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Though all of this seems to doom the study of Advaita to the fate of endless reading, pedantic detail, and ownership by a very small, elite audience, actually the opposite is true. The evident, available Textual status of Advaita makes it accessible to outsiders who do not realize the truth of Advaita intuitively from the start, who at the start share few of its premises and expectations. The permanent textuality of the Text ensures the possibility that one can learn Advaita from the outside in, by reading. If the demand that one read is a barrier which excludes those lacking sufficient determination or patience, it is also the school par excellence in which the persistent learner can ever so slowly advance in the desired knowledge of Brahman. For those who learn to perform according to its standards, the Text is the pathway to truth; it is a powerful and generous teacher, whose extraordinary demands allow the persistent few to learn gradually to make the right distinctions and right connections, to begin to know the truth of Brahman. |
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Or it ought to: the tension between Text and truth remains, and the pathway from becoming expert in the reading of Advaita to knowing the pure, simple, nondual truth of Brahman is not a clear one. How is the extratextual truth of Brahman inscribed within the multiple reading strategies inscribed in the Text? To this question we now turn, in Chapter 3. |
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