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Op reasoning from anvaya...
93
ing of a term is set aside, part retained. Although later Advaitins do not generally discuss details of reasoning from anvaya and Vyatireka to discriminate between what is and is not the self, Vidyāranya does demonstrate how, reasoning in this manner, one separates oneself from five things commonly equated with the self and then realizes Brahman. 56 Thus, given that in a dream the self appears while the gross body does not and the body fails to appear while the self does, one concludes that the body is not identical with the self. The appearance and non appearance of the self and egoconsciousness in deep dreamless sleep similarly serves to discriminate these. Vidyāraṇya specifies what he means by anvaya and yyatireka here: the continued appearance of the self conjoined with the non-appearance of the body or the ego-consciousness and, conversely, the non-appearance of these conjoined with the appearance of the self.57
Two points in what I have sketched out above merit stressing. First, reasoning from an vaya and vyatireka is precisely that, a mode of reasoning. It is not "a kind of meditation”.58 Secondly, this reasoning is used to discriminate between what is and is not the self and to determine what meanings may be attribued to speech units. It is not used directly to exclude in (7) parts of what tad and tvam refer to. These points require emphasis because some modern scholars have-wrongly, in my opinion--interpreted these matters quite differently. In a famous monograph, 59 Paul Hacker devoted one section to Suresvara's method of determining meanings of terms ( Die Methode der Bedeutungsbestimmung, p. 1980 [4]), another to his logical method ( Die logische Methode, pp. 1999-2000 (93-4]). In ihe first of these sections, he says: The understanding of the sacred utterance (7) proceeds from the understanding of the words which constitute the sentence, and one attains this understanding by the logical method of anvaya and vyatireka, that is, through reflecting on the fact that the contents of the words and the sentence are well grounded and that the contrary is logically impossible. 60 This
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