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Madhusudana's efforts in the Bhakti-rasayana to establish bhakti as the paramapurusartha suggest that he was hoping to place it on an ontological par with moksa, a difficult goal for anyone working within the context of Advaita. If this was in fact his intention, his efforts, while richly suggestive and for that reason extremely valuable, leave the critical reader finally unsatisfied. If he was only trying to establish the easier thesis to defend--namely, the experiential superiority of bhakti to moksa--the results are still inadequate when the question of the eternality of the experience is raised, by reason if nothing else of the lack Indeed, even if we reduce the of sufficient development.

320 scope of bhakti's superiority to the period of liberationin-life, the teaching of the Bhakti-rasayana is not without problems. As we have seen, it calls at the very least for a more expanded conceptualization of jIvanmukti than is available in the traditional works on Advaita. The fact is that Madhusudana is disappointingly vague in his whole treatment of the higher stages of bhakti and their metaphysical significance. When dealing with ideas that threaten to have a momentous impact on Advaitic theory, he combines a tantalizing and seemly reckless suggestiveness with a frustrating refusal to draw out explicitly the full implications of what he is saying. We must avoid, however, the hasty conclusion that Madhusudana was unconscious of these limitations. At this late date, a charge that the most brilliant non-dualist metaphysician of the sixteenth century was careless or incompetent, even in this one instance, would place a considerable burden of proof on the accuser. It is more probable than not that Madhusudana knew precisely what he was about when he wrote the Bhakti-rasayana True, the text is sketchy on critical points, ones that the author must have known would be controversial. But it seems to me that, with a writer of Madhusudana's caliber, we must at least consider the possibility that such apparent defects were deliberate, based on, if nothing else, a keen awareness of the

321 insurmountably paradoxical quality of his own spiritual experience. In the end, the question of why Madhusudana did not attempt a more adequate theoretical justification of the key teachings of the Bhakti-rasayana throws us back on a more basic problem, that of trying to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of his purpose in writing the work. will be one of those taken up in the next chapter. This task