Tradition and Reflection: Explorations in Indian Thought.

• Author: Brokington, J.L.

The present work forms a kind of companion volume to the author's India and Europe, and indeed there are extensive quotations from the earlier work in the first chapter; it is also to a large extent composed of material already published and consists of a series of separate essays linked by the theme of Indian philosophical reflection on the meaning of the Hindu tradition. The core chapters 3-6 "are thoroughly revised and greatly enlarged versions of my four Studies in Kumarila and Sankara, which were published in 1983" (p. viii). The degree of enlargement varies. In chapter 3 ("Vedic Orthodoxy and the Plurality of Religious Traditions," corresponding to chapter Ill of Studies) the last section on the concept of adhikara (pp. 66-74) is new but, because of the way in which the book is compiled, discussion of adhikara recurs at pp. 274-79 and 380-84. Chapter 4 (corresponding to Studies, ch. I) has new material on the Thugs (pp. 103-7) and the Iranian evidence (pp. 109-10) to extend his treatment of the "liberators from Samsara." But in chapter 5 (Studies, ch. II) only the epilogue (pp. 180-82) is new and there are just minor changes in the rest (mainly, as elsewhere, adding translations to longer quotations from Sanskrit). Similarly, in chapter 6 (the appendix to Studies), the new part is the last section, on "Sankara and Classical Yoga," which now rounds off this assessment of the Yogasutrabhasyavivarana.

Chapter 7 is wholly new and discusses the use of medical metaphors in the Indian religious traditions in relation to the search for identity. This leads naturally into the...