Advaita Vedanta

Author(s): Kalidas Bhattacharya, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 34

The Absolute as...
Another name of this viewing from outside is transcendence which is an entirely indeterminate affair, neither positive nor negative nor - one may add - both positive and negative or neither-positive-nor-negative, because it involves no sort of commitment at all. It is merely viewing from outside without any sticking to, any commitment to, that outside. This is the Madhyamika concept of sunyata. Or a third alternative, the withdrawal or transcendence, even as so indeterminate, may be understood as after all a form of consciousness, but consciousness which, in spite of its purity, is still wholly indeterminate. This is the Yogacara concept of vijñaptimātratā. Neither of these alternatives, hower, is acceptable to the Advaitin. Withdrawal, according to him, is negative attention, and all negation, he holds, presupposes, and posits also as a result, a positive as the ground. That positive ground, according to him, is pure subjectivity. Implicitly operating as the ground all through of the process of dissociation, from the extra-bodily world, through body and mind, to the stage of introspection, it evidences itself reflectively in its pure positive autonomy at this last stage. The Advaitin does not deny that lured by the successive acts of withdrawal, one might think that this withdrawal alone, whether as sunyata or as vijñaptimātrată, is the ultimate stand. It is just in order that one is not misled that way that between what he would call final realization and that transcendence he introduces another item for training, viz. a warning statement (mahāvākya) that the final truth is pure subjectivity, not merely the withdrawal nor even the withdrawing self qua withdrawing. It is this warning statement that occasions at the stage of final withdrawal the direct awareness of pure subjectivity. It revives the implicit ground that has so long been continuously pushed aside under the pressure of ever-growing withdrawing activity. The final withdrawal, called trancendence, is not, according to the Ad
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3 Neither-positive-nor-negative is still in the form of a possible commitment, only demanding that the indecision will ultimately be removed at a higher level.