Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History

Copyright Material    INTRODUCTION contesting the unity of hinduism The word “Hinduism” is loaded with historical and political resonances. Like such comparable terms as Buddhism, Sikhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, this word is a site of contestation, with proponents and detrac- tors, open to varied interpretations. In this introduction I briefly sketch two opposing and influential contemporary interpretations of Hinduism, both of which I believe have significant weaknesses. The first, often enunciated by Hindus themselves, is that Hinduism is the modern term for what was known in earlier times as the eternal reli- gion (sanātana dharma) described in such texts as the Bhagavad Gītā and the Vedas. Properly speaking, it has no history. Although historians today attempt with some degree of success to chronicle the poets and philoso- phers who found new ways of expressing the truths of Hinduism, the es- sence of this religion has remained the same since the very beginning of Indian civilization, thousands or even tens of thousands of years ago. In this regard, Hinduism is different from Christianity and Islam, two tradi- tions founded relatively recently by single individuals which have under- gone extensive changes in response to world-historical events. In the second, partly as a response to this portrayal, some scholars of modern history, anthropology, and postcolonial studies have argued that a unified set of beliefs and practices known as Hinduism did not exist before the nineteenth century. According to this narrative, British scholars closely aligned with Britain’s imperial project looked for an Indian analogue to the Western religions that they already knew. But after arriving in India and finding a multitude of popular rites without any unifying philosophical  Copyright Material 2 introduction or theological framework, “the first British scholars of India went so far as to invent what we now call ‘Hinduism,’ complete with a mainstream classical tradition consisting entirely of Sanskrit philosophical texts like the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads.” This invention was internalized by the English-educated Indians of the so-called Hindu renaissance, who were in fact elaborating on an entirely new religion that had little to do with the self-understanding of their own ancestors. According to this in- terpretation, the invention of Hinduism is one particular instance of the widespread tendency toward “the invention of tradition” that was so com- mon among the Victorians. Hinduism, far from being the oldest religion in the world, is one of the youngest, if it can really be said to exist at all. These two stories about the provenance of Hinduism could hardly be more starkly opposed. Critics of the first narrative argue that it is simply an ahistorical fabrication. It is based on a selective reading of ancient texts that ignores the great variety of opposed contradictory beliefs and prac- tices and the complete lack of any notion of a “Hindu unity” that existed before the arrival of the British in India. Conversely, many Hindus see the “modern invention of Hinduism” hypothesis as a slap in the face, the final culmination of Western imperialist scholarship on India, portraying faith- ful Hindus as passive dupes and Hinduism as nothing more than a fraud perpetrated by the imperialists themselves. I argue that these two general approaches, admittedly introduced here only in broad outline, are ten- dentious readings based on a modern tendency to homogenize and over- simplify premodern Indian history. The idea of Hindu unity is neither a timeless truth nor a fiction wholly invented by the British to regulate and control their colonial subjects. The thesis of this book is that between the twelfth and sixteenth cen- turies ce , certain thinkers began to treat as a single whole the diverse philosophical teachings of the Upanisads, epics, Purānas, and the schools ˙ ˙ known retrospectively as the “six systems” (saddarśana) of mainstream ˙ ˙ Hindu philosophy. The Indian and European thinkers in the nineteenth century who developed the term “Hinduism” under the pressure of the new explanatory category of “world religions” were influenced by these earlier philosophers and doxographers, primarily Vedāntins, who had their own reasons for arguing the unity of Indian philosophical traditions. Be- fore the late medieval period, there was little or no systematic attempt by the thinkers we now describe as Hindu to put aside their differences in order to depict themselves as a single unified tradition. After this late  Copyright Material introduction 3 medieval period, it became almost universally accepted that there was a fixed group of Indian philosophies in basic agreement with one another and standing together against Buddhism and Jainism. In pre-twelfth-century India, many thinkers today labeled “Hindu” went to great efforts to disprove one another’s teachings, including use of ad hominem attacks, straw man arguments, and other questionable means. There was no understanding then that all of these thinkers were part of a shared orthodoxy. Nor was there an idea that schools such as Sāmkhya ˙ and Mīmām sā had commonalities that differentiated them from the ˙ non-Hindu philosophies of the Jainas and Buddhists. Kumārila Bhatta, the ˙˙ influential seventh-century Mīmāmsaka, wrote that “the treatises on righ- ˙ teousness and unrighteousness that have been adopted in Sāmkhya, Yoga, ˙ Pāñcarātra, Pāśupata, and Buddhist works . . . are not accepted by those who know the triple Veda.” Likewise, Sām khya and Yoga philosophers ˙ faulted Vedāntins and Mīmāmsakas for their uncritical acceptance of Ve- ˙ dic authority, which included the performance of what they considered im- moral animal sacrifices. One author of this period, the eleventh-century Śaiva author Somaśambhu, even asserts that Vedāntins, Mīmāmsakas, and ˙ those who worship other gods such as Visnu will be reborn in hells un- ˙˙ less they undergo a complicated conversion ritual designed to make them full-fledged Śaivas. Later codifiers of Indian traditions sought to depict the “six systems of philosophy” (saddarśanas) as sharing a fundamental commitment to ˙ ˙ the authority of the Veda that unified them as Hindus and made them understand themselves as fundamentally different from Jainas and Bud- dhists. However, no single, well-demarcated boundary between “affirmers” (āstikas) and “deniers” (nāstikas) existed before the late medieval period. But by the sixteenth century, most Mīmāmsakas and Vedāntins did under- ˙ stand themselves united in their shared commitment to the Vedas over and against other groups they designated as nāstikas. In this book, I tell the story of this remarkable shift, arguing that the seeds were planted for the now-familiar discourse of Hindu unity by a number of influential phi- losophers in late medieval India. I give particular attention to one such philosopher, Vijñānabhiksu, a sixteenth-century polymath who was per- ˙ haps the boldest of all of these innovators. According to him, it was not just that all of the philosophies of the āstikas agreed on the sanctity of the Veda. He claimed that, properly understood, Sāmkhya, Yoga, Vedānta, ˙ and Nyāya were in essence different aspects of a single, well-coordinated  Copyright Material 4 introduction philosophical outlook and their well-documented disagreements were just a misunderstanding. Because of Vijñānabhiksu’s bold rethinking of the relationship between ˙ the schools of Indian philosophy, Western scholars have regarded him with suspicion. The nineteenth-century translator and historian Richard Garbe expressed the opinion of many of