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Philosophy East & West Volume 61, Number 4 October 2011 707–717 707© 2011 by University of Hawai‘i Press

FEATURE REVIEW

The Bhagavadgītā: Philosophy versus Historicism

Joydeep BagcheePost-Doctoral Fellow, University of Marburg

Desire and Motivation in Indian Philosophy. By Christopher G. Framarin. London and New York: Routledge. Pp. xv + 196. $170.00.

Christopher Framarin has spent many years analyzing the problem of niṣkāma karma or desireless action in Indian philosophy as evidenced by his many papers on the topic. The results of these papers are gathered into his book, Desire and Motivation in Indian Philosophy, which presents a sustained defense of the doctrine from mul-tiple perspectives. Its philosophical depth and sophisticated argument notwithstand-ing, Framarin’s work is lucid, persuasive, and well-executed. Framarin sets up the basic problem in the introduction and then proceeds to test various interpretive re-sponses. As he develops the book, he shows why each of these responses fails before presenting his own solution. The inquiry into non-viable responses is an integral part of the argumentation (both in Western philosophy and traditional Indian commen-taries), and the reader is therefore well advised not to view it as unnecessary “lucu-bration.” Each chapter marks a new ingress into the problem. This only becomes clear when one looks at the way Framarin develops the individual approaches in his papers, because he unfortunately does not always spell out the consequences of his moves in the book. In order to clarify the book’s complex logical structure, I will situate it both in relation to these early papers and to other Gītā scholarship.

The second is especially necessary, because while Framarin appears merely to be raising abstract logical points — in the words of one reviewer, he “experiments with many lines of possible explanation, presents them in formal terms with numbered premises and conclusions, and picks holes in them; and at the end he remarks upon what remains” — he is, in fact, dismantling pervasive misreadings of the text. I will refer to some recent and older Gītā scholarship to illustrate just how problematic these views are and to bring out Framarin’s incredible achievement in showing why these approaches misunderstand the Gītā through presenting a logical rather than a rhetorical argument.

In the introduction, Framarin sets up the basic argument as follows: in the Bhagavadgītā, Kṛṣṇa asks Arjuna to act without desire (the specific action he should here perform is his svadharma or the duty proper to him as a soldier). However, some scholars argue that Kṛṣṇa’s advice cannot be taken literally, as desire is a necessary condition of action. Hence, one must either reject it as absurd or revert to a non- literal interpretation. I adopt the shorthand “belief-desire theorist” in this review, al-though one could also describe their positions as “common sense philosophies” since

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the belief-desire theorist sets out from the common experience that one usually per-forms actions out of desire, that is, when one desires a particular end.1 The problem with the belief-desire interpretation is twofold.

1. As Framarin argues in chapter 1, the claim that action entails desire is not “analytically” true and hence cannot justify reverting to a non-literal interpretation. In fact, the claim is only true if “desire” is taken to refer to the agent’s purpose or reason for performing the action. It does not entail that the agent had a desire in the narrower, more substantive sense. Hence, the argument that the relation between desire and action is so obvious as to justify a non-literal interpretation of the Gītā does not work. The relation between desire and action is more complex than the belief-desire theorist acknowledges. Critically, he does not adequately distinguish between desires for means versus desires for ends, or desire in the narrower sense from desire in the sense of ends or purposes. For example, I might do something because it is my aim or because I believe it is the right thing to do, without necessar-ily having a desire either for or against the action.

2. By not allowing for these more complex situations, the belief-desire theorist assumes that desire is the only motivating cause. For example, in the latter case, he would argue that I do not do the right thing out of a normative belief that it is the right thing to do, but because I desire to do the right thing. Thus, he argues that belief can only function as a motivating cause when coupled with some additional desire (hence the name “belief-desire theorist”). This is the view famously advanced by D avid Hume.2 But, as Framarin argues, “this explanation begs the question. A desire, in this account, is defined as the only state that motivates. But the question is w hether other states motivate as well. Their explanation of desire only underlines the fact that the belief-desire theorist takes desire and motivation to be the same thing” (Framarin 2003, p. 11; see also chap. 7 of the present volume, where Framarin repeats the charge of circularity).

