The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedanta

Ayon Maharaj, Ayon Maharaj

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350063259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

This handbook brings together a distinguished team of scholars from philosophy, theology, and religious studies to provide the first in-depth discussion of Vedanta and the many different systems of thought that make up this tradition of Indian philosophy. Emphasizing the historical development of Vedantic thought, it includes chapters on numerous classical Vedantic philosophies as well as the modern Vedantic views of Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo, and Romain Rolland. The volume offers careful hermeneutic analyses of how Vedantic texts have been interpreted, and it addresses key issues and debates in Vedanta, including religious diversity, the nature of God, and the possibility of embodied liberation. Venturing into cross-philosophical and cross-cultural territory, it also brings Vedanta into dialogue with Saiva Nondualism as well as contemporary Western analytic philosophy. Highlighting current scholarly controversies and charting new paths of inquiry, this is an indispensable research guide for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of Vedanta and Indian philosophy.

Part One

Classical Vedānta

1

Contemplating Nonduality: The Method of Nididhyāsana in Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta

Neil Dalal

Advaita Vedānta articulates a philosophical position of radical nondualism based on the Upaniṣadic formulation of absolute reality (Brahman). Advaitins understand Brahman as transcending individuality and empirical plurality. They seek to establish that the Self (Ātman) is in reality nondual Brahman by tying a metaphysics of Brahman to a theory of personal consciousness. This endeavor depends upon systematized theories of language and epistemology and specific methods of teaching and contemplative practice intended to culminate in liberating nondual knowledge. Surprisingly, it is difficult to provide great detail on Advaita’s contemplative method known as nididhyāsana without reconstructive speculation. Even though nididhyāsana ostensibly plays a pivotal role in Advaita praxis, detailed discussions of how to do it are mostly absent in early Advaita literature, such as Śaṅkara’s commentaries, and rare even in the most prolix of later texts.

The scarcity of contemplative instruction in early Advaitin texts is conspicuous, different from similar traditions like Pātañjala Yoga or Mahāyāna Buddhism, and likely an intentional omission. There are a few likely reasons. The śāstra genre, sacred literature dealing with specialized traditions of learning, along with its commentaries, often does not give detailed instruction for practice, assuming the teacher will provide it through oral instruction. Second, nonduality is already present and innate according to Advaita Vedāntins. Construing contemplation as a practice by which one gains liberation or achieves nondual experiential states depends on presuppositions—such as that liberation is distant—which contradict the innateness of nonduality. Such presuppositions also contradict Advaita’s view of the Upaniṣads as a means of knowledge. As I will argue below, Advaita’s method collapses the dichotomy of theory and practice that is intrinsic to both ritual practice and yogic meditation methods. The question of “how to do contemplation” is thus inherently problematic. Third, the doctrine of nididhyāsana has a number of ambiguities, tensions, and paradoxes. Advaita’s liberation (mokṣa) is ultimately indeterminable—receding just out of reach of the horizon of reason and words. Mokṣa resists verbalization or objectification. There is a metaphysical uncertainty about it, for on the one hand a liberating cognition may be able to remove self-ignorance, but on the other it is problematic to reduce ever-present liberation to a cognition which is a product and a temporal event. If nididhyāsana is the penultimate precursor to this liberating knowledge or identified as this knowledge itself, then it shares some of the same obscurities. Thus, articulating a contemplative process that cultivates or maintains self-knowledge is difficult at best. Yet ironically, language provides the key for understanding nididhyāsana because Śaṅkara holds the counterintuitive position that words, in the form of key Upaniṣadic passages, are the sole means of recognizing Brahman.

Though a handful of academic publications discuss nididhyāsana, none systematically examine Śaṅkara’s understanding of the practice across his commentaries.¹ This study fills this gap by analyzing how Śaṅkara idiosyncratically grounds nididhyāsana in a method of language and a particular trajectory of philosophical inquiry. The chapter further isolates several elements of continuity as well as subtle differences in textual expressions of nididhyāsana practices. These case studies show that nididhyāsana is fundamentally different from meditation practices of focusing or controlling the mind, and that an accurate reading of Śaṅkara cannot wholly separate nididhyāsana from Upaniṣadic study or attribute any independent epistemological function to it.

