|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Chapter 3
The Truth of Advaita Vedanta |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I. The Problem Of Truth In The Text |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In Chapter 2 I showed that the study of Advaita entails a prolonged and gradually masterful engagement in a Text composed and complemented for the purpose of reading; the profound and subtle understanding which is the prized goal of Advaita is a reader's understanding. On its multiple levels and in its increasing complexity, the Text is the privileged place of Advaita knowledge, and it is a distortion to reduce it to a (somewhat cumbersome) representation of Sankara's thought, or to identify it as a systematization to which, when properly finished by later scholars, exegesis and argument become mere appendages.
1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Accordingly, we have already begun to examine the way in which Badarayana's UMS, as an organization of upanisadic knowledge, includes a series of judgments about what counts in the upanisads; we have begun to see how the UMS is patterned after a ritual arrangement of knowledge in which the performativeritual, meditative, literaryaspects of upanisadic knowledge are not sacrificed for the sake of content. In this chapter I comment more closely on the Advaitic construction of the meaning of the upanisads and, in particular, on the way in which Advaita moves toward a post-textual truth that never becomes purely extratextual. We thus turn our attention to the "truth of Advaita," the claims Advaita makes about the world |
|
|
|
|
|