In the ongoing debate regarding the origin and construction of the modern concept of “Hinduism”,Footnote 1 one fruitful avenue of research has been to consider the ways in which the medieval and early modern encounter with Islam may have served as an important step in the crystallisation of an increasingly self-aware “Hindu” communal identity.Footnote 2 In his book Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (2010), in particular, Andrew Nicholson examines the genre of Sanskrit doxographies in order to make the strong case that such a process of crystallisation was indeed taking place: even though “Muslims” are never explicitly mentioned in pre-colonial Sanskrit doxographies, Nicholson contends, the transformations that we can observe in this genre over time are indicative of a nascent “Hindu” identity emerging in the face of the “military and ideological threat” posed by Islam.Footnote 3 In this article, I seek to reevaluate and refine this account with reference to the work of one Sanskrit intellectual operating at the height of Muslim power in South Asia: the figure of Madhusūdana Sarasvatī (fl. sixteenth-early seventeenth centuries ce). In particular, I wish to argue that a more nuanced consideration of the different types of audiences that different doxographers may have had in mind—and, thus, the different intentions with which they may have been writing—can open up new possibilities for how to conceptualise early modern Sanskrit intellectuals’ reactions to the Muslim presence in the subcontinent.
Nicholson renders his thesis on the basis of several Indian doxographies, including, among others, Cāttanar's Tamil Maṇimēkalai (c. sixth century), Bhāviveka's Madhyamakahṛdayakārikā (sixth century), Haribhadra's Ṣaḍdarśanasamuccaya (eighth century), Mādhava's Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha (fourteenth century),Footnote 4 Vijñānabhikṣu's Sāṃkhyapravacanabhāṣya (sixteenth century), and Madhusūdana Sarasvatī's Prasthānabheda. Nicholson traces the deployment of different Sanskrit concepts (particularly āstika, “affirmer”, and nāstika, “denier”) and doxographical schemes (categorised as “binary and exclusivist”, on the one hand, and “hierarchical and inclusivist”, on the other) across these various treatises, identifying a general trend over this broad period towards what we might now call “Hindu unification”. What occurs, in other words, is a process wherein philosophical schools that were formerly identified as distinct rivals without any kind of alliance—including Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedānta—eventually come to be identified as a fundamentally unified tradition. So, whereas an early Vedāntin doxographer, for instance, may have judged Sāṃkhya and Mīmāṃsā to be every bit as “Other” as the various Buddhist, Jain and Cārvāka (Materialist) philosophical schools, by the time of Vijñānabhikṣu and Madhusūdana, Nicholson contends, we find doxographers positing a basic unity amongst the Sāṃkhya, Mīmāṃsā and other traditions that (purportedly) “affirm” the Veda (āstikas), as defined against those schools that “deny” it (the nāstikas, namely, Buddhists, Jains and Materialists). These early modern thinkers had thus formulated a “proto-Hindu” identity, which, Nicholson asserts, was later taken up by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hindu reformers to articulate “the world religion known today as Hinduism”.Footnote 5
Now, historically speaking, by the late medieval period, “Buddhism was virtually nonexistent in India, and Jainism [and Materialism] hardly a threat”, so why would early modern doxographers have continued to refute the Buddhist, Jain and Cārvāka schools?; and if these “nāstika Others” were indeed effectively absent from the scene, then what, in the absence of this longstanding enemy, could have driven these “Hindu” thinkers to unify the tradition so?Footnote 6 Following David Lorenzen in particular,Footnote 7 Nicholson contends that the “obvious answer to this question” was the “migration of Muslims into India that led to…eventual political domination”.Footnote 8 Localities tend to put aside their internal differences and band together, Nicholson observes, in order to withstand “foreign aggression” and “external threat”, and the clear candidate to play this role, for early modern Sanskrit writers, was Islam.Footnote 9 And so, Nicholson suggests, even though terms such as “Islam” and “Muslim” do not appear in early modern Sanskrit doxographies, there is every reason to suspect that the Buddhists, Jains and Materialists stood, at least in part, as “placeholders” for Islam; when Madhusūdana, in his own turn, “becomes the first doxographer to explicitly associate the beliefs of the nāstikas with those of [barbarian] foreigners (mlecchas)”, we may reasonably infer, Nicholson avers, that he is referring to Muslims and to Islam.Footnote 10
In arguing this case throughout the later stages of his book, Nicholson employs a fairly consistent set of vocabulary to depict the probable reaction of these “proto-Hindu” Sanskrit writers to the Muslim presence in South Asia: descriptors such as “foreign aggression”, “external threat”, “demonising” the “demonic Other”, “pressing concern”, and “military and ideological threat” make it clear that Nicholson attributes to early modern Sanskrit intellectuals an overall feeling of jeopardy, anxiety and perhaps even (existential?) fear.Footnote 11 Though it is not uncommon for modern scholarship to depict pre-modern Sanskritic attitudes towards Islam in this fashion, Nicholson nevertheless offers little evidence from the doxographies themselves—beyond the broad pejorative resonances that a term like “mleccha” carries over the centuriesFootnote 12—to justify his choice of vocabulary.Footnote 13 And so, if it was the Muslim presence in the subcontinent, above all else, that provoked the perceived need among Sanskrit scholars to fortify, protect and “unify” the “Vedic tradition”, it seems a worthwhile endeavour to try to articulate more precisely, and with more textual and hermeneutical nuance, exactly what condition, vis-à-vis Islam, Sanskrit doxographers exhibit in their texts: if we can agree that Islam was experienced as a “threat”, then exactly what manner of threat, of what character and texture? To this end, I aim below to take a closer look at the writings of just one Sanskrit doxographer, whose Prasthānabheda figures centrally in Nicholson's thesis: the figure of Madhusūdana Sarasvatī.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī and the Prasthānabheda
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī (fl. sixteenth-early seventeenth centuries)—a Vaiṣṇava Advaita Vedāntin most famous for his authorship of the celebrated philosophical treatise, the Advaitasiddhi—was active during the reign of the Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), his scholarly career possibly extending into the reigns of Jahāngīr (r. 1605–27) and Shāh Jahān (r. 1628–58) as well. His most famous doxographical composition, the Prasthānabheda, is actually only a section of his commentary upon Puṣpadanta's Śivamahimnaḥ-stotra (“Praise of Śiva's Greatness”), occurring within Madhusūdana's exegesis of the poem's seventh verse, which reads:
Since the approaches (prasthānas) are diverse—the three [Vedas], Sāṃkhya, Yoga, the doctrine of Paśupati, the Vaiṣṇavas—and because of the variety of inclinations—[people think] ‘this [way] is best; that [way] is suitable’—for men who favour various paths, straight or winding, you (Śiva) are the one destination, as the ocean is for the [various] waters. (7)Footnote 14
Taking this verse of the Śivamahimnaḥ-stotra as his exegetical starting point, Madhusūdana launches into a fairly rudimentary but far-ranging enumeration of the various “approaches” (prasthānas) and “sciences” (vidyās) that constitute the (in his view) proper “Vedic” tradition. He ultimately categorises eighteen such Vedic vidyās, including the Vedas themselves, the “Vedic supplements” (vedāṅgas: pronunciation, grammar, etc.), the “auxiliary supplements” of the Veda (upāṅgas: the Purāṇas, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, etc.), and the “auxiliary Vedas” (upavedas: medicine, military science, etc.).Footnote 15 As the manuscript evidence indicates, this section of Madhusūdana's commentary was subsequently minimally redacted in the form of an independently circulating treatise, which came to be known as the “Prasthānabheda” (“The Varieties of the Approaches”).Footnote 16
Madhusūdana employs the terms “approach” (prasthāna) and “science” or “knowledge-discipline” (vidyā) in quite a range of senses, referring, at one and the same time, to (1) the śruti itself (the Veda); (2) the methods for the proper study and ritual performance of the Veda; (3) other supplementary “scriptures”, such as the Epics and Purāṇas; (4) philosophical, theological, scriptural-exegetical, legal and practical knowledge-systems, all construed as somehow continuous with the Veda; (5) the foundational texts (śāstras) of each of these knowledge-systems; and also (6) the respective rituals, conduct or praxis enjoined by those same knowledge-systems. Madhusūdana is clear in presenting these prasthānas as being complementary to one another, rather than as competing “schools”.Footnote 17 In light of the opening assertion with which he initiates the Prasthānabheda—namely, that all of these prasthānas are aimed, directly or indirectly, at the Lord (bhagavat), who is their unifying, overarching object of interest and intent (tātparya)Footnote 18—the imagery invoked in the root verse of the Śivamahimnaḥ-stotra seems particularly apt: just as all the rivers, tributaries, streams and even the rain are all ultimately trying to get back the ocean—and, in many cases, work together to do so, as when rain contributes to a tributary, or a tributary contributes to a river, all on their respective ways towards the ocean—just so, all the prasthānas/vidyās have the Lord as their ultimate object and destination.Footnote 19 I have accordingly departed from Nicholson in translating the term prasthāna as “approach” (in the sense of “path”, “way of proceeding”, or even “method”) rather than “religious source”, although, like the term vidyā, it encompasses a broad variety of denotations and connotations that is difficult to capture with a single English term.