Hume’s view typifies the common sense response, but it is based on a double failing. But if refuting the common sense view is so straightforward, why does the problem of desireless action in the Gītā require such a complex philosophical exe-gesis and why does Framarin himself take five chapters before finally returning to Hume’s position? The answer is that the common sense misunderstandings are nu-merous and pervasive, necessitating the multi-pronged, multi-chapter approach that Framarin employs.

A first interpretation of Kṛṣṇa’s advice is to argue that since desire is a necessary condition of action, Kṛṣṇa can only mean to advise against some desires. Hence, there is a distinction between permissible and impermissible desires (a view Frama-rin discusses and ultimately rejects in chapter 2). This implies that we must seek a general criterion to distinguish permissible from impermissible desires, for example by distinguishing selfish from non-selfish desires, phenomenologically salient from phenomenologically non-salient desires, or the desire for mokṣa (final liberation) from other desires.

Let us start with the basic objection that if Arjuna were completely desireless, he could not fight in battle. Consequently, Kṛṣṇa’s aim cannot be the nullification of all

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desire in Arjuna, but rather to plant certain desires rather than others in Arjuna’s mind, namely those conducive to making him fight. This view was famously de-fended by German scholars such as Jacobi, Oldenberg, Garbe, and Hauer. German scholarship on the Gītā from this period (1918–1934) is unanimous on two points: the Gītā centers on the problem of how to get Arjuna to fight (by whatever means necessary), and Kṛṣṇa’s entire argument is politically motivated. The problem with this interpretation is that it lacks all textual support: for example, Kṛṣṇa never invokes Draupadī’s humiliation in the sabhā (court), where she is dragged by her hair and stripped in public, nor, when the Kauravas won the dice game by unfair means and sent their cousins into exile, does he describe their deprivation and degradation while living in the forest, et cetera. The kitchen-sink hypothesis (Kṛṣṇa uses every argument he can think of to get Arjuna to fight) does not work, and, as Framarin shows, there are good reasons why Kṛṣṇa does not use just any random argument, for his purpose is not to ensure that Arjuna performs a certain action but that he performs it for the right reasons. That is to say, moral action is not just right action (in this case, fighting) but the right action performed for the right reasons, that is, out of a norma-tive belief that fighting here is the right thing to do rather than out of rage or desire for ends, et cetera. If Arjuna were to slay his enemies in an orgy of hatred, Kṛṣṇa’s purpose would not be served — although the mainly German Indologists might then have had the shorter Heldengedicht (heroic poem) that they sought to distill out of the Gītā.

Framarin’s book thus leads the reader into extremely complex terrain. On the one hand, it seems that desires are not the only motivating causes (in fact, among motivating causes they are the lowest and most ignoble; cf. anāryajuṣṭam at 2.2). On the other, it is not what one performs,3 but the state of mind or the knowledge out of which one performs the action that is decisive.4 Hence, “[t]he message seems to be that even if Arjuna does not desire these consequences, he should desire them. That he does not desire them is based on a mistake of some sort” (Framarin 2007, p. 151). Framarin thus raises the entire problem to the level of an epistemological problem: what is at stake is not some war that must be fought at all costs,5 but the “fully knowl-edgeable agent”6 (p. 24). Right action is henceforward defined as action that such an agent would perform and not in terms of some particular outcome that is desired. Following the initial rejection of the skeptical rejoinder in chapter 1 (Kṛṣṇa’s advice is either absurd or a means to reject all action), Framarin now introduces, in chapter 2, the “fully knowledgeable agent,” whom he defines as someone “who only has those desires that both play a necessary role in motivating the right action and take as their objects the most valuable states of affairs appropriate for their desire type available to the agent” (p. 24).

