The “World Soul” in India

Frazier distinguishes four possible forms of “world soul” theory in the Vedāntic tradition—soul as shared substance, shared order, shared consciousness, and shared causality. She focuses on one Indian genealogy of reflection on the last, looking at the way that the pivotal concept of śakti, an energy or capacity, allowed Vedāntic philosophy to evolve a new understanding of complex causality. Whereas Rāmānuja focused on the centralized causality of God as a single world-agency, Rūpa and Jīva Gosvāmī subtly rebelled against this. They used aesthetic theory to develop a new appreciation of the way that a complex array of subsidiary agencies (i.e., created individual wills) facilitates new and precious emergent phenomena of relationship, motivation, drama, and affective experience—all things that a single ‘agency would not be able to generate alone. The resulting “fulfilled-capacity monism” or pūrṇa-śakti vedānta models a world soul with not only originative causality that channels a single agency, but also developmental causality that evolves novel features of intra-relationality.