Madhusūdana then introduces a hypothetical objector (pūrvapakṣin), who asks why the six nāstika approaches (four Buddhist schools—[1] Madhyamaka, [2] Yogācāra, [3] Sautrāntika, and [4] Vaibhāṣika—plus the [5] Cārvākas and [6] Digambara Jains) are not included among the enumerated prasthānas. Madhusūdana tersely retorts that
those approaches should be disregarded because, like the approaches of the barbarian foreigners (mlecchas), etc., they are not conducive to the proper ends of humankind (puruṣārthas) even indirectly, since they are external to the Veda (vedabāhya). And only the sorts of approaches that are in service of the Veda—conducive to the ends of humankind, either directly or indirectly—are presented here.Footnote 20
Madhusūdana thus affirms his simple (and “unifying”) criteria—namely, whether a philosophical school or śāstra is “internal” or “external” to the Veda—and then presses on without any further comment on these various nāstika traditions. Even though the objector had devoted approximately one sentence each to describing the characteristic tenet of each of these six nāstika schools, Madhusūdana never even bothers to refute these doctrines: it is enough to assert that they are vedabāhya like the traditions of the mlecchas, after which the treatise can move on to its résumé of the properly “Vedic” tradition, which alone contributes to the proper ends of human existence in any meaningful way. This particular deployment of the term “mleccha”, however momentary, is, of course, important for Nicholson's thesis, which contends that Madhusūdana had felt the Muslim threat so acutely that he felt compelled to insert “Muslims” into the annals of Sanskrit doxography, if only obliquely, where they had never before received mention.Footnote 21
Madhusūdana's doxographical contributions to “proto-Hindu unification” do not end there, however. Echoing a framework that had been utilised in earlier doxographies, Madhusūdana places all the various Sanskrit disciplines of knowledge within a hierarchy, locating Advaita Vedānta at the apex. Although he is here employing a schema inherited from previous writers,Footnote 22 Madhusūdana does introduce a significant variation: in articulating, at the conclusion of the Prasthānabheda, what makes this “Vedic” community coherent, he (perhaps uniquely among Vedāntin doxographers up to that time) goes so far as to depict all the sages (munis) and founders of all the multifarious traditions of “Vedic” thought—Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Pāśupata Śaivism, Vaiṣṇavism, etc.—as in fact omnisciently knowing one and the same non-dual truth, and yet consciously teaching different paths for different souls situated at different levels of readiness for knowledge and liberation (mokṣa):
The [true] object (tātparya) of all the sages, who are the authors of all these approaches (prasthānas), is the highest Lord (parameśvara), who is non-dual (advitīya)… For, it is not the case that these sages could have erred, because they are omniscient (sarvajña). However, for those who are plunged into external objects (bahirviṣayapravaṇa), immediate entrance into the [highest] aim of humankind (puruṣārtha) is not possible. Thus, a variety of modes has been presented by the sages in order to prevent nāstika-hood (nāstikya) [among the people].Footnote 23
Hence, the highest teaching, according to Madhusūdana, is the doctrine of Advaita Vedānta, which affirms that non-dual brahman alone is ultimately real, while the manifest, phenomenal universe is an illusory (mithyā) appearance. Most individuals, however, are too deluded by the ensnaring appearances of the world, entrenched in the mistaken view that it is substantially real. They are thus ill-equipped for this highest realisation and require the attenuated teachings of the sages of other āstika schools, who knowingly preach “partial truths” better within the grasp of most individuals’ limited capacities. These attenuated teachings, therefore, guard people against truly fruitless and erroneous nāstika stances, while, presumably, also potentially serving as an intermediary crutch or step on the way to Advaita Vedānta.Footnote 24 In this manner, although a great many more texts must be examined before we could say so conclusively, we witness in the Prasthānabheda a degree of unification of the “proto-Hindu” tradition perhaps unprecedented up to that point in time, painting all of the tradition's luminaries as entirely in accord; some paths are more veridical than others, but none of the āstika paths, as Madhusūdana asserts in the concluding words of the treatise, are deserving of censure (sarvam anavadyam).Footnote 25
Other doxographies considered: Madhusūdana's Siddhāntabindhu
The most “obvious” explanation for Madhusūdana's innovations, in Nicholson's terms, is the perceived threat of the Muslim presence in South Asia, encoded in the language of the mleccha.Footnote 26 Yet, it is worth restraining ourselves from what may at first seem the immediately evident answer, pausing to consider alternative explanations that may be more readily substantiated within the texts themselves. To this end, it is fruitful to compare the Prasthānabheda against the doxographical passages of Madhusūdana's other writings, regarding which his Siddhāntabindu and Vedāntakalpalatikā contain much of the most relevant material. We can begin with the Siddhāntabindu,Footnote 27 Madhusūdana's commentary upon the Daśaślokī (“Ten Verses [on the Self]”), of uncertain authorship though traditionally attributed to Śaṅkarācārya, as Madhusūdana himself attests at the outset of his commentary. Madhusūdana organises his interpretation of the Daśaślokī around the famous “great saying” (mahāvākya) of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (6.8.7), “tat tvam asi” (“That thou art”), long considered by the Advaita tradition to be one of the quintessential scriptural affirmations of the non-dual nature of reality and the fundamental identity between the innermost self (ātman) and ultimate Reality (brahman). With this mahāvākya as his starting point, Madhusūdana correspondingly construes verses 1–3 of the Daśaślokī as Śaṅkara's elucidation of the meaning of “thou” (tvam, i.e., ātman), verses 4–6 as his explanation of “that” (tat, i.e., brahman), and verses 7–10 as his explication of how the two are ultimately non-different.Footnote 28 For long stretches within these tvam and tat sections of the Siddhāntabindu, Madhusūdana adopts a doxographical mode as he pens two separate surveys of the positions held by different philosophical and theological schools concerning the nature of tvam/ātman, on the one hand, and tat/brahman, on the other, followed by his refutations of these rival positions and his ultimate defense of those whom he terms the “Upaniṣad-adherents” (aupaniṣada), that is to say, the followers of Advaita Vedānta.
