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This reversed path of reading is in part a pedagogical device; the Text is heavily redacted and refined, and one cannot claim merely to be putting its parts back in order. Nevertheless, the advice to read backwards serves as a useful corrective for the modern reader who, eager to engage the philosophical content of Advaita, may be tempted to use the larger divisions of the Text into adhyaya and pada as an excuse to read selectively, avoiding the discipline of a total and much more prolonged engagement in the Text. Many a reader has missed the point of Advaita by reading only as far as the end of UMS I.1.4. |
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IV. The Contextualization Of Meaning Through Engaged Reading |
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In this chapter I have urged that the learning of Advaita is a primarily textual process, a reader's achievement. This is in part simply the elaboration of the fact that our access to Advaita is for the most part textual: most of us learn most of what we learn about Advaita by reading texts. But it is also the additional insistence that Advaita subsists as this textual composition, what I have termed "the Text," the entire religious-literary act of text and commentary. This Text is a complex literary projectin its practices, in the developments it makes available to us in the form of commentary, and its resultant reinterpretation of the world is a project in writing. The fruits of this Textwhat one gets from immersing oneself in itcan be abstracted only at the great cost of severing the vital connection between a Vedanta philosophy and an Uttara Mimamsa. The Text's forward movement in the refinements of commentary is an act of deliberate composition and extension in language and literary form of the rich and ambivalent heritage of the upanisads, the Uttara Mimamsa Sutras, and each layer of earlier commentary. One must remain ready to read, to be educated, and so to become differently skilled by particular acts of reading. In addition, one must arduously argue one's way through the Text in its purvapaksas and siddhantas, patiently becoming learned in the particular refinements by which the discernment of right positions advances; only thereby does one profit fully from the Advaita Text. |
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