Divine Self, Human Self: The Philosophy of Being in Two Gita Commentaries

169 Pages·2013·1.32 MB·English

by  Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad

Divine Self, Human Self

Divine Self, Human Self
The Philosophy of Being in
Two Gītā Commentaries
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2013
© Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, 2013
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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.