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It becomes obvious that to incorporate bhakti as an eternal reality within Advaita would require at the very least a more elaborate soteriological structure and a more carefully articulated notion of Isvara than the orthodox system, or even Madhusudana himself, provides. To demonstrate this, I have had to fill out and extend his thought considerably, which has required much unwarranted speculation. But even if he had presented us with a more adequate conceptualization of the Advaita-bhakta's final

318 state, and the more developed understanding of the personal God that this would demand, his theory would still face problems. Unless developed on lines radically different from those I have suggested, it would require an additional argument for a final ontological parity between the para Brahman and Isvara. This is because an Advaitin must in the end hold that an eternal union with the personal God, no matter how exalted a state, is still penultimate to the attainment of Brahman, as the very concept of an eventual sarvamukti itself implies. To admit this, however, is to admit that bhakti, even as bhagavat, is ontologically less than moksa. Madhusudana is easily justified in holding that the Lord, as Brahman, is real and beyond maya. It is more difficult, however, to show that the Lord as Lord is such.11 Unlike theoreticians such as Sridhara and, in his later works, Appayya, who were willing to compromise certain foundational principles of Samkara's non-dualism in order to accommodate bhakti, Madhusudana remains (metaphysically, if not also religiously) an authentic Advaitin in the Bhakti-rasayana As such, he cannot explicitly argue for an ultimate identification of bhagavat and Being. He must maintain the distinction between the savikalpaka and the nirvikalpaka, though he might--for devotional reasons as well as others we have discussed in chapter two 12 --write in a way that

319 suggested he was collapsing it. If systematically developed, an argument for the ontological parity of Isvara and the pure Absolute would eventually lead an Advaitin to the brink of a fatal admission. It would entail, unless I am mistaken, the recognition of the final reality of maya and the world, since these are the factors whose "existence" is responsible for calling Isvara (as Isvara) into being. The concept of sakti could not have helped Madhusudana here, as it did the Gosvamins and perhaps Sridhara and Appayya, for if interpreted realistically it also would lead to a basic violation of Sankara's vision.