The Method of Early Advaita Vedanta.

• Author: Taber, John A.
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

The Method of Early Advaita Vedanta. By MICHAEL COMANS. Delhi: MOTILAL BANARSIDASS, 2000. Pp. xxiv + 492. Rs 495.

What are we to make of a philosophy that promises to free us from the bonds of limited existence merely by conveying an understanding of a few scriptural passages? While this question is not one that Comans explicitly asks in this study of early Advaita thought, it becomes increasingly urgent for the reader as he assesses Comans' findings. For all of Comans' apparently reasonable explanations of Advaita concepts and doctrines and careful interpretations of texts, the system of Advaita Vedanta in the end remains a mystery.

Comans surveys the writings of the four founding fathers of the Advaita tradition: Gaudapada, Sankara, Suresvara, and Padmapada. Three chapters are devoted to Gaudapada, three to Sankara, and one each to Suresvara and Padmapada. The first chapter on Gaudapada consists mostly of a "running commentary" on the Mandukya Upanisad and the so-called Agamasastra, the four-part commentary on the Mandukya Upanisad that many believe to have been written by Gaudapada. In his commentary Comans attempts to make consistent sense of the Agamasastra as an Advaita treatise. While he touches on some of the scholarly debates that have centered on this text, he seems determined not to get bogged down in them. Pointing to internal consistencies among the prakaranas, he goes along with the traditional view that the Agamasastra is a unified work by a single author and not a quartet of independent treatises. This makes it natural for him to regard Gaudapada, to whom individual verses from different prakaranas are ascribed in later texts, as the author of the entire work. Although he is reserved about whether Gaudapada was really Sankara's paramaguru and notes the uncertainty regarding the attribution of the well-known supercommentary on the Agamasastra, the Agamasastravivarana, to Sankara, he expresses the conviction, on the basis of the similarity of Sankara's thought and terminology to Gaudapada's in other works besides the Agamasastravivarana, that the relation between the two was quite close. (This last matter is addressed at the beginning of chapter four.) However, the primary aim of this first chapter is to elucidate the metaphysics of the Agamasastra, in particular, the doctrine of the four states of consciousness, the introduction of the Fourth, turiya, as the Absolute, and the assertion of the illusory nature of everything besides the Fourth.

In the second chapter, which focuses on the last prakarana of the Agamasastra, titled the Alatasantiprakarana ("The Extinguishing of the Fire-Brand"), Comans takes up the vexed question of Gaudapada's relation to Buddhism. Because this text begins with a mangalasloka addressed to "the best of men" (dvipadam varam) and contains numerous verses that seem to express Madhyamaka and Yogacara ideas, some scholars have taken it to be a Buddhist treatise outright while others have seen it as an Advaita text that attempts to demonstrate the compatibility of Advaita with Buddhism! Comans, however, aims to show that it is an Advaita treatise which employs certain Buddhist arguments in support of illusionism, but which certainly does not adopt Buddhist metaphysics wholesale and even criticizes it implicitly in certain places.

The third chapter discusses the path to liberation as depicted in the Agamasastra, with special attention paid to the asparsayoga of the third part. Here Comans is particularly concerned to dispel any idea that this is a "stilling of the functions of the mind" such as is described in the Yogasutra. Rather, it is simply the abiding in the knowledge of the non-dual self brought about by the (discursive) contemplation on the syllable om set out in the Upanisad. For Gaudapada, as for the Advaita thinkers who would immediately succeed him, sruti is the sole means of...