Divine Self, Human Self: The Philosophy of Being in Two Gita Commentaries PDF
Preview Divine Self, Human Self: The Philosophy of Being in Two Gita Commentaries
Divine Self, Human Self Divine Self, Human Self The Philosophy of Being in Two Gītā Commentaries Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ePDF: 978-1-4411-7681-3 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN For Julius Lipner Contents Preface viii Introduction ix 1 The Ground of Being/Non-Being, and the Divine Self: Śan˙kara on brahman and Kr.s.n.a 1 2 Being and the God Other than Being: Rāmānuja on brahman and Kr.s.n.a 41 3 A Comparative Study of Śan˙kara and Rāmānuja on Self and Person, Gnosis and Loving Devotion 77 Endnotes 117 Bibliography 133 Index 139 Preface This book is one of the outputs of a major research grant, 2008–11, from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, of which I was the PI. I would like to thank the AHRC for its support of the study of classical Sanskrit thought. I would like to thank Irina Kuznetsova, who was Research Associate on the AHRC project, for her careful and deeply scholarly editorial help; this book would have taken far longer to complete without her assistance. Sections of this book were presented at different places, and I would like to thank the audiences at the Dahlem Humanities Centre at Free University, Berlin, The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, and Lambeth Palace for their interest and comments. I would particularly like to thank the participants of a discussion group at The Centre for the Study of World Religions, Harvard, for their sympathetic yet rigorous and highly informed response to a draft of over half of this book. Various people have discussed ideas that have gone into this book, or read sections of it, and I am deeply grateful to them: Frank Clooney, Gwen Griffith-Dickson, Gavin Hyman, Parimal Patil, Laurie Patton, and Kate Wharton. Frank Clooney invited me to Harvard to give the inaugural Comparative Theology Lecture, where I first outlined the idea of this book; he also organised the discussion group from which I benefitted a great deal. Gavin Hyman long ago encouraged me to look carefully at postmodern Christian theology, and conversations with him for well over a decade have informed many of my ideas. My uncle, K. Sudarsan has always followed my interest in these philo- sophical materials, and gifted me Sanskrit texts across the years. Insightful and wise remarks by Rowan Williams, and the experience of working with him at a meeting with Hindu ācāryas in Bangalore, had a deep impact on my thinking about the central issues with which I have dealt here. Since the very beginning of my career, Julius Lipner has been an unfail- ingly encouraging and supportive senior colleague. His book on Rāmānuja was the first thing I read that made me understand the contemporary possi- bilities of the philosophical tradition into which I had been born. I dedicate this book to him. Lancaster University has been a supportive place, and I would particu- larly like to thank Tony Mcenery and Emma Rose. As ever, my parents, brother, father-in-law and children have provided a constant and warm environment for my work. And as always, nothing would be possible for me without Judith. Introduction This book is an essay in constructive theology. Let me approach what I mean by that through the timeworn tactic of saying what this book is not. It is not a study of the Bhagavad Gītā (c. first century ce) in any way: historical, philological or even theological. In much of this introduction, I do outline the Gītā’s structure, textual location, and reception history, as well as the contemporary secondary literature on it; but this is primarily to offer the full context of the commentaries on which I work thereafter, especially for those not familiar with Hindu traditions and Sanskrit. But this book is not a study of Śan˙kara’s (c. eighth-ninth century ce) and Rāmānuja’s (eleventh-twelfth century ce) commentaries (bhās.yas) either, in the strict sense of systematically going through these commentaries and offering a sort of sub-commentary within a textual-historical study. Nor is this book an overarching comparison of Śan˙kara’s Advaita (Non-Dualism) and Rāmānuja’s Viśis.t.ādvaita (Qualified Non-Dualism); that is to say, their competing interpretations of the meaning of the ancient Upanis.ad texts (called the Vedānta or end portions of the Vedas) and other sacred materials. It should not need saying – although, sadly, it usually does – that a theologian of Christianity would not need to make any such preliminary declaration. Contemporary Christian theology, in whatever different ways writers within it characterise themselves, is a living tradition in which the works of the great Christian thinkers of the past become the source of new thinking and re-thinking; and this is seen as a perfectly legitimate under- taking in the academy, along with historical, philological and other forms of study. There is no doubt that Hindu thought must come to terms with a hermeneutic rupture created in its history. Nevertheless, for some time now, it has been widely recognised in the Western academy, where constructive Christian theology flourishes as a discipline, that there can be neither moral nor intellectual grounds for denying that constructive theology is perfectly possible in different traditions.1 (That various hegemonies of thought still hold on tenaciously to strictures on what is permissible in the study of Hindu thought and culture is another matter. I propose to ignore them – they aren’t worth the bother of engaging in asymptotic approaches to the overcoming of prejudices.) The reality is that some sort of context-setting is required for a work that seeks to do constructive Hindu theology: there is no established field as such, and the precise nature of my engagement with the Sanskrit material requires some clarification, since it does not follow standard Indological disciplines.
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