Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies Volume 31 Celebrating Rāmānuja at 1000: The Heritage and Promise of the Study of Rāmānuja Article 27 in a Christian-Hindu Comparative Theology 2018 Getting Real with Advaita Vedānta: Receiving Bradley J. Malkovsky’s Gifts of Grace Reid B. Locklin St. Michael's College, University of Toronto Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs Recommended Citation Locklin, Reid B. (2018) "Getting Real with Advaita Vedānta: Receiving Bradley J. Malkovsky’s Gifts of Grace," Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies: Vol. 31, Article 27. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1704 The Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies is a publication of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. The digital version is made available by Digital Commons @ Butler University. For questions about the Journal or the Society, please contact [email protected]. For more information about Digital Commons @ Butler University, please contact [email protected]. Locklin: Getting Real with Advaita Ved?nta: Receiving Bradley J. Malkovsky Getting Real with Advaita Vedānta: Receiving Bradley J. Malkovsky’s Gifts of Grace Reid B. Locklin St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto I recently had the pleasure of spending time volume, through painstaking study of with Joël Dubois’s rich study The Hidden Lives Śaṅkara’s commentaries and significant field of Brahman.1 This work, I was delighted to work. But he also, just as importantly, places discover, begins on its first page with the himself in a lineage of great sages whose academic equivalent of a colophon with number includes our own beloved Bradley J. salutations to the scholar’s paraṃparā: Malkovsky. Most interpreters have regarded Michelle Voss Roberts has done a great Śaṅkara’s works as an intellectual service to the Society in offering a survey of tradition concerned primarily with Brad’s scholarly oeuvre and his fifteen years at brahman, understood as the ultimate the helm of this Journal. In this essay, I am reality transcending all particular setting out to do something less ambitious but, manifestations, words, and concepts. I hope, no less important: to trace the impact Śaṅkara’s primary teaching, this view Brad has had on the work of other scholars of asserts, is that the transcendent brahman Advaita, including Dubois, myself and a host of cannot be attained through any effort or others. The scholarship I survey here includes activity, as it is already the essential many sources that I found using search nature of anyone who seeks it. Building on engines, as well as a number I have the work of Marcaurelle (2000), Malkovsky encountered through my own reading. I am (2001) and Suthren Hirst (2005), I show in very conscious of my limited reach. I’m sure this book that such a characterization is that I have omitted important interlocutors, technically correct, yet also significantly and I know that this kind of survey, by misleading, as it ignores the hidden lives, necessity, tends to emphasize Brad’s earlier as it were, of the notion of brahman.2 work to the detriment of more recent In this passage, Dubois nicely sets up the publications. Michelle has, appropriately, detective story he will unfold in the rest of the drawn attention to Brad’s memoir and other Reid B. Locklin is Associate Professor of Christianity and the Intellectual Tradition at the University of Toronto, a joint appointment with St Michael’s College and the Department for the Study of Religion. His research focuses on a range of issues in Comparative Theology and Hindu-Christian Studies, particularly the engagement between Christian thought and the Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta. He also writes on the scholarship of teaching and learning in theology and religion. Dr. Locklin grew up in Athens, Georgia, completed a BA in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, a MTS from Boston University, and a PhD in Theology from Boston College in 2003. He has taught at the University of Toronto since 2004. Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies 31 (2018): 101-108 Published by Digital Commons @ Butler University, 2018 1 Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, Vol. 31 [2018], Art. 27 102 Reid B. Locklin significant contributions in the last decade. I counterintuitive. This has led some to critique take it for granted that Brad’s most important his views. Writing in the International Review contributions to Hindu-Christian studies still of Hindu Studies, Deepak Sarma notes with lie ahead, which makes the reception that his some irony that, although he finds Brad’s work has already received all the more exhaustive and careful scholarship persuasive, impressive. he is “nonetheless struck by the beliefs of Grace thirteen hundred plus years and countless Brad completed his doctoral thesis at the followers of Advaita Vedānta, who would 6 University of Tübingen on the concept of vehemently dispute