The Vedanta Sutras Part I: The Sacred Books of the East Part Thirty-Four

by F. Max Müller (Editor)

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576 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Friedrich Max Müller, K.M. (Ph.D., Philology, Leipzig University, 1843)—generally known as Max Müller or F. Max Müller—was the first Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford University, and an Orientalist who lived and studied in Britain for most of his life. He was one of the founders of the western academic field of Indian studies and the discipline of comparative religion. Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of Indology and the Sacred Books of the East, a 50-volume set of English translations, was prepared under his direction.

Müller became a naturalized British citizen in 1855. In 1869, he was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres as a foreign correspondent. He was awarded the Pour le Mérite (civil class) in 1874, and the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art the following year. In 1888, he was appointed Gifford Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, delivering the first in what has proved to be an ongoing, annual series of lectures at several Scottish universities to the present day. He was appointed a member of the Privy Council in 1896.

His wife, Georgina Adelaide Müller was also an author. After Max's death, she deposited his papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Reviews

[Thomas]

"Then, therefore, the enquiry into Brahman." That is the first of the Vedanta Sutras, and in the next hundred pages or so Ramanuja explains why Sankara's understanding of Brahman as undifferentiated consciousness is wrong. It's not always an easy argument to follow, but the non-dualist position is not a difficult one to criticize (from a Westerner's perspective, anyway). What is more difficult for me is to see how at the end of the day Ramanuja can still call himself a non-dualist (albeit, a "qualified" non-dualist.) The translation is pretty clear and Thibaut does a good job of maintaining consistency in terminology, arcane as it sometimes is. (Sublation, anyone?) Interesting stuff, but not as interesting as Sankara.