Other schools of Vedānta, and beyond

This site keeps Advaita in the foreground. It would be a poor kind of foreground that pretended nothing stood behind it. The same three sources — the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā and the Brahma Sūtras — were read by other great teachers who came to different conclusions, argued them for centuries with the Advaitins, and built living traditions that are worshipped in today by many more people than read this page. Beyond Vedānta altogether stand the Śaiva systems of Kashmir and the Tamil country, the Vīraśaiva movement of Karnataka, and the six classical schools from which all of Indian philosophy takes its vocabulary. This page is a map of that ground: who the teachers were, where and when they were born, where they travelled, what they built, and what each of them held. It is written with respect, by people who hold a different view, and it links to each tradition's own institutions and texts rather than to anyone's summary of them.

One set of texts, many readings

Every school of Vedānta starts from the same "triple foundation" (prasthāna-traya): the Upaniṣads, the Gītā, and Bādarāyaṇa's Brahma Sūtras, 555 terse aphorisms that try to reconcile the Upaniṣads into one doctrine. The sūtras are so compressed that they cannot be read without a commentary, and the commentaries are where the schools part. Sri Śaṅkara's is the oldest surviving one. Sri Rāmānuja's, Sri Madhva's, Sri Nimbārka's, Sri Vallabha's, Sri Bhāskara's, Sri Śrīkaṇṭha's and Sri Baladeva's followed over the next thousand years, each written against its predecessors.

The question they divide over can be stated in a sentence. The Upaniṣads say both that Brahman is one without a second and that the world and the individual souls exist; how are the two statements to be held together? Advaita says the second statement describes an appearance: from the standpoint of truth there is only Brahman, and the soul is Brahman under a misapprehension it can be released from. Viśiṣṭādvaita says souls and world are real and are the body of Brahman, distinct from it as attributes are from their substance, and never dissolved into it. Dvaita says the difference is absolute and eternal. The Bhedābheda schools say difference and non-difference are both real, as waves are both the sea and not the sea. Each of these positions is worked out with immense care, and none of them is a careless reading. When this site says "the teaching", it means the Advaita teaching; it does not mean that the others are not teachings.

One more thing needs saying plainly. The Śaiva traditions of Kashmir and Tamil Nadu and the Vīraśaivas are not Vedānta at all in the strict sense — they rest on the Śaiva Āgamas and on Tamil and Kannada scripture as well as on the Vedas — and the six darśanas are older than any commentary on the Brahma Sūtras. They are here because a seeker who reads Advaita will meet them: in Sri Śaṅkara's arguments against Sāṅkhya and Mīmāṃsā, in Sri Ramaṇa Maharṣi's Tamil Śaiva surroundings at Aruṇācala, in Swami Vivekananda's use of Patañjali, and in the recognition-philosophy of Kashmir, which comes to conclusions so near Advaita's that the two are often confused.

Where these traditions were born

Almost all of the founders below were born in the south of the subcontinent and the west of it, and almost all of them travelled the whole of it. The map plots birthplaces and principal seats from present-day coordinates. It is drawn, not photographed, and nothing on it is invented.

Viśiṣṭādvaita — Sri Rāmānuja and the Śrīvaiṣṇavas

What it holds. Brahman is Nārāyaṇa, a person with infinite auspicious qualities, and the souls and the world are real and eternal — but not independent. They are Brahman's body, as your body is yours: distinct from you, wholly dependent on you, incapable of existing a moment apart from you. So "non-dual" (advaita) is true, Sri Rāmānuja says, but only of a Brahman "qualified" (viśiṣṭa) by souls and world; hence the name. Liberation is not the disappearance of the soul into Brahman but its release from karma into an eternity of conscious service and love in Nārāyaṇa's presence, and the way there is surrender (prapatti) as much as knowledge. The tradition also gives scriptural authority to the Tamil hymns of the twelve Āḻvārs, poet-saints of the sixth to ninth centuries, alongside the Sanskrit Veda, and calls itself the Ubhaya-Vedānta, the Vedānta of both languages.

Sri Nāthamuni (ninth to tenth century) was born at Vīranārāyaṇapuram, now Kāṭṭumannārkōyil in the Cauvery delta of Tamil Nadu. The tradition credits him with recovering the four thousand verses of the Āḻvārs, which had been scattered and half-forgotten, arranging them as the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham and setting them to music for recital in temples — the act that made a Tamil devotional literature into scripture. He also wrote a Nyāya-tattva and a Yoga-rahasya, both now lost except in quotation.

Sri Yāmunācārya, called Āḻavandār, "he who came to rule", was Sri Nāthamuni's grandson, active in the tenth and early eleventh centuries at Srirangam. His name records a debate he won as a young man at the Pāṇḍya court in Madurai, but his lasting work is philosophical: the Siddhi-traya, three treatises establishing the reality of the individual soul, of God and of knowledge against the Advaitins and the Buddhists; the Āgama-prāmāṇya, defending the authority of the Pāñcarātra scriptures; the Gītārtha-saṅgraha, a summary of the Gītā that fixed the school's reading of it; and the Stotra-ratna, a hymn of surrender that Sri Rāmānuja knew by heart. The tradition says that he died at Srirangam before he could meet the young Rāmānuja, and that his hand was found with three fingers folded — three unfulfilled wishes, which his successor spent his life fulfilling.

Sri Rāmānuja is the school's great teacher. He was born, by the tradition's reckoning, in 1017 at Śrīperumbūdūr near Kāñcīpuram in Tamil Nadu, to Āsūri Keśava Somayājī and Kāntimatī, and was named Lakṣmaṇa, or in Tamil Iḷaiya Perumāḷ. The Srirangam Andavan Ashramam's account gives the birth-star as Ārdrā in the month of Cittirai. He married young, moved to Kāñcīpuram and studied Vedānta under the Bhedābheda teacher Yādava Prakāśa — and broke with him, the tradition says, over the reading of a single Upaniṣadic sentence describing the eyes of the Lord: Yādava rendered "like the buttocks of a monkey" what Rāmānuja insisted meant "like a lotus opened by the sun". The story is remembered because it is the whole method in miniature: he would not let a grammatical possibility override the beauty and dignity of what the text was for.

