Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta is largely dismissive of ritual action, in part because the metaphysical position of non-duality erodes any independent existence of the individual as a ritual agent, and because knowledge of non-duality is thought to be independent of action. However, a close reading of Śaṅkara shows that he does accept forms of devotional practice that have remained largely marginalized in studies of Advaita Vedānta. This article compares and contrasts contemplative devotion, in the form of visualized meditations on īśvara, with (...) knowledge-like contemplation of non-duality. The challenge is that the Upaniṣads provide no clear distinctions between the two, and these upāsanas appear indistinguishable from nididhyāsana because they incorporate a conceptual identity with brahman or appear to affirm non-duality in some sense. Furthermore, the practices of both are rather obscure despite their significance in Śaṅkara’s system. Analyzing Śaṅkara’s interpretations of their underlying Upaniṣadic sentence structures in terms of grammatical apposition and reconstructing their use of visualization, superimposition, and negation, provides clues to properly delineate these practices, and to understand their epistemological functions and potential religious experiences. (shrink)

Vṛṣabhadeva’s Sphuṭākṣarā, a commentary on the first chapter of Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya and its Vṛtti, offers a peculiar interpretation of the monistic ideas exposed at the beginning of the mūla text. The reflection on the status of ordinary reality and its relation with the unitary metaphysical principle is particularly interesting. Although according to Bhartṛhari’s perspective the entities of the world are real, the Sphuṭākṣarā offers a more intricate picture in which different degrees of reality seem involved. Furthermore, the author adopts hermeneutical (...) tools that are unusual in Bhartṛhari’s texts, and comparable to those of Advaita Vedānta. In particular, the article will deal with Vṛṣabhadeva’s use of the notion of ‘inexpressibility’, as well as with other concepts which are typical of the scholastic phase of Advaita. In discussing these affinities the paper will also touch upon the problem of Vṛṣabhadeva’s historical collocation. (shrink)

This dissertation is a study of modern Indian philosophy. It examines three engaging articulations of the Advaitic notion of liberating knowledge or brahmajñāna provided by three prominent Indian philosophers of the twentieth century, namely, Badrīnāth Śukla (1898-1988), Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya (1875-1949), and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975). Particular attention is paid to the existing relation between their distinctive conceptualisations of liberating knowledge and the doxastic attitudes that these authors professed towards the Sanskrit intellectual past of South Asia and the presence of the Western (...) Other. In the main, it argues that the profound differences to be found, on the one hand, in Śukla’s elucidation of this key Advaitic notion and, on the other, in Bhattacharyya’s and Radhakrishnan’s take on the same, betray their commitment to two radically different doxastic attitudes. Classifying these into (a) non-dialogical and (b) dialogical in relation to the Western Other as well as into (c) exegetic and (d) hermeneutic in relation to the Sanskrit intellectual past of South Asia, it contends that, in comparison to the conceptual scheme and the parameters of intelligibility that shaped and underpinned the precolonial Advaitic discourse on brahmajñāna in Sanskrit, there is a certain kind of epistemic discontinuity in the dialogical cum hermeneutic stance taken by Bhattacharyya and Radhakrishnan that is not to be found in the non-dialogical cum exegetic engagement enacted by Śukla. It suggests that this particular sort of discontinuity, absent as it is from Śukla’s elucidation of the process of knowing Brahman, reflects the far-reaching commitment of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan to appropriate the precolonial Advaitic notion of liberating knowledge hermeneutically and to conceptualise it in the face of Western modernity, that is, rendering it meaningful in terms and within the parameters of intelligibility of the Western Other in order to contest what they took to be a troublesome predicament of Western modernity. By examining their ways of engaging with the Advaitic notion of liberating knowledge, this dissertation contributes to the on-going debate about the nature and the driving forces of modern Indian philosophy. (shrink)