Vedantic Approaches to God Library of Philosophy and Religion
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VEDANTIC APPROACHES TO GOD LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION General Editor: John Hick, H. G. Wood Professor of Theology, University of Birmingham This new series of books will explore contemporary religious understandings of man and the universe. The books will be contributions to various aspects of the continuing dialogues between religion and philosophy, between scepticism and faith, and between the different religions and ideologies. The authors will represent a correspondingly wide range of viewpoints. Some of the books in the series will be written for the general educated public and others for a more specialised philosophical or theological readership. Already published William H. Austin THE RELEVANCE OF NATURAL SCIENCE TO THEOLOGY PaulBadham CHRISTIAN BELIEFS ABOUT LIFE AFTER DEATH Patrick Burke THE FRAGILE UNIVERSE William Lane Craig THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT FROM PLATO TO LEIBNIZ Lynn A. de Silva THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF IN BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY Padmasiri de Silva AN INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHIST PSYCHOLOGY Ramchandra Gandhi THE AVAILABILITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS J.C.A.Gaskin HUME'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION H. A. Hodges GOD BEYOND KNOWLEDGE Hywel D. Lewis PERSONS AND LIFE AFTER DEATH EricLott VEDANTIC APPROACHES TO GOD Hugo A. Meynell AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERNARD LONERGAN F. C. T. Moore THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OF MORALITY Dennis Nineham THE USE AND ABUSE OF THE BIBLE Bernard M.G. Reardon HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION JohnJ. Shepherd EXPERIENCE, INFERENCE AND GOD Patrick Sherry RELIGION, TRUTH AND LANGUAGE-GAMES Wilfrid Cantwell Smith TOWARDS A WORLD THEOLOGY Robert Young FREEDOM, RESPONSIBILITY AND GOD Furlher titles in preparation VEDANTIC APPROACHES TO GOD EricLott Foreword by John Hick © Eric Lott 1980 Foreword© John Hick 1980 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1980 978-0-333-27109-4 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1980 in the U.K. and all other parts of the world excluding the U.S.A. by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke First published in the U.S.A. 1980 by HARPER & ROW PUBLISHERS INC. BARNES & NOBLE IMPORT DIVISION Filmset in Great Britain by VANTAGE PHOTOSETTING CO. LTD London and Southampton British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Lott, Eric J. Vedantic approaches to God -Library of philosophy and religion) 1. Vedanta I. Title II. Series 181'.48 B132.V3 ISBN 978-1-349-04846-5 ISBN 978-1-349-04844-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04844-1 BARNES & NOBLE ISBN 978-0-06-494365-9 LCN 78-17886 To Chris Contents Foreword by fohn Hick ix Preface xi List ofAbbreviations Xlll 1 Orientation to Vedanta 1 2 Common Features in Vedanta 10 3 The Transcendence of Brahman 20 4 The Analogy of Selfhood 27 5 Individual Self and Supreme Self 38 6 Ways of Knowing 66 7 The Supreme Cause 93 8 Brahman as Supreme Person 121 9 TheLord'sGrace 151 10 Means of Approach to the Transcendent End 169 11 A Summary of V edantic Viewpoints 191 Notes 195 Bibliography 207 Index 211 Foreword Vedanta is known in the west as a school of Hindu philosophy. It is in fact a family of schools of Indian religious philosophy; and Dr Lott is concerned to bring out its diversity, and in particular to remind us that to a great extent Vedanta is theistic. The different members of the Vedanta family are all attempts to speak about Brahman, the Ultimate Reality, described by Dr Lott as the 'trans-empirical, immortal Being, the supreme Ground of all beings'. But western interest has tended to concentrate upon one member of this family to the exclusion of the others -advaita Vedanta, centring upon the idea of Brahman as the non personal Absolute. The most considerable thinker of this school was Shankara, in the ninth century A.D., who has been aptly compared with Thomas Aquinas as a great constructive systematiser who was also a saint. It is this advaitic form of Vedanta that has been likened in a number of comparative studies to nineteenth century German Idealism and to the thought of such twentieth century writers as F. H. Bradley and Paul Tillich. According to advaita Vedanta the personal God of religious devotion represents the way in which the trans-personal Brahman is experienced by finite persons in their state of illusion, so that the worship of a personal God belongs to a preliminary stage of men's advance toward full enlightenment. This type of Vedanta has often been equated by western writers with Vedanta as a whole; and in this book Dr Lott redresses the balance by