Engaging Advaita: Conceptualising Liberating Knowledge in the Face of Western Modernity. By Pawel Odyniec

Abstract

Pawel Odyniec’s doctoral dissertation, published as a monograph, explores the Advaita writings of three Indian philosophers from the twentieth century—Badrīnāth Śukla (1898–1988), Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya (1875–1949), and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975). The book focuses on their engagement with the Advaita notion of liberating knowledge (brahmajñāna) and conducts a comparative study of the hermeneutical and dialogical strategies developed by these thinkers in relation to the classical Sanskrit scholarship on Advaita, as well as with respect to the Western ‘Other’. The appendix of the book includes the fragment of the original text in Hindi and Odyniec’s own English translation of Śukla’s Vyākhyā on Sadānanda Sarasvatī’s Vedāntasāra 28, along with Sarasvatī’s original text in Sanskrit and its translation. Two more commentaries on the same fragment from the Vedāntasāra—Vidvanmanorañjanī of Rāmatīrtha Yati and Subodhinī of Nṛsiṃhāśrama—are also provided in Sanskrit and in translation. The book does not contain an index, but it has a general glossary with Sanskrit and Hindi terms, as well as a glossary with Sanskrit and English terms in the writings of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.