After Yāmuna's death he received the tradition from five teachers in turn, of whom two matter most to the story. Periya Nambi initiated him at Madurāntakam, under a tree, in the rain, without waiting for the proper place — because, he said, the proper time was now. Tirukkōṭṭiyūr Nambi made him walk from Srirangam to Tirukkōṭṭiyūr eighteen times before consenting to teach him the secret meaning of the eight-syllable mantra, on condition of secrecy; and Rāmānuja, having learnt it, climbed the temple tower and taught it aloud to everyone who had gathered below. Asked whether he knew this meant hell for him, he is recorded as saying that it would be a small price if so many were saved. Whatever one makes of the account, the movement he led was in fact opened to people of every caste, and the temple town of Srirangam, whose administration he reorganised, became the school's capital.

The travels are extensive even by the standards of Indian teachers. He is said to have gone to Kashmir to consult the ancient commentary of Bodhāyana on the Brahma Sūtras — the tradition says the manuscript was taken from him on the way back and his disciple Kūratāḻvān recited it from memory — and, in a journey around the subcontinent, to have debated at Puri, Dvārakā, Badrinath and Kāśī. The most consequential journey was forced. In the early twelfth century the Coḷa king, a Śaiva, demanded that the Vaiṣṇava teachers of his kingdom sign a declaration of Śiva's supremacy; Kūratāḻvān and Periya Nambi went in Rāmānuja's place and were blinded, and Rāmānuja himself escaped west into the Hoysaḷa kingdom in what is now Karnataka. He lived about twelve years at Tirunārāyaṇapuram — Melkote, on its rock above the Cauvery plain — restored the temple there, and is said to have brought the Hoysaḷa king Biṭṭideva into the faith under the name Viṣṇuvardhana. He returned to Srirangam when the persecution ended and died there, aged one hundred and twenty by the tradition's count, in 1137. His body is preserved in the temple.

His nine works are the school's foundation: the Śrī Bhāṣya, the great commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, with two shorter commentaries on the same text, the Vedānta-dīpa and Vedānta-sāra; the Vedārtha-saṅgraha, his most original book, which sets out the whole system as a reading of the Upaniṣads before attacking Advaita, Bhedābheda and the doctrine of a Brahman without qualities; the Gītā-bhāṣya; the three prose hymns called the Gadya-traya, of which the Śaraṇāgati-gadya is the school's charter of surrender; and the Nitya-grantha, a manual of daily worship. What he made was not only a philosophy but an institution — the seventy-four teaching seats (siṁhāsanādhipatis) he is said to have appointed, the temple administration at Srirangam and Tirupati, the opening of the tradition to all.

Sri Piḷḷai Lokācārya, of Srirangam in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, wrote eighteen "secret treatises" in the mixed Tamil-Sanskrit prose called Maṇipravāḷa, the greatest of them the Śrīvacana-bhūṣaṇa, "the jewel of good words", on the nature of grace and the disciple's utter dependence. He is the principal ācārya of the school's southern (Teṉkalai) branch, which holds that grace needs no cause on the soul's side — the cat carries the kitten; the kitten does nothing. The tradition remembers that when the Delhi armies fell on Srirangam in 1323, it was the aged Lokācārya who carried the processional image of the Lord south to safety, and that he died on the road at Jyotiṣkuḍi near Madurai.

Sri Vedānta Deśika is the other great name. Born Veṅkaṭanātha at Tūppul, in Kāñcīpuram, in 1268, to Ananta Sūri and Totārambā, and taught from the age of seven by his maternal uncle Kiḍāmbi Appuḷḷār, he became the school's most formidable logician and its most prolific poet — over a hundred works in Sanskrit, Tamil, Prakrit and Maṇipravāḷa. Against Advaita he wrote the Śatadūṣaṇī, a hundred objections of which sixty-six survive; for his own school the Tattva-muktā-kalāpa, the Nyāya-siddhāñjana and the Nyāya-pariśuddhi, which give Viśiṣṭādvaita a complete epistemology and logic; for the ordinary devotee the Śrīmad Rahasya-traya-sāra, a long treatise in Maṇipravāḷa on the three secret mantras, which remains the school's standard manual of the path of surrender. He wrote the Pādukā-sahasra, a thousand verses on the Lord's sandals, in a single night, the tradition says, to win a poetry contest; an allegorical drama, the Saṅkalpa-sūryodaya; a Sanskrit epic on Kṛṣṇa, the Yādavābhyudaya; and a commentary on Sri Rāmānuja's Gītā-bhāṣya. He lived at Kāñcīpuram, Tirupati and Srirangam, and in 1323, when Srirangam was sacked, he hid among the dead, escaped with the commentary called Śruta-prakāśikā and the sons of its author, and lived in exile at Satyagālam in the Karnataka country for many years, returning to Srirangam in extreme old age when the image was restored. He is the principal ācārya of the northern (Vaḍakalai) branch, which holds that grace, though free, responds to the soul's turning — the monkey's infant clings to the mother. He died, by the tradition's reckoning, in 1369.

Sri Maṇavāḷa Māmunigaḷ (1370–1443), born at Āḻvār Tirunagari in the far south and settled at Srirangam, is the last of the great Teṉkalai ācāryas: a commentator on Piḷḷai Lokācārya, on the Āḻvārs and on the Tiruvāymoḻi, and the organiser of the branch's teaching lineage into eight seats. The Vaḍakalai branch's institutions include the Ahobila Maṭha, founded around 1398 by Sri Ādivaṉ Śaṭhakōpa Jīyar, and the Parakāla Maṭha of Mysore; the Śrīvaiṣṇava temples of Srirangam, Tirupati, Kāñcīpuram and Melkote remain the school's living centres, and its teachers are still active on every continent.

Dvaita — Sri Madhva and the Tattvavāda

What it holds. Difference is real, eternal and fivefold: between God and souls, God and matter, soul and soul, soul and matter, and one piece of matter and another. Viṣṇu is the only independent reality; everything else is real but dependent on Him. Souls are innumerable, each distinct, graded eternally in capacity (tāratamya), and liberated not into identity with God but into the full enjoyment of their own nature in His presence — and even in liberation the gradation stays. The world is not an appearance; Sri Madhva's most sustained polemics are against the "doctrine of māyā", which he regarded as a disguised Buddhism. Knowledge of God, gained by study and by His grace, and devotion to Him, are the way. The school calls itself Tattvavāda, "the doctrine of reality".