Early on in the section on tvam, Madhusūdana quickly runs through a series of different schools and their respective stance(s) on the self, including, in order: (1) five views among the Materialists (Cārvākas); (2) two views among the Buddhists (SugataFootnote 29 and Mādhyamika); (3) the view of the Digambara Jains; (4–6) Vaiśeṣika, Tārkika (i.e., Nyāya), and Prābhākara (Mīmāṃsā), all grouped together as maintaining the same shared view of the self; (7) Bhāṭṭa (Mīmāṃsā); (8–9) Sāṃkhya and Patañjali (i.e., Pātañjala Yoga), presented as sharing the same view of the self; and (10) the followers of the Upaniṣads (Aupaniṣadas).Footnote 30 Each view is presented in only a sentence or so, reduced to just a few phrases or descriptors. Upon finishing this brief résumé, Madhusūdana then asserts what he takes to be Śaṅkara's central purpose in composing the Daśaślokī: although everyone, through a general subjective experience of a notion of “I” (aham-pratyaya), admits in some way some basic awareness of a conscious self (cidātman), the mutually contradictory affirmations of these various teachers (vādivipratipatti) render the existence and character of that conscious self ambiguous and uncertain (sandigdha). Śaṅkara accordingly composed the verses of the Daśaślokī in order to clarify matters.Footnote 31 Madhusūdana devotes his commentary upon the first verse, in particular, to refutations of these rival schools’ positions, couched within a lengthy dialectical back-and-forth—the standard Sanskritic style of pūrvapakṣin vs. siddhāntin, utilising rational argumentation and the citation of scriptural proof-texts—aimed at establishing Advaita Vedānta's doctrine of ātman. Many of the pūrvapakṣa objections raised therein relate the sorts of critiques that many of these rival schools would typically level against Advaita Vedānta, to which Madhusūdana responds with considerable depth and detail—certainly not the level of dialectical sophistication embodied by his renowned Advaitasiddhi, but substantially more philosophically and scholastically advanced than anything to be found within the Prasthānabheda.
Given that this tvam section of the Siddhāntabindu enumerates the various philosophical schools in a roughly comparable sequence as in the Prasthānabheda (cf. note 15 above), one might suspect that Madhusūdana here has in mind some sort of hierarchy or alliance of intellectual traditions, wherein certain (presumably āstika) traditions are more closely aligned with Advaita Vedānta than certain other (especially nāstika) traditions, thus exhibiting the “proto-Hindu unification” that Nicholson accredits to the Prasthānabheda. Several features of the text, however, would undermine this suggestion. In the first place, unlike the Prasthānabheda, nowhere in the Siddhāntabindu does Madhusūdana proclaim any kind of alliance between Advaita Vedānta and any other group; quite to the contrary, he presents all other schools as teaching contradictory doctrines, simply meant to be discarded in favour of Advaita Vedānta. After finishing with the first three verses and initiating the tat section of the commentary, for instance, Madhusūdana employs much the same language already encountered above:
hence, in the first three verses, the meaning of the term ‘thou’ (tvam) was ascertained, preceded by the repudiation (nirākaraṇa) of the contradictory affirmations of [other] teachers (vādivipratipatti). Now, the meaning of the term ‘that’ (tat) must be likewise ascertained. Thus, the contradictory affirmations of [other] teachers (vādivipratipatti), which are to be repudiated (nirākārya), will be [presently] explained.Footnote 32
The term vipratipatti, repeated twice in this passage and elsewhere, denotes mutual disagreement, opposition and incompatibility, on the one hand, as well as the idea of being mistaken, holding false views or speaking falsely or erroneously, on the other. Both these senses of the word combine here to encapsulate the recurring frame of the Siddhāntabindu, wherein all schools other than Advaita Vedānta are deemed to be doctrinally erroneous and meant to be discarded, yet, since the plethora of mutually contradictory śāstras is liable to confuse aspirants and practitioners, there is accordingly a need for preceptors of the likes of Śaṅkara and Madhusūdana to disclose the true teaching.
The notion that the Siddhāntabindu exhibits an implicit hierarchy or alliance of “Vedic”/āstika traditions is further undermined by the tat section of the commentary, wherein Madhusūdana alters the sequence in which the rival schools are presented. For this second round of doxographical writing, Madhusūdana turns to the varying philosophical views regarding the character of brahman/tat and its role as the cause of the world (jagat-kāraṇa), this time offering several sentences for each school's stance, in the following sequence: (1) Sāṃkhya; (2) Pāśupata (Śaivas); (3) Pāñcarātrika (Vaiṣṇavas); (4–5) Jains and Tridaṇḍins (three-staff renunciants), presented as sharing the same view; (6) Mīmāṃsā, with no distinction drawn in this instance between Prābhākara and Bhāṭṭa; (7) Tārkika (Nyāya); (8) Saugata (Buddhists), again with no distinctions drawn between any Buddhist sub-schools; (9) Pātañjala (Yoga); and (10) the followers of the Upaniṣads (Aupaniṣadas).Footnote 33 Although Madhusūdana's ordering is largely constrained by the wording of the Daśaślokī's root verse,Footnote 34 it is nevertheless significant that “Hindu” and “non-Hindu” groups are intermixed across this doxographical sequence, with the Jains and Buddhists casually interspersed betwixt the “Hindu” schools without any apparent or acknowledged justification. Indeed, even where the root verse leaves Madhusūdana the freedom to do as he pleases, he opts to blur the purported “boundaries” even further: the Daśaślokī verse, for instance, makes no mention of Nyāya, Buddhism, or Pātañjala Yoga, so it was entirely Madhusūdana's independent decision to insert Buddhism between these other two “Hindu” schools. Even more strikingly, while the Daśaślokī verse makes no mention of the Tridaṇḍins—a group Madhusūdana elsewhere recognises to be “Vedic”/āstika Footnote 35—the commentator nevertheless chose to append them to the Daśaślokī's Jains, grouping the two and hence affirming these two schools, one āstika and the other nāstika, to profess effectively identical conceptions of brahman.Footnote 36 Even the vaidika/vedabāhya distinction fails to hold up: although, in the Prasthānabheda, groups such as the Jains could be summarily cast aside as “external to the Veda” while the Pāśupata (Śaivas) and Pāñcarātra (Vaiṣṇavas) were readily listed among the “Vedic” prasthānas, in the Siddhāntabindu, in contrast, Madhusūdana refutes all three schools (and, in some manuscripts, the Tridaṇḍins as well) in one swift stroke, declaring them all to be manifestly contradictory to both the Veda and to reason, without need for any further explanation: “Pāśupata, Pāñcarātrika, [Tridaṇḍin,] and Jaina thought are [all] untenable (ayukta), because they are contradicted (bādhita) by reason (yukti) and scripture (śruti)”.Footnote 37 Indeed, Sāṃkhya, Nyāya, and Buddhist thought alike are all treated in arguably comparable fashion, with Madhusūdana furnishing numerous scriptural proof-texts to illustrate how, in his view, the Veda plainly contradicts their central doctrines.Footnote 38
In this manner, from various angles, the other so-called “Hindu” schools are repeatedly treated as being just as erroneous as the “non-Hindu”, Advaita Vedānta alone encompassing the truth of matters. The Siddhāntabindu thus exhibits several textual features that would undermine any suggestion of a kinship between Advaita Vedānta and any other schools, while displaying a notable dearth of any positive signs to the opposite effect: Madhusūdana does not even deploy the proto-“Hindu” vocabulary of “āstika” vs. “nāstika” within the commentary, for instance. Such observations make it difficult to conceive of the Siddhāntabindu as an agent of “proto-Hindu unification”, much less to attribute to Madhusūdana such a conscious intention or deliberate agenda therein. Crucially, Madhusūdana also never mentions the mlecchas within the Siddhāntabindu, nor any other group that could be plausibly read as a coded surrogate for Islam.
