ABSTRACT
The intellectual climate of Advaita following Sankara produced several budding schools of thought characterized by an increased focus on logic and argumentation. This increasing emphasis in Vedanta dialectics eventually culminates in Khandanakhandakhadya of Sriharsa, a twelfth-century Advaitin text which uses a destructive method of argument not unlike that of Nagarjuna. In the Advaita of Sankara and Suresvara, the ultimate truth of the non-dual real exhaustively cancels all conventional categories comprehended in space and time, including the body, for liberation is equated with bodilessness. Suresvara makes use of another sense of the term ‘experience’, an appeal to the ‘experience of the wise’ as an important example for seekers. Although the experience of the wise is not apodictic, it serves as an important plank in the cumulative case of Advaita, for it establishes both a ‘model of and ‘model for’ a particular kind of experience which in turn has important social, as well as soteriological, consequences.
