Exploring Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality
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Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality
Ayon Maharaj
Swami Medhananda
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa
Swami Vivekananda
About This Event
Sri Ramakrishna is widely known as a nineteenth-century Indian mystic who affirmed the harmony of all religions on the basis of his richly varied spiritual experiences and eclectic religious practices, both Hindu and non-Hindu. In Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality, Ayon Maharaj argues that Sri Ramakrishna was also a sophisticated philosopher of great contemporary relevance.
Through a careful study of Sri Ramakrishna's recorded oral teachings in the original Bengali, Maharaj reconstructs his philosophical positions and analyzes them from a cross-cultural perspective. Sri Ramakrishna's spiritual journey culminated in the exalted state of "vijñana, " his term for the "intimate knowledge" of God as the Infinite Reality that is both personal and impersonal, with and without form, immanent in the universe and beyond it. This expansive spiritual standpoint of vijñana, Maharaj contends, opens up a new paradigm for addressing central issues in cross-cultural philosophy of religion, including divine infinitude, religious pluralism, mystical experience, and the problem of evil.
Sri Ramakrishna's vijñana-based religious pluralism--when grasped in all its subtlety--proves to have major philosophical advantages over dominant Western models. Moreover, his mystical testimony and teachings not only cut across long-standing debates about the nature of mystical experience but also bolster recent defenses of its epistemic value. Maharaj further demonstrates that Sri Ramakrishna's unique response to the problem of evil resonates strongly with Western "soul-making" theodicies and contemporary theories of skeptical theism. A pioneering interdisciplinary study of one of India's most important philosopher-mystics, Maharaj's book is essential reading for scholars and students in philosophy of religion, theology, religious studies, and Hindu studies.
Speakers
Swami Medhananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and an academic philosopher, currently serving as Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood. He is also the Hindu Chaplain at both UCLA and the University of Southern California. He is Section Editor for the International Journal of Hindu Studies (Springer), overseeing submissions in Hindu and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion. His current research focuses on global philosophy of religion, the epistemology of mystical experience, cosmopsychism, Indian scriptural hermeneutics, and Vedāntic philosophical traditions, especially the philosophies of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo.
After receiving spiritual initiation from Swami Swahananda, he joined the Ramakrishna Order in 2010 at the Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute in Belur Math, West Bengal, where he served as Associate Professor and Head of the Program in Philosophy until 2021. He received initiation into Sannyasa from Swami Smaranananda in 2020.
He is the author of four books: Karma and Rebirth in Hinduism (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press, 2022), Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018), and The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is the editor of The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedānta (2020) and co-editor, with Benedikt Paul Göcke, of Panentheism in Indian and Western Thought: Cosmopolitan Interventions (Routledge, 2023). He is also the editor of two special issues of the International Journal of Hindu Studies, one on "Vedāntic Theodicies" (December 2021) and one on "Swami Vivekananda as a Cosmopolitan Thinker" (April 2023). He has published over thirty articles in such journals as Philosophy East and West, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Religious Studies, Journal of Consciousness Studies, The Monist, Kantian Review, Journal of Religion, Journal of World Philosophies, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, History of European Ideas, Religions, PMLA, and Journal of the History of Ideas.
He has been invited to lecture at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Oxford, WWU Münster, École Normale Supérieure, University of Edinburgh, Waseda University (Japan), and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, among other institutions. He earned his PhD in 2009 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he specialized in German aesthetics. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2006–7) and a Visiting Student at Oxford University (2000–1).
He is currently working on two book projects, both under contract with Oxford University Press. An All-Embracing Oneness: Sri Aurobindo's Integral Advaita and the Legacy of Sri Ramakrishna will be the third book in his "Integral Advaita" trilogy. He is also editing the book, Indian Spirituality in Contemporary Philosophy, to which fifteen leading philosophers are contributing.
Moderator
Phd research scholar at Jadavpur University, Sylff fellowship recipent, Former Research fellow at Smith College, south Asian studies.
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