his colleagues when he wrote that “Vijñānabhiksu mixes up many . . . heterogeneous matters, and even quite ˙ effaces the individuality of the several philosophical systems.” Nonethe- less, Garbe considered Vijñānabhiksu’s works too important to be writ- ˙ ten off as the idiosyncratic ramblings of a fringe thinker. He describes Vijñānabhiksu’s commentary on the Sāmkhyasūtras as “not only the fullest ˙ ˙ source we have of the Sāmkhya system, but also one of the most impor- ˙ tant.” More recently, scholars of Yoga have found Vijñānabhiksu’s subcom- ˙ mentary on Patañjali’s Yogasūtras similarly indispensable for a detailed understanding of the Yoga system of philosophy. All of the previous scholarly treatments on Vijñānabhiksu have had in ˙ common an approach that understands him only from a single perspec- tive, through the lens of Sāmkhya, Yoga, or Vedānta. They either sidestep ˙ the question of the relationship between the three parts of Vijñānabhiksu’s ˙ corpus or are openly hostile to Vijñānabhiksu’s efforts toward a concor- ˙ dance of philosophical systems. This attitude is based on an uncritical acceptance of a particular model of the relationship between the philo- sophical schools of India. According to this model, the schools of Indian philosophy are well established and distinct. Most commonly, they list six āstika darśanas (commonly translated “orthodox schools”), without exploring the provenance of this list. On the other side are the nāstika schools, the most well known of which are the Buddhists, Jainas, and Cārvāka materialists. Any attempt to blur the divisions between these dis- crete philosophical schools is condemned as syncretism, an illicit mixture of irreconcilable philosophies. It is surprising how widespread and influential this understanding of the schools of Indian philosophy remains today. This picture comes from the writings of Indologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although these early Indologists did not invent these ideas by themselves. Rather, they adopted for their own purposes the classificatory schemes they found in reading medieval catalogues of doctrines, or doxographies. These doxographies, composed at a relatively late date by authors who were themselves partisan adherents of one or another of the schools they sought to catalogue, were widely accepted by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century  Copyright Material introduction 5 Orientalists as objective depictions of a fixed state of affairs. Oriental- ists extrapolated from these texts the notion that the Indian philosophical schools arose as separate and distinct in ancient times and have remained stable and essentially unchanged for centuries. By comparison, they un- derstood Western philosophical schools as arising, adapting, and going out of existence in historical time, sometimes portrayed as the unfolding of a larger historical dialectic. Much like Marx’s depiction of traditional Indian social life as “undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative,” Orientalists often understood Indian philosophy as existing outside of history. Unlike Marx, however, they understood this ahistoricity as one of the positive features of Oriental wisdom, in contrast to the changeable fads of European intel- lectuals. Hindu reformers of the modern period picked up the Oriental- ist narrative of premodern India as a timeless realm of philosophical con- templation to serve their own ends. Although modern Hindus continue to take the great antiquity of Indian intellectual traditions as a source of national pride, many have denied the incompatibility of the āstika philo- sophical schools, instead arguing for a common essence at the heart of all āstika schools. One of the ironies of the Orientalists’ use of medieval doxographies to show that the schools of philosophy were distinct and logically incompat- ible is that it was these same doxographies that began to question earlier assumptions about the logical incompatibility of philosophical schools. Vijñānabhiksu was only one of a number of late medieval intellectuals in ˙ India who sought to find unity among the apparent differences of the philo- sophical schools of the āstikas. Śan˙kara, the influential eighth-century Ad- vaita Vedāntin, issued scathing attacks on āstika and nāstika alike, hardly distinguishing between the two. Yet Śan˙kara’s self-proclaimed followers of the late medieval period rehabilitated the same āstika schools that early Vedāntins had scorned, most notably the Sāmkhya and Yoga schools. The ˙ medieval Advaita doxographers Mādhava and Madhusūdana Sarasvatī suggest that such non-Vedāntic schools are useful as partial approxima- tions of a truth only fully enunciated by Advaita Vedānta. Although his al- legiances were to a different school of Vedānta, Vijñānabhiksu is the most ˙ outstanding example of this late medieval movement to find unity among the apparent diversity of philosophical schools. None of these unifiers would have described themselves as “Hindus,” a term that was still un- common in sixteenth-century Sanskrit usage. But it was their unification of āstika philosophies that nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers drew on when they sought to enunciate a specific set of beliefs for a world  Copyright Material 6 introduction religion called “Hinduism.” While some recent scholars have argued that the vision of Hinduism as a single, all-embracing set of beliefs is wholly a modern fabrication, such assertions ignore the historical developments of the late medieval period. In unifying the āstika philosophical schools, Vijñānabhiksu and his contemporaries made possible the world religion ˙ later known by the name Hinduism. vijñnabhiks u and his late medieval milieu ˙ Like many premodern Indian authors, Vijñānabhiksu offers little in his ˙ works to help identify his time and place. He makes no mention of his teachers or family, nor does he comment on political or historical events. Although there is consensus among historians that he lived in the latter half of the sixteenth century, this dating is itself based on meager evi- dence. Scholars have estimated Vijñānabhiksu’s dates based on the dates ˙ of his disciples, in particular one disciple named Bhāvāganeśa. Since ˙ Bhāvāganeśa identifies himself as an immediate disciple of Vijñānabhiksu, ˙ ˙ and since Bhāvāganeśa’s life span has been estimated from the late six- ˙ teenth to the early seventeenth century, it follows that Vijñānabhiksu’s ˙ dates would be slightly earlier, suggesting that he flourished sometime af- ter 1550. Scholars have also attempted to locate Vijñānabhiksu in time ˙ based on perceived influences on his philosophy. So, for instance, S. C. Śrīvāstavya puts Vijñānabhiks u after Sadānanda Vyāsa, author of the ˙ Vedāntasāra, and T. S. Rukmani argues that Vijñānabhiksu was influenced ˙ by the Navya-Naiyāyika Raghunātha Śiromani. Since Vijñānabhiksu nei- ˙ ˙ ther refers to these authors by name nor quotes their works directly, these, too, are admittedly conjectures. Śrīvāstavya also attempts to determine Vijñānabhiks u’s place of residence based on his occasional references ˙ to Prayāga (modern-day Allahabad) and claims based on his analysis of Vijñānabhiksu’s Sanskrit usage that he was a Hindi speaker. Reviewing ˙ all the evidence collectively, there is enough to suggest that he lived in northern India in the late medieval period. Tentatively accepting Gode’s arguments regarding Bhāvāganeśa’s identity, I will assume for the purposes ˙ of this study that Vijñānabhiksu lived in approximately the late sixteenth ˙ century, perhaps in the vicinity of what is now Uttar Pradesh. Vijñānabhiks u is primarily known to modern scholars for his com- ˙ mentaries on texts from the Sām khya and Yoga schools, especially for ˙ his commentary on the Sāmkhyasūtras (the Sāmkhyapravacanabhāsya) ˙ ˙ ˙ and his subcommentary on the Yogasūtras (the Yogavārttika). However,  Copyright Material introduction 7 his works on Sām khya and Yoga were written after his Vedāntic works, ˙ which make up the majority of Vijñānabhiksu’s extant corpus. These ˙ works include Vijñānabhiks u’s commentary on the Brahmasūtras (the ˙ Vijñānāmrtabhās ya), his commentaries on numerous Upanis ads (col- ˙ ˙ ˙ lectively known by the name Vedāntāloka), and his commentary on the Īśvara Gītā section of the Kūrma Purāna (entitled Īśvaragītābhāsya). ˙ ˙ Vijñānabhiksu considers these three texts to be his prasthānatrayī, the ˙ trilogy of commentaries obligatory for Vedāntins. It is this he has in mind when he remarks at the beginning of the Īśvaragītābhāsya that his com- ˙ mentary on the Īśvara Gītā makes up for the lack of a commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, since there is no difference in meaning between the two. These Vedāntic writings have been largely neglected by modern schol- ars. Although editions of Vijñānabhiksu’s four works on Sāmkhya and Yoga ˙ ˙ have been published both in Sanskrit and in English translations, only one of Vijñānabhiksu’s Vedāntic texts has been published in Sanskrit, and ˙ none have been translated in full. Yet an understanding of these earlier works is necessary to comprehend the metaphysical foundations of his later writings on Sām khya and Yoga. Vijñānabhiksu himself makes this ˙ ˙ clear by referring the reader time and again to his Vijñānāmrtabhāsya ˙ ˙ when discussing metaphysical issues in the Sāmkhyapravacanabhāsya and ˙ ˙ Yogavārttika. This is also clear evidence that Vijñānabhiksu conceives of ˙ all of his writings as presenting a single comprehensive philosophical posi- tion. Unlike other thinkers who commented on texts of multiple schools, Vijñānabhiksu is not content to see his comments on a single text as merely ˙ applying to that school and no other. He sees the dualism of Sāmkhya and ˙ Yoga’s purusa (consciousness) and prakrti (primal matter) as valid at a ˙ ˙ certain level of analysis, and he refrains from positing a higher, overarch- ing unity in his works on Sāmkhya and Yoga. But by his references to the ˙ Vijñānāmrtabhāsya, he clearly maintains that this higher unity exists—in ˙ ˙ his work on Sāmkhya and Yoga, he never retracts statements from his ear- ˙ lier Vedantic writings. In most cases, he instead tactfully skims over issues about which Vedānta, Sāmkhya, and Yoga disagree. ˙ In his Vedāntic works, Vijñānabhiksu only hints at the coordination of ˙ various doctrines found in his later Sāmkhya and Yoga commentaries. It is ˙ likely that he had not yet fully worked out the details of this concordance, and at times he criticizes Sāmkhya and Yoga for their shortcomings. But ˙ the Bhedābheda (Difference and Non-Difference) metaphysical founda- tion he lays out in these earlier works is well adapted to accommodate the realist and dualistic aspects of Sāmkhya and Yoga. Like Sāmkhya and Yoga ˙ ˙  Copyright Material 8 introduction commentators, most Bhedābhedavādins accept some form of the view that the world is a real transformation ( parināma) of Brahman, and not merely ˙ an illusory manifestation (vivarta). Using Bhedābheda interpretive strate- gies, Sāmkhya’s teaching of the multiplicity of individual selves ( purusas) ˙ ˙ can also easily be reconciled with the statements from the Upanisads ap- ˙ parently expressing the ultimate unity of the self. Although Vijñānabhiksu ˙ understands non-separation (avibhāga) to be the fundamental relation of the individual selves and Brahman, during the period of the world’s exis- tence selves become separated from Brahman and from each other and therefore exist as described in the Sāmkhyasūtras. Similarly, the funda- ˙ mental dichotomy described in Sāmkhya between consciousness and mat- ˙ ter, prakrti and purusa, can be explained as real from a certain perspective ˙ ˙ by the Bhedābhedavādin, although originally both must be understood to come from Brahman, the material cause (upādānakārana) of the entire ˙ world. My approach to Vijñānabhiksu in this book proceeds from the premise ˙ that he was not the willfully perverse and arbitrary thinker that his crit- ics make him out to be. When understood in proper historical context, even his most controversial claims make sense. Vijñānabhiksu’s claim that ˙ Kapila, the mythical founder of the Sām khya system, was not an athe- ˙ ist must be understood in light of the influence of Pūran ic Sām khya in ˙ ˙ the medieval period. The Bhāgavata Purāna , for instance, contains a ˙ lengthy section in which Kapila teaches the value of devotion to God to his mother, Devahūti. Modern advocates of Advaita Vedānta have por- trayed Vijñānabhiksu’s realist Vedānta as nonsensical and his claims of de- ˙ fending an older form of Vedānta from the more recent Advaita school as historically baseless. The attitudes of critics generally stem from their own lack of knowledge of the complexity within the philosophical traditions of Sāmkhya and Vedānta. In the case of Sām khya, this includes their arbi- ˙ ˙ trary insistence on the canonical status of Īśvarakrsna’s Sāmkhyakārikā, ˙˙ ˙ ˙ paired with an ignorance of early commentaries on this same work that are theistic in their outlook. In the case of Vedānta, the hegemony of Ad- vaita Vedānta in the modern period has blinded most modern authors to the diversity of opinions among the Vedānta schools. The realist tradition of Bhedābheda Vedānta predated Śan˙kara’s school of Advaita Vedānta, and in the late medieval period Bhedābheda experienced a renaissance in north- ern India. Vijñānabhiksu’s corpus was a part of that renaissance. Although ˙ his philosophy contains its own internal tensions, as any comprehensive  Copyright Material introduction 9 philosophical system must, it can almost never be as lightly dismissed as his critics maintain. doxography and method Vijñānabhiksu’s assertions about the concordance of the āstika schools ˙ must be understood in the context of his late medieval intellectual mi- lieu. His contemporary, the sixteenth-century doxographer Madhusūdana Sarasvatī, argues that since all of the sages who founded the āstika philo- sophical systems were omniscient, it follows that they all must have shared the same beliefs. The diversity of opinions expressed among these sys- tems is only for the sake of its hearers, who are at different stages of un- derstanding. Madhusūdana, who understood the highest truth of these sages to be the monistic doctrine of Advaita Vedānta, not Vijñānabhiksu’s ˙ Bhedābheda Vedānta, shared with Vijñānabhiksu a concern for reconciling ˙ the diverse systems of the āstikas. According to Madhusūdana, the sages taught these various systems in order to keep people from a false attraction to the views of nāstikas such as the Buddhists and Jainas. Even Mādhava’s well-known fourteenth-century doxography Sarvadarśanasam graha ˙ (Compendium of All Schools) can be read as an attempt to show that all of the āstika philosophical schools exist in a complementary logical hierarchy. Although Vijñānabhiksu’s project is more ambitious than these ˙ other authors and based on Bhedābheda instead of Advaita notions of ul- timate truth, his basic problematic is common to a number of other late medieval thinkers. Vijñānabhiksu never wrote a doxography, but his entire ˙ corpus is motivated by doxographic concern, the need so typical among late medieval Vedāntins to organize, classify, and rank different philoso- phies in order of their truth and efficacy. “Doxography” is, of course, not a native Sanskrit category. Scholars of Indian philosophy have adopted the term from scholars