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.
Ivan Tolchelnikov (Mon,) studied this question.