Sri Madhva was born in 1238 — the Uttarādi Maṭha's own account gives the year — at Pājaka, a village near Udupi on the coast of what is now Karnataka, to Madhyageha Bhaṭṭa and Vedavatī, and was named Vāsudeva. The accounts remember a boy of extraordinary physique, a wrestler, swimmer and runner nicknamed Bhīma, who took the sacred thread at five and, against his parents' grief, sannyāsa in his eleventh year from the Advaitin ascetic Acyutaprekṣa, who named him Pūrṇaprajña and later Ānanda Tīrtha. The pupil soon out-argued the teacher, and Acyutaprekṣa handed him his seat. He travelled twice to the Himālaya — to Badrinath, and beyond it, the tradition says, to the hidden Badarī where he received his teaching from Vyāsa himself, the author of the Brahma Sūtras; he returned from the first journey with his Gītā-bhāṣya and wrote the Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya after it. He toured south and north India debating, camped at Śrīmuṣṇam near Chidambaram for a rainy-season retreat that the Uttarādi Maṭha still records, and at Udupi installed the image of the child Kṛṣṇa that is the centre of the town to this day — recovered, the tradition says, from a lump of sacred clay in the cargo of a ship from Dvārakā that he had saved from a storm. He founded a maṭha for its worship and ordained eight young monks to keep it in rotation; their eight maṭhas (Aṣṭa Maṭhas) still do, the two-year rotation called Paryāya being one of the great public festivals of coastal Karnataka. He wrote thirty-seven works, collectively the Sarvamūla, and disappeared from sight in 1317, by the tradition, while teaching the Aitareya Upaniṣad in the Anantēśvara temple at Udupi, a shower of flowers falling where he had sat. His followers hold him to be the third incarnation of Vāyu, after Hanumān and Bhīma.

The works are the most systematic attack on Advaita ever written, and Advaita became more precise in answering them. The Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya, and the Anuvyākhyāna in which he defends it verse by verse; commentaries on the Gītā and on ten Upaniṣads; the Bhāgavata-tātparya-nirṇaya and the Mahābhārata-tātparya-nirṇaya, which fix the school's reading of the epics; the Viṣṇu-tattva-vinirṇaya, his longest independent treatise; and ten short tracts (Daśa-prakaraṇas) including the Māyāvāda-khaṇḍana and the Upādhi-khaṇḍana, aimed directly at the Advaita doctrines of illusion and of limiting adjuncts. The technical instruments — the doctrine of viśeṣa, which lets a thing be one and yet have many attributes; the sākṣī, the "witness" faculty that certifies knowledge; the analysis of testimony — became the common property of later Indian logic.

Sri Padmanābha Tīrtha, his first ordained disciple, carried the doctrine north into the Marāṭhā country. Sri Narahari Tīrtha, a minister of the Kaliṅga court, is remembered for bringing the images of Rāma and Sītā that the school still worships. Sri Jayatīrtha (about 1345–1388), born Dhoṇḍo Raghunāth at Maṅgaḷavēḍhe near Pandharpur, a young horseman who, the story says, drank from a river without dismounting and was asked by a passing ascetic whether he had been a bullock in a previous life — and remembered that he had, and followed the ascetic — became the school's greatest commentator. His Nyāya-sudhā on Sri Madhva's Anuvyākhyāna is the text a Dvaita scholar is measured by, and his Tattva-prakāśikā on the Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya is read beside the original. His tomb (bṛndāvana) is at Malkhed on the Kāgiṇī river.

Sri Vyāsatīrtha (1460–1539), born at Bannūr near Mysore, made Dvaita a power at the Vijayanagara court, where he was honoured by Kṛṣṇadevarāya; the tradition says he served twelve years as priest of the Tirupati temple before that. His three works — the Nyāyāmṛta, the Tarka-tāṇḍava and the Tātparya-candrikā — are the "Vyāsa-traya", and the first of them, a massive refutation of Advaita, provoked Sri Madhusūdana Sarasvatī's Advaita-siddhi a century later, which provoked in turn the Nyāyāmṛta-taraṅgiṇī of Sri Rāmācārya and the Laghucandrikā of Sri Brahmānanda Sarasvatī — a debate conducted in writing across three hundred years, at a level of rigour that has few parallels anywhere. He also began the Haridāsa movement of Kannada devotional song: Sri Purandara Dāsa (1484–1564), the wealthy merchant who gave everything away and whose compositions are the foundation of Carnatic music, and Sri Kanaka Dāsa, the shepherd-poet, were both his disciples. His tomb is at Nava Bṛndāvana, an island in the Tuṅgabhadrā near Hampi.

Sri Vādirāja Tīrtha (the tradition gives 1480–1600), born at Hūvinakere near Kundāpura and head of the Sode Maṭha, reorganised the Udupi Paryāya to its present two-year cycle in 1522, wrote the Yukti-mallikā, a comprehensive defence of the school, and the Rukmiṇīśa-vijaya, an epic on Kṛṣṇa, and left the Tīrtha-prabandha, a versified account of his pilgrimage around the whole of India — a rare first-hand travel record by a medieval Indian teacher. Sri Rāghavendra Tīrtha (the maṭha's tradition gives 1595–1671), born Veṅkaṭanātha at Bhuvanagiri in Tamil Nadu and trained at Kumbakonam, wrote the Parimaḷa on Sri Jayatīrtha's Nyāya-sudhā and commentaries across the whole corpus, and in 1671 entered his tomb alive, by the tradition, at Mantrālayam on the Tuṅgabhadrā in what is now Andhra Pradesh. His shrine there draws more pilgrims than any other in the school; the Śrī Rāghavendra Svāmī Maṭha traces its lineage directly from Sri Madhva through Sri Padmanābha Tīrtha and Sri Jayatīrtha.

