Deciphering the Hidden Meaning : Language and the Highest Good in Early Advaita Vedanta

Deciphering the Hidden Meaning presents a transformative history of one of the most significant ideas in Indian philosophy: liberation. Taking the great philosopher Sa?kara as the focal point, Aleksandar Uskokov analyzes the relationship between liberation, language, and scripture.

Deciphering the Hidden Meaning presents a transformative history of one of the most significant ideas in Indian philosophy: liberation. Taking the great philosopher Sa?kara as the focal point, Aleksandar Uskokov analyzes the relationship between liberation, language, and scripture. While modern portraits of Sa?kara often cast him as a mystic or a religious reformer, the book paints a more complex portrait of the historical Sa?kara. As a theologian of liberation, Sa?kara was a maverick within the prevailing Brahmanical ideology of his time. In an intellectual landscape dominated by Mima?sa ritualists and Vedantic practitioners of meditation, Sa?kara introduced a radical claim: that the para? sreyas ("highest good") is attained not through action, ritual, or prolonged meditation, but through the immediate, intellectual understanding of the Upani?adic identity statements. Uskokov shows that the birth of the maha-vakya or "great statement"--such as tat tvam asi ("You are That")--was not the work of Sa?kara himself, but rather his tenth-century follower Sarvajñatman who used the structural logic of the Mima?sa school. The book meticulously traces the evolution of this soteriological model, exploring how early Advaitins navigated complex debates over language, ritual causality, and the nature of the Self. In doing so, it argues that Sa?kara''s most significant contribution was his intervention against Vedic theologians who viewed scripture as a guide for action and meditation rather than primarily informative.An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.