Swami Vivekananda’s Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism by Swami Medhananda (review)

Reviewed by: Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanismby Swami Medhananda George Adams Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism. By Swami Medhananda. Oxford University Press, 2022. 412pages. 110. 00 hardcover; ebook available. Any student who has taken a course in Religions of the World has likely heard of Swami Vivekananda, almost always in conjunction with his celebrated appearance in Chicago at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions and his subsequent widespread lecturing and establishment of Vedanta Centers in America. In this role, Vivekananda is typically identified as the most significant figure in bringing Hinduism in general, and Vedānta in particular, to the broader American religious landscape. Vivekananda certainly did perform such a role, but he was much more than just a popular proselytizer for a particular school of Hinduism. He was also a serious philosopher who displayed a depth and breadth of not only Indian but also western thought in the philosophy of religion. Swami Vivekananda's Ved ā ntic Cosmopolitanism, by Swami Medhananda, is an attempt to correct the popular pigeon-holing of Vivekananda into his role as a popularizer of Hindu Neo-Vedānta by presenting the full body of his work as a philosopher whose thought deserves serious consideration. As such, Medhananda performs for Hindu philosophy something similar to what Jay L. Garfield does for Buddhist philosophy, in that each has demonstrated that the respective Asian philosophical traditions that they cover deserve a degree of serious consideration that is often not granted in the western philosophical world. Given the strongly devotional and even hagiographical tone of much Neo-Vedāntic literature in the west, one might expect a work by Medhananda, a follower of the same Ramakrishna tradition that Vivekananda came out of, to be similarly characterized by an excess of sectarian praise and a deficiency of the scholarly objectivity that, ideally at least, characterizes western philosophical analysis. Such is not the case here. In fact, the book is characterized by a philosophical rigor and detail that is on equal terms with any serious treatment of western philosophy. Medhananda employs a sophisticated theological and philosophical analysis that carefully chronicles the evolution of Vivekananda's thought from his early tutelage under the mystic Ramakrishna through his evolving understanding of Vedānta and nondualism, culminating in what Medhananda calls Vivekananda's "Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism. " The book's ten chapters are organized under the headings of four aspects End Page 122of Vivekananda's thought: Integral Advaita; The Experiential Basis of Religion; Faith and Reason; and Consciousness. Since Vivekananda never produced a comprehensive, systematic summary of this thought, Medhananda acknowledges the difficulty in capturing the essence of Vivekananda's philosophy. Hence his positions must be reconstructed through a variety of lectures and shorter works. In addition, Vivekananda's understanding of Vedānta changed significantly over the years, making it difficult to connect his thought with any single school of Vedānta. Medhananda, however, does a superb job of mapping out the evolution of Vivekananda's Vedāntic philosophy and its relationship to the different schools of Vedānta. Perhaps most significantly, Medhananda demonstrates a thorough understanding of the diversity of Vedānta and consequently avoids the common trap of western interpreters who naively represent Vedānta as synonymous with the position of Shankara. Medhananda convincingly demonstrates that the mature thought of Vivekananda departs from Shankara in several significant dimensions, in that it affirms the reality and value of the phenomenal world, minimizes the role of m ā y ā (illusion), emphasizes the ethical implications of Vedānta, and incorporates elements of theism that are largely absent from both Shankara and western expositors of Vedānta. As such, Vivekananda's thought is shown to be far more compatible with the qualified nondualism of Ramanuja than the nontheistic pure nondualism of Shankara. Medhananda's thorough grounding in the history of Indian philosophy also allows him to construct a strong rebuttal against the commonly heard argument that Vivekananda's nondualism is the result of colonialist influence. Perhaps the most intriguing section of the book comes in chapters 7 and 8, where Medhananda explores Vivekananda's philosophy in the context of major figures in western thought, including Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, William Kingdon. . .