Most philosophy writing is like a pint in a two gallon bucket: a few good points wrapped in repetition and waffle which tends to obscure them. Sankara in his preamble to the Brahma-Sutra Bhasya reverses this m.o. to give a concentrated aphoristic expression of almost poetic compression. The whole argument is put before you in a way that allow you to see it in a single comprehension. That is its strength and its stumbling block. The philosophic mind must enlarge and expand on the thought to fill the bucket. Here I am threatening to do the same. "I had not the time to write a short letter so you are getting this long one instead -Pascal in his Provincial Letters.
The Snake/Rope/ analogy is often the standard introduction to Advaita conditioning our sense of its scope and direction. That is not the path of the argument taken by Shankara in the Preamble. He starts with an onto-epistemological aporia but because this master analogy has become the default gateway I will try to offer a couple of points on what it is trying to express and what the wrong turns are as I see them. First of all the Rope/Snake is a confusion not a delusion or an illusion. Even offering this initial distinction is potentially a wrong turn. I have begun to become fascinated by the logical analysis of the common place occurrence and forget to pay attention to the main thrust of what the analogy is trying to accomplish viz. the orientation of the mind in the direction of a transcendental hypothesis about the nature of subject/object awareness.
Shankara indicates this clearly:
"With regards to this , some say that it consists in the superimposition of the attributes of one thing on another. But others assert that whenever a superimposition on anything occurs, there is in evidence only a confusion arising from the absence of discrimination between them. Others say that the superimposition of anything on any other substratum consists in fancying some opposite attributes on that very basis. From every point of view, however, there is no difference as regards the appearance of one thing as something else.
In a confusing move Shankara appears to himself get drawn into answering a logical analysis:
"For everybody superimposes something else on what is perceived by him in front, and you assert that the Self is opposed to the non-Self and is not referable (objectively) by the concept "you".
He answers this objection by giving examples of non-objective things that are subject to superimposition. This would appear to validate treating analogy as homology i.e. likeness in a global respect. From the point of view of the adhiropa/apavada strategy or version of dialectic i.e. progressive approximation, this may be acceptable.
Nor is there any rule that something has to be superimposed on something else that is directly perceived through the senses; for boys superimpose the ideas of survace (i.e. concavity) and dirt on space (i.e. sky) that is not an object of sense-perception. Hence there is nothing impossible in superimposing the non-Self on the Self that is opposed to it."
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