Sadyojyoti's Refutation Logic vs. Selvalingam's Pluralism Endorsement
Inside a single source: Selvalingam — The 8 Schools of Shaivism (2025-03-27).
Inside a single source: Selvalingam — The 8 Schools of Shaivism (2025-03-27).
Selvalingam in the same lecture (a) explicitly endorses religious pluralism — all schools are equally valid readings of one capacious reality — and (b) admiringly walks through Sadyojyoti's Paramokṣa-nirāsa-kārikā, calling it his favorite Sadyojyoti text. The text refutes three rival liberation theories. The refutations work by showing each rival theory is philosophically incoherent or inadequate.
How can a pluralist endorse a refutation text?
A strict religious pluralist holds that all schools equally reveal the same reality. The schools are not arranged in a hierarchy of more-true to less-true; they are equally valid readings of one capacious thing.
Sadyojyoti's refutation operation does the opposite. It identifies one school's account of liberation as wrong (utpatti-pakṣa fails the anything-gained-can-be-lost test); identifies a second school's account as incoherent (saṃsthāna-śānti fails the fragrance-mechanism critique); identifies a third school's account as category-mistaken (āveśa-pakṣa cannot be mokṣa because possession is not freedom). Three schools' liberation-theories are systematically eliminated. What remains is the Shaiva Siddhānta's innate-divinity doctrine.
This is a ranking operation. Some accounts of liberation are wrong. Sadyojyoti's tradition's account is better. The text is structurally inclusivist-at-best and exclusivist-at-worst. It is not pluralist.
- For Reading 1 (bait-and-switch): Selvalingam to actually use the Sadyojyoti refutations as ranking moves elsewhere in his teaching — to argue that traditions whose liberation theories Sadyojyoti refuted are therefore lesser traditions.
- For Reading 2 (two registers): Selvalingam to articulate the metaphysical/coherence-level distinction explicitly somewhere — to defend the appropriation of the refutations as internal-coherence moves rather than ranking moves.
- The lecture itself does not provide enough evidence to decide. Selvalingam admires the Paramokṣa-nirāsa-kārikā without explicitly addressing how its refutation logic coexists with his pluralism endorsement.