The Role of Divine Grace in the Soteriology of Sankaracarya.

• Author: Rukmani, T.S.
• Position: Book review

The Role of Divine Grace in the Soteriology of Sankaracarya. By BRADLEY J. MALKOVSKY. Numen Book Series, Studies in the History of Religions. Leiden: BRILL, 2001. Pp. 421.

This book attempts systematically to study an "overlooked feature" in the theory of liberation of Sankaracarya, and the author is convinced that he is able to establish a "solid systematic theology of grace" in Sankara (p. xii). He has an abiding interest in this aspect of Sankara's soteriology, and his earlier publication "The Personhood of Sankara's Para Brahman" (The Journal of Religion, 1977) addresses the same question differently. He also leans heavily on the earlier researches of Paul Hacker and Richard De Smet (p. xiii), both of whose views are more or less called into service to reinforce his own findings in the book. Amongst a long array of Advaita scholars, not many espouse the presence of divine grace for liberation in Sankara. Malkovsky mentions just four who seriously promote the idea of grace in Sankara's Advaita, two westerners (Hacker and Smet) and two Indians (Kokileswar Sastri and V. H. Date). Even scholars sympathetic to the notion of grace in Sankara like A. G. Krishna Warrier and T. M. P. Mahadevan do not fully support it. It is the emphasis on the One Reality in Sankara's metaphysics that prevents divine grace from having a role in the soteriology of Sankara.

The book contains ten chapters, along with an exhaustive and valuable bibliography and an index. Chapters one to four deal with Sankara's life and work, epistemology, metaphysics, and soteriology in his works. Chapters five and six deal with grace in pre-Sankara Vedanta and modern interpretations of grace in Sankara's thought. They all provide a wealth of information. Chapters 7-10 come to grips with the question of grace.

Malkovsky's approach is an exegetical analysis of the different works of Sankara. However this approach is mainly a semantic one, confined to selected words, like prasada, anugraha, etc., that denote grace in common parlance. As only those passages containing these words come under exegetical scrutiny, such an approach prejudices the exegetical methodology chosen by the author. It is also important to bear in mind that a philosopher of any merit has a committed view and is devoted to a coherent elaboration of a main thesis, which in Advaita is the ontological reality of Brahman alone. Epistemology or how one understands oneself in the lived world or even the status of the lived world itself are of secondary importance, not figuring seriously in the ultimate analysis. Having stated his thesis in the introduction to the Brahmasutra (BS) commentary, where he draws a distinction between reality and non-reality, Sankara expects us to apply that understanding of Advaita in his different works. Sankara builds his Advaita in his commentaries in keeping with the hermeneutical principles of ekavakyata (unity of meaning from beginning to end) and upakrama-parakrama nyaya, where the initial statements carry more weight than the later ones, in order to drive home his Advaita philosophy. He also gives ample proof of his grasp of the other darsanas (schools of Hindu thought), and he often buttresses his arguments with arguments drawn from these schools. It is therefore not easy to read Sankara in a linear fashion.

The major part of Malkovsky's book (pp. 161-288) is devoted to examining Sankara's commentaries on the BS, about...