Shankara and Indian Philosophy.

• Author: Wood, Thomas E.

The author of this book, a researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow (Russian Academy of Sciences), sets out to show that the Advaita Vedana of Sankara embodies a coherent world view, and one that differs in essential ways from that of any other Indian school, including the Vijnanavada and Sunyavada of the Mahayana. On both points, her argument relies heavily on an appeal to the special role that the Vedic texts (sruti) play in Sankara's thought.

The claim that Sankara's version of the Vedanta embodies an internally consistent world view is seriously compromised by the author's insistence that the problematic concepts that figure in the system (e.g., illusion, causality, and the relationship between the world and brahman) are incomprehensible (p. 164). This concession also makes it more difficult for the author to distinguish Advaita from the Mahayana, since the Mahayana also held that everything is ineffable and indeterminable.

To be sure, Isaveya finds a number of important differences between the Vedana and the Mahayana, and in her opinion, they are all to the disadvantage of the latter. She says, for example, "when the Buddhists refused to postulate the existence of atman as an a priori reality, they at once stumbled over logical and gnoseological difficulties" (p. 185). Furthermore, the Buddhist view that relata have no reality apart from their relations to each other (anyonyasraya) leads to the logical defects of infinite regress (anavastha) and vicious circle (p. 192).

Nevertheless, even by the author's own admission, Sankara's system was subject to very similar objections. She concedes, for example, that causality (and presumably other relations as well) are also indeterminable on sankara's view (p. 168). According to Isaveya, in fact, even the claim that the Advaita has an ontology, whereas the sunyavada does not, turns out to be a very elusive distinction, since even the application of the terms being (bhava) or nonbeing (abhava) to an indeterminable and attributeless entity would...