Malkovsky’s claims.” T.S. divine grace in Śaṅkara’s teaching, and this Rukmani and Peter Stephan each attempt, in thesis was eventually brought out as a extended review essays, to explain this monograph in the prestigious Numen Book apparent disconnect by questioning Brad’s 7 Series at Brill. It would be fair, I think, to say philology and interpretative choices. Most that this monograph is to this date the most perceptively, Rukmani suggests that the influential and most frequently cited of Brad’s meaning and function of a concept should not works. Nevertheless, his core argument in the be reduced to the analysis of individual terms; book and related essay—namely, that it must instead take into account the overall Śaṅkara’s soteriological vision advances a philosophical framework of the author in strong theology of divine grace—has met with question. Such an holistic approach, and a mixed reception. Rukmani’s more general commitment to the In several instances, Brad’s work is cited “economy of reasoning” (lāghava) typical of briefly as an uncontested authority on the South Asian philosophy, leads her to doubt topic. Thus, Sucharita Adluri notes his study in that divine grace plays a particularly 8 connection to her own work on Rāmānuja.3 significant role in Śaṅkara’s soteriology. Andrea Pinkney positions her synthetic Other scholars who engage Brad’s account of prasāda in South Asian religion in argument fall somewhere between uncritical reference to two different literatures: a acceptance and wholesale rejection. In my contemporary, ethnographic approach own comparative reading of Śaṅkara in exemplified in the work of R.S. Khare, Paul conversation with Augustine of Hippo’s Toomey, and Lawrence A. Babb, and a more theology of election, for example, I found conceptual, philological approach exemplified myself lingering on Brad’s proposals, only to by Brad and Andy Rotman.4 Entertainingly, in move eventually to the self-revealing a provocative essay entitled “Salvation, character of ātman itself as a more fitting Damnation and Economic Incentives,” Brad’s analogue to an Augustinian understanding of 9 work is cited as demonstrating Śaṅkara as an effectual grace. Jacqueline G. Suthren Hirst exception to the unrelenting monism and offers a more substantive engagement in her intellectual aridity of most traditions of Saṃkara’s Advaita Vedānta, but she reaches 10 Vedānta.5 No doubt, this would come as a similar conclusions. Brad provides bookends surprise to Madhusūdana Saraswati! for Suthren Hirst’s treatment of the Lord. This last example highlights an important First, she introduces his work as one side of a element of Brad’s argument about the debate about Śaṅkara’s devotional theism, and important role of grace in Śaṅkara’s then she engages him more directly towards theological project: namely, that it is the end of the chapter, in a discussion of https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs/vol31/iss1/27 DOI: 10.7825/2164-6279.1704 2 Locklin: Getting Real with Advaita Ved?nta: Receiving Bradley J. Malkovsky Getting Real with Advaita Vedānta: Receiving Bradley J. Malkovsky’s Gifts of Grace 103 grace.11 Like Brad, Suthren Hirst situates the teaching of Advaita Vedānta in the real, Śaṅkara’s theology in the context of ancient living contexts of those teachers and disciples and medieval Vaiṣṇavism and criticizes any that have brought it forward, from one too-easy contrast between saguṇa and nirguṇa generation to the next. Second, at the level of brahman.12 For Suthren Hirst, however, this the highest truth, it argues against those has less to do with Śaṅkara’s commitment to a monist or illusionistic interpretations of gracious God than with his commitment to the Advaita that have tended to carry the day, at truth, coherence and efficacy of śruti.13 least in the modern period. As scholars, we make arguments, and With regard to establishing an adequate generally we intend to convince others of the social and historical context for interpreting rightness of our conclusions. But sometimes Śaṅkara, Brad is frequently recognized for his the true value of our work has less to do with careful, detailed treatments of primary and the questions we solve than with the questions secondary sources. I have already noted we lay to rest. The scholarly consensus on Suthren Hirst’s self-conscious affinities with Brad’s scholarly account of grace in Śaṅkara’s Brad’s work on a probable Vaiṣṇava context of theology may be that this work, on this topic, Śaṅkara’s teaching.15 Suthen Hirst, among is impressively broad, careful and definitive. others, also invokes his authority to establish We may or may not be persuaded by the authentic texts and legendary traditions argument. Nevertheless, we can expect that— associated with the great teacher.16 And Vijay at least for the foreseeable future—our various Ramnarace draws on his expertise to explore positions will of necessity be developed in Śaṅkara’s chronology in relation to the serious, considered dialogue with Bradley J.