The Embodied One

Abstract

Advaita Vedanta is often approached as a philosophy of non-dualism. However, I show that approaching the tradition as a Sariraka Mamamsa, a hermeneutics of embodiment, better captures some of its core concerns. On this account, the Upanisads are primarily invested in clarifying the complex dynamics of human embodiment and the self’s immersion in various domains of materiality. To this extent, Advaita is well-placed to make unique interventions in the materialist turn in philosophy and religion, articulating a coherent discourse of embodied experience and pedagogy. Thus while the Vedantic project may be framed in terms of God or Brahman as its hermeneutic centre, it is the unfoldment of the nature of the saririn, the embodied, that drives the project at the first place. This requires discerning superimposed layers of identity (adhyasa), exfoliating each to arrive at the embodied one beneath the self’s embodying environs. This is not a negative process of withdrawing an ‘authentic’ self from its material or psychic entanglements, that is, desuperimposition (apavada). Rather, Advaitic method enjoins an embrace of the self’s immersion in its bodily environs, opening the phenomenal landscape of consciousness to hitherto unrecognized domains of phenomenal being submerged beneath conscious awareness. This is an expansive process that recalibrates one’s sense of self preparing it for more subtle forms of discernment in a graded phenomenal itinerary. I distinguish between two terms, adhyasa and adhyaropa, that, while mapping the same dynamics of embodiment, deploy it along different ends. Failure to appreciate this can obscure the precise work done by deliberate superimposition (adhyaropa) in Advaita.