Abstract: This paper explores how the philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi (1937-2007) approaches plurality and ‘the other’ from an advaita-informed philosophical hermeneutics. Broadly, it argues that otherness and plurality provide, for RCG, the necessary condition for awakening, and it explores how the multiplicity of the world, the many appearances (or ‘images’) that constitute phenomenality, are understood as an ecstatic expression of the creativity of consciousness. In the first section of the paper, I explore how RCG understands communication as an ‘everyday sādhanā’, which potentially leads to self-consciousness and, ultimately, to the understanding that addresser and addressee are fundamentally non-different. Given RCG’s positioning of the notion of ātman at the crux of not only his philosophy, but as the ‘chief resource for dealing with inter-religious conflict’, the second part of the paper reconstructs his distinctive understanding of self/consciousness. In doing so, his approach is discussed in relation to both Advaita Vedānta and Śaiva non-dualism, and I consider his view of the ceaseless self-imaging of consciousness in relation to resonate positions in the Tripurārahasya. The paper closes by drawing out the practical and ethical implications of his non-dual philosophy, addressing how he understands his non-dual position in relation to asymmetrical power, hegemony, and diversity.
About the Speaker: Dr. James Madaio is a fellow at the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. He is Editor of The Journal of Hindu Studies (OUP) and an Editor (Indic traditions) of Bloomsbury’s Introductions to World Philosophies book series. He received his PhD from the University of Manchester and was a postdoctoral fellow at New Europe College (Bucharest) and an affiliated researcher at the Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute (Chennai). He was previously a lecturer at the University of Maryland (USA), University of Manchester (UK), and Charles University (Czech Republic).
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