Their Conceptual Sphere is Where the Cow Wanders: Metaphor and Model From Veda to Vedanta
Dissertation, University of Hawaii at Manoa (
1990)
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Abstract
This dissertation examines the relationship between sacred text and religious experience. Its method is an analysis of metaphors and their relation to models and conceptual spheres. The method of metaphor analysis is applied to sacred texts of the Indian tradition, especially the Vedas and the texts of Advaita Vedanta. The analysis generates a model of religious experience for each of these subtraditions. Finally, the dissertation picks out features from the traditional models which best inform a contemporary model of religious experience. ;Metaphor is defined, after I. A. Richards and Janet Soskice, as a figure of speech in which one speaks about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another. Vedic metaphors speak about natural events in terms which are seen to be suggestive of deity and material prosperity. The pervasive use of metaphor in the Vedas generates a model of religious experience which is represented by invocation, sacrifice, and henotheistic explanation. Henotheism, the worship of successive gods as if each were supreme, produces a pool of divine attributes from which the Vedic poets freely draw. ;The context of the Advaitic model is the Vedic world view. The locus of metaphor is the text or utterance; the locus of the conceptual sphere is the human person and the world. Thus, the Vedic conceptual sphere is a kind of weltanschauung, including both the 'world' and the 'view.' The Advaitic model becomes contextualized, and hence construed as realist, only in the presence of an ideal given by the Vedic world view. The Advaitic model is characterized by "real-process idealism." The ideal is given by the tradition through Vedic sacred text. It has a particular content which is suited, as telos, to the explanation sought by the model. ;The thesis is: the insights expressed in Vedic metaphor inform an Advaitic model of real-process idealism in which the centrality of religious experience redefines the boundaries of the Vedic conceptual sphere and suggests a contemporary model of religious experience