ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the interests and expectations of Western missionaries, orientalists, and, later, philosophers and theologians functioned as a hermeneutical filter, but not (as is often claimed) as a source of projection, in the Western encounter with the religious traditions of India. In a second “moment” of this cross-cultural dialectic, an orientalized image of Hinduism was critically appropriated by an influential group of religious thinkers in India as they asserted their identity in response to the cultural challenge of the West. A particular focus of this analysis is the emergence of the tradition of Non-dualist (Advaita) Vedānta as the epitome of Indian religious thought in the modern concept of Hinduism.
