Center for the Study of Hindu Traditions

A seminar for graduate students & faculty with Graham Schweig (Professor, Christopher Newport University).

Scholars of Indology in the earlier part of the twentieth century sought to understand conceptions and expressions of theism within Hindu traditions. For example, coming from Abrahamic backgrounds and perhaps even motivated by Christian missiological purposes, scholars’ works, such as Carpenter’s Theism in Medieval India and McNicol’s Hindu Theism, represent well the attempts to explore Hindu and Indic expressions of theism. However, contemporary Indological scholars, such as Larson and Rukmani, claim, that while there may be forms of theism within sectarian Hindu traditions, no theism is present in the Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali despite Patañjali’s employment of such terms as īśvara-praṇidhāna and iṣṭa-devatā. In this study, Schweig finds that the modern definition of theism is too narrowly conceived, as it is a notion constructed through Abrahamic traditions and constricted by them. Therefore, Schweig offers a new, comprehensive definition of theism by drawing from the Yoga Sūtra and the Bhakti Sūtra for addressing the question of theism in Yoga as compared with the theism in Bhakti and the Abrahamic traditions. He will argue that Yoga as explicated in the Yoga Sūtra possesses a strong and natural theological character, containing a distinct, open-ended raw theism that contributes to and necessitates the expansion of the domain and definition of the term theism. Additionally, Schweig, in pursuit of an expanded definition of theism, will present some surprising theological discoveries derived from original constructive and exegetical analyses of sacred Hindu texts.

Graham M. Schweig did his graduate studies at both the University of Chicago and Harvard University and received his doctorate from Harvard in comparative religion. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Christopher Newport University. Schweig is a scholar of comparative theology and religion with a focus on the traditions of love mysticism in world religions and specifically those coming from sacred India. Among his numerous publications are Dance of Divine Love: The Rāsa Līlā of Krishna from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (Princeton University Press, 2005) and Bhagavad Gītā: The Beloved Lord’s Secret Love Song (Harper Collins, 2007). His forthcoming translations of The Bhakti Sūtra (Columbia University Press) and The Yoga Sūtra (invitation to publish by Yale University Press) are works, among others, from which he will draw in this presentation.