The introduction of the epistemological problem has global consequences for the Gītā; it can no longer be read as a political text of a Machiavellian cast, but be-comes the most sustained and enduring reflection on action in Indian thought. The Gītā is not “the textbook of the Bhāgavatas” ( Jacobi) but an epistemological and on-tological critique of action wherever and whenever action takes place.7 The simple analysis of right action as all action that shares in a specific characteristic falls by the

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wayside (thereby also undercutting the permissible/impermissible desires distinc-tion). Action now becomes complex and ambiguous, triggering the sustained and manifold exploration of action in the Gītā as a whole. The view popularized by Ger-man scholars of an original Gītā (Ur-Gītā) that referred purely to the epic situation and was later contaminated through the insertions of greedy and unscrupulous brah-mins proves to be a fantasy of German Indology because the question of how to act is not simply answered by: “kill them all, O Arjuna.”8

Besides linking right action to “normative belief” rather than desire, Framarin also rejects the claim that there is some further criterion of right desire (besides being based on right belief ). This takes the form of an engagement with three proposed criteria — permissible desires are unselfish, phenomenologically non-salient, or those conducive to mokṣa — developed in chapters 3, 4, and 6, respectively. As I am more interested in the broader implications of the rejection of the underlying premise, I forego a close reading of the individual arguments. While there is nothing inherently implausible about these common sense responses to the basic problem, there are two good reasons for rejecting them:

1. If a single criterion of right action (besides being the action that a fully knowl-edgeable agent performs) were possible, then the Gītā’s complex analyses of action become redundant. Indeed, “Kṛṣṇa might just say, in chapter 2: just act altruistically, or just act calmly, or just act in accord with śruti” (Framarin 2007, pp. 155–156).

2. The three responses are all too rigid to encompass the full complexity of ac-tion. For example, “[t]o say . . . that any desire other than the desire for mokṣa is impermissible is to ignore the wide range of valuable states of affairs that an agent might play some role in bringing about. A fully knowledgeable agent will desire states of affairs other than mokṣa” (Desire and Motivation in Indian Philosophy, p. 59).

Again, this is a point of global significance for the Gītā’s structure: the Gītā is not a dogmatic treatise that lays down a particular course of action as right in all circum-stances. It does not, for example, say “only pursue the goal of mokṣa” or “never do this,” but rather proposes a solution that is inherently polymorphic, varied, and indi-vidually modulated: act as the fully knowledgeable agent would. This places the onus squarely upon the individual to take responsibility (and thought) for his own moral development, a point Brodbeck misses in his attempt at “calling Kṛṣṇa’s bluff.”9

In chapter 5, Framarin examines the theory of motivation in the Manusmṛti, thereby showing how the Gītā-critical positions rest upon the tacit imputation of a Humean framework to the Indian theory of action. For example, Manusmṛti 2.2–2.4 is frequently cited as evidence that the Indian tradition holds that action entails de-sire. Framarin, however, argues that this view is based on a mistranslation: Manusmṛti 2.3 does not hold that “[d]esire is the very root of the conception of a definite inten-tion,” as Doniger and Smith translate it, but rather that “[e]ven desire has a definite

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intention as its basis” (p. 79). In a second step, Framarin argues that, in the context of the Manusmṛti, saṅkalpa is better translated as “a belief or cognition” (ibid.) than as “intention.” Thus, there are two ways of representing the Manusmṛti’s theory of ac-tion depending on how one translates the verse:

1. Desire (kāma) → intention (saṅkalpa) → action (karma) (It is only according to this view that Kṛṣṇa undercuts action by advising against desire.)

2. Belief (saṅkalpa) → desire (kāma) → action (karma) (According to this view, Kṛṣṇa does not necessarily undercut action by advising against desire, since desire plays a different role here. I discuss the specific form of desire that is permitted in the first paragraph below.)

In the second reading, beliefs rather than desires are the primary motivating cause of actions, and, once this is clear, it is also evident how Kṛṣṇa can claim that Arjuna should replace desire (not wishing to fight, anger, despair, etc.) with right belief and still continue acting. Indeed, in Framarin’s view, the Manusmṛti is not only diametri-cally opposed to the Humean view, but makes cognition the very basis of desire and thus of a purpose or intention. Hence, although some scholars (e.g., Brodbeck, who raises this very objection against Framarin [2010, p. 137]) oppose that the Manusmṛti argues that “never does desirelessness (akāmatā) exist here on Earth. . . . No action of [a person who is] desireless is ever seen here” (2.2–2.4; Framarin’s trans.), this state-ment must be relativized: while the Manusmṛti’s view entails that desire is a neces-sary condition of action, desire does not play the same role here.