Bhedābheda — difference and non-difference

What it holds. That the soul and the world are both different from Brahman and not different from it, in the way a wave is and is not the ocean, or a spark is and is not the fire — and that both statements are literally, not figuratively, true. This is probably the oldest reading of the Upaniṣads of all; the Brahma Sūtras themselves seem closer to it than to any later school, and Sri Śaṅkara's commentary spends much of its energy arguing against a Bhedābheda position that was clearly the established one in his day.

Sri Bhāskara, active in the eighth or ninth century, a generation or so after Sri Śaṅkara, wrote the oldest surviving non-Advaita commentary on the Brahma Sūtras and a commentary on the Gītā. He held that Brahman is really one and becomes really many through limiting conditions (upādhi), as one space becomes many spaces in many pots; that the soul's difference from Brahman is therefore real but temporary; and, against Sri Śaṅkara, that liberation needs works as well as knowledge (jñāna-karma-samuccaya). He attacked the māyā doctrine in terms Sri Rāmānuja later borrowed. Sri Yādava Prakāśa, the eleventh-century Kāñcīpuram teacher of Sri Rāmānuja, held a version in which the difference is natural rather than conditional; the tradition says he ended as his former pupil's disciple. Sri Vijñānabhikṣu in the sixteenth century revived the position in commentaries that also tried to reconcile Vedānta with Sāṅkhya and Yoga. The school survives today chiefly through Sri Nimbārka's tradition, which is a form of it.

Dvaitādvaita — Sri Nimbārka

Sri Nimbārka was born, according to the account kept by the Divine Life Society from the tradition's sources, at Vaidūryapaṭṭanam on the banks of the Godāvarī in what is now Andhra Pradesh, to the ascetic Aruṇa Muni and Jayantī Devī, and named Niyamānanda. The date is genuinely uncertain: the tradition places him very early, some accounts in the eleventh century, most modern scholars in the thirteenth or later, since his commentary appears to know Sri Rāmānuja's. He settled in the Braj country at Nimbagrāma near Govardhan, and his short commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, the Vedānta-pārijāta-saurabha, and his ten verses, the Daśaślokī, teach that souls and world are both different and non-different from Brahman, who is Kṛṣṇa together with Rādhā — the first school to place the pair at the centre of its theology. The path is surrender to the guru and the couple's grace. His disciple Sri Śrīnivāsācārya expanded the commentary into the Vedānta-kaustubha; Sri Keśava Kāśmīrī Bhaṭṭa, in the fifteenth century, a celebrated debater, wrote the Vedānta-kaustubha-prabhā; Sri Harivyāsa Devācārya and Sri Paraśurāma Devācārya in the sixteenth century established the seat that still leads the tradition, at Salemabad near Ajmer in Rajasthan, the Akhil Bhāratīya Nimbārkācārya Pīṭha, which counts forty-eight ācāryas in unbroken succession. The tradition remains strong in Braj, Rajasthan and Bengal.

Śuddhādvaita — Sri Vallabha and the Path of Grace

What it holds. "Pure non-dualism": the world is Brahman, really and not by illusion — Sri Vallabha rejected māyā as firmly as Sri Madhva did — and the soul is a real part of Brahman, as sparks are of fire. Kṛṣṇa is Brahman; the world is His play; the soul is not to escape it but to enter into His grace (puṣṭi), through a love that expects nothing. Everything one has is offered to Him first, and the offering, not renunciation, is the discipline.

Sri Vallabhācārya was born in 1479 — the tradition's own date is the eleventh day of the dark fortnight of Caitra in the Vikrama year 1535 — in the forest of Campāraṇya in what is now Chhattisgarh, to Lakṣmaṇa Bhaṭṭa and Illammāgāru, Telugu Brahmins of the Vellanāḍu community who were on the road from Kāśī to their native Kāṅkarvāḍ in Andhra when the child came. He was educated at Kāśī, had completed the Vedas, Purāṇas, the six systems and the Buddhist and Jaina literatures by eleven, according to the Puṣṭimārga's own account, and set out on the first of three long pilgrimages around India. At Vijayanagara he took part in the debate at Kṛṣṇadevarāya's court and, the tradition says, received the "golden bath" (kanakābhiṣeka) as its victor. At Gokul in Braj, in 1493, he received from Kṛṣṇa the mantra of brahma-sambandha, the dedication of the self to God, which is the sect's initiation to this day; at Govardhan he established the worship of the image now called Śrīnāthjī. He lived latterly at Aḍel near Prayāg, married, and had two sons; in 1531, aged fifty-two, he took sannyāsa at Kāśī and, on the day of the Rathayātrā, walked into the Ganga at Hanumān Ghāṭ and did not return — a bright light, the tradition says, rising into the sun.

His Aṇubhāṣya on the Brahma Sūtras, unfinished at his death and completed by his son, is the school's commentary; the Subodhinī, on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, is its heart; the Tattvārtha-dīpa-nibandha its systematic statement; and the sixteen short works (Ṣoḍaśa-grantha) its practical manual. Sri Viṭṭhalanātha (1516–1586), the younger son, called Gusāīṁjī, completed the commentary, organised the worship into the elaborate daily service (sevā) of the eight watches that gives the school its music, painting and cuisine, gathered the eight poets (Aṣṭachāp) including Sūrdās, whose Hindi songs are among the treasures of the language, and divided the succession among his seven sons, whose houses still lead the community. In 1672 the image of Śrīnāthjī was carried from Govardhan to Mewar for safety and enshrined at the place now called Nāthdwārā in Rajasthan, the tradition's chief seat. The Puṣṭimārga is strong in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Mumbai, and wherever the Gujarati merchant communities have gone.

Acintya-bhedābheda — Sri Chaitanya and the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas

What it holds. That the soul and the world are simultaneously one with God and different from Him, and that this is "inconceivable" (acintya) — not a paradox to be resolved but a truth beyond the reach of argument, to be entered by love. Kṛṣṇa is the supreme Brahman; His energies are the souls and the world; Rādhā is His own bliss-energy; and the highest state is not knowledge of Brahman but participation in the love between them, cultivated by chanting His names. The school's theology was written by its second generation; its founder wrote eight verses.

