This erudite and thought provoking volume serves many purposes. First, it is a fairly straightforward meditation upon the development and reception of the oeuvre of the circa sixteenth-century philosopher Vijñānabhikṣu, and it is an explicit attempt to “rehabilitate the reputation” of this “maligned thinker” (p. 13). But Andrew Nicholson also makes the larger and more interesting and internally contested claim about doxography as developing a frame within which such religious texts could be understood as philosophic inquiry, “[between the] twelfth and sixteenth centuries c.e., certain thinkers began to treat as a single whole the diverse philosophical teachings of the Upaniṣads, epics, Purāṇas, and the schools known retrospectively as the ‘six systems’ (ṣaḍdarśana) of mainstream Hindu philosophy” (p. 2), a “ unifying” these inquiries under one rubric. Nicholson's complex thesis has political ramifications that suggest that the origins of Hinduism are not only the Vedas, as Hindu nationalists claim (pp. 1, 201–5), nor a product of British colonial rule (pp. 14–23, 196–201) as understood by some scholars. Richard King's original theoretical criticism of Hinduism being misconstrued and misunderstood through an Orientalist lens (1999) is lent credence through Nicholson's careful scholarship.

Courageously focusing upon the lesser known Bhedābheda Vedānta (pp. 39–66, especially 39–50, 99, 108–23, 223 n. 22), the author argues that Vijñānabhikṣu's many writings on Vedānta, Sāṃkhya, and Yoga philosophy (pp. 6–9, 85) along with the Nyāya of Gautama and the Vaiśeṣika of Kapila, as āstika or “orthodox” texts, in opposition to Advaita Vedānta, Buddhism, Jainism, the materialist Cārvāka schools, which “unified” Hinduism through a “doxographic concern.” The unification of these various schools into one central philosophical inquiry around astika-nastika divides leads Nicholson to suggest that unification “is a process, not an entity” (p. 202), which he proceeds to elaborate through following several other thinkers in their attempts to unify. This brave attempt to pull all these thinkers under one rubric is painstaking attended to throughout this work.

Nicholson's argument is powerful, well researched and delivered, and so is remarkably persuasive. Nicholson's study serves to argue that the Sāṃkhya school of philosophy somewhat lesser known that the Advaita Vedānta school was significant and that Vijñānabhikṣu, a plastic and somewhat unconventional thinker, goes against the grain of the ossifying doxographic hierarchy and has thus been ignored. By foregrounding the work of Vijñānabhikṣu and of Bhedābheda Vedānta, Nicholson braves current scholarly fashions to “read against the grain” (p. 84) to argue that Yoga was theistic whereas Sāṃkhya was an atheistic school of philosophy. Nicholson's work is significant not only in terms of its excellent fine grained reading of the text but also for its broader political and critical claim that Bhedābheda Vedānta is valuable and on par with the better known schools of Indian philosophy.

But I would gently suggest that Nicholson's focus on process through the lens of doxography might perhaps be better served by access to greater array of translated texts. That the scholarship should rest on a mere sliver of the oeuvre makes it troubling though Nicholson is the first to admit that much of Vijñānabhikṣu many writings have yet to be translated. Given this paucity of primary material one wonders if Nicholsons' claim of the penetrability between various schools of Indian philosophy might be overstated. However, Unifying Hinduism is an important volume not only for the significant contribution it makes to translation of the Sāṃkhya school but also because it ends with an exploration of the reasons for Hindu inclusivism and toleration. Nicholson suggests that “the tendency of thinkers in India to create hierarchy of systems of belief. . .” was not limited to the medieval period but a “true Hindu attitude” was an “active embrace of the other” (p. 185) but only as the episteme of insiders and outsiders—astikas and nastikas. And while Nicholson challenges the established thinking that historically Hinduism is a relatively new term, and the conception of a unified Hindu identity equally new (p. 197), he makes the valuable argument that “the increasing availability of translated vernacular texts from the late medieval period should put to rest the notion that there was no conception of a specifically Hindu identity. . . ” (p. 199) making a strong claim for doxographic method.

In short I found this book very valuable, challenging of my assumptions, powerful in method and original in focus. Nicholson's challenge to any scholar of Hinduism is to consider the lesser-known vernacular texts and to look at the exceedingly complex picture of Hindu philosophy anew.