Vijnanabhiksu

Vijnanabhiksu is an Indian philosopher who lived in north India in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He wrote commentaries on three different schools of Indian philosophy, Vedanta, Samkhya, and Yoga. Although his sub-commentary on the Yoga Sutras, the Yogavarttika , is his most widely read work in the modern period, his earliest works belonged to the school of Bhedabheda (Difference and Non-Difference) Vedanta. Like many medieval Vedantins , he considers Shankara's school of Advaita Vedanta a school of Buddhism in disguise, and understands the phenomenal world as real instead of illusory. As Vijnanabhiksu claims that all three of the schools he commented on were a unity, this leads him to make some controversial claims (for instance, that the originator of the Samkhya philosophical system believed in the existence of God). Little good work has been written in English on Vijnanabhiksu, and most of the texts in his large corpus have yet to be edited and published in Sanskrit, let alone translated into English.