Mokṣa and the means thereto: doxography in the Vedāntakalpalatikā
Turning to Madhusūdana's other prominently doxographical composition, the Vedāntakalpalatikā Footnote 39 is an independent treatise dedicated to the subject of liberation (mokṣa), leading Madhusūdana into such varied philosophical territory as the nature of knowledge (vidyā) and ignorance (avidyā), the proper means of knowledge (pramāṇa), the various powers and capacities of language (śabda) to convey and bring about knowledge, the role of inquiry (vicāra) in the realisation of mokṣa, and other related topics. Madhusūdana organises roughly the first third of the treatise around a survey of different philosophical and theological schools’ views on mokṣa, doing so in three roughly sequential subsections. Madhusūdana first presents all the schools’ respective conceptions of liberation, variously termed (depending upon the school) mokṣa, mukti, apavarga or kaivalya; he then refutes their doctrines regarding the nature of liberation, one-by-one, via dialectical argumentation and citation of “scriptural” proof-texts; finally, Madhusūdana counters each school's account of the means (sādhana) to liberation. In each of these three rounds of doxographical surveying, with only minor deviation, Madhusūdana adheres to the following sequence of schools: (1) Lokāyata (Cārvāka), (2) Vijñānavāda (Yogācāra), (3) Madhyamaka, (4) Ārhata (Jaina), (5) Kāṇāda (Vaiśeṣika), (6) Tārkika/Nyāya, (7) unnamed group, likely a variety of Mīmāṃsā, (8) Prābhākara (Mīmāṃsā), (9) Bhāṭṭa (Mīmāṃsā), (10) Sāṃkhya, (11) Pātañjala (Yoga), (12–16) Tridaṇḍin, Pāśupata (Śaiva), Vaiṣṇava, Hairaṇyagarbhin (worshippers of HiraṇyagarbhaFootnote 40), and unspecified “others” (apare), seemingly grouped together under the broad category of bhedābheda (“difference-cum-non-difference”),Footnote 41 and (17) Aupaniṣada (Upaniṣad-adherents). A somewhat wider range of schools and sub-schools is taken up in the Vedāntakalpalatikā than in either the Siddhāntabindu or Prasthānabheda, with Madhusūdana occasionally expounding multiple stances on mokṣa from within each school, e.g., two views among the Lokāyatas, two views among the Vijñānavādins, two views among the Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsakas, three views among the Tridaṇḍins, etc. Additionally, in the Vedāntakalpalatikā, Madhusūdana offers a somewhat more extensive account of each rival school's position(s) than in either of the previous two doxographies, with many schools given one to several paragraphs’ worth of explication, including even an occasional quotation from their respective śāstras. The Vedāntakalpalatikā is overall a more demanding treatise, philosophically-speaking, than the Siddhāntabindu, and is decisively so in comparison with the Prasthānabheda.
With an organisation that again mirrors (and further expands upon) the sequence of schools as presented in the Prasthānabheda, one might again suspect the Vedāntakalpalatikā of exhibiting a tendency toward “proto-Hindu unification”. The treatise does indeed offer some support for this case, most immediately in its deployment (unlike the Siddhāntabindu) of the vocabulary of “āstikas” and “nāstikas”, however limitedly. The lines are drawn in the Vedāntakalpalatikā along an effectively identical boundary: the Materialists, Buddhists and Jains play the role of the nāstikas, with everyone else from the above list seemingly falling into the āstika category. While the Prasthānabheda places primary emphasis upon the idea of being “Vedic”—i.e., it is because the nāstika traditions are “external to the Veda” (vedabāhya) that they are “not conducive to [any of] the proper ends of humankind” (puruṣārthas)Footnote 42—in the Vedāntakalpalatikā, in contrast, this Vedic criterion is not specifically brought to the fore, but rather, the nāstikas’ inability, according to Madhusūdana, to logically and self-consistently entertain a notion of an enduring self (ātman) or of mokṣa as a permanent, desirable object of human pursuit.Footnote 43 Furthermore, though not nearly as exaggerated as the Prasthānabheda, wherein the nāstikas are cast aside in nary more than a sentence, one could nevertheless make the case that, in the Vedāntakalpalatikā, Madhusūdana similarly devotes less space and effort to refuting nāstika groups, whereas the āstika śāstras are dealt with in comparatively greater depth and detail. One should be careful not to infer too much from this minor disparity, however, as Madhusūdana's engagement with the Materialists, Buddhists and Jains in the Vedāntakalpalatikā is more than merely perfunctory; to the contrary, he does present a workable, albeit terse, sketch of their respective stances, and offers viable arguments for disputing those stances, even if less than fully elaborated.
Despite this limited evidence in favour of reading the Vedāntakalpalatikā as another instance of Madhusūdana's novel “Hindu-unifying” efforts, several features of the text pose complications for the proposition. In the first place, Madhusūdana never presents any group that is or could be identified with the “mlecchas”, much less “Islam”, meaning that Madhusūdana's single most significant doxographical innovation in the Prasthānabheda, per Nicholson's thesis, is entirely absent from the Vedāntakalpalatikā. The nearest candidate that could serve as a surrogate for Islam would be the vague category of “others” (apare), whom Madhusūdana describes as “prattling on much about that which is fancifully imagined within their own heads, opposed [both] to reason and scripture”.Footnote 44 Madhusūdana does not in any way connect this group of “others”, however, with the nāstika Materialists, Buddhists, and Jains (1–4), but rather, only takes them up in the portion of the treatise that treats the Tridaṇḍins, Pāśupatas, Vaiṣṇavas and Hairaṇyagarbhins (12–15), that is to say, the miscellaneous, largely bhakti-oriented groups who are treated in brief subsequent to Madhusūdana's more substantial engagement with the more conventional āstika schools. Based upon the doxography's organisation thus, as well as the treatment of the “Pāśupatas” and “Vaiṣṇavas” in the Prasthānabheda as seen above, it seems clear that Madhusūdana considers these miscellaneous groups, including the “others”, to be āstikas; this is further bolstered by the observation that the sole invocation of the term “nāstika” within the Vedāntakalpalatikā occurs in reference to the Cārvākas, Buddhists and Jains specifically, with no other schools referenced.Footnote 45 Accordingly, the most likely identification of these “others”, I would argue, would be any of the myriad “Hindu” (possibly bhakti- and/or bhedābheda-oriented) groups not otherwise addressed within the Vedāntakalpalatikā, whether one of the alternative varieties of Vedānta (perhaps Dvaita Vedānta, a central opponent occupying much of Madhusūdana's scholarly attentionFootnote 46), other Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva, or even Śākta or Tāntrika lineages, or nearly countless other contemporary “Hindu” sects. Even if one were to argue that this “others” category should be read as separable and dissociated from the group of Tridaṇḍins, Pāśupatas, etc. (#12–15), still there is nothing in the description of these “others” themselves that would justify the conclusion that the intended referent is “Muslims” in particular, or even “mlecchas” more generally: as already seen above, Madhusūdana applies the accusation of “being opposed to reason and scripture”Footnote 47 to numerous rival schools, ranging from the Jains and Buddhists to the Pāśupatas, Tridaṇḍins, and Pāñcarātra Vaiṣṇavas—arguably even to the Naiyāyikas, Vaiśeṣikas, and other unambiguously āstika groups. Hence, to encounter such a generic description of these “others” and read “Muslims” into it, with any kind of specificity, would require simply an unwarranted leap, as neither Madhusūdana's portrayal of this category of “others” nor its context within the treatise lends support to interpreting it as a stand-in for Islam.