Deciphering nididhyāsana requires an adequate understanding of Advaita’s philosophy and method. This chapter thus begins with a brief historical sketch of Advaita Vedānta and then provides a philosophical introduction to Advaita philosophy for the nonspecialist through a case study of one “great sentence” (mahāvākya) from Taittirīya Upaniṣad (TU) 2.1.1—“Brahman is existence, consciousness, and limitless” (satyaṃ jñānaṃ anantaṃ brahma). The following section explains Advaita’s foundational verbal methods for indicating Brahman, which form the architecture underlying nididhyāsana. The chapter then analyzes case studies of nididhyāsana, focusing on Śaṅkara’s interpretations of key passages in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (BṛU), Upadeśasāhasrī (US), and the Bhagavad-Gītā (BhG). Together these case studies provide the main elements to reconstruct nididhyāsana according to Śaṅkara. Despite continuities across these case studies, the precise relationship between nididhyāsana and immediate self-knowledge in terms of causation and chronology remains ambiguous in Śaṅkara’s writing. The final section explains these ambiguities and provides an overview of contentious differences that post-Śaṅkara Advaitins developed about the nature of nididhyāsana. The conclusion summarizes the method of nididhyāsana and argues that an accurate understanding of Śaṅkara’s nididhyāsana from the inside out requires us to expand our assumed boundaries of Upaniṣadic texts.

1.1 A Brief Historical Overview of Advaita Vedānta

Advaita Vedāntins trace their lineage back through Bādarāyaṇa (c. first century BCE), the author of the Brahmasūtra (The Aphorisms on Brahman), to the individuals in Upaniṣadic narratives, and ultimately to īśvara (roughly “God”) as Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa or Dakṣiṇāmūrti, a teaching form of Śiva. The historical record of Advaita Vedānta, however, is obscure prior to Gauḍapāda (sixth century CE), who was Advaita’s earliest extant author. He composed the Gauḍapādakārikās (Verses of Gauḍapāda), which explain the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad. According to tradition, he was the teacher of Śaṅkara’s teacher named Govinda. Gauḍapāda is well known for his theory of ajātivāda (that the world is never actually born), his disputes (and potential similarities) with Mādhyamika Buddhism, and his meditative “yoga of non-contact” (asparśayoga) based on the idea that the mind has no contact with external objects.²

The tradition finds its most sustained early philosophical articulation in the works of the preeminent eighth-century Advaitin, Ādi Śaṅkarācārya (hereafter Śaṅkara), and his elder contemporary Maṇḍanamiśra. Maṇḍanamiśra composed an important text titled the Brahmasiddhi (The Proof of Brahman). Śaṅkara composed our earliest extant commentaries on the Upaniṣads, Brahmasūtra, and Bhagavad-Gītā, which constitute Advaita’s triple canon, as well as an independent work, the Upadeśasāhasrī (A Thousand Teachings). Śaṅkara attempted to establish his philosophy of nondual Brahman and to systematize Advaita exegesis by reconciling the diverse passages of Upaniṣadic texts. His work is the most influential for Advaita’s teaching tradition and monastic lineages. Śaṅkara’s direct disciples, particularly Padmapāda and Sureśvara, expanded upon his commentaries.

Two important subschools of Advaita eventually emerged in the post-Śaṅkara tradition: the Vivaraṇa subschool, a moniker derived from Prakāśātman’s (1000 CE) Pañcapādikāvivaraṇa (Elucidation of Five Parts), a subcommentary on Padmapāda’s Pañcapādikā (Five Parts), and the Bhāmatī subschool named after the famous polymath Vācaspati Miśra’s (950 CE) Bhāmatī (The Lustrous) subcommentary on Śaṅkara’s Brahmasūtra commentary. These two subschools agreed for the most part, but diverged on several subtle issues, such as the precise relationship of consciousness to the cognizing individual, conceptions of īśvara, whether the individual is the locus of ignorance, and the epistemological importance of nididhyāsana. From the twelfth century onward, a technical body of Advaita literature arose in dialogue with other Indian philosophies. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Advaitins such as Śrīharṣa (1150 CE) and Citsukha (1220 CE) disputed with Naiyāyika logicians, whose realist metaphysics (which affirms the reality of distinctions) and theory of consciousness as a non-intrinsic property of one’s Self, threatened to undermine the nonduality of Advaita’s Brahman.

In the following centuries, Advaitins such as Vidyāraṇya, Dharmarājādhvarin, Nṛsiṃhāśrama, Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, and Appayya ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Table of Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Sanskrit Transliteration
• Introduction: The Past, Present, and Future of Scholarship on Vedānta
• Chapter Summaries
• Part 1: Classical Vedānta
• Part 2: Modern Vedānta
• Part 3: Key Themes, Concepts, and Debates in Vedānta
• Part 4: Hermeneutic Investigations
• Part 5: Cross-Cultural Explorations
• Index
• Imprint