Lybroan James and the Perpetually Evolving Reality

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad writes that “Advaita and Mīmāsā are agreed that action and cognition are not intrinsically able to change the content of the other.” (Ram-Prasad  105) I disagree. The two are each half of a perpetually evolving reality. Knowledge and action are not mutually exclusive. They can shape one another. Moreover, one does not take epistemological precedence over the other.

I had a high school algebra teacher named Lybroan James. Lybroan employed several unconventional methods, but maintained one fundamental rule: if you could teach a concept to another student, and the other student consequently understood it, you yourself understood the concept. That was an A+ for the day, because Lybroan knew that action and knowledge are perpetually reciprocal.

Kumarila argues that simply acknowledging (knowing) that something is wrong is not grounds to stop partaking in it. Sankara asserts that a mistaken belief, idea, or thought isn’t going to be offset by an action, but by new or further elucidated knowledge.

My question for both: why not? If I have been adding 5 plus 5 to find that the sum is 9, then I am – in mathematics parlance – wrong. If my math teacher corrects me, and illuminates for me what I’ve been doing wrong and how exactly I need to go about getting 10 as the answer, then my actions have been corrected and bettered by knowledge. I will ultimately, necessarily stop partaking in the wrong action. Further, my teacher’s action of correcting me offsets what had been a false belief.

Might it be the restrictive, categorical nature of these assertions and questions that are most problematic?