Anirvachanaya

 I see anirvachanaya has come up as a topic in an advaitic blog which does not welcome ontological pondering so I won’t engage with it there. 

anirvachanaya

  It gets to the anirvachanaya quandary by way of an initial stipulation of  what is really real.

“Sat (Real): That which exists in all three periods of time (past, present, and future) and is never sublated or negated. Only Brahman/Consciousness fits this definition.

1. Asat (Unreal): That which is absolutely non-existent and can never be perceived, such as  “the son of a barren woman” or “the horns of a hare”.

Framing a position by starting from a stipulation is I would suggest a pointless venture.  That quandary about the co-existence of the real and the unreal only arises when conclusions have been reached by other means, down the line as it were.

Ask yourself: How does Sankara open his ontological position on the real?  He accepts sense perception but is puzzled by what the Greeks called an aporia (plural aporiai) : How is perception possible?  How does that out there concrete reality somehow come to be in here in my consciousness as an awareness of the thing as it is.  The concrete and immaterial consciousness are incommensurable.  

I have gone into the nuts and bolts of the progression of Shankara’s  thinking on this subject several times so I won’t repeat it here (follow the topic heads below).  Essentially what allows us to know the object is the unity of the substratum. (vritti - upadhi- adhyasa).  If I may be so bold as to add my own twist on the problem.  Ask why the overall form of awareness, which is ‘I AM’ , does not reflect back on itself instead of reaching the object.  

This is the fundamental transcendental hypothesis as sketched in the Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya.  I would hold that it dissolves the Real/Unreal dyad by establishing the concept of the non-dual or Advaita.  That division has become factitious.

 

Realism, the Mind/Body problem in Western and Advaitic thought.

 

“Now at the same time it is just those self-same things which his mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’s time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person’s mind. ‘Representative’ theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader’s sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist.”  (from ‘Radical Empiricism’ by William James)

In his clear way James has set out the aporia which in Advaita is called the chit jada granthi (the knot between the conscious and the inert).  It is the initial statement of the puzzleShankaracarya deals with in the preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya.  He writes:

“Accordingly, the superimposition of the object, referable through the concept “you”, and its attributes on the subject that is conscious by nature and is referable through the concept “we” (should be impossible), and contrariwise the superimposition of the subject and its attributes on the object should be impossible.”

What he finds to be a difficulty that must be stated before his commentary on the body of the sutras is simply this: how does that out there a material object come to be in here in my mind as a subjective unextended state of awareness.

This is just that very ‘double entry’ problem that under various modalities keeps cropping up.  The problem of universals comes under that rubric, primary and secondary qualities thinking is coloured by it and it may even be that the hard wired moral tenets, the evolutionary adaptive, correspond to the really out there as against the ‘in here’ cultural mores.  To put it at its most general: is Realism a thing?

Aristotle and Plato thought so and got to it in their different ways.  Advaita as I have pointed out mentions the problem and via the pramanas assumes the truth of realism but its discussion of the problem is put to one side by the very practical problem of self-realisation.  That gives a Cartesian critical tinge to its philosophical investigations.  What is ‘kuthasta ‘, unchanging, as firm as an anvil?  It is Consciousness irradiated by self awareness, underlying that advice given by Nisargadatta’s guru - focus on ‘I AM’ and become liberated.

Earnest Advaitic seekers will demur claiming that none of this Western problematic exists.  It does but they are dazzled by the shiny object of confusion, summarised in the snake/rope analogy and are thereby led into interesting problems such as ‘how is error possible’  and the various fata morgana of Idealism.

Sankaracarya stated the central aporia in the preamble and therefore we must assume that the commentary on the sutras is a working out of a solution.  Essentially the answer is non-duality or how you can have non-numerical identity between consciousness and the objective world.  I have written several notes on this for anyone who is interested in following the subject topics/labels.

Sankara's Adhyasa Bhasya: Advatic Stone Kicking

A la Samuel Johnson - ‘Thus I refute thee’ of the immaterialism of Bishop Berkeley.  It sounds like that, because in both the translations of the adhyasa bhasya (Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya) at my disposal the declaration of the foundational externality of perception is declared emphatically.

(a) It being established etc. (Swami Gambhirananda)

(b)It is not a matter requiring any proof etc. (George Thibaut)

Then there is the paradox that this externality, which is so patent that it does not require proof, comes burdened with the aporetic: how does that object out there, a material entity, come to be somehow inside me as a cognition which we intuitively accept as a true picture of what the object is.

No wonder the idealist says ‘stop, there is no outside and externality is an illusion’ and by the great razor of Occam this is the simplest explanation.  That only leaves one with the difficulty of an illusion of something that has never occurred.  A rare beast indeed.

Sankara declares that externality (a) should be impossible; (b) it would be wrong, given the aporia/impasse just detailed.  Nevertheless it is so.  Let us describe what seems to be taking place and work from there towards a transcendental hypothesis which accounts ontologically for it.  This is a ‘saving the appearances’ operation and is begun with the concept of superimposition viz. adhyasa.

More anon.

 

Panchapadika of Padmapada - Sri S.S.S. Critique

And so what are you reading at the moment?

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, witty spookery and of course the long, very long The Method of Vedanta by Sri SSS. which is what Indians call him. At page 418 I’m not at the half way mark yet. It’s comprehensive and the print is small with three varieties of typeface, bold for his own position, light for scriptural gloss and light cursive for explanatory notes of the latter.

You’d want to be in the whole of your health for that.

The present chapter, only 84 pages long, is enlivened by controversy. It’s on Panchapadika, no diacretics on this computer and if there were I wouldn’t know what to do with them.

That’s by Padmapada the close disciple of Shankaracarya. How could that be controversial, if anyone had the knowledge it was surely someone who 'took the dust’ of Bhagavatpada.

Well no, Swami says that he has given a wrong turn to the interpretation of the Preamble to the B.S.B. with his focus on the technicalities of superimposition (adhyasa) and his assertion that it is the cause of creation. He is quite firm in this and his analysis is convincing. When I initially read the preamble without having read any 'authoritative’ commentaries on it I was amazed that advaitins could have become so fascinated by 'confusion’ which they persisted in calling delusion. Rote learning can be like post hypnotic suggestion in over-riding plain perception and an obvious reading.

These various views (of what confusion is) are mentioned, but none of them is criticised, (by Shankara) because the question of how superimposition arises, and the answers given to it, are of little interest. and not relevant to the topic under discussion. That topic is not an exposition of the causes of superimposition. The topic being expounded is: ‘In worldly experience there is a natural superimposition of Consciousness and the non-conscious’. pg.396

Isn’t adhyasa according to other schools an invention of Shankara himself without a Vedic basis?

Pass. I think that it is a teaching device to illustrate a metaphysical insight into the aporetic nature of perception and go from that to a generalisation about what he calls ‘worldly experience’ namely various forms of self-identity. The fact that he brings it in at the beginning of his major work is an indication that he considers it a central insight that requires exposition. To that end he uses the analogy of common confusion. cf:
consciousness

Is that analogy a fixed element in his metaphysics?

Elsewhere he regards analogies as approximations which are of their nature surpassed when the truth is achieved. Adhyasa may be the last of those fingers pointing at the moon on the bough.