Sureśvara about Himself as a Disciple of Śaṅkara: Methodological Conclusions

Abstract

The article is based on those places in the texts of Sureśvara where he acknow­ledges their secondary character to Śaṅkara’s. Analyzing the reflection of Sureś­vara on what motivates him to write his own works, two motivations are estab­lished: polemical and autodidactical. The article has the following logical structure. The corpus of Advaita-Vedānta texts is considered through Roland Barthes’ sign theory (on self-reflections of advaita-vedāntins it is concluded that the corpus is a paradigm of forms representing the same content not prone to his­torical changes) and the «Meaning – Text» theory of Igor Mel’čuk, which allows to formally describe the structure of this corpus, the division of Advaita-Vedānta on two opposing directions (Vivaraṇa and Bhāmatī) and to distinguish polemic strategies between the texts of opposing directions of one school and of different schools. It is concluded that the texts of the Advaita-Vedānta are presented as each other’s periphrasis, and their authors assume that any changing of the philo­sophical content is an undesirable event. In the conclusion part of the article the author shows how a researcher can problematize differences between Śaṅkara and Sureśvara from the standpoint of this approach on example of the ques­tion whether renunciation was allowed to all the three varṇas or only to brāh­maṇas. The methodology proposed in the article, which aims to determine by In­dian thinkers their own role within the tradition, allows us to better understand the mechanisms of traditional Sanskrit exegesis of authoritative texts both for the purposes of apologetics and for the purposes of soteriological realization.