Nevertheless, Madhusudana harmonized the Hindu sects as different paths to
the same goal, corresponding to different personal inclinations (Halbfass,
1991: 73; Dasgupta, 1922–1955: 4:204–320). A new note was struck by
Prakashananda (1500s); whereas other Advaitins were realists, decentering the
perceiver from the ultimate transcendent reality, Prakashananda turned Ad-
vaita into a pure Berkeleyesque subjectivism, in which objects come into
existence when perceived and go out of existence when they are not perceived
(Potter, 1976: 244–247).
But this was to be the last piece of significant original philosophy. Syncre-
tism became more and more the mode. Indian philosophers from the 1600s
on are minor figures, commentators on the old traditions. The Advaitins lost
their sharp edges and syncretized with their theist enemies. The writers of the
most famous manuals put together Nyaya with Advaita and Mimamsa (An-
nambhatta, 1500s), or Samkhya with Nyaya (Vamshidhara, 1700s). After
about 1550, Neo-Nyaya recombined with the older Nyaya. In the 1800s and
1900s, Advaita became a kind of “official” philosophy of India, absorbing
every school into what Karl Potter calls a “bhaktized Advaita leap-philoso-
phy,” that is to say, a faith that everything leads to the same spiritual conclusion
although that conclusion is not in the end conceptually demonstrable.^71 The
creative conflicts of Indian philosophical history became sublimated into a
sentimentalized nativism.
These modern philosophers syncretized positions whose political underpin-
nings had been weakened. They pulled together a Hindu national philosophy
in united front against European colonial domination after 1800, and con-
trasted it as sharply as possible with modern European secularism and mate-
rialism. Just at this time the concept of a unitary “Hindu” culture was formu-
lated, first by British administrators, then embraced by Indian nationalists
themselves (Inden, 1992). But why did the syncretism set in even earlier, in the
1500s? The reason is Islam. Although there had been prior inroads of Muslim
conquerors in India, these had been relatively unstable conquest states largely
confined to the northwest, until the Mogul Empire spread rapidly from Af-
ghanistan beginning in the 1560s through the 1600s to cover virtually all of
India. The great syncretizers Vijñanabhikshu and Appaya Dikshita lived during
the late 1500s and early 1600s in the last major Hindu state in the south while
this Muslim wave expanded; the later Hindu scholastics lived under Muslim
rule or under the European colonials. In a much earlier wave of conquest,
during the Islamic invasion of the Ganges around 1100, the Buddhists just
before their fadeout were urging an alliance with Vaishnavas and Shaivas to
repel the Islamic threat (Nakamura, 1980: 339). Dividing in strength, in
weakness philosophies unite. Given that among the modes of syncretism there
is the sloppy loss of conceptual sharpness, there is generally more creativity in
their dividing than in their uniting.
270 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths