Accomplishing the Accomplished: The Vedas as a Source of Valid Knowledge in Sankara.

• Author: Clooney, Francis X.

In this concise volume Rambachan continues his important work of sorting out the Advaita Vedanta tradition, particularly by focusing on the continuities and discontinuities between Sankara's Advaita and the Neo-Vedanta of the past century.(1) His careful analyses of Sankara's writings (he does not stray into social or historical considerations, and only rarely into post-Sankara Advaita) impress upon us two points. First, he reminds us that Advaita is at its heart a highly orthodox exegetical system deeply rooted in the ritual and textual practices of Mimamsa; its precise interpretive principles receive epistemological and later metaphysical, psychological and cosmological elaborations only in a most cautious fashion. The Advaita carefully avoids giving independent roles to reason or experience, and defends the centrality of scripture from theoretical and practical perspectives. Second, Rambachan's work shows us that the Neo-Vedanta, informed by other currents of Indian thought and greatly affected by the categories and values derived from Western thought, is marked by notions of religion, experience and reason quite distinct from those of Sankara and at important points contrary to his orthodox scriptural commitments.

Accomplishing the Accomplished, his first full-length study, refutes the notions (which he takes as almost universally accepted by modern scholars) that Sankara and the Vedantins awarded to anubhava (experience) and anumana (inference) equality with or primacy over srutipramana (scriptural knowledge), and that an ultimate validation of truth by religious experience is a unique characteristic of Indian philosophy in general, "which places it in a distinctively superior category from Western philosophy". Put positively, Rambachan's thesis is that for Sankara, "given the nature of Brahman, sruti as a means of knowledge is the only logical and credible pramana ... given the nature of Brahman and the fact that the fundamental human problem is one of avidya (ignorance), the knowledge derived from the words of the sruti is a fully adequate solution".

After a vigorous introductory complaint against scholars (ranging from Swami Prabhavananda, S. Radhakrishnan, and N. K. Devaraja to M. Hiriyanna, R. deSmet, and Ninian Smart) whom he judges to have compromised Sankara's insistence that sruti requires no validation beyond itself, his major chapters survey the six pramanas (ch. 1), the Vedas as pramana (ch. 2), the method of gaining...