ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Sankara’s work and shows that, in the main, his dominant epistemology of religious experience is intemalism. It examines Sankara’s epistemology of religious experience and argues that, while an important creative dialectic between extemalism and intemalism is evident in his reflections, intemalism best accounts for his method of gaining saving knowledge, and, more importantly, justifies the sacred experience itself. The chapter argues that Sankara’s definitive mechanism is internalism, on the basis of his metaphysical axioms and the introspective process of accessing, indubitably and in a self-justifying manner, the inner Self. Despite this non-dual metaphysic and the internalism it suggests, the process of accessing saving knowledge is profoundly supported by a broad ‘external circuitry’ of Advaita, an interwoven process of text, tradition and teacher which presents and reinforces a particular construal of reality in its broadest context.
