/lit/ - Literature

>>14552198

When Westerners refer to something as being "positive" they almost always think of manifestation, of the created; hence their preference for the perspective of Ramanuja and their mistake in attributing "abstractions" to Shankara – or to Plato. God is abstraction for the world because the world is abstraction in relation to God. Now it is God who is real, not the world. People often believe that the content of a statement is false to the extent that the enunciation can be attacked by dialectics. Now every statement the is every transcendent truth, can be contradicted by arguments drawn from experience. Shankara never said that the inevitably human formulation of truth, bearing for instance on absolute Consciousness, could not be attacked; he said that such formulations were intrinsically true and something that the reason alone could not verify. When the Advaitins say that Consciousness has such and such a nature and that the example of deep sleep shows it, that does not at all mean that they themselves had need of this example or that they could be discomfited by a demonstration of the gaps it necessarily contains. Clearly it is not because of a contrary aspect but because of an analogy that one has recourse to an example. Contrary aspects do exist but they are not relevant here. If we say that, compared to an opaque body, any light is like the sun, the fact that this light has neither the form, nor the dimensions, nor the matter of the sun is absolutely without significance in this connection; moreover, if the example differed in no way from the thing to be demonstrated, it would be, not an example, but the thing itself.

Intellectual intuition communicates a priori the reality of the Absolute. Reasoning thought infers the Absolute by starting from the relative; thus it does not proceed by intellectual intuition, though it does not inevitably exclude it. For philosophy, arguments have an absolute value; for intellectual intuition their value is symbolical and provisional. Shankara did not "construct a system"; he did not "seek a solution" of such and such a "problem." He did not suffer from what he himself calls the disease of doubt. Shankara is like a colorless glass which allows the rays of light to pass through it intact whereas Ramanuja might be compared to a colored glass which also transmits light, but imparts to it a certain tint; this is to say that Ramanuja's doctrine also is inspired and not invented. Sages are instruments for the crystallizing of the pure Light; they are anything but inventors of systems. It is intellection that determines everything; the mode of expression is dictated by the requirements of the particular traditional form. With philosophers in the ordinary meaning of the word the initiative comes from the human side, from mental restlessness, from doubt, from lack of contemplative quality; their attitude is Promethean, not prophetic.

- Schuon, 'Language of the Self'