Even further, upon closer inspection, the very bifurcation between āstikas vs. nāstikas—part of the bedrock upon which the thesis of “Hindu unification” is built—is somewhat compromised within the Vedāntakalpalatikā. Again, the āstika-nāstika distinction is only invoked once during the doxographical portion of the treatise, in the midst of the “second round” of surveying. However, Madhusūdana intriguingly puts the words in the mouth of a pūrvapakṣin objector, rather than in the “conclusive” and “established” affirmations of the siddhāntin respondent. At the start of the passage in question, having examined and critiqued the views of the Materialists, Buddhists and Jains concerning the nature of liberation, Madhusūdana's pūrvapakṣin then concedes: “very well, let it be [granted] that there is no desire for mokṣa among the nāstika views, on account of [both] the fruit (i.e., mokṣa) and the enjoyer of the fruit (i.e., ātman) being perishable. But that fault is not present in the āstika view”.Footnote 48 Here the pūrvapakṣin deploys the nāstika and āstika categories in the expected sense, excluding the Materialists, Buddhists and Jains from the “affirmer” category, in this instance on the basis of their rendering both the self and the state of liberation as impermanent, transient objects. The pūrvapakṣin, interestingly, portrays the nāstika views in the plural (nāstikamateṣu), while projecting a unified āstika view in the singular (āstikamate), expounding this āstika “consensus,” so to speak, over the next several pages of detailed discussion. The gist of the pūrvapakṣin's case is that, unlike the nāstika schools, all āstikas agree, on the grounds of perception (pratyakṣa), inference (anumāna) and testimony (śabda) alike, that ātman is eternal (nitya) and all-pervasive (vibhu), a determination that coherently justifies the pursuit of mokṣa as a desirable end.Footnote 49 This purported consensus then becomes the occasion for the pūrvapakṣin to put forward the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika-Prābhākara view, namely, that a self becomes bound to transmigration (saṃsāra) upon the arising of nine specific attributes (navaviśeṣaguṇa) within it;Footnote 50 the cessation (nivṛtti) of these same nine attributes, in turn, constitutes mokṣa.Footnote 51
The siddhāntin, significantly, flatly rejects the pūrvapakṣin's proposal.Footnote 52 In an even lengthier dialectical back-and-forth, Madhusūdana's siddhāntin refutes this Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika-Prābhākara conception of the self in a detailed passage spanning several pages, highlighting what he takes to be the internal contradictions and inconsistencies of the doctrine, itself unestablished by any reliable means of knowledge (pramāṇa). The pūrvapakṣin attempts to salvage his position through resort to the Bhāṭṭa, Sāṃkhya, and Yoga doctrines of ātman and mokṣa, only for Madhusūdana's siddhāntin to reject these possibilities as well, impugning each group for rendering the self's liberation impossible or nonsensical in some way or another. Madhusūdana sums up his overall objection to this assemblage of āstika views as follows: “since all these views grant that mokṣa is adventitious (āgantuka)…[then], by reason of its being occasioned (janya), mokṣa is necessarily perishable (vināśin) [as well], for, the mere fact of being occasioned itself renders [a thing] perishable”.Footnote 53 In this fashion, by putting the case for an “āstika consensus” in the mouth of a pūrvapakṣin, Madhusūdana in fact ends up undermining the idea considerably: the replying siddhāntin does not directly contradict the sentiment that āstikas are somehow united against the nāstikas in professing some vaguely shared affirmation of an abiding self, but he does emphatically render such a notion effectively impotent, irrelevant, and uncompelling. Indeed, Madhusūdana clearly announces his intentions to this effect in the opening verses of the treatise:
I pay obeisance to the revered, wondrous Śaṅkara, extractor of the fruit of immortality, by whom the Upaniṣad, snatched away deceitfully by Mīmāṃsā, was rescued to its [proper] freedom, just as Vinatā, [enslaved] by the mother of snakes (Kadrū), was rescued by Garuḍa… (1)
After repudiating (nirdhūya) the utterances of Jaimini (Mīmāṃsā), Patañjali (Yoga), and Gautama (Nyāya), as well as the views of the Kāṇādas (Vaiśeṣika), Kāpilas (Sāṃkhya), Śaivas, and others, I will propound lucidly [in this Vedāntakalpalatikā], with measured speech,Footnote 54 the limpid truth (śuddhi) in the sense indicated by Śrī Vyāsa, Śaṅkara, and Sureśvara.Footnote 55 (4)
For the sake of ending doubts (vikṣepa) regarding what needs to be done (anuṣṭheya) on the part of those desirous of liberation (mumukṣu), I will describe mokṣa, along with the means thereto, through casting aside the [false] opinions of other schools (parapakṣanirāsa). (5)Footnote 56
Such blunt utterances, only amplified by additional word-choices and phrases peppered across the treatise (such as variants of the term “vipratipatti”, discussed above),Footnote 57 announce Madhusūdana's orientation clearly: Advaita Vedānta alone teaches the true doctrine of the self and liberation, while all other schools—āstika and nāstika alike—are decisively and fatally mistaken in their views, therefore fit only to be discarded. Whatever tenuous affirmation of āstika unity or hierarchy may fleetingly appear, floundering within just one passage of pūrvapakṣin dialogue, becomes hardly an afterthought in the context of this inter-śāstric rivalry and broadscale contentiousness that frames and pervades the Vedāntakalpalatikā, formulated to present Advaita and Advaita alone as veridical. In contradistinction to Nicholson's claim that, unlike Śaṅkara's time-period, “[f]or Madhusūdana approximately eight hundred years later, discrediting Kapila, Patañjali, and the other āstika sages was not a viable alternative”,Footnote 58 we see here in the Vedāntakalpalatikā that this alternative was in fact alive and well.
Before drawing this brief glimpse at the Vedāntakalpalatikā to a close, one final feature of the treatise merits reflection, if only as a cautionary episode regarding the exegesis of such a text. During the third and final round of doxographical surveying, after refuting the Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika accounts of the means (sādhana) to liberation and before proceeding to the Prābhākara, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and Bhāṭṭa schools, Madhusūdana inserts an especially pithy interlude: “to refute (nirākaraṇa) the doctrine of ‘aikabhavika’ would [only] bring shame upon the refuter. Since the viewpoint is wholly unfounded, thus it is [simply] disregarded”.Footnote 59 The term “aikabhavika” might be rendered as “relating to one lifetime” or “possessing one birth”, leading R. D. Karmarkar to translate Madhusūdana's phrase as “the doctrine of those who believe only in one life” (aikabhavikapakṣa).Footnote 60 Now, encountering a phrase such as this and observing Madhusūdana's disdainful, mocking repudiation of it, a reader on the lookout for “Islam” could be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that we have at last found in the Vedāntakalpalatikā a direct reference to Muslims, the most conspicuous disbelievers in reincarnation to populate early modern South Asia. Interpreting Madhusūdana's comment in better context, however, reveals the reading to be misguided: this repudiation of aikabhavika doctrine actually refers back to a point considerably earlier in the treatise, during Madhusūdana's first round of doxographical surveying (34 pages prior in Karmarkar's edition), namely, the “unnamed group” (#7) in the above list of schools addressed in the Vedāntakalpalatikā.
This very first mention of the aikabhavika “school” within the Vedāntakalpalatikā offers appreciably more specificity as regards the group's identity:
But others say, by reason of the principle (nyāya) of “belonging to one lifetime” (aikabhavika), as a result of the performance of the compulsory (nitya) and occasional (naimittika) karmas along with the non-performance of the prohibited (niṣiddha) and voluntary (kāmya) karmas, even without knowledge (jñāna) of ātman, no future karmas will be produced. And due to the destruction of present karmas by way of their enjoyment (bhoga), they speak of “release” (apavarga) as characterised by the disappearance of karma in all its parts.Footnote 61
On this account of liberation, crucially for Madhusūdana, knowledge of ātman is entirely superfluous; rather, only the correct Vedic ritual regimen, and nothing else, can accomplish the goal. This ritual regimen involves avoiding activities prohibited (niṣiddha) by the Veda and hence productive of demerit and negative karma, as well as ritual action done out of some personal desire or interest (kāmya), which generates meritorious karma that nevertheless keeps one bound to the cycle of transmigration (saṃsāra). At the same time, in order to avoid the sin (pāpa) and negative karma that comes from defying the Veda, an individual must continue to perform all the obligatory rituals enjoined by scripture—those at regular, fixed intervals (nitya) as well as those prompted by a non-routine context or special occasion (naimittika)—both of which, done solely due to Vedic injunction, are deemed not to produce any new karma. With no new karma being generated during the current lifetime, the only remaining obstacle preventing liberation is the store of karma already accumulated (saṃcita) by the agent as a result of activity done in previous lives.
