That You Are, Without Illusion
If the self simply is Brahman and the many things are an error, the sentence 'that you are' is true at the price of the world. Rāmānuja asks whether a reading can be right that turns the scripture teaching it into part of the mistake.
Against the non-dualist reading of Advaita, the treatise presses three questions. Whose ignorance produces the world, if only a self-luminous consciousness exists and nothing can hide it from itself? How can the Vedas remove an error they belong to? And who is left to know the liberating truth once the knower is counted among the things it cancels, like a cutter cut by his own stroke? No source of knowledge, Rāmānuja concludes, ever shows a thing without features, and the clay in the Upanishads' example makes its pots knowable, not unreal.
- scriptural interpretation
- scriptural authority
- ignorance
- illusion
- nonduality
- consciousness
- knowledge
- reality
- perception
- epistemology
- identity
Enter a dialogue
- If the many things of the world are an error, the Vedas and their teachers are part of it. Why can an error not cure itself?
- A dreamer who knows she is dreaming can still be afraid. What does that say about ending suffering by seeing the world as unreal?
- The Upanishads themselves call Brahman without parts and without qualities. How do you read those sentences without making them say less than they say?
- If consciousness lights itself and nothing else exists, nothing could hide it. Whose ignorance, then, do your opponents need for the world to appear?
- A knowledge that cancels its own knower, you say, is like a blow that fells whoever deals it. Who is left to be freed?