Living Liberation in Hindu Thought.

• Author: Olivelle, Patrick

The nucleus of this volume comes from a panel organized by Andrew Fort at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in November 1989 on the topic of liberation while one lives (jivanmukti) within the Hindu religious traditions. The book contains eight papers and concludes with an essay by Patricia Mumme on "Living Liberation in Comparative Perspective." Three papers deal with the Vedanta traditions: "Living Liberation in Sankara and Classical Advaita: Sharing the Holy Waiting of God," by Lance E. Nelson; "Is Jivanmukti State Possible?: Ramanuja's Perspective," by Kim Skoog; and "Direct Knowledge of God and Living Liberation in the Religious Thought of Madhva," by Daniel P. Sheridan. Three papers address jivanmukti in relation to Yoga and renunciation: "Living Liberation in Samkhya and Yoga," by Christopher Key Chapple; "Liberation While Living in the Jivanmuktiviveka: Vidyaranya's 'Yogic Advaita,'" by Andrew Fort; and "Modes of Perfected Living in the Mahabharata and the Puranas: The Different Faces of Suka the Renouncer," by C. Mackenzie Brown. The final two papers study jivanmukti within the Saiva traditions: "Aspects of Jivanmukti in the Tantric Saivism of Kashmir," by Paul E. Muller-Ortega; and "Living Liberation in Saiva Siddhanta," by Chacko Valiaveetil.

This is the first time that such a broad study of this doctrine, a doctrine central not just to the "Hindu" but also to Buddhist and Jain(1) theologies, has been undertaken.: Despite the reservations that I note below, this is an important work and will serve as a basis for any future historical study of this doctrine.

As the editor, Andrew Fort, notes in his introduction (pp. 23), there are some things that this volume does and some that it does not. All the papers look almost exclusively at texts, and all, with the exception of Mackenzie's, are the products of theological schools. All, again with the exception of Mackenzie's, "focus on philosophical and/or theological issues" (p. 2). They do not deal with individuals who have claimed or who were believed to be jivanmuktas or with their followers or with modern manifestation of this belief. Restricting the parameters of a volume is clearly justifiable. Nevertheless, most of the papers deal with the "philosophical/theological" issues within a historical context; in other words, the authors of this volume are not engaging in philosophical/theological discourse, even though they sometimes point out logical inconsistencies...