giving proper attention also to the leading theistic Vedantists, Ramanuja (in the twelfth century A.D.) and Madhva (in the thirteenth century). Ramanuja was a great theologian and saint of bhakti, the loving adoration of the personal God, who was for him the ultimate Brahman. Instead of seeing the human self as identical, in the depths of its being, with Brahman, he saw finite selves as dependent upon God, and the whole universe as related to God in a way analogous to the body's rela tionship to its controlling conscious self. Madhva went yet further and taught a total distinction between the divine Self and human selves. If Ramanuja's thought might be described as a form of panentheism, X FOREWORD Madhva's is a form of strict monotheism. God, for him, is the sole creator of the universe, and all creaturely being exists in absolute dependence upon its divine source. And yet the divine Lord also indwells his creation, giving life and guiding souls. It is clear that the Hindu tradition has become increasingly theistic and has for approximately the last thousand years taken centrally the theistic-devotional form of hhakti. Indeed the Bhagavad Gita, which is dominated by the idea of the personal Lord, and which has long been India's most influential scripture, was written before the time of Christ. Dr Lott's book, with its restored emphasis upon this theistic movement, will help many western readers to a better proportioned understanding of V edantic Hinduism than has been common since the nineteenth century. He enables us to see Vedanta again, not as an abstract philosophy of the impersonal Absolute, but as a living approach to God. JOHN HICK Preface Any attempt in one book to introduce Western students of religious thought to the full range of Vedantic ideas is more than a little ambitious. It has, for one thing, been necessary to balance on a formidable hermeneutical tightrope. Without some kind of selection, systematising, and interpreting of the material, Vedantic thought would be likely to remain obscure by reason of its unfamiliar form of expression, even in translation. And yet, unless there is sufficient loyalty to what Vedantins actually wrote, the result is likely to be the usual 'Vedanta-for-Western man', bearing little resemblance to actual V edantic systems. I can only hope that my interpretation has not distorted any of the systems, and that my loyalty to the texts does not look like obscurantism. Unfortu nately, studies in this field have tended to overbalance on one side or the other. I cannot claim to be without any personal bias in my approach to these three great Vedantins, though I have made every effort to get inside the mind of each of them and represent their position fairly. My defence for tending to favour theistic Vedanta is that few writers in the past have given the theists a fair deal. Virtually no Vedantic scholar has attempted the kind of parallel description, giving equal weight to each, that has been done here. And I trust that my concern to make Vedanta in general more widely understood will come through more clearly than my particular preference for the theists. The title speaks of 'approaches to God', though almost invariably one or other of the Vedantic terms-Brahman, supreme Person, highest Lord, etc-has been used in the book. For the Western reader, however, the term 'God' seems to be the most immediately meaningful, and the study itself will show to what extent this is a valid appellation for Vedanta's Object of enquiry. Personally I find Vedanta to be essentially a theological discipline, and many of the basic questions it raises are those raised in Western theological discussion. The nature of divine transcen dence and its relation to cosmic immanence, ways of knowing that transcendent Being, description by way of analogy, the relation of the Xll PREFACE transcendent Being to human action and the question of divine grace, divine purpose and spontaneity of being, the relation of supreme Cause to other causal factors, the nature of the divine-human relationship, the soul's destiny-these are but some of the topics as central to Vedanta as to any theological system. Other aspects of Vedantic thought will appear very new, probably even alien, to Western ways of theological thinking. I trust that I have brought out this distinctive stance of Vedanta clearly enough also. Many of the primary sources are available in English translation, and where I have thought these to be both accurate and intelligible I have made some use of them, usually with changes of my own. Extensive use of Sanskrit has been avoided for obvious reasons. In transliterating Sanskrit terms it has not been possible to be absolutely consistent. In some cases it has seemed most natural to keep the spelling that readers have become accustomed to-Vedanta, Upanishad, Krishna, for exam ple. Mostly, though, I have used standard transliterative forms.