'Vijnana Vedanta: The Theology of Sri Ramakrishna' with Swami Medhananda

In this conversation, we discuss Swami Medhananda’s milestone publication on Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa which brings the thought of this esteemed saint in conversation with debates in the Western philosophy of religion.
We discuss how what can be termed Sri Ramakrishna’s ‘Vijnana Vedanta’ differs from the other schools of Vedanta such as Advaita, Vishishtadvaita, and Dvaita. Swami Medhananda shows how this view sees God as the Infinite Reality that is simultaneously both personal and impersonal, with and without form, immanent in the universe and beyond it. We discuss what the fact of the ‘Infinitude of God’ entails for discussions on idolatry, and how iconoclasm may itself turn out to be its own kind of conceptual idolatry. Finally, we sketch out Sri Ramakrishna’s views on the diversity of religions, and how his model of pluralism offers a fresh alternative to both the relativizing tendencies of constructivism on the one hand, and the generalizing tendencies of perennialism on the other.
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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. From 2010 to 2021, he was Associate Professor and Head of the Program in Philosophy at the Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute in Belur Math, West Bengal. He received 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). 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.
He is the author of three books: 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 “Swami Vivekananda as a Cosmopolitan Thinker” (2023) and one on “Vedāntic Theodicies” (2021). He has published over thirty articles in leading academic journals.
He is currently working on two book projects: Karma and Rebirth in Hinduism (Cambridge University Press, under contract) and An All-Embracing Oneness: Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Advaita and the Legacy of Sri Ramakrishna (Oxford University Press, under contract).