Concluding Reflections

0.      John in a vision saw God seated upon His throne (Revelation 4:1–3), and Daniel had a similar vision (Daniel 7:9–10), as did Isaiah (6:1–5). Similarly, we are told that Moses, Aaron, his sons, and the elders of Israel “saw the God of Israel” (Exodus 24:9–11). And Moses was permitted to see the back (but not the face) of God (Exodus 33:18–23). See also Ezekiel 1.40.2. See Williams (2009) for discussion and references to transcendent anthropomorphism in the Semitic traditions.

0.      Colossians 1:15 and Timothy 1:17 indicate that God is invisible.

0.      Certain sages recount how, despite performing intense austerities, when they arrived at Nārāyaṇa’s abode within the universe called Śvetadvīpa in the hope of seeing the Supreme Being, they were blinded by His effulgence. Other great souls who resided there, however, were able to see Nārāyaṇa.

0.      Thus, etymologically, the name Jupiter is cognate with Zeus pater and, in Sanskrit, Dyaus pitṛ. And functionally, Thor, Zeus, and Indra are all leaders of the other celestials, associated with rain, thunder, and lightning, and have a weapon that they hurl.

0.      As is well-known, aspects of the old pre-Christian traditions are absorbed into Christianity (such as the appropriation of the birthday of Mithras on December 25).

0.      Various texts speak of the devas as having forms made of expressions of prakṛti other than the gross matter of this realm, such as tanmātra (see Bryant 2009, 74, for references; the inhabitants of Śvetadvīpa mentioned in note 3 are one such example).

0.      When compared with the sword-bearing archangel Gabriel, the warrior nature of the gandharvas enhances the comparison.

0.      Of course, Īśvara is simultaneously also immanent given that prakṛti and the ātmans are a part of His manifestation and therefore nondifferent from Him.

0.      Actually, in Gauḍīya theology there are unlimited Vaikuṇṭha realms, as God has unlimited manifestations.

0.    The exception to this is the early Vedic religion as expressed in the four Vedas, at least as construed by academic Indological methods. There is no transcendent supreme deity explicitly revealed there, but rather a situation much closer to the other Indo-European pantheons, where, at best, we find a martial chieftain prominent in the form of Indra (performing the functional parallel role of Zeus or Thor) among ontologically equal celestials. Traditional Hindu theologians have reworked this potential problem in different ways. The thirteenth-century Vaiṣṇava theologian Madhva, for example, who wrote a commentary on forty hymns of the Ṛg-Veda, argued that these gods originally represented the various powers of the transcendent Viṣṇu that came to be considered separate autonomous entities only in later, more spiritually decadent times. Other revisionist reworkings can be found in nineteenth- to twentieth-century monotheistic exegeses of the Vedas by prominent Hindu apologists such as Dayananda and Aurobindo.

0.    Bhāgavata I.4.14.

0.    We resist the usual translation for avatāra as “incarnation” (etymologically, “to enter flesh”), since Vaiṣṇava theology holds that Kṛṣṇa descends in this Brahman (pure consciousness) body and not one made of matter (see Lipner 1976 for a discussion in Rāmānuja’s lineage).

0.    See, for example, from the most seminal thinkers, Freud as the externalization of subconscious forces; Durkheim as social forces; Tyler as primitive science; Weber as economic forces; Marx as related to the control of the modes of production; and others.

0.    For instance, Max Muller, Mircea Eliade, the Theosophists, and other shades of perennialist thinkers.

0.    For a good start on the construction of the category of religion triggered by the early European encounter with the non-Western world, see Halbfass (1988), King (1999), Masuzawa (2005), Oddie (2006), Pennington (2005), and Balagangadhara (2012).

0.    There are a number of instances of this throughout the text, such as the Virāṭ-rūpa material form in the second book, which is explicitly described as being meditative rather than factual.

0.    The pratyakṣa and anumāna in, for instance, Yoga Sūtras I.7.

0.    The prioritizing of empiricism and reason is most noteworthy in the Cārvāka, Nyāya, and Buddhist traditions, but most schools incorporated rich intellectual argumentation into their theologies, and almost all in one way or another accepted the paramount nature of empiricism as the basis of other epistemes, other than in domains inaccessible to reason and sense perception.

0.    See Halbfass (chapter 21), however, for resistance to the trump card of experience in certain conservative discourses such as the Mīmāṁsā, as in the writing of Śaṅkara.

0.    The ultimate vairāgya, detachment, is guṇa vaitṛṣṇyam, disinterest in anything made of the guṇas.

0.    The roots of the tension between mythos and logos in fact goes back to the pre-Socratics.

0.    See references in previous citations.

0.    Of course, aspects of the historical method are selectively appropriated by a certain genre of nationalists in such political contestations as that over Ayodhyā, the birthplace of Rāma in epic sources (Gopal 1992), and the Aryan invasion debate (Bryant 2001).

0.    See Brown (2013) for an excellent discussion.

0.    See Holdrege (2013) for discussion.

0.    Shukavak Dāsa (1999).

0.    Albeit for completely different reasons, here he appropriates part of the hierarchical schema of Śaṅkara noted earlier (himself following a Madhyāmakā Buddhist schema).

