Archives: Lectures

Session 1: Gadamer’s Biography: Beyond Theism and Atheism

Gadamer appears to be an unusually secular figure among the phenomenologists of his day; unlike those who began as theologians, his study of classical culture taught him to study religion dispassionately, while embracing religious arts as a channel for his own concerns. Influenced by “Swabian piety”, Bultmannn’s ‘demythologisation’, the spirituality and humanism of the classical world, ‘free-thinkers’ such as Goethe, Rilke, and Stefan George, and creative re-thinkers of the Christian tradition such as Scheler and Heidegger, Gadamer affirmed both the cultural contingency of faith, and its confessional power.

Graduate Seminars in Indic Religion: Session Two

Convenors: Tristan Elby and Lucian Wong

The Contested Category of ‘Neo-Vedānta’:

Swami Vivekananda and the Multivocality of Pre-Colonial Advaita Vedāntic Traditions  

James Madaio, University of Manchester 

‘Neo-Vedānta’ is the standard scholarly term for the philosophical-theological teachings of Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902). The concretisation of labels, however, can occlude as much as it can reveal. I argue that early Indological interest in historical origins and certain modalities of Advaita Vedāntic theology underrepresents the multivocality of Advaita Vedāntic traditions.  And it is precisely the understudied periods and text genres that were key sources for colonial period ‘Neo-Vedāntins’ such as Vivekananda.  My paper therefore aims to complicates categories of comparison derived from mid-twentieth century Indological scholarship still evident in post-colonial approaches to the swami.

A New Stage in Comparative Theology:

‘The Mystical Appropriation’ of Swami Abhishiktananda

Ionut Moise, Wolfson College

In this presentation I inquire into the doctrinal issues deriving from Hindu-Christian forms of worship promoted by Swami Abhishiktānanda (Henry le Saux). I will try to underline the problems and the need for the development of a liturgical comparative theology, which relates to both the Christian doctrine and Hindu ritual. The relation between Hindu culture and Christian faith, their orthodoxy and orthopraxy, will be the focus of my presentation. I start by looking at Abhishiktānanda’s understanding of integrating or ‘appropriating’ the Advaita experience and the difficult issues deriving from it. Three months before his death, Abhishiktānanda, intensely faithful to sannyasa, wrote a letter to Murray Rogers (MR, 4.10.73) in which he said that his legacy would be freedom from any notion of ‘Churchianity’ including worship. Yet, Abhishiktānanda’s legacy, (the Shantivanam Ashram) which represents today a meeting point between Hindu culture and Christian faith, seems to contradict his previous statement on the transcendence of the theological ritual. After all, is Hindu-Christian worship needed or not? Second, I will attempt to look at Hindu–Christian worship per se and to explore the value and theological implications deriving from it. A Hindu–Christian liturgy supposes a new language of faith, a new spirituality, and new hermeneutics.  To what extent does the Hindu worship joined to the Christian one remain orthodox? In Hindu traditions, the value of ritual is measured not according to the meaning which carries, but according to the orthopraxy of its performance. On the other hand, in Christianity worship carries a meaning, a dogmatic message. Without these clarifications, the Hindu-Christian worship falls into the syncretism, which Abhishiktānanda rejected.Finally, my paper will try to explain the development of a liturgical theology, which could, or could not lay the premises for an experiential and theological encounter between Hinduism and Christianity.

Ionut Moise

An Introduction to Vedantic Hermeneutics: Jayatīrtha’s Commentary on the Īśā Upaniṣad: Session Four

Hindu theology, and particularly Vedānta, is grounded in the reading of sacred texts and has been largely developed in commentaries on those texts. This Sanskrit reading class will explore the way Vaiṣṇava Vedānta develops its theology through a careful reading of the Upaniṣads. This term, we will read the commentaries on the Īśā Upaniṣad by Jayatīrtha, an important Dvaita theologian, paying particular attention to the way he builds on the commentary of his predecessor Madhva, and how he develops his theology. This reading class aims to introduce students with an intermediate knowledge of Sanskrit to the style and reasoning of Sanskrit commentaries as well as the fundamentals of Vaiṣṇava Vedānta.

Negotiating the Scriptural Boundary in Early Modern South Asia: Appayya Dīkṣita and Jīva Gosvāmī on Madhva’s Untraceable Citations

In an important paper published in 2012, Elisa Freschi effectively establishes the significance of what we might call ‘Quotation Studies’, an area of study which has been underexplored. Among many benefits such a study can yield, Freschi points out that the study of quotation can reveal the way in which an author understood authority in his / her tradition. In this context Freschi mentions an exciting case of Madhva’s untraceable citations, which Madhva uses to validate his own view.

As Freschi points out, the topic of Madhva’s quotes is a controversial one because many of the passages and the texts quoted by Madhva are found only in his works. For example, he would cite a passage and attributes it to certain text such as the Caturvedaśikhā, which no one ever heard of. Or after citing a verse, he would say iti varāhe but we do not find such a verse in the editions of the Purāṇa currently available. Or he would simply write iti ca, without telling us where his citation is coming from.

In the contemporary Indological field the topic of Madhva’s untraceable quotes has been systematically and extensively explored by Roque Mesquita, who argues that Madhva’s untraceable quotes are for the most part not actual quotes but his own creation. This claim has received considerable criticism from the scholars who belong to the Mādhva tradition. Therefore, in this presentation I shall first briefly describe the history and the nature of the modern day controversy concerning Madhva’s quotes. Then I briefly explore the possible implications of this controversy in relation to the Purāṇic study and the study of Vedānta as Hindu Theology. The main part of this presentation however consists of an exploration of the writings of two important Hindu Theologians in the sixteenth century namely Appayya Dīkṣita and Jīva Gosvāmī, who held opposing views on Madhva’s quotes. While Appayya rejects Madhva’s untraceable quotes to refute the latter’s Dvaita position, Jīva refers to the same quotes to validate his own Gauḍīya viewpoint. By examining these two authors, I hope to show the complexity involved in this topic, which in my view has not been fully addressed in Mesquita’s works.

Session 2: Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: Bias, Understanding, and Expanding Horizons

Gadamer saw culture, religion, and art as ‘living texts’ that integrate our life experience into a meaningful worldview that allows us to think, act, and create. But no worldview is ever static or finished; in ‘understanding’ we use bias (that of ourselves and others) as the raw material from which a new worldview is created. In this respect Gadamer shares much with Aristotelian and later Vitalist thinkers. But Gadamer also affirms that texts can act poetically as ‘angels’, as he puts it in his studies of Rilke and Paul Celan, gesturing toward the transcendence of that which cannot be encompassed in human thought.

An Introduction to Vedantic Hermeneutics: Jayatīrtha’s Commentary on the Īśā Upaniṣad: Session Five

Hindu theology, and particularly Vedānta, is grounded in the reading of sacred texts and has been largely developed in commentaries on those texts. This Sanskrit reading class will explore the way Vaiṣṇava Vedānta develops its theology through a careful reading of the Upaniṣads. This term, we will read the commentaries on the Īśā Upaniṣad by Jayatīrtha, an important Dvaita theologian, paying particular attention to the way he builds on the commentary of his predecessor Madhva, and how he develops his theology. This reading class aims to introduce students with an intermediate knowledge of Sanskrit to the style and reasoning of Sanskrit commentaries as well as the fundamentals of Vaiṣṇava Vedānta.