of Western philosophy only recently to distinguish a genre of Indian texts often la- beled using the Sanskrit terms samgraha (“compendium”) or samuccaya ˙ (“collection”). The word “doxography” was a neologism coined by the classicist Hermann Diels in 1879 for his collection entitled Doxographi Graeci. Since Diels, historians of Western philosophy have applied this term, sometimes quite loosely, to refer to works by authors such as Cicero, Plutarch, and Diogenes Laërtius that present the philosophical views of a number of different thinkers or schools. There are differences between  Copyright Material 10 introduction Sanskrit doxography and doxography written in Greek and Latin, but they have enough in common to justify the use of a single term to refer to both groups of texts. The study of doxography in India is still quite new, and scholars of Indian doxography can look to the recent work of Jaap Mans- feld and David Runia on European doxography for an example of how to proceed. Richard Rorty, in his essay “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” nicely encapsulates an important feature that Indian and West- ern doxographies share. In Rorty’s use of the term, doxography is “the at- tempt to impose a problematic on a canon drawn up without reference to that problematic, or, conversely, to impose a canon on a problematic constructed without reference to that canon.” For Diogenes Laërtius, this means asking the question “what did X think the good was?” for a disparate group of philosophers who may or may not have directly addressed this question. Similar problems occur for the eighth-century Jaina doxographer Haribhadra when he seeks to classify the philosophical schools according to deity (devatā). When confronted with schools that have no deity, he stretches his definition in such a way to serve his needs as a comprehensive cataloguer of philosophical views: he ascribes to Buddhists a deity known as Sugata (i.e., the Buddha), and Jinendra, the supreme Jaina patriarch, becomes the deity of the Jainas. This way of approaching Buddhism and Jainism serves Haribhadra’s classificational needs as a doxographer, but it does so by distorting the actual views of the two schools. Rorty is more interested in “doxography” in the modern period than in the ancient, and David Runia has censured him for unnecessarily stretch- ing the term and turning it into a pejorative. Rorty expands the category of doxography to include more recent works that share the feature he con- siders essential, the doxographer’s imposition of a problematic on a given canon of thinkers. Examples include many common works with the title “A History of Philosophy,” such as those by Frederick Copleston and Bertrand Russell. It is not difficult to find modern “histories of Indian philosophy” that suffer from the same defects. Of these, there is sometimes a direct link to the medieval doxographies of Mādhava and Pseudo-Śan˙kara. Of- ten authors of works on Indian philosophy seem uncertain of the precise purpose of their writing and end up with works that neither are faithful enough to the original Sanskrit text to be described as translations nor analyze arguments in any depth. Such writings involve lists of conclusions, skipping over the dialectics that led to these conclusions. These “histories” are neither historical nor philosophical—they are doxographies, in the  Copyright Material introduction 11 broadest literal sense of a text that records the opinions (doxai) of philoso- phers. From the reader’s perspective, the most immediate problem of such works is boredom. Lists of other people’s beliefs do not make for excit- ing reading, especially when there is no effort to give context or show the wider relevance of these beliefs to contemporary philosophical debates. When the problem is compounded by the jargon and stilted language that are typical of many books on Indian philosophy, even the most motivated students are driven to despair. It is no wonder, then, that educated readers with a good general knowl- edge of Western philosophy are so often ignorant about even the most ba- sic aspects of Indian philosophy. While the near-total exclusion of Indian philosophy from departments of philosophy in North American universi- ties is primarily due to lingering Eurocentric biases, some responsibility must also be accepted by Anglophone authors on Indian philosophy. We have for too long been content to repeat these same lists of doctrines, de- void of serious philosophical analysis or historical examination of their claims (such as the time-worn belief that the true Sāmkhya is atheistic). ˙ Such presentations have led readers to conclude that the beliefs of Indian philosophers were derived from private mystical experiences, operating entirely outside the realm of warrant and rational argument. Hence the widespread idea that Indian religions are mystical rather than rational. Public intellectuals like Freeman Dyson can proclaim in the New York Re- view of Books that “Hinduism and Buddhism . . . have no theology” and are “poetical, rather than analytical.” None of Dyson’s editors caught the mistake, as they surely would have with such a massive error about West- ern intellectual traditions. Books titled “The History of Indian Philosophy” rarely deal with his- tory. The “historical” portion of such books is generally limited to a few sentences at the beginning of each section listing the philosopher’s dates and (optionally) in which part of India he lived. The theory of history presupposed in these books typically conforms to a perennial philosophy/ great books model. A small group of great minds was able to rise above the petty squabbles that concerned their contemporaries, to address the same timeless, universal philosophical concerns that we grapple with to- day. By studying the answers to these perennial questions provided by such great men side by side, we ourselves become culturally literate. Such a minds-floating-in-the-ether model of the history of philosophy led in the late twentieth century to a spate of comparative works mixing and match- ing Derrida, Wittgenstein, Śan˙ kara, Bhartr hari, and Nāgārjuna. These ˙  Copyright Material 12 introduction articles generally avoid the messy complexities of textual analysis and rely on the Davidsonian premise that any linguistic differences can be read- ily bridged with a good translation, so knowledge of primary languages is unnecessary. The lingering effects of this discourse have had disastrous effects on the discipline of the history of Indian philosophy. Modern histories of In- dian philosophy generally offer depictions quite similar to their premodern Indian doxographic counterparts, including discussions of a fixed num- ber of philosophical schools (typically, the aforementioned six systems: Mīmām sā, Vedānta, Sām khya, Yoga, Vaiśesika, and Nyāya). Such his- ˙ ˙ ˙ tories deemphasize the disagreements and historical shifts that occurred within these philosophical schools, along with the contradictions and am- biguities within the bodies of work of individual authors. The reason ear- lier generations of scholars were attracted to simple generalizations and classificatory schemes is clear. Early authors on Indian philosophy, such as T. H. Colebrooke (1765–1837) and A. E. Gough (1845–1915), faced the daunting task of making a map of an intellectual world hitherto uncharted. Taking seriously the classificatory schemes provided by Indian authors was an important first step, enabling Western scholars for the first time to make out the outlines of the various thinkers and schools in Indian phi- losophy. But in our current situation, approximately two hundred years after the pioneers in the history of Indian philosophy made these first