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past exaggerations, these strategies need to be appreciated without the immediate imposition of a philosophical interpretation. |
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Subsequently, it becomes possible to speak of this Advaita truth in metaphysical and epistemological language. The truth claims posed by the Text on the world can be adequately appreciated, argued, perhaps even proven, if one first sees them as skillfully composed textual achievements, claims on how we read the texts which constitute the Advaita Text. |
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III. Truth After The Text: The True Meaning Of The Upanisads And The World Of Advaita |
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The preceding comments, which complement the project begun in Chapter 2, have emphasized the power and indispensability of the Text as a field in which the reader engages the truth of Advaita, which is accessible only by an active reading which confronts it as a finely composed text inscribed in ongoing acts of commentary. With its multiple inscribed strategies, the Text first claims readers through a reformulation of their rules of reading, the proper performance of reading enacted by a trained reader. Though Brahman is not what we say about Brahman, and though reality, utterly simple, does not directly reflect the complexity of ordinary experience and our words about it, Advaita is marked by a subtle, complex and uncompromising commitment to texts and commentaries as the vehicle of this realization of truth within the confinement of language. |
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Attention to the linguistic and literary strategies of the Text must in turn be complemented by an examination of the Text's content, those claims about Brahman which are by implication claims about the self and the world. The Advaitins invest certain contents with meaning, and articulate a definite position about what the upanisads actually say; they intend to identify the arguable, defensible truth of the upanisads. |
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Identified through careful reading, this truth is protected in two ways. First, the Advaitins construct around it a frame of meanings and rules about meaning which favor their interpretation. Second, they preempt efforts to construct meanings out- |
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