Sri Chaitanya Mahāprabhu was born on 18 February 1486, on the full-moon evening of Phālguna during an eclipse, at Navadvīpa in Bengal, to Jagannātha Miśra and Śacī Devī, and named Viśvambhara — Nimāi to his family, Gaurāṅga, "the golden-limbed", to everyone after. He was a brilliant and combative young Sanskrit scholar who opened his own school at sixteen, the Gauḍīya Mission's account says, and was famous for defeating visiting pandits. In 1508 he went to Gayā to perform his father's rites and was initiated there by Īśvara Purī with the ten-syllable Gopāla mantra; he came back a different man, unable to teach for weeping, and Navadvīpa filled at night with his processions of singing (kīrtana). In January 1510, aged twenty-three years and eleven months by the same account, he left his mother and his wife Viṣṇupriyā at night and took sannyāsa from Keśava Bhāratī at Katwa, receiving the name Kṛṣṇa Chaitanya. He walked to Purī, where the king Pratāparudra became his devotee; then, in 1510–12, through the whole of the south — Srirangam, where he spent a rainy season in the house of Veṅkaṭa Bhaṭṭa, the far south at Kanyākumārī, the west coast, Udupi, where he debated with the Mādhvas, and the Vijayanagara country, bringing back two texts, the Brahma-saṁhitā and the Kṛṣṇa-karṇāmṛta, that the school still treasures. In 1515 he went north to Vṛndāvana through the forests of Jhārikhaṇḍa, identified the sites of Kṛṣṇa's life that had been lost, and on the way back, at Prayāg and Kāśī, taught for months the two brothers Rūpa and Sanātana, ministers of the Sultan of Bengal, and, the tradition says, converted the Advaitin sannyāsīs of Kāśī under their leader Prakāśānanda Sarasvatī. He spent his last eighteen years at Purī, in a room called the Gambhīrā in the house of Kāśī Miśra, in states of absorption that his companions Svarūpa Dāmodara and Rāmānanda Rāya recorded, and disappeared in 1534; the traditions differ on how. He left one written work, the eight verses of the Śikṣāṣṭaka.

The theology was written in Vṛndāvana by the Six Gosvāmīs: Sri Rūpa, whose Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu and Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi are the school's analysis of devotional love as an aesthetic experience; Sri Sanātana, whose Bṛhad-bhāgavatāmṛta and Hari-bhakti-vilāsa give it its cosmology and its ritual; their nephew Sri Jīva, whose Ṣaṭ-sandarbha, six treatises on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, is its philosophical foundation and the work in which acintya-bhedābheda is argued; Sri Gopāla Bhaṭṭa, from Srirangam, who founded the Rādhāramaṇa temple; and Sri Raghunātha Dāsa and Sri Raghunātha Bhaṭṭa. Two centuries later Sri Baladeva Vidyābhūṣaṇa, from Odisha, wrote the Govinda-bhāṣya, the school's own commentary on the Brahma Sūtras, at Jaipur around 1718, in answer to a challenge that a tradition without one could not claim Vedāntic standing. The modern revival came through Sri Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura (1838–1914), a magistrate who wrote a hundred books and re-identified the birthplace at Māyāpur; his son Sri Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī (1874–1937), who founded the Gauḍīya Maṭha in 1920 and sent the first missionaries to London and Berlin in 1933; and his disciple Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupāda (1896–1977), who sailed to New York in 1965 at the age of sixty-nine with a trunk of books and founded, the following year, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. The tradition's presence in the West is now larger than that of any other Indian school except Advaita's, and the sound of its chanting is the one most people outside India have heard.

Śivādvaita — Sri Śrīkaṇṭha and Sri Appayya Dīkṣita

There is a Śaiva Vedānta too. Sri Śrīkaṇṭha Śivācārya, whose date is disputed but who probably wrote between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, produced the Brahma-mīmāṃsā-bhāṣya, a commentary on the Brahma Sūtras which reads Brahman as Śiva, qualified by His energy (Śakti) and by the souls and world that are His body — a structure parallel to Sri Rāmānuja's, with Śiva in the place of Nārāyaṇa, and the text the school calls Śiva-viśiṣṭādvaita. It might have remained obscure had it not found, four centuries later, one of the great polymaths of Indian letters.

Sri Appayya Dīkṣita was born in 1520 at Aḍayapālam, a village near Arani in what is now Tiruvannamalai district of Tamil Nadu, into a family of Śaiva scholars; his father was Raṅgarāja Adhvarin. He wrote, by the tradition's count, a hundred and four works, and what is remarkable is their spread: an Advaita masterpiece, the Siddhānta-leśa-saṅgraha, which catalogues the differences between the sub-schools of Advaita with perfect fairness, and the Parimala on the Bhāmatī tradition; the Śivārka-maṇi-dīpikā, his enormous commentary on Sri Śrīkaṇṭha, which is the reason Śivādvaita is still read; a work on Sri Vedānta Deśika's epic; the Caturmata-sāra-saṅgraha, a survey of four schools of Vedānta; the Kuvalayānanda and Citra-mīmāṃsā on poetics, which every student of Sanskrit rhetoric still reads; treatises on Mīmāṃsā; and Śaiva hymns of great personal intensity, above all the Ātmārpaṇa-stuti, composed, the story goes, when he had deliberately taken a drug to see what his mind would produce when unguarded — and it produced a hymn to Śiva. He was the court scholar of Cinna Bomma Nāyaka of Vellore, who bathed him in gold; he built the temple of Kālakaṇṭheśvara in his village, whose inscription of 1582 records it; and he died, the tradition says, at Chidambaram in 1593, in his seventy-third year. He was an Advaitin who held that Śiva and Brahman are one, a defender of Śrīkaṇṭha who thought Śrīkaṇṭha's dualism a concession to beginners, and a scholar of Sri Rāmānuja's school who wrote on its texts with respect: the last man, perhaps, to hold the whole of the Vedāntic argument in one head without contempt for any part of it. His grandnephew Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita continued the line at Madurai.

Kashmir Śaivism — the philosophy of recognition

What it holds. That there is one reality, Śiva, who is pure consciousness — and that this consciousness is not still and featureless, as Advaita's Brahman is, but absolutely free (svātantrya), and expresses that freedom by appearing as the universe. The world is therefore real, as Śiva's own manifestation, not an appearance to be seen through; the individual is Śiva who has freely contracted Himself and forgotten; and liberation is recognition (pratyabhijñā) — not the acquisition of anything but the recognition of what one has always been, as a woman recognises in a stranger the lover she was told about. The school is also called Trika, "the triad", after its three principles of Śiva, Śakti and the individual, and its non-dualism is so close to Advaita's that the two traditions have argued with each other for a thousand years chiefly about the reality and value of the world, and about whether the ultimate is static or dynamic.

