The Ubiquitous Siva Volume II: Somananda's Sivadrsti and His Philosophical Interlocutors

This is a sequel to a volume published in 2011 by OUP under the title The Ubiquitous Śiva: Somānanda's Śivadṛṣṭi and his Tantric Interlocutors. The first volume offered an introduction, critical edition, and annotated translation of the first three chapters of the Śivadṛṣṭi of Somānanda, along with its principal commentary, the Śivadṛṣṭivṛtti, written by Utpaladeva. It dealt primarily with Śaiva theology and the religious views of competing esoteric traditions. The present volume presents the fourth chapter of the Śivadṛṣṭi and Śivadṛṣṭivṛtti and addresses a fresh set of issues that engage a distinct family of opposing schools and authors of mainstream Indian philosophical traditions.

In this fourth chapter, Somānanda and Utpaladeva engage logical and philosophical works that exerted tremendous influence in the Indian subcontinent in its premodernity. Among the authors and schools addressed by Somānanda in this chapter are the Buddhist Epistemologists, and Dharmakīrti in particular; the Hindu school of hermeneutics, i.e., the Mīmāṃsā; the Hindu realist schools of the logic- and debate-oriented Nyāya and their ontologically-oriented partners, the Vaiśeṣika; and the Hindu, dualist Sāṃkhya and Yoga schools.

Throughout this chapter, Somānanda endeavors to explain his brand of Śaivism philosophically. Somānanda challenges his philosophical interlocutors with a single over-arching argument: he suggests that their views cannot cohere--they cannot be explained logically--unless their authors accept the Śaiva non-duality for which he advocates. The argument he offers, despite its historical influence, remains virtually unstudied. The Ubiquitous Śiva Volume II offers the first English translation of Chapter Four of the Śivadṛṣṭi and Śivadṛṣṭivṛtti along with an introduction and critical edition.