Dattatreya, the Immortal Guru, Yogin, and Avatara: A Study of the Transformative and Inclusive Character of a Multi-Faceted Hindu Deity.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo
• Position: Brief Reviews of Books

Dattatreya, the Immortal Guru, Yogin, and Avatara: A Study of the Transformative and Inclusive Character of a Multi-Faceted Hindu Deity. By ANTONIO RIGOPOULOS. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1998. Pp. xvi + 342.

"For all religious groups whose propensity it is to include ideas, practices, and teachings from the ocean of traditions, Dattatreya is truly a paradigm" (p. xii). This interesting, unusually complex, and very little studied Indian god is the object of a revised version of a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1994).

The first chapter deals with a wide variety of myths connected with Dattatreya's parents Atri and Anasuya and his brothers Soma and Durvasas, and with his birth. Chapter two shows how Dattatreya comes into his own in the Puranas, and how, from "his more basic identity as a heterodox, antonomian figure" (p 46), he becomes portrayed as a more orthodox Vaisnava. His role in three groups of minor Upanisads is the subject of chapter three: the Darsana- and Sandilya- (Yoga Upanisads), and Sandilya- (Yoga Upanisads), the Brhadavadhuta-, Jabala-, Naradaparivrajaka-, Bhiksuka-, and Muktika- (Sannyasa), and the Dattatreya-(Vaisnava). It is with the Mahanubhavas (chapter four) that Dattatreya makes his first appearance in the Maratha area, and that he "emerges as one of the leading deities within the Hindu pantheon" (p. 89), next (chapter five) to ascend to the top of the Marathi pantheon with Sarasvati Gangadhar's Gurucaritra, "truly the 'Bible' of all Dattatreya...