The lineage begins with Sri Vasugupta (about 875–925), who lived on the Mahādeva mountain above Srinagar and received, the tradition says, in a dream, directions to a rock on which the seventy-seven Śiva Sūtras were inscribed; the rock at Harwan is still shown. His disciple Sri Kallaṭa wrote the Spanda-kārikā, the verses on "vibration", the doctrine that consciousness is a pulsation, not a stillness. Sri Somānanda (about 900–950) founded the school's philosophical branch with the Śivadṛṣṭi, the first sustained argument for it; his pupil Sri Utpaladeva (about 925–975) wrote the Īśvara-pratyabhijñā-kārikā, the "verses on the recognition of the Lord", which are the system's foundation, and the Śivastotrāvalī, hymns of a personal devotion that surprise readers who expect only philosophy.

Sri Abhinavagupta is the summit. Born in Srinagar around 950 into a learned Brahmin family — his father Narasiṁhagupta taught him grammar; his mother Vimalā died when he was small, which he records as the event that turned him inward — he studied under more than a dozen teachers in every branch of learning, travelled to Jālandhara in the Punjab to receive the Kaula tradition from Śambhunātha, whom he calls his true master, and never married. He wrote, between about 975 and 1020, the Tantrāloka, "light on the tantras", thirty-seven chapters that systematise the whole of Śaiva scripture, ritual and philosophy into one edifice; its summary, the Tantrasāra; two commentaries on Utpaladeva's verses, of which the Īśvara-pratyabhijñā-vimarśinī is the school's standard philosophical text; the Parātrīśikā-vivaraṇa and Mālinīvijaya-vārttika; the Paramārthasāra, a short verse manual; a commentary on the Gītā; and — the reason he is read by people who care nothing for theology — the Abhinava-bhāratī, his commentary on the Nāṭyaśāstra, and the Locana on the Dhvanyāloka, which between them made the theory of aesthetic experience (rasa) into a philosophy, and argued that the delight of the spectator at a play is a taste of the delight that is consciousness itself. The tradition says that around 1016 he walked into a cave at Bīrwā near Srinagar with twelve hundred disciples, reciting a hymn, and was not seen again. His pupil Sri Kṣemarāja (about 1000–1050) wrote the short texts by which the school is usually entered — the Pratyabhijñā-hṛdayam, "the heart of recognition", twenty sūtras with his own commentary, and the Spanda-nirṇaya — and commentaries on the Śiva Sūtras and the Śaiva scriptures. Lalleśvarī, Lal Ded, in the fourteenth century, put the teaching into Kashmiri verses (vākh) that every Kashmiri still knows.

Swami Lakshmanjoo (1907–1991) was the last master of the oral tradition. Born on 9 May 1907 in Srinagar to Narain Dass Raina — who, his institute's account notes, introduced the houseboat to Kashmir — and Arnimal, he was making clay liṅgas at three, was trained by Swami Mahatabakak, and at thirty-one made a silent pilgrimage across India to test his realisation against other saints, the Kashmir Shaiva Institute records. He built an ashram at Ishber on the shore of Dal Lake and there, for fifty years, taught the texts of the school to anyone who came — Kashmiri Pandits, Indian scholars, Europeans — recording the lectures that his Ishwar Ashram Trust has since published, and translating the Tantrāloka and the Śiva Sūtras into living speech. He left the body in 1991, a year after the Pandit community of the valley was driven from it. The Trust continues in Srinagar, Jammu and Delhi.

Śaiva Siddhānta — the Tamil Śaiva theology

What it holds. Three eternal realities: the Lord (pati), the souls (paśu, literally "cattle"), and the bonds (pāśa) — three of them, the soul's innate darkness (āṇava), karma, and māyā, which here means the real material of the world, not an illusion. Liberation is the removal of the bonds by Śiva's grace (aruḷ), after which the soul is united with Śiva as salt with water — inseparable, indistinguishable, and yet not identical. The school's name means "the established conclusion of the Śaivas", and its "advaita" means, by its own gloss, "not-two" in the sense of "not separable", against the Advaita meaning of "one only". The path is fourfold — service (caryā), ritual (kriyā), yoga, and knowledge (jñāna) — and the school is the theology of the great Śiva temples of Tamil Nadu, including Chidambaram and Aruṇācala, where Sri Ramaṇa Maharṣi lived.

Its scriptures are twofold: the twenty-eight Sanskrit Śaiva Āgamas, and the Tamil canon of the Tirumuṛai, twelve books of hymns. Tirumūlar, whose date is disputed across five centuries, wrote the Tirumantiram, three thousand verses that are the canon's tenth book and its first philosophical statement — the source of the line "love and Śiva are two, said the ignorant; that love itself is Śiva, none knew". The three great hymnists of the seventh and eighth centuries, Sri Tirujñānasambandar, Sri Appar and Sri Sundarar, walked the temples of the Tamil country singing the Tēvāram, and Sri Māṇikkavācakar of Tiruvādavūr near Madurai, a minister of the Pāṇḍya king in the ninth century, composed at Chidambaram the Tiruvācakam, "the sacred utterance", of which the Tamils say that whoever is not melted by it will be melted by nothing. The hymns were collected around the turn of the eleventh century by Nambi Āṇḍār Nambi under the Coḷa king Rājarāja, and the lives of the sixty-three saints (Nāyanmār) were written in the twelfth by Sekkiḻār as the Periya Purāṇam.

