Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identify in Indian Intellectual History.

• Author: Nemec, John
• Position: Book review

By Andrew Nicholson. New York: Columbia University press, 2010. Pp. xii Identity intellectual history. + 266. $45.

The present volume is concerned with the development and reception of the writings of the circa sixteenth-century philosopher Vijnanabhiksu. Following an introduction in which the author lays out his intellectual agenda (chapter 1), the book includes two chapters concerned with Vijnanabhiksu's contributions to Vedanta philosophy (chapters 2 and 3), three concerned with his commentaries on Samkhya and Yoga works (chapters 4-6), and a pair of chapters that address the classificatory models of a number of premodern doxographers, Haribhadra, Madhava, and Madhusudana Sarasvati principal among them (chapters 8 and 9). The reception of Vijnanabhiksu's works by four important Orientalist scholars, H. T Colebrooke, A. E. Gough, Paul Deussen, and Richard Garbe, is treated in chapter 7. Finally, the tenth chapter outlines the author's conclusions and briefly examines their implications for the contemporary study of premodern Indian philosophy.

However, Nicholson offers something other than a straightforward study of the contents of Vijnanabhiksu's oeuvre, though he explicitly states his desire to "rehabilitate the reputation" of this "maligned thinker" (p. 13). He instead defends a more general argument, namely that "between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries C.E., certain thinkers began to treat as a single whole the diverse philosophical teachings of the Upanisads, epics, Puranas, and the schools known retrospectively as the 'six systems' (saddarsana) of mainstream Hindu philosophy" (p. 2). In other words, Nicholson argues that a number of influential philosophers sought in the twelfth to sixteenth centuries to "unify" the myriad traditions today known as Hinduism, with Vijnanabhiksu being "perhaps the boldest of all of these innovators" to attempt to do so (p. 3). Consequently, two competing views regarding the origin of Hinduism are both wrong: it neither dates to the time of the Vedas, as Hindu nationalists sometimes argue (pp. 1, 201-5), nor is it solely a product of British colonial rule (pp. 14-23, 196-201).

In support of this thesis, Nicholson explores two related arguments. First, he suggests that there exists a self-consciously constructed internal coherence to Vijnanabhiksu's myriad writings on Vedanta, Samkhya, and Yoga philosophy (pp. 6-9, 85), one that classes all of these traditions, along with the Nyaya of Gautama and...