By most accounts, it would take a multitude of successive lifetimes for this accumulation of past karma to spend itself “naturally”, hence most schools’ insistence upon some additional factor as a feature of the means to liberation, such as the special power of nitya karmas, penance, meditation or self-knowledge (ātmajñāna) to destroy saṃcita karma in an exceptional, accelerated manner. This aikabhavika school, however, proposes an alternative, namely, the conviction that the entirety of one's prior accumulated karma is in fact the cause of only one's current lifetime, of no causal relevance for any future births beyond it. On this explanation, accordingly, all of one's accumulated karma comes to fruition (bhoga) by the conclusion of the present lifetime, and hence naturally exhausts itself upon the moment of death. If, additionally, no new karma has accrued during the course of that same lifetime, then the individual is liberated, there being no karma left, old or new, to effect a subsequent birth. Given the pronounced investment in Vedic ritual and its categories on display here (even to the exclusion of any role for self-knowledge), the most likely identification for this aikabhavika group would be a less established variety of (Pūrva-)Mīmāṃsā (alongside the better-known Bhāṭṭa and Prābhākara schools), a suggestion further bolstered by similar descriptions and identifications penned by other Sanskrit writers.Footnote 62 Madhusūdana evidently considers this duo of views—viz., (1) saṃcita karma has no causal extension beyond a single lifetime, and (2) ātmajñāna has nothing whatsoever to do with liberation—to be so plainly absurd that to bother refuting it would be worse than a waste of one's time. Needless to say, however, any suggestion of an Islamic identity for this aikabhavika group must be definitively ruled out, and should serve as a reminder for present-day readers of the inherent risks involved in trying to fill in the “gaps” and “silences” of pre-modern texts. Too often, we only succeed in filling those gaps with our own views and expectations. Hence, it is worth revisiting Madhusūdana's “mleccha” in the Prasthānabheda to consider more carefully whether modern scholarship has fallen into the same trap.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī and early modern Sanskrit doxography reconsidered
These two alternative and less-studied examples of Madhusūdana's doxographical writing, accordingly, do not at all echo the distinctive, innovative features of the Prasthānabheda that Nicholson highlights: neither treatise mentions a nāstika-proximate “mleccha”—or any other term that could be construed as a surrogate for Islam—nor does either text present an explicit or even functional hierarchy of Vedic traditions, much less a coordinated, covert effort by all āstika sages to incrementally guide the population towards Advaita Vedānta. What could account for this discrepancy between the three compositions? Modern scholars generally consider the Vedāntakalpalatikā and Siddhāntabindu to be two of Madhusūdana's earliest works, given that at least one of them is referenced in nearly all his other writings. These two texts, furthermore, are generally believed to have been composed around the same time, since they both mention one another.Footnote 63 Meanwhile, the Śivamahimnaḥ-stotra-ṭīkā, (of which the Prasthānabheda is a part) explicitly references the Vedāntakalpalatikā and contains an arguable reference to the Siddhāntabindu.Footnote 64 It seems fairly certain, therefore, that both the Vedāntakalpalatikā and Siddhāntabindu were composed prior to the Prasthānabheda. Could it be that events in Madhusūdana's life in the intervening years prompted him to develop new perspectives, or to emphasise or render explicit certain views kept quieter in his younger years? One could only speculate that, as Madhusūdana travelled across different regions of South Asia, or, perhaps, as his status grew more prominent and he took on new responsibilities (e.g., as a leading paṇḍit in Banaras and defender of Advaita Vedānta against the recent polemics powerfully put forth by the Dvaitins),Footnote 65 he might have progressively perceived a need for certain types of teachings over others. Or else, if Madhusūdana's contacts with Muslims grew over the years—perhaps even at the Mughal court, as popular memory recollects himFootnote 66—this might have prompted Madhusūdana towards a re-envisioning of the contours and boundaries of his own religious and intellectual community.
All such suggestions, of course, are inescapably speculative, as most suggestions would be that are based upon Madhusūdana's tendentious biography. And so, more concrete evidence must be sought elsewhere. On this front, we can refer to two more of Madhusūdana's writings: the Bhaktirasāyana, a treatise on bhakti (devotion) and aesthetics, and the Gūḍārthadīpikā, Madhusūdana's commentary upon the Bhagavad Gītā, itself also containing considerable discussion on the topic of bhakti. Based on Madhusūdana's cross-references, it is clear that the Bhaktirasāyana pre-dates the Gūḍārthadīpikā, the former being one of his earliest compositions. As Lance Nelson argues in his comparison of the presentation of bhakti between the two texts, a significant discrepancy has occurred: in the Bhaktirasāyana, says Nelson, the young Madhusūdana boldly affirms for bhakti, against the grain of nearly all preceding Advaita tradition,Footnote 67 a status equal to, if not surpassing, that of jñāna (knowledge), as he defends the former as an independent means to mokṣa available to all regardless of gender or social background. In the “more sober” Gūḍārthadīpikā, in contrast, Madhusūdana “domesticates” bhakti into more conventional Advaitin sensibilities, restricting the attainment of the highest levels of bhakti only to male Brahmins who have formally renounced the world (saṃnyāsa).Footnote 68 While it might be tempting to attribute this shift to Madhusūdana's “exuberant youthfulness” versus his “sober maturity”, Nelson disagrees, given that, in the Gūḍārthadīpikā, Madhusūdana repeatedly refers his readers back to the Bhaktirasāyana, which “disallows the simple explanation that, having changed his mind, he had repudiated the teaching of his earlier work”. Instead, Nelson proposes that, between the two works, Madhusūdana “is simply speaking to different audiences and adjusting his discourse accordingly”, aiming to bring educated bhaktas closer to an Advaitin perspective, in the first case, and to recommend bhakti to his fellow Advaitin renunciants, in the latter.Footnote 69
Although I view Nelson to have somewhat overstated the discrepancy between the Bhaktirasāyana and Gūḍārthadīpikā,Footnote 70 he has nevertheless offered up a promising key: the question of audience. The Siddhāntabindu and Vedāntakalpalatikā are, philosophically speaking, rather challenging texts, clearly meant for certain varieties of advanced readers, while the Prasthānabheda is written in a far more basic and accessible style. Indeed, Madhusūdana announces his intended audience in the early stages of the Prasthānabheda, affirming that the text was written “for the sake of the cultivation of bālas”.Footnote 71 Now, a bāla could be a “novice” or someone “inexperienced” or “lacking in knowledge”; the most literal sense of bāla, however, is that of a “youth” or “child”. Accordingly, if we take Madhusūdana at his word, it means that the Prasthānabheda was intended for young students at the early stages of their studies, a suggestion that accords with the simple language of the text and its overall introductory character. Or, even if bāla should be read in the sense of a “novice” or even someone a bit “dull”, the overall principle would still stand. If we reflect, additionally, upon the original context of the Prasthānabheda before it was re-rendered as an independent treatise, one could readily imagine a slightly different though still comparable story: taking advantage of the Śivamahimnaḥ-stotra's status as a devotional poem intended for broad popular appeal, Madhusūdana could conceivably have intended his exegesis to fulfill a function of public education.Footnote 72 Given the cross-sectarian context of the commentary, wherein a Vaiṣṇava Advaitin offers an interpretation of a Śaiva hymn, Madhusūdana may well have grasped the opportunity to promote a vision of a coherent, ecumenical “Vedic” tradition, a vision plausibly edifying in various ways for an educated but non-scholarly “Hindu” public at large. One could certainly imagine such a gesture, furthermore, as Madhusūdana's response, at least in part, to a perception of public confusion or anxiety over the Muslim presence in the subcontinent—although we should, once again, be circumspect in how we fill in the Prasthānabheda's textual “silences”, as cautioned above.
