ABSTRACT
In this essay, I concentrate on two significant passages in Śaṅkara's Brahmasūtrabhāṣya: (1) a few sentences from the introductory passage, and (2) his critique of Vijñānavāda. While I will not directly examine the classical Advaitic doctrine that Brahman alone is ‘real’, I hope to show that Śaṅkara adopts a sophisticated position on the nature of the ordinary world extrinsic to the subject of consciousness. This can be seen from a study of his analysis of the claim that dreams prompt suspicion about the nature of the world or, at any rate, the veridicality of our cognitive contact with it. The resultant position, which I characterize as ‘nonrealism’ regarding the world, is that while such a world must be accepted for the purpose of conventional knowledge, since it alone adequately explains the nature of our experience, there is nothing in our experience, and the reasoning based on it, that will enable us to say that the world which is experienced is the sole and determinate reality. Obviously, if there is no philosophical foundation to the idea that this world is the sole and determinate reality, there is at least a prima facie case for considering the soteriological possibility of Brahman-reality against which this world can be set as indeterminate in some significant way. I shall not pursue this soteriological claim because (a) much of the sustained argument for the plausibility of the indeterminacy of the world was done by Śaṅkara's successors, and (b) because I think that the soteriological argument is unpersuasive unless one is committed to some acceptance of Brahman (or indeed a Deity). I argue here that in his rejection of the Buddhist use of dreams and in his qualified acceptance of dreams himself, Śaṅkara provided us with sufficient material for an interesting reconstruction of the Advaitic philosophical position. The aim of this essay is to use the material on the critique of Vijñānavāda to provide a Śaṅkarite reconstruction of the role of dreams in our understanding of the external world; I will not attempt to make this an exegesis of Śaṅkara. The interest lies, I think, in the way in which arguments rooted in a tradition can be developed with regard to contemporary themes in philosophy. I must emphasize at this stage itself that the Advaitic view which I present here is substantially at odds with the spirit of the subschool exemplified by Padmapāda and Sureśvara, which, on the basis of the philosophical positions I give here, may more properly be understood as being idealistic. My Advaitin is a reconstructed Śaṅkarite who owes a fair amount to the subschool represented by Vācaspati, and to the subtle skepticism of Śrī HarṢa.