The Manusmṛti’s analysis further allows us to distinguish between those actions undertaken out of a desire for ends (kāmyakarma) and those undertaken because they are prescribed (nityakarma), with the injunction against desire applying only to the latter. In “the case of nityakarma, . . . the agent can desire to do what they are doing” (p. 85), but they specifically cannot desire phala (ends). The specific differ-ence between kāmyakarma and nityakarma is not so much that one is accompanied by desire and the other not, but that each chooses a different type of object as most valuable or as desirable. In other words, the difference between them must be based on a cognitive difference. Indeed, as Framarin points out, verse 3.25, “one of the only passages in the Gītā in which Kṛṣṇa seems to endorse desire” (p. 91), reads: “As the ignorant act attached in action, O Arjuna, so the wise [vidvān] should act without attachment, desiring (cikīrṣur) lokasaṃgraha” (ibid.; Sadhale trans.). The wise per-son’s desire is not a desire for a specific end (which would dispose him to joy or disappointment depending on the outcome); it is a “desir[e] to do” (ibid.). “Hence the desire that Kṛṣṇa advises Arjuna to act on is a desire to do what he does — just as it is in the Manusmṛti10 (ibid.). That is to say, you should desire to do what you do and, as a vidvān, you ought to do “what is to be done” (ibid.).

Thus, both the Manusmṛti and the Gītā seem to hold that action always originates in cognition, not desire (indeed, desire itself originates from a false cognition). In the Gītā, Kṛṣṇa makes a distinction between action that proceeds purely from phenom-

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enal cognition (cf. dhyāyato viṣayān puṃsaḥ [2.62]) and the wise person’s action, which proceeds from a noetic understanding that transcends the empirical subject (cf. evaṃ buddheḥ paraṃ buddhvā [3.43]). Framarin’s analysis thus shows that the relation of cognition and desire, cognition and action, and desire and action is much more complex than in the Humean position, which views desire as some kind of oc-cult property that motivates action but itself cannot be further analyzed.

In chapter 6, Framarin examines the Nyāyasūtra and Brahmasiddhi to show how Indian thinkers distinguished between phenomenologically salient and non-salient desires in terms of the quality of “fieriness.” Vācaspatimiśra, for example, likens dveṣa (aversion) to a blazing fire and distinguishes dveṣa from vairāgya, which Fra-marin suggests might be translated as “a negative purpose” (p. 105) that does not dispose the agent to passion. Through clarifying the distinction between rāga/icchā and dveṣa/vairāgya, Framarin is finally able to demonstrate that the Humean position basically comes down to saying, “I do nothing unless I am enraged, move about in a state of passion, et cetera.” The Humean error is to confuse the subset of desires that conflict with the “equanimity requirement” (p. 93) for all desires; it is an error of in-duction.

Framarin concludes his systematic exposition in chapter 7 with a final rejection of the Humean view, which he shows to be circular (see p. 2 above), before summa-rizing his work in the conclusion. Unfortunately, Framarin ends abruptly without spelling out any of the consequences of this sustained logical meditation on the prob-lem of action. Yet, his work provides strong evidence that Indian thinkers arrived at the formulation of niṣkāma karma found in the Gītā11 and other texts through a l ogical reflection upon the nature of action rather than because of their alleged “the-istic” and sectarian commitments — a fact that has been overshadowed by the attribu-tion of “deism” and “pantheism” to them through the early European and Romantic reception of Indian thought.12 As an analytic philosopher, Framarin is able to cut through the massive historicist overgrowth that works against a positive p hilosophical engagement with Indian thought, some of whose effects I have tried to show here.13 But it would be wrong to categorize Framarin merely as an analytic philosopher un-clear about the textual tradition and incapable of carrying out historical and cross-cultural comparisons: he is fully in control of his material and uses the classical Indian commentaries effectively to support his points.14 A useful set of appendices, in which Framarin provides a translation and running commentary of select passages from his other primary texts, and a brief index conclude the book, although the ap-pendices could have been better integrated with the main chapters. Concerning ty-pographical errors, I could only find sarvān karmān for sarvān kāmān (2.71) in the preface (repeated in the introduction but correctly given in chapter 1; see p. 18). A discussion of verse 7.11, where Kṛṣṇa says he is “that desire that does not run counter to law” (dharmāviruddho bhūteṣu kāmo ’smi; van Buitenen trans.), could have been useful in providing further insight into the Gītā’s theory of action.