In considering the respective audiences for the Siddhāntabindu and Vedāntakalpalatikā, in contrast, a starkly different set of probable motives emerges. Madhusūdana informs us of his intended audience at the outset of the Siddhāntabindu: while accrediting to “Śaṅkara's” Daśaślokī the purpose of helping “all souls” (sarvān jīvān), whether directly or indirectly (sākṣāt paramparayā vā), to discriminate between Self and non-Self,Footnote 73 Madhusūdana asserts that his Siddhāntabindu commentary, in turn, represents “some efforts” exerted “for the sake of instructing those who are lethargic (alasa) in the study of Vedānta śāstra”.Footnote 74 Madhusūdana adds at the conclusion of the commentary that the Siddhāntabindu was composed for the sake of his direct pupil, Balabhadra (fl. c. 1610), who repeatedly solicited his preceptor to produce such a composition.Footnote 75 I here take Balabhadra to be something of a “nagging graduate student”, so to speak, maybe a tad on the underperforming or lazy side, with Madhusūdana responding accordingly to the needs of his pupil (who was perhaps not quite living up to his full potential at the time!). Given Balabhadra's standing as one of Madhusūdana's most prominent and central disciples, along with perhaps Puruṣottama Sarasvatī (fl. 1600) and Govinda Śeṣa,Footnote 76 it makes sense that the Siddhāntabindu would be considerably more advanced and scholastically demanding than the Prasthānabheda, that is to say, something of a pedagogical stepping-stone on the way to the formidable academic heights embodied by the Advaitasiddhi, upon which Balabhadra would ultimately compose his own commentary (the Advaitasiddhivyākhyā). The Vedāntakalpalatikā, in turn, could be said to represent a level of scholarship somewhere “between” the Siddhāntabindu and Advaitasiddhi, that is, an earnest philosophical inquiry into the question of mokṣa aimed more squarely at the establishment of the truth as an end in itself, while comparatively uninterested in more secondary pedagogical or practical concerns. Madhusūdana states his purpose to this effect at the outset, embellishing upon the treatise's title via extended metaphor:
this Vedāntakalpalatikā (‘Creeper Vine of the Paradisal Tree of Vedānta’)—growing upon the celestial tree of the true purport of ‘the embodied self’ (śārīraka), manifesting the utmost splendor “through the fruit of fixity in the knowledge of paramātman” by way of flower-clusters of sound reasoning (sattarka)—should be approached intently (upāsanīya) by those of sound intellect (sudhī).Footnote 77
The clear focus in this text is to discern the reality of mokṣa and the means thereto, a query that presupposes an intelligent audience already thoroughly steeped in Sanskrit learning and well-trained in philosophical method.
And so, perhaps, while composing the Prasthānabheda for his “young” students, “novices”, or those simply lacking in knowledge, Madhusūdana might have wished to present a unified outline and vision of the entire “Vedic” Sanskrit curriculum, highly respectful of all its branches of learning, even while gently steering students towards an Advaita worldview and away from anything “vedabāhya”. The potential benefits of such a tone and content for, e.g., a new student just beginning a Sanskrit education, in terms of cultivating an affection and attachment to the “Vedic” tradition, is not too difficult to imagine. The more advanced and already committed students of the Siddhāntabindu or Vedāntakalpalatikā, in contrast, could readily dispense with such propaedeutic pleasantries. Accordingly, it may be the case that the Prasthānabheda's unique presentation of the unanimous founder-sages (munis) is less some principled, path-breaking revolution in doxography and “Hindu” self-identity, and more a particular teaching tool applied to a specific context and neophyte audience—a context and audience that, notably, are not generally shared by the other, comparatively more intricate doxographies of the other authors upon whom Nicholson's argument is based. The passing reference to the mlecchas is, of course, undeniably present in the Prasthānabheda, an expression which certainly could be merely generic and customary for the sake of introductory framing; on the other hand, it is difficult to definitively rule out the reference as indeed Madhusūdana's response to Islam, however terse and opaquely presented. Certainly, one could plausibly locate the propaedeutic Prasthānabheda within a broader early modern Advaitin efflorescence of brief, introductory pedagogical works, often bereft of dialectical argumentation, such as Sadānanda's Vedāntasāra (and, to a lesser extent, Dharmarāja Adhvarīndra's Vedāntaparibhāṣā).Footnote 78 The new social, intellectual, and institutional realities posed by Mughal sovereignty may have occasioned a fresh need for such innovative educational materials, although, as Minkowski rightly points out, such historical conditions under Muslim rule are often assumed and rarely, if ever, demonstrated.Footnote 79 At the very least, I would suggest that conceiving the Prasthānabheda as a “propaedeutic student primer” opens up the possibility of viewing Madhusūdana's unification of the munis in a new light, suggesting less a beleaguered (proto-)Hindu increasingly fearful of the “threat” of Muslims—and desperately trying to hold his tradition together—and more a teacher offering a (perhaps strategically) exaggerated account of the unity of the Vedic tradition to young students and a broader “Hindu” public, in the hopes of nudging them along in the “right” direction.
Yet, it is instructive to pause in order to further query this standing explanation for the apparent “unificatory” trend of early modern Hindu thought, namely, the oft-repeated and oft-assumed “Muslim threat”. As much as this threat may have been imposing itself, it should also be recalled that the early modern era was a period of marked fertility and productivity for Sanskrit intellectuals.Footnote 80 The world of Sanskrit scholarship, by all appearances, was doing just fine, seemingly abundantly confident in its longstanding foundations and epistemologies: the astounding śāstric sophistication of a text like the Advaitasiddhi, wherein Madhusūdana engages in intricate navya-nyāya-style polemics against the Dvaitins (with nary a Muslim on the radar), attests well to this intuition. Madhusūdana's compositions, I would argue, do not at all betray the signs of, e.g., an “epistemological crisis” of the sort articulated by MacIntyre,Footnote 81 and which would become increasingly common under British colonial rule. This “Muslim threat”, insofar as it was indeed a threat, must have been a peril of a different sort, demanding a more nuanced hermeneutic and vocabulary than modern scholarship currently offers for reconstructing the experience(s) of early modern Sanskrit intellectuals under Muslim rule. Madhusūdana regularly projects an apparently untroubled certainty that his tradition—be it Advaita Vedānta specifically, or the “Vedic tradition” more generally—provides everything that could be needed for that which, according to his writings, is most vitally important: liberation (mokṣa), knowledge (jñāna), devotion (bhakti), and so forth. Indeed, read along these lines, an attitude of genuine indifference towards Muslims would seem every bit as likely as one of fear.Footnote 82 Furthermore, with such an elaborate and extensive Sanskrit intellectual tradition already before him, and with so much work to be done to engage and respond to it, Madhusūdana perhaps had little time, energy or inclination left to worry about or reflect upon the Muslims inhabiting the territory around him.
Accordingly, in preliminary search for this more nuanced hermeneutic, and without reverting to an exclusively internalist historical methodology, one could nonetheless make productive use of the internal logic of Madhusūdana's and others’ writings to make plausible sense of a number of the historical developments and conundrums of early modern Sanskrit that Nicholson and others have highlighted. We have seen Nicholson contend above, for instance, that early modern Sanskrit's continued doxographical engagement with the effectively absent Buddhist and Jain traditions is most “obviously” explained as a veiled anxiety in the face of “Muslim…political domination”.Footnote 83 However, the Siddhāntabindu, structured around a comprehensive clarification of the mahāvākya “That thou art”, suggests a markedly distinct rationale: the Advaita tradition has long considered the hearing of such mahāvākyas to be the central if not sole means of achieving liberation, but doubts and confusions over the semantics of these Vedic utterances prevent the dawning of realisation within the aspirant.Footnote 84 Refuting the Materialists, Buddhists and Jains, along with all other schools, accordingly, performs the crucial soteriological function of clearing away delusions and mental uncertainties over the meanings of the mahāvākya's words—are “you” really your body? Your consciousness? Is “that” God the creator of the world? What, then, is “your” relationship with “that”?—without which mokṣa, that highest of human ends (puruṣārthas) for Madhusūdana, is simply not possible. In other words, in answer to the question, “[w]hat could possibly have been the use of vilifying a school that had disappeared almost completely from the Indian subcontinent?”,Footnote 85 the framework of the mahāvākya permits the reply: even if practitioners of those particular nāstika traditions were no longer to be found around every corner, doubts posed by their ideas and arguments could still be ever-present and, hence, requiring continued response.
Similarly, what I have etically referred to as the question of “audience” could be more emically tracked with this very same question of “human ends/puruṣārthas”. Madhusūdana's explicit sphere of interest, in the Prasthānabheda, is those “approaches” that are conducive, directly or indirectly, to any of the four proper aims of human existence, viz., dharma (righteousness/duty), artha (wealth), kāma (pleasure) and mokṣa. A text such as the Vedāntakalpalatikā, in contrast, is framed around mokṣa exclusively, entirely unconcerned with any of the other three “lower” puruṣārthas. As such, it should come as little surprise that the multifaceted scope of the former treatise coincides with a capacious acknowledgement of multiple diverse śāstras directed at a variety of hierarchical goals, whereas the latter work, aimed at mokṣa alone, can admit only one śāstra. Now, none of these “internalist” accounts of the doxographies’ interior logics are at all incompatible with Nicholson's more externalist narrative of Sanskrit's slow, centuries-long grappling with the inexorable reality of Muslim rule; most certainly, both could be true at one and the same time. I would suggest, however, that modern scholarship could stand to benefit considerably from putting the two varieties of explanation into better and more consistent conversation with one another.
