Intellectual Differences as Productive: Svāmīnārāyaṇa on Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Veda, and Pañcarātra

This paper asks if it was possible for Hindu thinkers to conceive of intellectual difference as a productive attribute of śāstric discourse rather than a problem that needed to be negotiated through exclusion or hierarchical subsumption. I direct my query towards the reception of the Mokṣadharmaparvan’s(MDh) composite theology of Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Veda and the Pañcarātra among Hindu intellectuals to explore the modalities through which difference was understood and organized. A doxographical approach to the MDh’s eclectic theology can be observed in Viśiṣṭādvaita literature whereby intellectual difference was conceptualized in terms of possessing varying degrees of extraneity to the Veda. By contrast, Svāmīnārāyaṇa’s interpretive framework did not presume a confrontation with extraneity. Rather, he wielded difference to resolve the conceptual paradoxes that broadly characterized Hindu theological discourse. His approach presents an alternative to the treatment of difference within doxographical frameworks, which subsume or reject difference according to a normative hierarchy of authoritative discourse.