at- tempts, such simplistic schemes as the “six systems” do more harm than good. Confronting this situation, the philosopher and historian Daya Krishna remarked, [The schools of Indian philosophy] are treated as something finished and final. No distinction, therefore, is ever made between the thought of an in- dividual thinker and the thought of a school. A school is, in an important sense, an abstraction. It is a logical construction springing out of the writ- ings of a number of thinkers who share a certain similarity of outlook in tackling certain problems. Sām khya, for example, is identified too much ˙ with Īśvarakrsna’s work, or Vedānta with the work of Śan˙kara. But this is ˙˙ ˙ due to a confusion between the thought of an individual thinker and the style of thought which he exemplifies and to which he contributes in some manner. All that Śan˙kara has written is not strictly Advaita Vedānta. Nor all that Īśvarakrsna has written, Sāmkhya. Unless this is realized, writings ˙˙ ˙ ˙ on Indian philosophy will continuously do injustice either to the complex-  Copyright Material introduction 13 ity of thought of the individual thinker concerned, or to the uniqueness of the style they are writing about. The philosophy of Vijñānabhiksu flies in the face of the reified concep- ˙ tion of discrete philosophical schools championed by nineteenth-century Orientalists, and it is this that accounts for much of the hostility directed toward him. Hence, an examination of Vijñānabhiksu’s entire oeuvre of- ˙ fers not just the opportunity to rehabilitate the reputation of a maligned thinker; his work also forces us to turn our gaze back on ourselves, the historiographers of Indian philosophy. Like Daya Krishna, I believe that we must overcome the facile overreliance on “schools” that still informs much writing on Indian philosophy. At the same time, when understood to be a construction of the historian instead of a pre-given entity, the no- tion of “school” has value as a heuristic device, in pointing out the simi- larities between thinkers. The danger of the notion of schools, however, is the tendency to concentrate on the similarities between thinkers classified under the rubric of a single school and to gloss over significant differences. Just as the concept of the philosophical school overemphasizes simi- larity between thinkers within the school, it has also frequently led to the assumption that the doctrines of separate schools are contradictory and irreconcilable and that thinkers of separate schools are natural enemies, competing for adherents to their philosophies. In the west, our under- standing of Indian philosophical schools (as the word darśana is gener- ally translated) has been colored by our own history. The default model for the relationship between these schools is often unwittingly based on models derived from Western religious history: the hostilities between the three religions of the Book, the modern relationship of the various Chris- tian denominations, or even the relation between orthodox and heterodox sects in early Christianity. But other familiar models can also be deployed as a corrective to models emphasizing conflict above concordance. One is the relationship between the natural sciences in contemporary academia. Biologists, chemists, physicists, and astronomers typically see their work as complementary, not in direct conflict. The biologist assumes the laws of chemistry and physics to be true, and it is with these laws in the back- ground that he undertakes his own experiments. In India, this model of complementarity predated Vijñānabhiksu, and he extends it even farther. ˙ He portrays all of the āstika schools in this way, saying that when the schools of philosophy are understood in terms of their proper scope, they  Copyright Material 14 introduction are complementary and not at all contradictory. This claim has some plausibility, since the various schools of Indian philosophy do have differ- ent central foci: Mīmāmsā focuses on exegesis of Vedic ritual injunctions, ˙ Vedānta on the nature of Brahman, Nyāya on logical analysis, Vaiśesika ˙ on ontology. Yet there are also many apparent contradictions between the āstika schools, as a student with even the most cursory knowledge of In- dian philosophical polemics will show. Vijñānabhiksu’s challenge is to show ˙ that the complementarity model he espouses is superior to other models emphasizing conflict and contradiction. Even his detractors must admit that he often shows extraordinary philosophical and interpretive ingenu- ity, whether or not all his arguments to this end are ultimately persuasive. premodern philosophy in a postcolonial world After Richard Rorty impugned what he described as “modern doxogra- phies,” he registered his support of another genre of writing about philoso- phers, called “intellectual history.” Included in this genre is one particular subcategory: I should want to include under “intellectual history” books about all of those enormously influential people who do not get into the canon of the great dead philosophers, but who are often called “philosophers” . . . people like Erigena, Bruno, Ramus, Mersenne, Wolff, Diderot, Cousin, Schopen- hauer, Hamilton, McCosh, Bergson and Austin. Discussion of these “minor figures” often coalesces with thick description of institutional arrangements and disciplinary matrices. Had Rorty concerned himself with the Indian intellectual sphere, he would have certainly included Vijñānabhiksu in his list. Like those think- ˙ ers, Vijñānabhiksu exists somewhere at the fringes of the philosophical ˙ canon. Unlike Śan˙kara and Rāmānuja, he did not found a lasting intellec- tual lineage, nor were hagiographies composed about his life. There was little time for that—he lived during the final flourishing of the Sanskrit in- tellectual tradition, just a few years before the Mughal Emperor Jahangir officially recognized the British East India Company in 1617, part of a series of events that would lead to British political dominance of the subconti- nent. By indications such as the small number of his manuscripts available in Indian archives, Vijñānabhiksu’s influence among Sanskrit intellectuals ˙ was not as great as the enormous impact of the Bhedābheda Vedāntins  Copyright Material introduction 15 Caitanya and Vallabha, whose lineages continue to thrive in modern-day India and elsewhere. Vijñānabhiksu’s greatest fame began in the eighteenth century, when ˙ Orientalists seeking to catalogue the doctrines of the Hindus looked to his treatment of the Indian philosophical schools in his commentary on the Sāmkhyasūtras as a possible set of guidelines for understanding the rela- ˙ tionship between Vedānta, Sāmkhya, Yoga, and Nyāya. Also in question ˙ was the authenticity of the Advaita Vedānta interpretation of the Vedas, which H. T. Colebrooke argued was a recent departure from an older tra- dition. By the late nineteenth century, the Indological controversies sur- rounding Vijñānabhiksu had died down. Some rejected his model for the ˙ concordance of schools in favor of other concordances that portrayed Ad- vaita as the pinnacle of āstika philosophies. Other scholars, like Garbe, insisted on the irreducibility of the six ancient schools of Indian philos- ophy. Vijñānabhiksu’s name, if not his Bhedābheda philosophy, has been ˙ recognizable to subsequent generations of scholars, often with a whiff of controversy. His works today appear in scholarly footnotes and from time to time as optional reading in Indian university curricula. Meanwhile, the hegemonic narrative established in the nineteenth century of Advaita Vedānta as the essence and culmination of Indian philosophical systems has drowned out competing counternarratives, especially