Parabrahman Among the Yogins

Abstract

This article demonstrates that, on the eve of colonialism, Advaita Vedānta in its most institutionalized forms represented itself before a wider public in terms of its authorship of miracles, and not śāstras, and provides evidence, particularly on the basis of textual traditions associated with the renunciate tradition out of Śṛṅgeri, that a range of Tantra-inflected subtle body practices had come to be understood as integral to the process of the realization of Brahman. It argues that the tradition’s ability to incorporate such conceptual resources was itself predicated on a deliberate but unrecognized intellectual decision that remained hotly contested well into the colonial period. Succinctly, departing from an earlier representation of yogic praxis as serving solely worldly ends in contradistinction with the direct realization of Brahman, some time around the thirteenth century Advaitins came to conclude that the term of art nididhyāsana was pregnant with the wide-ranging semantic possibilities that the wider pan-Indic traditions attribute to words like dhyāna, yoga, and samādhi. In much broader terms, through examining a corpus of deeply influential but largely unstudied narrative, scholastic, and esoteric works produced and used by the scholars and theologians of early modern Advaita Vedānta, the article aims to make evident the folly of treating śāstric conversations as somehow hermetically sealed off from the larger religious and cultural environments in which they were composed.