for-meditation (UMS III.3,) and then to proceed to a textually constituted examination of the results (UMS IV, UMS III.4) of the presuppositions of the act of meditation, psychology and cosmology (UMS III.1-2,) of apologetics and the removal of doubts about Advaita (UMS II.2,) and finally of the formal rules and practices of the systematization of this knowledge (I). |
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