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VEDANTA
alized Brahman," we read in Sankara's Upadeśasahasrī, “is a knower of the Self; and no one else." 223
Positing Brahman involves the positing of the experience of liberation; positing liberation involves automatically the positing of bondage; and when this pair-of-opposites is posited all the other pairs-of-opposites are posited too. Illusion, ignorance, and the world of birth and death become thus re-established and nothing has been gained. The speculating mind has again snared itself in its own subtle web of thought. But through the force of paradox the logic of this tenuous web of the mind can be broken, whereupon the great and glamorous tradition of painstaking demonstration disappears-as the splendor of a rainbow into the purity of a translucent firmament. The final, paradoxical, self-annihilating formulae of Advaita Vedanta perfectly harmonize with those of the transcendental "Wisdom of the Other Shore" of the Mahayana Buddhist texts and meditations.224 All agree that the spiritual adventures, conquests, initiations, and experiences met with in pursuit of the goal of liberation are purely phenomenal.
Thus, by the paradox, Indian thought overcame at last its own besetting passion for metaphysics and philosophizing. The impact of the actual experience gained through yogic absorption carried the field against the logical arrangements of the way of speculative knowledge (jñāna-mārga). Thought, the mirror of reality, was shattered by the force of reality itself when the truth was realized at the end of the path of introspection. Thought-with all its fine distinctions-was then recognized as only a more subtle horizon of ignorance, in fact the most subtle of all the deluding devices of māyā. For the temptation of thought is another invitation to yield to the fascination of diversity (represented now through individual ideas tending to cluster into pairs-of-opposites) instead of piercing the glitter
223 Sankara, Upadesasahasri 115. 224 Cf. infra, pp. 478ff.
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