The Role of Divine Grace in the Soteriology of Sankaracarya (Book Review‪)‬

The Role of Divine Grace in the Soteriology of Sankaracarya. By BRADLEY J. MALKOVSKY. Numen Book Series, Studies in the History of Religions. Leiden: BRILL, 2001. Pp. 421. This book attempts systematically to study an "overlooked feature" in the theory of liberation of Sankaracarya, and the author is convinced that he is able to establish a "solid systematic theology of grace" in Sankara (p. xii). He has an abiding interest in this aspect of Sankara's soteriology, and his earlier publication "The Personhood of Sankara's Para Brahman" (The Journal of Religion, 1977) addresses the same question differently. He also leans heavily on the earlier researches of Paul Hacker and Richard De Smet (p. xiii), both of whose views are more or less called into service to reinforce his own findings in the book. Amongst a long array of Advaita scholars, not many espouse the presence of divine grace for liberation in Sankara. Malkovsky mentions just four who seriously promote the idea of grace in Sankara's Advaita, two westerners (Hacker and Smet) and two Indians (Kokileswar Sastri and V. H. Date). Even scholars sympathetic to the notion of grace in Sankara like A. G. Krishna Warrier and T. M. P. Mahadevan do not fully support it. It is the emphasis on the One Reality in Sankara's metaphysics that prevents divine grace from having a role in the soteriology of Sankara.