Andrew J. Nicholson

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the BuddhaA. J. NicholsonRoger-Pol Droit. The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha. Translated by David Streight and Pamela Vohnson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 263.Roger-Pol Droit's recently translated study, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha, is not a book about Buddhism per se. Rather, it is a rich and theoretically sophisticated overview of the reception of Buddhism in Europe that deserves shelf space alongside Wilhelm Halbfass' India and Europe and Raymond Schwab's The Oriental Renaissance. But while some of the figures Droit covers may be familiar from these other studies in the history of orientalism, Droit's book has its own unique narrative thread. Specifically, Droit wishes to examine the once widespread notion that Buddhism is a nihilistic religion, a religion that worships nothingness. His central thesis is that this conception of a nihilistic religion really wasn't about Buddhism at all, but "that Europe... was speaking only of herself." Droit sees in the cult of nothingness the subconscious expression of a crisis of foundations among nineteenth-century European intellectuals, as well as a "hidden laboratory for the theoretical development of European nihilism."Along the way to illustrating this thesis, Droit leads a masterful and extremely entertaining tour of the opinions of early Buddhologists and Eastward-looking philosophers, some of whom have seldom been documented elsewhere. He also provides an enormous bibliography of European writings on Buddhism from 1638 to 1890. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Buddha was often identified as one of many gods belonging to an inchoate and primitive world of mythical concordances. Thus, George Stanley Farber wrote in 1816 that "the primeval Buddha... is the same as Vishnu, or Shiva, or Osiris." Writers in this genre were especially fond of identifying the Buddha with the god Mercury. The sole reason, it seems, was simple linguistic confusion-the word for the planet Mercury in Sanskrit is budha, one letter short of buddha. Furthermore, the preeminent Indologist Sir William Jones posited the identity of the Norse god Woden and Buddha; this was later taken up by A. W. Schlegel in his Indische Bibliothek, and eventually influenced the publication of such unforgettable titles as Holmboe's Traces du Buddhisme en Norvège avant l'introduction du Christianisme. Jones elsewhere hinted that the Buddha might have been of Ethiopian, rather than Indian origin, and this set off another wave of speculation. To reconcile theories of a primordial god named Buddha with new evidence that the Buddha had been a man who had lived at a relatively recent date, for a short time a theory of two Buddhas emerged, first suggested by Antione Augustin Giorgi, and later taken up by Jones himself.Droit sees Hegel as the single figure most responsible for establishing the link between Buddhism and nothingness that endured in the nineteenth-century philosophical imagination. Droit painstakingly charts Hegel's changing attitudes toward Buddhism over the course of his lectures from 1822 to 1831. In spite of, or perhaps because of, Hegel's familiarity with all of the most recent secondary works on Buddhism, he had great difficulty in integrating Buddhism into his philosophical grand [End Page 577] narrative. But his most enduring interpretation of Buddhism came in 1827, when he asserted that for Buddhism, "Saintliness consists in man uniting himself with God, with nothingness, with the absolute in this destruction, in this silence.... Man must make himself nothing." Hegel did not get this idea from his contemporaries, but from an earlier stratum of writing on Buddhism, that of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit missionaries. After this portrayal of Buddhism became prevalent in European philosophical circles, an extraordinary debate developed. The notion of a religion that worships nothingness was so contrary to common sense that it threatened the Enlightenment conviction that there existed a single, universal human nature. Jules Barthélmy Saint-Hilaire summed it up quite clearly: "In the presence of a phenomenon so curious and so deplorable... one might ask... if, in those climates where life is so horrific and nothingness is worshiped instead of God, human nature is...

The “Lives of Great Religious Books” from Princeton University Press is a series with the worthy goal of introducing general readers to major works from many different traditions. The phrase “lives of” indicates that the point is not just to elucidate the work’s meaning but also to trace how it has been interpreted between the time of its composition and the present day. In Richard H. Davis, the author of one previous book on visual culture in India and another dealing with Śaiva ritual, Princeton has found a happy conjunction of scholar and subject matter. To The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography Davis brings years of reflection on the diversity of religious expression in medieval and modern India, and..

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” explores the boundaries between religions by exploring the ambiguous place of yoga in various religious traditions, both modern and premodern. Recently, certain Hindus and Christians have tried to argue that yoga is an essentially Hindu practice, making their case by appealing to the Yoga Sutras, a text by the Sanskrit author Patanjali. However, on closer examination, the Yoga Sutras seem to exist in a fuzzy, indeterminate space that is not quite “Hindu” in the way the word is understood today. For instance, other Sanskrit authors of the first millennium CE criticized Patanjali's yoga teachings for not being properly theistic and for having strong affinities to Buddhism and Jainism. Yoga was also integrated into at least one of the “religions of the book” in the medieval period: in India in the second millennium, yoga was practiced widely among Sufis, who adapted it in surprising and idiosyncratic ways to make it compatible with their own Islamic philosophies. Nicholson concludes with an appeal for a more nuanced understanding of religious contact that goes beyond the pejorative term syncretism to acknowledge that religious mixing has been a central force in the development not only of Hinduism and Islam, but also of Christianity

