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is found in its texts, yet only after the reader has acquired an understanding of these at first puzzling claims. The great sayings are the Text's "other" inscribed within it; they impel the reader into a reader's awareness of the truth of Advaita, a truth not merely present in words such as "You are that."
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Riffaterre observes that the truth of fiction is not the sum total of the meanings found within the text, but rather its significance, which he explains as follows: "Significance . . . now appears to be more than or something other than the total meaning deducible from a comparison between variants of the given. That would only bring us back to the given, and it would be a reductionist procedure. Significance is, rather, the reader's praxis of the transformation, a realization that it is akin to playing, to act out the liturgy of a ritualthe experience of a circuitous sequence, a way of speaking that keeps revolving around a key word or matrix reduced to a marker . . . It is a hierarchy of representations imposed upon the reader, despite his personal preferences, by the greater or lesser expansion of the matrix's components, an orientation imposed upon the reader despite his linguistic habits, a bouncing from reference to reference that keeps on pushing the meaning over to a text not present in the linearity, to a paragram or hypogram . . ."18 He observes too that readers may be tempted to slip onto an easier path to meaning, by searching into the life of the author, etc.; only if they can resist this escape from textuality, they will be confronted with the "truth" of the text.19 Thinking of truth as this kind of significance can aid us further in understanding how the whole of the Advaita Text can be true, without this truth being the accumulation of the truths of the individual parts or simply a series of single truth statements.20 |
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The preceding analyses of the tensions provoked in the reader by the distinction between Brahman with and without qualities, and by the paradoxical great sayings, suggest that one can read the Advaita with an insistence on its profoundly textual, literary communicativeness, while yet continuing to respect its traditional "trademarks," such as the claim that its truth is not a textual product and is truly beyond words, that Brahman is without qualities, that "you" are ''that." As a remedy to |
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