at the popular level of appreciation for Indian philosophy. The recovery of the history of Indian philosophy is a difficult project, given the few chronological markers left by authors writing in Sanskrit and the difficulty in settling on even the most minimal biographical de- tails about these thinkers. Is it also a misguided project, a philological flight from real human concerns in the postcolonial era? This is a logical conclusion that might be drawn from the “modern invention of tradition” hypothesis with regard to Hindu philosophy and religion. If the Indian encounter with European colonialism was truly a rupture in which all tra- ditional institutions for the transmission of knowledge were uprooted, re- placed with new regimes of knowledge and power by the British, then the study of precolonial India has little or no significance for understanding the current postcolonial situation. Whether or not this attitude toward premodern Indian intellectual life has been fully articulated by scholars of modern India, it is impossible to deny the disciplinary chasm between scholars of premodern and modern India. Perhaps it is surprising that the uselessness of the attempt to recover premodern Indian intellectual history is the one area where more extreme  Copyright Material 16 introduction advocates of the “invention of Hinduism” hypothesis tend to agree with those who understand Hinduism as eternal and essentially unchanging. For the first group, premodern history has nothing to tell us about the pres- ent, making it the sole province of those who seek imaginative escape from their current situations and from human life, the class of philological footnote-scribblers. For the second group, premodern intellectual history is a waste because it has no ability to shed light on the perennial, universal as- pects of Indian philosophical traditions. The truth of Hindu philosophy tran- scends space and time, and therefore any attempt for a historically grounded study of Indian philosophy is doomed from the outset. Time would be better spent studying the other thinkers East and West whose thought transcends history (e.g. Meister Eckhart, Plotinus), instead of being distracted by the ac- cidental sociopolitical conditions in which these thinkers lived and worked. Such portrayals of a timeless, otherworldly, spiritual Orient have been ably critiqued by Edward Said and other critics of Orientalism, including many scholars of South Asia. However, Said’s model of the relationship between Orientalist and Orient has also contributed to the neglect of the study of premodern Asian intellectual traditions. Said, a scholar of Euro- pean literature by training, emphasizes the irrelevance of knowledge of a “real” Orient when it comes to studying the phenomenon of Orientalism. In the book Orientalism he is ambivalent about whether such a real place exists. Sometimes he seems to suggest that the Orient is nothing more than a “production” of European culture. At other times he shies away from this constructivist language and acknowledges that there is a real Orient. But Said is insistent that knowledge of the real Orient, whatever its onto- logical status, is irrelevant to the understanding of the wholly European phenomenon of Orientalism. If Said is correct that the Orient is little more than a blank screen on which Orientalists projected their fantasies of a spiritual, exotic, timeless Other, it follows that knowledge of the texts that the Orientalists were reading and the non-Western interlocutors with whom they were speaking is of little use to the study of Orientalism. But, of course, to know whether Said’s model is correct requires us to know something about these texts and peoples, to ascertain whether or not there is such an absolute discon- nect between the discourses of the Orientalists and the objects of their study. I believe that this is not the case. We require an alternative model that sees Orientalists as engaged in a project of interpretation, albeit one whose prejudices often distorted the object of study completely beyond recognition. Instead of understanding the phenomenon of Orientalism as a  Copyright Material introduction 17 one-way projection, we should approach it as a two-way relationship. This relationship was one in which there was a vast imbalance of power. Yet the “Oriental” objects of the Orientalists’ studies did have a part in shaping the Orientalist stereotypes that became prevalent in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries. In the words of Chinese historian Arif Dirlik, Oriental- ism is “the product of an unfolding relationship between Euro-Americans and Asians, that required the complicity of the latter in endowing it with plausibility.” In the case of the history of Indian philosophy, the Oriental- ists’ primary living interlocutors were Brahmin pundits, who themselves had a particular understanding of their own intellectual traditions and who did their best to portray themselves as essential to any Orientalist project to govern according to native customs and laws. They were also eager to give these Western scholars of Indian philosophy what they wanted, spe- cifically to point them to the types of texts that would confirm the Euro- pean stereotype of Indians as quietistic, impractical idealists who doubted or denied the very existence of the physical world. It is in this way that Vedānta, especially the “idealist” Advaita Vedānta, gained its modern repu- tation as the essence of the Indian mind. The backlash against traditional Orientalism since the late 1970s has also had the consequence of delaying further advances in the study of Vedānta, particularly in those parts of the Western world that have been most influ- enced by postcolonial and post-Orientalist thought. Recent studies have made enormous advances in the understanding of realist intellectual tra- ditions that had been largely neglected by Orientalist historiography, such as Mīmāmsā and Nyāya. It is ironic, however, that our picture of Vedānta ˙ has not been updated to the same extent and that many of these Orientalist discourses have continued to hamper our ability to appreciate the diversity of Vedānta philosophical schools. In this book, I show that most of these schools bear scant resemblance to the stereotype of Vedānta as an idealist monism unconcerned with ethical action and being in the world. Recent trends in academia have moved away from Orientalist biases, which is a good thing, but in doing so have also moved away from the study of premodern India, especially by marginalizing the study of the “elite” Sanskrit knowledge systems in favor of more practical orientations toward India as an emerging economic and political superpower. Indolo- gists today tend to argue against this trend by invoking the importance of pure knowledge and of study of the past as itself having intrinsic value. But another argument can be made, once we better appreciate the importance of Sanskrit knowledge systems toward the making of the modern world,  Copyright Material 18 introduction through their influence on both the European Orientalists and Indian in- tellectuals in the modern period. No one can deny the importance of these intellectuals, including Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Auro- bindo, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and Mohandas Gandhi, in shaping Indi- ans’ self-understanding and the political formation of India as a modern nation-state. Once the theory of the British invention of almost everything in modern India has been properly debunked, we can look realistically at the ways that such thinkers creatively appropriated some Indian tradi- tions and rejected others. This is not the only reason to study premodern