Exegesis: What It Is and
Why It Is Useful in Adidam

This is Part 2 of Chris Tong's fourteen-part article, A Framework for Exegesis: Understanding Adi Da's Word in Context.

Adidam is certainly not the first religious or spiritual tradition that has had a need to develop tools for helping the reader understand its sacred texts or the words of its founder altogether. There is a long history of how various traditions do this. Exegesis is a word familiar to those engaged in this process of studying the world's great sacred texts.

Exegesis (from the Greek εξηγησις from εξηγεισθαι 'to lead out') is exploration of the meaning of a text (most commonly, a sacred text from one of the world's religious or spiritual traditions), which then leads to discovering its significance or relevance. A primary aspect of exegesis — the one addressed by the framework presented in this article — is the investigation of the history and origins of the text to more fully inform its meaning.

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All the world's great religions provide such a framework for exegesis of their sacred scriptures. In other words, they don't just provide the text alone, or just write an introduction to a sacred book, and leave it at that. They do much more: they provide "line by line" elaboration, footnote insertion, etc. of each nuance of each sentence, of everything worth knowing about the context of that sentence, etc. For example, for students of Judaism, the Midrash "fills in many gaps left in the biblical narrative regarding events and personalities that are only hinted at." [Samuel Rapaport, Tales and Maxims from the Midrash]

The greatest scholars and Realizers of a religion or spiritual way have traditionally provided the commentaries. For instance, Adi Shankara, a great Realizer himself, wrote extensive commentaries on the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. Adi Da's Gnosticon and Pneumaton include profound commentaries on many traditional sacred texts, including The Ribhu Gita, Maneesha Panchakam ("Five Verses on Wisdom"), Shankara's Dasasloki ("Ten Declarations"), the Devikalottara, and The New Testament.

Because such commentary has been created often over a period of many centuries, for any given paragraph of a sacred scripture, you frequently can read the commentary from not just one but many commentators.

And then, regardless of the tradition — whether one is a Christian engaged in "Bible study", a Hindu studying the Bhagavad Gita, or a Jew studying the Tanakh — one has access to this very full commentary as one is studying. Not too surprisingly, given that we are now in the 21st century, there now are many software-based or Web-based study aids for doing "Bible study", study of the Bhagavad Gita, etc.

The sacred texts of Adidam very much deserve this same degree of support, and their study would be aided greatly by having a suite of tools that support exegesis of each text (as well as each of Adi Da's talks and essays, and even the countless brief, memorable quotes from Adi Da that are circulating around the Web every day), along with a group of Adidam scholar-devotees dedicated to creating such tools. Hence this article, as a starting point with that goal in mind.[1]

[1]		We have developed, and are continuing to develop, a wide variety of supportive tools custom-tailored to Adi Da's manner of writing and speaking, that take full advantage of 21st century technology. For example, because Adi Da has created a vast array of specialized terminology (much like most well-developed fields of knowledge, from nuclear physics to English literature), you'll see throughout this site pop-up "glossary entries" wherever a specialized Adidam term is used (like this one) — a great improvement over having to go to a glossary on a separate page and look up a particular term.