These minor criticisms notwithstanding, this is an important book that will likely generate significant interest in the Gītā’s philosophy of action both among analytic philosophers and in the wider tradition of Western philosophy.

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Notes

1 – The term is from Framarin’s paper “Desire and Desirelessness: A Case for Niṣkāmakarma” (Framarin 2003, p. 1; see also pp. 111–112 of the present vol-ume, although Framarin does not use the term here).

2 – Although I refer to this as the “Humean” view, it is important to make a distinc-tion between Hume’s own position, which is more complicated, and the way his views were used by later commentators. It is in this latter sense that I use the word “Humean” throughout.

3 – Obviously, with the suitable caveats. But could one perform the wrong action for the right reasons? Is the right resolve alone enough to judge the moral qual-ity of an action? In the Gītā’s view, it seems that it is not. Hence, a number of chapters (e.g., 17) are devoted to elucidating vidhis (injunctions) and to a de-fense of śāstra (scripture). In general, Western scholarship on the Gītā has t ended to downplay these chapters, possibly because of a mistaken (historicist) belief that these sections have only limited applicability within a specific historical and cultural context. I would have liked to see Framarin address these chapters in some depth, especially the indiscriminate tendency to read verse 2.43 as articulating an opposition between the Gītā and the Veda.

4 – The obvious parallels with Kantian ethics have been noticed by many scholars, among them Framarin’s teacher Arindam Chakrabarti (see Chakrabarti 1988). The detailed and mature analyses of analytic philosophers stand in stark con-trast to the views of Indologists as typified by Malinar’s pronouncement, “While the comparison with Kant has become a favorite exercise in later scholarship . . . , it seems that, for the philosophers of the early nineteenth century, such a connection was rather far-fetched, as indeed it is when the respective philo-sophical frameworks are taken seriously” (Malinar 2007, p. 20). Nowhere, to my knowledge, has Malinar actually engaged with Kantian philosophy; her work is limited to identifying various ad hoc layers in the Gītā, an approach that is incompatible with a consideration of the Gītā’s philosophical argument as a whole.

5 – In fact, at the time of the Gītā’s narration, Arjuna has already re-entered the battle, and Bhīṣma, the Kaurava patriarch and general of the opposing army, has fallen, so the reader already knows how the battle has turned out. Thus, from the perspective of storytelling, the Gītā contributes very little to the narrative, which perhaps explains the frequent attempts to remove it from the epic.

6 – Although Framarin borrows the expression from analytic philosophy, he does not “read” it into the Gītā. As he points out in his paper “The Desire You are Required to Get Rid of: A Functionalist Analysis of Desire in the Bhagavadgītā,” Kṛṣṇa “defines the wise one as one who has abandoned ‘all desires’ (kāmān-sarvān), ‘whose desire is gone,’ and who is ‘without desire, fear, and anger’ . . .” (Framarin 2006b, pp. 604–605; Framarin’s emphasis). In chapter 2, the Gītā

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recommends that the agent be like the sthitaprajña (one who is established in wisdom), confirming Framarin’s hypothesis.