India, but it is one of the most important. Sanskrit intellectual traditions should be approached not as a rarefied sphere of discourse hovering above everyday life and historical time but, rather, as a human practice arising in the messy and contingent economic, social, and political worlds that these intellectuals occupied. Although scholars are nowadays at great pains to avoid perpetuating stereotypes about the essential otherness of the consciousness of modern Indians, discourses about otherness persist when dealing with the mind- set of the premodern Indian. Medieval historian Jeffrey Cohen has ob- served that “postcolonial theory in practice has neglected the study of this ‘distant’ past, which tends to function as a field of undifferentiated alterity against which modern regimes of power have arisen.” So it is, accord- ing to the hypothesis of the modern invention of Hinduism, that Indian self-consciousness underwent an absolute transformation at the begin- ning of the so-called Hindu renaissance. At the hands of the British, the Indians became modern for the first time and in this process became com- pletely alienated from their own traditions. Recapitulating the rupture that occurred with the renaissance in sixteenth-century Europe, the Indians re- ceived the gift and the burden of modernity from their British colonizers. Since Edward Said’s book Orientalism, published in 1978, scholars of Asia have bent over backward to avoid “Orientalizing” the peoples and texts of their studies: that is, positing Orientals as an ontological other wholly distinct from Europeans. According to the Orientalist discourses prevalent during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and most of the twentieth centuries, Oriental peoples are not like Europeans. Europeans are his- torical, while Orientals have no historical consciousness. Europeans (es- pecially modern Europeans) are secular, while Orientals have a funda- mentally religious outlook that provides all the norms by which they live their lives. Europeans are rational, while the lives of Orientals are su- perstitious. Contemporary scholars of Asian studies have rejected these  Copyright Material introduction 19 pernicious stereotypes, yet they live on in latent forms in a variety of ways. For some historians of modern Asia, the stereotypes have just been pushed back several centuries. Modern Asians, this thinking goes, are quite a bit like us—how could they not be, since their entire conceptual universe was determined by the discourses of their European colonial oppressors? For this reason, Asians have no real understanding of their own histories, just a vague idea of cultural superiority employed to the ends of identity poli- tics and nationalist ideologies. The lives and the thought-worlds of their ancestors four hundred years earlier are just as foreign to them as they are to the European scholars who study them. We sometimes forget that the stereotypes earlier generations of Oriental- ists used to “Orientalize” the peoples of Asia were not invented by them. In fact, they were largely recycled from the discourses about premodern Eu- rope propagated by historians in the nineteenth century. For instance, one influential historian of the renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt, wrote in 1860: In the Middle Ages, both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as well as that which was turned without—lay dreaming and half aware beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. With a few alterations (replacing “Middle Ages” with “Asia” and chang- ing verbs from past to present tense), this confident statement by a ro- mantic historian about the European past would be quite at home in the description of the Hindus from James Mill’s History of British India. Pres- ent here are statements about the dreamlike, passive state of the medieval European consciousness. Also here is the idea that medievals had no in- dividual consciousness but, instead, were only aware of themselves as “di- viduals,” mere parts in the larger whole of society. Contemporary medieval studies has rejected this “medievalism,” the treating of the European middle ages as the ontological other of the mod- ern era, lacking all constitutive features of modernity. So, too, have schol- ars of Asia rejected Orientalism in its most blatant forms. But the Oriental medieval is still often depicted by default using these familiar ideas from European scholars centuries ago. So it becomes possible to oppose “tra- ditional Hinduism” with “Neo-Hinduism”—the first being the authentic  Copyright Material 20 introduction mindset of premodern Hindus, the second the Westernized consciousness of modern ersatz Hindus. Both of the assumptions at work here are prob- lematic: the first that there was a single traditional way of being Indian or Hindu, and the second that, due to the shock of colonialism, the traditional way of being is no longer available to Westernized Indians. Instead of tak- ing our cue from Orientalist periodizations that posit three eras in Indian history—Hindu, Muslim, and British (which were themselves inspired by the periodization of European history into ancient, medieval, and mod- ern periods)—we must instead recognize the ruptures and discontinuities within each of these supposed epochs, along with the ideologies of those historians who created these periodizations. Even further, we must rec- ognize that human subjectivities in the contemporary world are complex and contradictory, bearing the contemporaneous imprint of the “premod- ern,” “modern,” and “postmodern.” This is not only the case in India, where the cliché of “ancient faiths meet modern democracy” is invoked by the Western media every time an Indian election occurs, but also in the west and particularly in North America, where the once–seemingly inevitable triumph of secularism and the withering away of atavistic belief systems has shown itself to be an illusion. We postmoderns are more medieval than we care to admit. Some avenues opened by the postcolonial critique of European cul- tural hegemony have yet to be fully explored. One of these is what Di- pesh Chakrabarty terms the “provincializing” of Europe. Virtually all of the work done in contemporary literary theory and continental philos- ophy is overwhelmingly Eurocentric. Even the work of postcolonial and post-Orientalist thinkers remains almost exclusively devoted to a Euro- pean canon of French and German intellectuals. As Chakrabarty puts it: Faced with the task of analyzing developments or social practices in mod- ern India, few if any Indian social scientists or social scientists of India would argue seriously with, say, the thirteenth-century logician Gan˙geśa or with the grammarian and linguistic philosopher Bhartr hari (fifth to ˙ sixth centuries), or with the tenth- or eleventh-century aesthetician Abhi- navagupta. Sad though it is, one result of European colonial rule in South Asia is that the intellectual traditions once unbroken and alive in Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic are now only matters of historical research for most— perhaps all—modern social scientists in the region. They treat these tradi- tions as truly dead, as history.  