Some postcolonial theorists argue that the idea of a single system of belief known as "Hinduism" is a creation of nineteenth-century British imperialists. Andrew J. Nicholson introduces another perspective: although a unified Hindu identity is not as ancient as some Hindus claim, it has its roots in innovations within South Asian philosophy from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. During this time, thinkers treated the philosophies of Vedanta, Samkhya, and Yoga, along with the worshippers of Visnu, Siva, and Sakti, as belonging to a single system of belief and practice. Instead of seeing such groups as separate and contradictory, they re-envisioned them as separate rivers leading to the ocean of Brahman, the ultimate reality. Drawing on the writings of philosophers from late medieval and early modern traditions, including Vijnanabhiksu, Madhava, and Madhusudana Sarasvati, Nicholson shows how influential thinkers portrayed Vedanta philosophy as the ultimate unifier of diverse belief systems. This project paved the way for the work of later Hindu reformers, such as Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, and Gandhi, whose teachings promoted the notion that all world religions belong to a single spiritual unity. In his study, Nicholson also critiques the way in which Eurocentric concepts—like monism and dualism, idealism and realism, theism and atheism, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy—have come to dominate modern discourses on Indian philosophy

While the Bhagavad Gītā is an acknowledged treasure of world spiritual literature, few people know a parallel text, the Īśvara Gītā. This lesser-known work is also dedicated to a god, but in this case it is Śiva, rather than Kṛṣṇa, who is depicted as the omniscient creator of the world. Andrew J. Nicholson’s Lord Śiva’s Song makes this text available in English in an accessible new translation. A work of both poetry and philosophy, the Īśvara Gītā builds on the insights of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra and foreshadows later developments in tantric yoga. It deals with the pluralistic religious environment of early medieval India through an exploration of the relationship between the gods Śiva and Viṣṇu. The work condemns sectarianism and violence and provides a strategy for accommodating conflicting religious claims in its own day and in our own.

This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge, introduces the sixth and final installment of “Fuzzy Studies,” the journal's “Symposium on the Consequence of Blur.” Suggesting that “Fuzzy Studies” should be understood in the context of a desultory campaign against zeal conducted in the journal for almost twenty years, he explains that the editors' assumption has been that any authentic case for the less adamant modes of thinking, or the less focused ways of seeing, needs to be unenthusiastic and carefully ramified. To establish the distinction between overenthused and unemphatic approaches to blur, he contrasts the ecstatically amorphous “Blur building” with examples of classical Chinese landscape painting. Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio, in their book blur: the making of nothing, chronicle the development of their plans for the Blur building and, in the process, inadvertently show that, to overbear various negative associations of blur and fog, the authors/architects grew self-contradictorily emphatic about the need to produce de-emphasis in architecture and in modern life. Perl shows how this self-contradiction appears also in phenomenology-inflected writings on blur by T. J. Clark, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Kraus, J.-P. Sartre, and Georges Bataille, but not in the work of the phenomenologist François Jullien, whose book The Great Image Has No Form analyzes the role of blur in classical Chinese art theory and practice. Where traditional Western painting, Jullien argues, calls for voyeuristically intense focus, traditional Chinese painting stimulates “dé-tente, relaxation or ‘untensing’.” Intense focus on a blur is still, Perl observes, an intense focus. In describing a painting by the Yuan Dynasty master Ni Zan, Perl concludes that the only way to be un-self-contradictorily positive about fuzziness, whether in logic or aesthetics, is to de-reify and de-differentiate with the aim of achieving blandness.

The late 16th century Indian philosopher Vijñānabhikṣu is most well known today for his commentaries on Sāṃkhya and Yoga texts. However, the majority of his extant corpus belongs to the tradition of Bhedābheda (Difference and Non-Difference) Vedānta. This article elucidates three Vedāntic arguments from Vijñānabhikṣu’s voluminous commentary on the Brahma Sūtra, entitled Vijñānāmṛtabhāṣya (Commentary on the Nectar of Knowledge). The first section of the article explores the meaning of bhedābheda, showing that in Vijñānabhikṣu’s understanding, “difference and non-difference” does not entail a denial of the principle of contradiction. The second shows how the relation between the individual soul (jīva) and Brahman can be understood as a relation of part and whole. The third section discusses Brahman as cause of the world, and Vijñānabhikṣu’s particular formulation of Brahman as “locus cause” (adhiṣṭhānakāraṇa). Understanding these arguments enables us to appreciate how Vijñānabhikṣu’s Difference and Non-Difference Vedānta is a credible alternative to the Advaita Vedānta schools prevalent in northern India in the late medieval period, and how in his later works Vijñānabhikṣu built upon this Difference and Non-Difference metaphysical framework to argue for the unity of Vedānta, Yoga, and Sāṃ-khya philosophies.