The philosophy proper begins with Sri Meykaṇḍār, "he who saw the truth", of Tiruveṇṇainallūr in the thirteenth century — the tradition gives 1232 for his work — whose Śivajñānabōdham, twelve sūtras with his own gloss, is the school's foundation and one of the shortest foundational texts of any system anywhere. His disciple Sri Aruḷnandi Śivācārya expanded it into the Śivajñāna-siddhiyār, which sets out and refutes the rival systems before stating its own; Sri Maṛaijñāna Sambandar followed; and Sri Umāpati Śivācārya of Chidambaram, around 1300 — a temple priest who was expelled by his colleagues for taking a low-caste teacher — completed the fourteen canonical treatises (Meykaṇḍa Śāstras) with the Śivaprakāśam and the Tiruvaruṭpayaṉ, a hundred couplets on grace. These four are the Santāna Kuravar, the "lineage teachers". In Sanskrit, Sri Aghoraśiva of Chidambaram, in the twelfth century, fixed the ritual and the doctrine for the temples of the south; his manuals are still used by their priests. The tradition is carried today by the monastic establishments (ādīnams) of the Cauvery delta — Tiruvāvaḍuturai and Dharmapuram, both founded in the sixteenth century, the latter by Sri Guru Jñānasambandar, whose spiritual awakening at the Golden Lotus tank of the Madurai temple the ādīnam's own history records — and by the Śaiva Siddhānta institutions of Sri Lanka and the Tamil diaspora.

Vīraśaivism — Sri Basavaṇṇa and the śaraṇas of Kalyāṇa

What it holds. That God is Śiva as the liṅga, worn on the body (iṣṭaliṅga) and worshipped there, so that no temple, priest or caste stands between the devotee and the divine; that the soul rises to union with Śiva through six stages (ṣaṭ-sthala), from devotee to "one who has become one"; that work is worship (kāyaka) and sharing is duty (dāsōha); and that birth confers nothing. The philosophical statement, worked out later, is called Śakti-viśiṣṭādvaita — non-dualism of a Brahman qualified by its energy — but the movement was first of all a revolution in Kannada, conducted in short free-verse sayings (vachana) by men and women of every caste, and it is those sayings, not the metaphysics, that Karnataka knows by heart.

Sri Basavaṇṇa was born about 1131 at Basavana Bāgēvāḍi, or in the nearby village of Iṅgaḷēśvara, in what is now Vijayapura district of Karnataka, to Mādarasa and Mādalāmbike, Śaiva Brahmins. He refused, the tradition says, to wear the sacred thread that marked him off from others, left home as a boy for Kūḍalasaṅgama, where the Kṛṣṇā and the Malaprabhā meet, and studied there for years under Jātavēda Muni. He entered the service of the Kalachuri king Bijjaḷa at Maṅgaḷavēḍhe and rose, when the king took Kalyāṇa — now Basavakalyāṇ in Bidar district — to be his treasurer and chief minister. In Kalyāṇa he built the Anubhava Maṇṭapa, "the hall of experience", where devotees of every caste and both sexes debated and composed together, with Sri Allama Prabhu presiding on the "seat of the void" (Śūnya Siṁhāsana). His own vachanas, each ending with his address to "the Lord of the meeting rivers", Kūḍalasaṅgamadēva, are among the most direct religious poems in any language: "The rich will make temples for Śiva. What shall I, a poor man, do? My legs are pillars, the body the shrine, the head a cupola of gold." The movement's marriage in 1167 of a Brahmin's daughter to a cobbler's son brought the reaction: the fathers were executed, the king was assassinated soon after, the śaraṇas were scattered, and Basavaṇṇa went back to Kūḍalasaṅgama, where he became one with the liṅga (aikya) — the tradition gives 1196 for the year, though some accounts place it soon after the collapse. The Aikya Maṇṭapa at Kūḍalasaṅgama, now surrounded by a reservoir, marks the place; Basava Jayanti is a public holiday in Karnataka.

Sri Allama Prabhu, of Baḷḷigāve in Shimoga district, a temple drummer whose young wife's death drove him into the wandering that ended in illumination, addressed his vachanas to "the Lord of caves", Guhēśvara; they are the most difficult and the most admired in the canon, and his examination of every śaraṇa who came to Kalyāṇa is the frame of the Śūnya-sampādane, the fifteenth-century anthology that is the movement's central text. Akka Mahādēvi, of Uḍutaḍi in the same district, walked out of a king's palace, and, the tradition says, out of her clothes, covered only by her hair, to search for the Lord she called Cennamallikārjuna, "the beautiful jasmine-white Lord"; was tested by Allama at Kalyāṇa and admitted; and went on to Śrīśailam in the Andhra hills, where she is said to have attained union in her twenties. Her vachanas are among the great love-poems of India, and she is the first woman in Kannada literature. Sri Cennabasavaṇṇa, Basavaṇṇa's nephew, systematised the six stages; Sri Siddharāma of Sonnalige (Solapur) built tanks and temples and joined the movement late; and the roll of śaraṇas includes cobblers, ferrymen, washermen, potters, soldiers and dozens of women, each with vachanas of their own — a body of scripture composed by working people, which has no parallel in the twelfth century anywhere. The community, now called Liṅgāyat, numbers many millions in Karnataka; the Basava Samithi in Bengaluru publishes the vachanas and the studies of the tradition, and Kūḍalasaṅgama is a place of pilgrimage.

The six darśanas — the classical schools

Behind all of the above stand the six classical systems (ṣaḍ-darśana, "the six views") that Indian tradition counts as orthodox because they accept the authority of the Veda — though several of them do very little with it. They are usually grouped in three pairs. Every Vedānta teacher learnt them first; Sri Śaṅkara's Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya argues with all of them; and the vocabulary of every later argument — cause and effect, substance and quality, perception and inference, the means of knowledge (pramāṇa) — comes from them.

Nyāya, "the method", is the school of logic and epistemology. Its Nyāya Sūtras are attributed to Gautama Akṣapāda, perhaps in the second century of the common era; Vātsyāyana's commentary followed in the fifth, Uddyotakara's in the sixth, and Sri Vācaspati Miśra — the same ninth- or tenth-century Mithilā scholar whose Bhāmatī is the main commentary on Sri Śaṅkara — wrote on it too. Sri Udayana of Mithilā, around 984, gave in the Nyāya-kusumāñjali the classical proofs of God's existence; Sri Gaṅgeśa, also of Mithilā, around 1300, founded the "new logic" (Navya-Nyāya) with his Tattva-cintāmaṇi, and Sri Raghunātha Śiromaṇi of Navadvīpa carried it in the sixteenth to a technical refinement that modern logicians have found startling. Nyāya defines the four means of knowledge — perception, inference, comparison and testimony — that every other school then had to accept or argue with; it is a realist and, from Udayana on, a theistic school, and the Advaitins used its logic while rejecting its conclusions. Vaiśeṣika, "the school of particulars", paired with it, is attributed to Kaṇāda, perhaps of the second century before the common era, and systematised by Praśastapāda in the sixth century after it; it is an atomism and a theory of categories — substance, quality, action, universal, particular, inherence, and, later, absence — which gave India its physics and its ontology. Sri Śaṅkara's refutation of atomism is in the second chapter of his commentary.