0.    Raja Ram Mohan Roy, for example, the so-called father of modern India, had no place for Kṛṣṇa in his Christian Upaniṣadic mélange, institutionalized as the Brahmo Samaj, and, indeed, lambasted him with no small measure of pre-Victorian-derived indignity. Like his successors in the Brahma Samaj, such as Devendranatha Tagore and Krishna Chandra Chaterjee, he was nonetheless a monotheist (as opposed to, say, a neo-advaitin such as Vivekānanda), but he espoused a monotheism that conceived of God in terms much closer to the Abrahamic models that influenced them so greatly than to those of the premodern Vaiṣṇava and Śaivite traditions. We can also place the influential Dayānanda, founder of the Ārya-Samaj, on this side of the monotheistic spectrum. Others, like the more devotional Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, set out to construct and propagate a righteous Kṛṣṇa as preserved in the Bhagavad Gītā by extricating him from what Bankim deemed centuries of Purāṇic accretions epitomized by the Kṛṣṇa of the Bhāgavata. Thus purged, the sterilized Kṛṣṇa could be set up as a superior role model for humanity to the Christ of the colonizers. There was a wide spectrum of monotheistic responses to the encounter with modernity on issues lying at the core of Hindu bhakti (see Sardella 2010, 2013, for discussion). The monistic neo-advaita response is an enormous topic in its own right, which lies outside the main concerns of this study. It has, in fact, received far more attention in both scholarly and popular circles than the monotheistic strains in Hinduism, for reasons that have arguably a lot more to do with Hindu nationalism in India and New Age spirituality in the West than any de facto reality of on-the-ground Hindu beliefs and practices past and present.

0.    Note, for instance, Yaska’s interpretation of Indra killing the Vṛtra demon, a pivotal Vedic and Purāṇic narrative, as the production of rain.

0.    The historical accords with the traditional Vedic exegetes such as Sāyana; the mystical, which is his main focus, involves identifying hymns to various deities as actually denoting attributes of Viṣṇu; and the transcendent features the relationship between the ātman and Brahman (see Sharma 1971, 180ff., for discussion). One might wonder whether the nineteenth-century Dayānanda Sarasvatī was influenced by Madhva’s approach.

0.    See Edelmann (2013) for discussion.

0.    For discussion and references, see Edelmann (2013). The astronomical traditions of the Siddhāntas and Jyotiḥśāstra in the period 500–1900 C.E. were willing to depart from Purāṇic cosmology without rejecting the Purāṇas themselves. Similarly, literary theory presents elaborate theoretical criteria pertaining to when a primary signification (vācya) of a text is to be superseded by secondary (nonliteral) readings, specifically indicated (lakṣya) and suggested (vyaṅga) meanings (briefly, wherever the primary meaning of scriptural passage is obstructed [baddha] by other knowledge, secondary meanings can be applied).

0.    We should note, however, that Jīva would not call the mental absorption of the asuras bhakti, even as they might have attained some form of liberation. Bhakti requires a positive attitude toward Īśvara (see “Meditating in Enmity: Kṛṣṇa and the Demons”).

0.    Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 361, 743; Schiffman, 130.

0.    Autobiography of Swami Sivananda, ix.

0.    The record of this claim is buried in the organization’s archives, which I was not able to access, but it is common knowledge and surfaces in the brochures and other literatures of the organization (such as the Grass Valley, California, Guide to Programs, 2014, 26).

0.    Uttarapara speech, May 30, 1909.

0.    This well-known anecdotal exchange is noted in, for example, the Inaugural Souvenir of the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute, 1975.

0.    Cornell (2001).

0.    Autobiography of a Yogi, 399.

0.    Muktānanda (1978), chapter 20. In Kaśmir Śaivism, blue is the color of pure consciousness.

0.    For excellent historical excavations of the evolution of modern postural yoga, see DeMichelis (2004), Alter (2004), Singleton (2008, 2010), Straus (2005), Syman (2010), Sjoman (1996), and Jain (2015).

0.    Western forms of dualism correlate the mind and cognition with the soul (psyche), whereas these are outer material coverings completely distinct from the ātman, in Sāṅkhya, Yoga, and Vedānta (but not in Nyāya and Vaiśeṣiká, where they are qualities of the ātman itself).

0.    There are, of course, sections of the text dealing with the mystic powers that are obviously beyond the pale of scientific acceptability.

0.    In terms of theological dialogue, see the excellent work of Goswami (2012; one can only lament the author’s premature demise after laying such a substantial cornerstone for a Vaiṣṇava contribution to inter-religious dialogue). In terms of the interface between the science of the Bhāgavata and modern science, see Thompson (1981, 2006, 2007); Cremo (1993) for an antagonistic view; and Edelmann (2014) for an accommodative view. For an excellent discussion of the challenges posed to Hinduism in general by modern science and an analysis of some of the responses this has engendered, see Mackenzie Brown (2012).

0.    At the time of writing this introduction, the author received a visit from Bhadresh Swami, a sannyasī of the Swami Nārāyaṇa tradition, who bestowed a copy of his recently completed commentary on the Vedānta Sūtras. Other than evidencing the continuation of the formal Vedānta commentarial tradition, the swami expressed great eagerness and commitment to improving his English, and in being exposed to the modes of the Western academic study of religion, in order to engage in dialogue with what we have been calling “modernity” in this field.

0.    We follow here the Upaniṣadic usage of locating both the ātman and the citta, mind, in the heart (Kaṭha I.14, II.12, III.1, and IV.6–7; Muṇḍaka II.1.8 and 10, II.2.1, and III.1.7). Technically, according to Gauḍīya siddhānta, bhāva is bestowed by Kṛṣṇa as an act of grace (Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu Eastern Quadrant II.233). It is a śakti power that permeates the citta (antarāṅga śakti).

0.    We use the term “subject-centered” heuristically. More precisely, at this stage, all notions of subject and object dissolve.

0.    See, for instance, Kaṭha Upaniṣad III.15, V.6; Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad I.1.6; Gītā II.11–30; and Yoga Sūtras II.5.

0.    The Nyāya and Vaiśeṣiká traditions hold that consciousness is only an adventitious quality of the ātman when in conjunction with the mind and is not manifest in liberation. Mīmāṁsā holds a similar view, although earlier Mīmāṁsā was not committed to notions of liberation.