Conclusion
So what, in the end, are we to make of Madhusūdana's innovative formulations and affirmations within the Prasthānabheda, in light the work's substantial discrepancies with the author's other doxographies? Our brief foray into the three treatises here suggests that these innovations, purportedly spurred on by the “Muslim threat”, do not quite constitute the ground-breaking moment in “Hindu” unification and self-identity that they are often depicted to be. The Prasthānabheda's linking of the nāstikas with the mlecchas, for instance—suggested by Nicholson to be a covert method of importing “Islam” into Sanskrit doxography for the first time—is an articulation not shared by the other two works. Indeed, neither the Siddhāntabindu nor the Vedāntakalpalatikā contain any convincing candidate for a surrogate for “Muslims” or even mlecchas more generally. If Madhusūdana wished to make a point to his readers about Islam, then it was too insignificant a point to warrant mention in his other, considerably more erudite and substantial doxographies, which instead continue to engage Materialist, Buddhist and Jain thought with interest and investment, as in previous generations of Sanskrit doxography. These observations are only compounded by the complication, noted above, that Madhusūdana was actually not the first doxographer to make this nāstika-mleccha correlation, as Nicholson contends; rather, Vācaspati Miśra, at the very least, had already asserted the connection in the tenth century, meaning that Madhusūdana not only had direct precedent in earlier doxographical materials, but precedent that even pre-dates widespread Indo-Muslim political hegemony.Footnote 86 The cumulative evidence, accordingly, undermines the novelty of Madhusūdana's nāstika-mleccha formulation, the importance of this assertion for his own scholarly thought and oeuvre, the degree to which the Muslim conquests can be considered the primary motivating factor, and the extent to which “Islam” can be read into the terms mleccha/nāstika in much more than a generic, non-specific, non-pointed way.
The most genuinely unprecedented innovation within the Prasthānabheda, on the other hand, appears to be Madhusūdana's depiction of all the āstika founder-sages as in fact unanimously acknowledging one and the same non-dual Reality, and yet propounding intentionally attenuated doctrines for the sake of those lacking the capacity to grasp the fullness of the truth, viz., Advaita Vedānta. Although, as Nicholson helpfully observes,Footnote 87 Madhusūdana is likely adapting a strategy found in the Purāṇas (and possibly the Buddhist tactic of upāya or “expedient means”), it nevertheless seems that Madhusūdana has here devised a doxographical technique and degree of “Hindu” unification unseen among doxographers before him. Even in this regard, however, the evidence undermines certain aspects of this novelty while suggesting greater continuity with the past—even the pre-Islamic past—than has hitherto been recognised. Neither the Siddhāntabindu nor the Vedāntakalpalatikā echoes this unique feature of the Prasthānabheda; even further, the two treatises make little to nothing of even the basic notion of an āstika-nāstika divide, repeatedly refusing even a vague semblance of an āstika alliance. Hence, whereas Nicholson contends that the late medieval period witnessed a rise of āstika unification to such a degree that, “[f]or Madhusūdana…discrediting Kapila, Patañjali, and the other āstika sages was not a viable alternative”,Footnote 88 the Siddhāntabindu and Vedāntakalpalatikā demonstrate that this option remained vibrantly compelling in modes largely continuous with Sanskrit writing even prior to widespread Indo-Muslim rule, à la Śaṅkara, Vācaspati Miśra and many others.
Additionally, the question of audience further complicates the narrative. The exceptionally introductory character of the Prasthānabheda lends itself to a pedagogically exaggerated depiction of āstika unity, such that one might wonder to what extent the view is genuinely peculiar to Madhusūdana or “his time”, or else whether the affirmation is predominantly just a product of the propaedeutic objectives of the composition. In other words, perhaps other Advaitin doxographers might have crafted similar affirmations had they set out to write a comparably introductory work, as, to my knowledge, only very few did. The matter is only further complicated, once again, by the texts and data that Nicholson's argument overlooks: a popularising Advaitin work such as Kṛṣṇamiśra's allegorical drama, the Prabodhacandrodaya, already depicts, in the eleventh century, a trenchant āstika-vs.-nāstika divide, both camps populated by a cast of śāstras and schools nearly identical to Madhusūdana's arrangement,Footnote 89 complete with a hierarchical āstika alliance—(allegorically) “at war” against the nāstikas—with Advaita Vedānta at the apex.Footnote 90 Now, the Prabodhacandrodaya was probably composed just a few decades after Maḥmūd of Ghaznah's campaigns in the subcontinent (1001–1025 ce), meaning that Kṛṣṇamiśra either innovated these mature, fully-formed āstika/nāstika categories in a surprisingly rapid, dramatic, and yet deeply “camouflaged” response to the first Muslim advances beyond the far west of Sindh and Multan, or else, far more likely, these categories were chiefly the product of centuries of competition with Buddhists and Jains prior to the advent of Islam. To be sure, Kṛṣṇamiśra does not depict a hidden philosophical unanimity among the āstika sages as the Prasthānabheda does, and yet, the starkness of the war allegory, with all āstikas fervently lined up for coordinated battle against the nāstika forces of King Delusion (mahāmoha), makes the developmental “jump” to Madhusūdana's articulation seem rather small indeed.
By way of summary, Madhusūdana's three forays into doxography examined here demonstrate far greater continuity with earlier precedent than is typically acknowledged, whether through his Siddhāntabindu and Vedāntakalpalatikā—both of which exhibit disinterest if not outright rejection of an āstika “unity,” preferring the well-worn model wherein a single school alone is veridical and all others false—or else through the Prasthānabheda itself—whose mleccha-nāstika correlation had already been articulated in Advaitin Sanskrit literature even pre-dating widespread Muslim hegemony. The Prasthānabheda's hidden “consensus” among the āstika munis does seem (so far as has yet been uncovered) to be Madhusūdana's original innovation, and yet, the magnitude of the innovation is somewhat undermined in light of the foregoing. Perhaps this exaggerated āstika alliance is better conceptualised as a strategic feature of works aimed for broader public consumption, as in the popularising Prabodhacandrodaya, and hence only obliquely indicative, at best, of a scholar's fundamental operative categories or religious self-identity. Indubitably, the Muslim presence in the subcontinent cannot remotely be ruled out as a catalyst for transformation: doxographical compositions do seem to proliferate during the periods under Muslim rule, alongside other more propaedeutic and pedagogical worksFootnote 91 and encyclopedic nibandhas,Footnote 92 suggesting certain shifts in the concerns of “Hindu” scholars that could very conceivably have been driven by a “Muslim threat”. The push toward “public” or “novice” education, especially, of which the Prasthānabheda could be considered an instance, seems a particularly significant transformation, to my eyes, and may suggest a genuine popularization of a “unified” view of the tradition in the face of Muslim political dominance. Nevertheless, the origins of most of the central concepts and categories operative in the Prasthānabheda's vision of “Hindu” unity—i.e., Madhusūdana's particular articulations of āstika vs. nāstika, nāstika-as-mleccha, vaidika vs. vedabāhya, etc.—appear to have been already established by Advaitin writers largely prior to the arrival of Islam. These profound continuities with earlier, even pre-Islamic, eras should suggest a cautious pause before jumping to claims of an existential “threat” experienced by “Hindu” scholars vis-à-vis Muslim rule: on my reading, at least, it seems just as likely that Madhusūdana was genuinely indifferent towards Muslims and unshakenly confident in his own tradition to furnish the truly needful. Any final adjudication of the matter, however, will require the evidence of the multitudes of texts from across these broad centuries that still await proper study.