7 – My views here are diametrically opposed to those of Hanneder, who writes:

To the unbiased reader, who here supposes, that around the turn of the century in India some problems of the modern world were already resolved, the sober philologist can unfortunately only say in opposition that according to the historical context the basic conflict of the Bhagavadgita is a special problem of a member of the Indian warrior-caste. For members of the military order, the use of violence in battle belongs to their social and, therewith, ultimately religious duty and the Bhagavadgita is according to the context a detailed justification for this divine social order. The potential deserter is brought through the best arguments to follow his mission pregiven by birth. Only when one removes the episode of the gigantic epic from its military context, do other elements let themselves be emphasized more strongly. (Hanneder 2008; my translation)

For Hanneder, the valorization of a particular method (the “historical-critical” method) takes precedence over the philosophical problem of action. Even from a historical-critical perspective, Hanneder is led astray by the temptation to view the epic solely within a military context. This has always been the déformation profesionelle of German Indologists; see, for example, the work of Holtzmann, who claims that “the unreservedly warlike world-view [Weltanschauung] . . . constitutes the genuine soul of the old portions of the epic” and can sense the “raw war-like air of the old Germanic north . . . blow[ing] against us here,” in contrast to the “elegiac softness, the resignation, being tired of life, of later In-dian literature” (Holtzmann 1892, p. 45; my translation).

8 – Indeed, Arjuna’s inceptive question to Kṛṣṇa is not how to act but what to be-lieve (he describes himself as dharmasaṃmūḍhacetāḥ, confused as to duty [2.7]), and the first words Kṛṣṇa utters in response are not “act thus” but prajñāvādāṃś ca bhāṣase . . . nānuśocanti paṇḍitāḥ (2.11); that is, Arjuna’s words appear wise, but those who are truly wise, the paṇḍitāḥ, do not mourn. Among contemporary interpreters, only Framarin has correctly seen that the discourse is elevated from the outset to an epistemological level (cf. Framarin 2007, p. 152). Arjuna is wrong to not fight because this action arises from a mistaken view of reality. The right action here is not fighting for any reason whatsoever (out of rage, etc.) but fighting out of the epistemological and onto-logical certitude that flows from right reason. The fully knowledgeable agent acts unceasingly (cf. na me pārthāsti kartavyaṃ triṣu lokeṣu kiṃ cana / nānavāptam avāptavyaṃ varta eva ca karmaṇi [3.22]). The entire logic of Kṛṣṇa’s speech aims at getting Arjuna to act as a fully knowledgeable agent (cf. naṣṭo mohaḥ smṛtir labdhā [18.73]) and not as an unthinking killer.

9 – Brodbeck argues:

far from becoming worthless and meaningless, human action has, under the influence of the Bhagavadgītā’s determinism, become transformed into sacred action. A less pes-simistic attitude to human action is hard to find. Action thus transfigured becomes d harmic by definition: every action of the Kṛṣṇa-bhakta is known to contribute to

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lokasaṃgraha, since every action is a vital part of what the loka, on this particular day of brahman, happens to be. (Brodbeck 2004, p. 96)

In general, Brodbeck arrives at conclusions exactly opposite to Framarin’s (the no-action interpretation; Kṛṣṇa means to advise Arjuna against all action), and Framarin points out the multiple flaws in Brodbeck’s argument. Framarin con-vincingly argues that if, as Brodbeck argues, teleological action is impossible (since all action is causally explained, our desires or intentions play no role in influencing action), then so, too, is the “epistemological remedy” Brodbeck proposes, namely changing one’s (mistaken) belief in the efficacy of desires. As Framarin points out, “in order to change beliefs on purpose, the agent must adopt the purpose to do so! If the agent can have some effect on what purposes to adopt, then they can have some effect on what they desire and do” (p. 13).

10 – Brodbeck is therefore wrong when he attributes “a Humean denial of Kṛṣṇa’s theory” (Brodbeck 2010, p. 137) to the Manusmṛti citing na caivehāsty akāmatā . . . akāmasya kriyā kācid dṛśyate neha karhicit (2.2–2.4), because Framarin has already worked out the problem in standard Western readings of this passage and identified the basic mistake of inverting the relationship “intention → desire to desire → intention” through reading a Humean view into the text. I am unclear why Brodbeck presses the point, since this analysis is not restricted to Framarin’s paper “Motivation in the Manusmṛti” (Framarin 2006a) but also oc-curs in the present volume.

