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A Modern Understanding of..
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 śünyatā. 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 Yogācāra concept of vijñaptımātratā 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 sūnyalā or as vijnaptımātratā, 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 (mahāyāk ya) that the fipal 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 trapcendence, is not, according to the Ad
3 Neither positive-nor-negative is still in the form of a possible commit
ment, only demanding that the indecision will ultimately be removed at a higher level.
