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T.S. Rukmani is currently Professor and Chair in Hindu Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

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Works by T. S. Rukmani

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The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy (2011) — Contributor — 28 copies

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An English rendering of the Yogavarttika of Vijnanabhiksu in its entirety has never been attempt so far. This need has been fulfilled by the four-volume series on the Yogavarttika. The text of the Patanjali Yogasutra and the Vyasabhasya with a new translation are also included in all the four volumes. It is therefore a unique contribution to the world of philosophical literature. It affirms the continuity of religious and metaphysical thought in the unbroken Indian tradition down the ages. A fresh look has also been given to the sutra and the bhasya and the translations are in the current idiom so that it is intelligible to the modern reader, both layman and scholar alike. Its syncretic nature and the difficulty of understanding it without the aid of the sutra and the bhasya has always deterred the undertaking of this work for a detailed study The present work gains added importance due to the critical notes given under every varttika.

Vijñānabhikṣu (also spelled Vijnanabhikshu, fl. 1550-1600) was an Indian philosopher who lived in north India. He wrote commentaries on three different schools of Indian philosophy, Vedānta, Sāṃkhya, and Yoga, and brought them together into a single theistic synthesis known as avibhagādvaita ("indistinguishable non-dualism"). Although his sub-commentary on the Yoga Sutras, the Yogavarttika, is now his most widely read work, his earliest works belonged to the school of Bhedābheda (Difference and Non-difference) Vedanta. Like many medieval Vedāntins, he considers Shankara's school of Advaita Vedānta a school of Buddhism in disguise, and understands the phenomenal world as real instead of illusory. As Vijñānabhikṣu claims that all three of the schools he commented on were a unity, this leads him to make some controversial claims (for instance, that the originator of the Sāṃkhya philosophical system believed in the existence of God).

Nicholson mentions Vijnanabhiksu as a prime influence on 19th century Indology and the formation of Neo-Vedanta. According to Nicholson, already between the twelfth and the sixteenth century,

... certain thinkers began to treat as a single whole the diverse philosophical teachings of the Upanishads, epics, Puranas, and the schools known retrospectively as the "six systems" (saddarsana) of mainstream Hindu philosophy.

The tendency of "a blurring of philosophical distinctions" has also been noted by Burley.] Lorenzen locates the origins of a distinct Hindu identity in the interaction between Muslims and Hindus, and a process of "mutual self-definition with a contrasting Muslim other", which started well before 1800. Both the Indian and the European thinkers who developed the term "Hinduism" in the 19th century were influenced by these philosophers.
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Saraswati_Library | Sep 26, 2014 |

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