11 – The Gītā does not itself use the term, which would seem to have originated with the later commentarial tradition as a useful shorthand for its theory of action.

12 – See chapter 4 in Halbfass 1988 for a useful discussion; also see chapter 4 in Herling 2006 for the way the Pantheismusstreit internal to late eighteenth- century Germany was projected outward onto Indian thought, which thus be-comes the “other” to this German debate.

13 – Although mostly implicit, this prejudice has also been frequently explicitly for-mulated; see, for example, von Stietencron, who writes:

The analytic thinking of Western interpreters who were schooled in historical- philological methods stands in contrast to the traditional Indian commentators, who not only harmo-nized and freely downplayed all breaks in the text [i.e., the Gītā], but, above all, sought to read their own philosophical-theological concepts out of individual textual passages, in order to secure Kṛṣṇa’s divine authority for them. In this manner, several p hilosophical schools developed their own Gītā-interpretation — a spectrum that has, since the begin-ning of India’s independence movement been further supplemented by politically moti-vated interpretions in modernity. (Malinar 1996, p. 1; my translation)

Malinar, too, writes in her new book (almost contemporaneous with Framarin’s book but lacking his philosophical perspicuity) that “neither the later Sanskrit tradition of commentaries nor modern Hindu interpretations of the text will be included [i.e., in her book], since each author establishes his own hermeneutics

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on the basis of the religious or philosophical traditions he adheres to” (Malinar 2007, p. 17). Such contextualization shows just how radically enlightened Fra-marin’s work is in combining a Western analytic framework with hermeneutic readings of the Indian commentarial tradition. For a recent review of Malinar’s book, see Adluri 2010; especially the incisive critique of Malinar’s “‘layers’ hypothesis”:

Malinar forces the text into a predetermined framework according to which the BhG is allegedly composed of multiple ‘layers.’ I am unclear about the exact number of ‘layers’ Malinar attributes to the text, since she is rather free in her in-vention and classification of ‘layers.’ Malinar initially distinguishes three layers: (1) a nontheistic Sāṃkhya layer; (2) a nontheistic Yoga layer; and (3) a theistic/monotheistic layer in which Kṛṣṇa is pro-claimed the highest god (54–55). However, Hiltebeitel and Sukthankar (whose erudite and pertinent On the Meaning of the Mahābhārata is not cited) have shown that the ‘l ayers’ hypothesis is untenable. To account for the text’s complexity, Malinar is forced to introduce further ‘layers.’ Thus, there are now ‘ātman-interpolations,’ a ‘theistic inter-pretation of the Sāṃkhya model’ (93), a ‘reinterpretation of saṃnyāsa in the framework of Sāṃkhya and Yoga concepts’ (108), ‘ “classical” Samkhya,’ ‘epic Samkhya’ (115, cf. also 192), ‘the doctrine of bhakti, which is presented in this [ninth] chapter as something new and unheard of’ (145), not to mention Vedic and Brahmanic strands of thought (cf. 205), ‘political and s ocio-cosmic dimensions’ (224), but this list could be extended i ndefinitely. Indeed, Malinar herself notes that ‘in each layer others could be traced’ (30), thus dissolving the text. This is the chimera of historicism replacing the task of hermeneutics (Adluri 2010, p. 105).

14 – Brodbeck’s criticism of Framarin (“Speaking generally, the contextual distance between the commentaries and the root texts is potentially extreme, and using the commentaries in an attempt better to understand those texts is a risky m ethod, often pursued at the expense of those texts” [Brodbeck 2010, p. 137]) should therefore not be allowed to detract from the achievements of this book especially as Framarin clearly justifies his decision to use various texts in the introduction (see pp. 1–2).

References

Adluri, V. 2010. Review of The Bhagavadgītā: Doctrines and Context, by Angelika Malinar. History of Religions 50 (1) (August): 102–107; www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/656634.

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