Copyright Material introduction 21 The Eurocentrism of the institutional structures that have excluded thinkers from the curricula of graduate programs in philosophy, liter- ary theory, and the social sciences has not yet given way to the pressure of post-Orientalist critique. Students of literary theory today, whether in Calcutta or Cambridge, take more inspiration from Aristotle than from Abhinavagupta. If they are acquainted with Indian philosophy at all, it is regarded only as a historical curiosity, not as a vital philosophical tradi- tion. This entrenched historicist attitude, in which the works of premodern thinkers can only be approached as symptoms of a certain historical epoch, has long since fallen by the wayside in works on the history of philosophy in European antiquity. Yet when we approach the history of Indian philos- ophy, there is an unspoken taboo against raising questions of truth and fal- sity. Contemporary historians of philosophy are willing to fully engage with and criticize European philosophers: perhaps to say that Plato was mis- taken in his positing on a realm of pure forms, that Descartes’ mind-body dualism is untenable, or that Kant’s distinction between analytic and syn- thetic propositions cannot pass muster. Out of a lingering sense that pre- modern Indian philosophers are somehow fundamentally “other” in a way that the philosophers of European antiquity are not, historians of Indian philosophy in Europe and North America have refrained from approach- ing these thinkers with a properly critical—that is to say, philosophical— attitude. Yet whether or not we acknowledge it, historians of philosophy are not just writing history. We are also doing philosophy. Even when this is not explicit, there are always implicit philosophical commitments that the historian of philosophy brings to bear on her subjects, including philo- sophical commitments about the nature of history itself. The very act of choosing which philosophers’ works are of sufficient value to include in a philosophical canon and which are only of marginal importance is both a historical and a philosophical judgment. Although at times in this book I do critique premodern Indian philoso- phers, I am generally more concerned with critiquing the claims of those Western Indologists who sought, for instance, to marginalize the works of realist Vedāntins in arguing for an authentic, originally monist Vedānta orthodoxy. I employ to this end a “hermeneutics of charity.” As I under- stand it, this means giving the benefit of the doubt to premodern thinkers such as Bhāskara and Vijñānabhiksu whose works have been dismissed as ˙ philosophically incoherent. When confronted with an idea, an argument, or a block of text that appears problematic, instead of assuming that the  Copyright Material 22 introduction premodern thinker is childish, guilty of a philosophical solecism, or a vic- tim of false consciousness, I begin with the assumption that I as the inter- preter am the one with the problem. This does not mean that the premod- ern author is always right. Instead, it is an assumption of innocence until proven guilty. This principle of charity is not the same as that expounded by Donald Davidson, in which any apparent philosophical mistake an ear- lier philosopher makes is to be read in such a way to impute to him the correct answer established by later generations. It is, rather, an attempt to identify and preserve ideas that seem so different, wrongheaded, or strange that they appear to require immediate correction. Once this project of hermeneutic recovery has been provisionally accomplished, these think- ers’ works can become potential participants in twenty-first-century philo- sophical conversations. Instead of approaching these premodern Indian philosophers in terms of an ontological other, as earlier Orientalists and some current scholars are wont to do, I believe that the language of “difference” is much more productive. This approach avoids the false dilemma of (1) if the premod- ern philosopher is truly other, then we have no real access to his ideas since they arise in such a different conceptual universe that they will have no meaning to us in our current situation and (2) if the premodern phi- losopher is the same as we are, then we have nothing to learn from him since the things he says we have already heard. Using the language of “dif- ference,” however, we can recognize both that a philosopher might have something relevant to say to us that has not yet been said in our European philosophical tradition and that, with some effort, these different ideas are recoverable in spite of obvious historical and linguistic obstacles. Philoso- phers in medieval India do have something to teach those of us living in the twenty-first century to help us out of the apparent philosophical im- passe between the sovereign, universal subject of the European Enlighten- ment and the fragmented, localized subjectivities of post-Enlightenment critique. To that end, in this book I attempt to create a clearing for future attempts at constructive engagement with medieval Indian philosophy. My hope here is that I can point to possible modes of self-understanding and self-transformation that fall between such binaries as religious/secular, rational/mystical, and Hindu/non-Hindu—alternative possibilities that have been overlooked by most philosophers in the modern West. This book is structured to give an overview of certain philosophical cur- rents in the Wirkungsgeschichte of premodern India. I also feel it necessary to go into some depth presenting specific arguments in the works of Indian  Copyright Material introduction 23 philosophers, especially those whose core philosophies have been widely misinterpreted or misrepresented in the modern period. Although read- ers looking for a general history may be somewhat less interested in these close readings of Vijñānabhiksu and other medieval philosophers, they ˙ are necessary to fully understand the interpretive tendencies and philo- sophical rigor of those thinkers who attempted to establish unity of In- dian darśanas. In chapters 2 and 3, I present Bhedābheda Vedānta, first by uncovering the history of Bhedābheda Vedānta and its relation to other schools (chapter 2) and then by presenting three of Vijñānabhiksu’s char- ˙ acteristically Bhedābheda arguments in some detail (chapter 3). In chap- ters 4 through 6, I take a similar approach to Sāmkhya and Yoga philosophy. ˙ Chapter 4 is a historical exploration of Sāmkhya and Yoga, with particular ˙ reference to the relation between these two schools (if, indeed, they are two separate schools) and to the question of God’s existence in each. In chapter 5, I analyze Vijñānabhiksu’s reading of the Sāmkhyasūtras, espe- ˙ ˙ cially his attempt to find a place for God in Sāmkhya in the context of the- ˙ istic Sāmkhya traditions. In chapter 6, I focus on Vijñānabhiksu’s works on ˙ ˙ Yoga, showing his understanding of Yoga as both a specific philosophical system and a practice of self-transformation open to varying philosophi- cal interpretations. In chapters 7 through 10, I look at questions surrounding the classifica- tion of philosophical schools, expanding the focus of this study to under- stand the early history of the formation of these boundaries and the influ- ence of medieval Indian classifications on modern scholars. I do this in chapter 7 by taking the controversies surrounding Vijñānabhiksu’s concor- ˙ dance of schools in his reception by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalists as an opportunity to reflect on the historiography of Indian philosophy. In chapter 8, I analyze tendencies in the forms of Indian dox- ography, from their earliest examples through to the late medieval period. In chapter 9, I deal extensively with the distinction of āstika and nāstika throughout a variety of texts, as well as looking more generally at modes of “othering” in Indian philosophical discourse. I conclude in chapter 10 by arguing that Vijñānabhiksu and his contemporaries formulated a ˙ proto-Hindu identity. This identity was later elaborated by Hindu reform- ers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and transformed into the basis of the world religion known today as Hinduism.