Sāṅkhya, "the enumeration", is the oldest of the systems, attributed to the sage Kapila and known to the Gītā and the later Upaniṣads, but its surviving foundation is Sri Īśvarakṛṣṇa's Sāṅkhya-kārikā, seventy-two verses of the fourth or fifth century, with a commentary by the same Sri Vācaspati Miśra. It teaches two ultimate principles: consciousness (puruṣa), which is many, passive and only a witness, and nature (prakṛti), which is one and evolves, under the gaze of the witness, into the twenty-three further principles that make up mind, senses and world. Liberation is the witness's recognition that it was never involved. Advaita takes over almost the whole of this analysis — the witness that does not act, the evolution of the world from an unconscious principle, the doctrine that the effect pre-exists in its cause — and rejects its two conclusions: that there are many witnesses, and that nature is independently real. Sri Śaṅkara's argument against Sāṅkhya is the longest in his commentary; he called it "the principal opponent". Yoga, paired with it, is Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras, a hundred and ninety-five aphorisms compiled perhaps between the second and fourth centuries, with Vyāsa's commentary and, again, one by Sri Vācaspati; it accepts Sāṅkhya's metaphysics, adds God as a special self, and supplies the practice — the eight limbs of restraint, observance, posture, breath, withdrawal, concentration, meditation and absorption. Every teacher on this site uses its discipline; Swami Vivekananda's Rāja Yoga is a commentary on it; and Sri Ramaṇa's warning against mistaking the stillness of absorption for knowledge is a warning about this school.

Mīmāṃsā, "the enquiry", is the school of Vedic interpretation. Jaimini's Mīmāṃsā Sūtras, some two thousand seven hundred aphorisms in twelve chapters from perhaps the third century before the common era, are the longest of the sūtra texts; Śabara's commentary, perhaps of the fifth century after it, is their basis, and in the seventh the school divided between Sri Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, whose Śloka-vārttika and Tantra-vārttika defended the Veda against the Buddhists with such force that the tradition credits him with turning the tide, and Sri Prabhākara, whose Bṛhatī founded a rival interpretation. Mīmāṃsā holds that the Veda is eternal and authorless, that its purpose is to enjoin action, and that its statements about the nature of things are subordinate to its commands; the ritual it prescribes is dharma, and its result comes by an unseen potency (apūrva), without a God to administer it. Advaita is its child and its adversary at once. Sri Śaṅkara's "enquiry into Brahman" is named on the model of Jaimini's "enquiry into dharma", uses its rules of interpretation on every page, and begins by denying its central claim — that the Upaniṣads must be read as injunctions to act. The debate in the Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya over whether knowledge is a kind of doing is the Mīmāṃsā debate; and Sri Maṇḍana Miśra, who wrote the Mīmāṃsā treatises Vidhi-viveka and Bhāvanā-viveka before, the tradition says, his defeat by Sri Śaṅkara made him an Advaitin, personifies the passage from one to the other. Vedānta itself, the "end of the Veda", is the sixth of the six, also called the Uttara-Mīmāṃsā, "the later enquiry"; every school on this page is a form of it.

Outside the six stand the systems that rejected the Veda — the Buddhists, whose Madhyamaka and Yogācāra schools were the Advaitins' sharpest philosophical opponents and, their critics said, their nearest relatives; the Jainas, with their doctrine that every judgement is true only from a standpoint; and the Cārvākas or Lokāyatas, the materialists, who held that consciousness is a product of the body and perishes with it, and whose arguments the Upaniṣads and their commentators answer at length. Sri Mādhava-Vidyāraṇya's fourteenth-century Sarva-darśana-saṅgraha, the "compendium of all views", surveys sixteen systems beginning with the Cārvākas and ending with Advaita, each stated fairly in its own terms before the next is allowed to reply — the method this page has tried, at a fraction of the depth, to follow.

Side by side

A single table cannot carry the weight of any of these systems, and each of them would object to its row. It is here because a reader new to the field needs a first orientation, and can then read the fuller sections above.

School	Founding teacher	Soul, world and God	Liberation is	Root text
Advaita	Sri Gauḍapāda; Sri Śaṅkara, c. 8th century	Only Brahman is real; the world is an appearance; the soul is Brahman	Knowledge that one is, and always was, Brahman	Sri Śaṅkara's commentaries
Viśiṣṭādvaita	Sri Rāmānuja, 1017–1137	Souls and world are real and are the body of Nārāyaṇa	Eternal service and love in His presence	Śrī Bhāṣya
Dvaita	Sri Madhva, 1238–1317	God, souls and world are eternally and absolutely distinct	Enjoyment of one's own nature in Viṣṇu's presence, graded	Brahma-sūtra-bhāṣya, Anuvyākhyāna
Bhedābheda	Sri Bhāskara, 8th–9th century	Soul and world are both different and non-different from Brahman	Knowledge together with works	Bhāskara-bhāṣya
Dvaitādvaita	Sri Nimbārka, date disputed	Difference and non-difference both real; God is Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa	Loving surrender to the divine pair	Vedānta-pārijāta-saurabha
Śuddhādvaita	Sri Vallabha, 1479–1531	The world is really Brahman, not an illusion; souls are its parts	Grace (puṣṭi) received through selfless love	Aṇubhāṣya, Subodhinī
Acintya-bhedābheda	Sri Chaitanya, 1486–1534	Simultaneous oneness and difference, beyond thought	Participation in the love of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa	Ṣaṭ-sandarbha; Govinda-bhāṣya
Śivādvaita	Sri Śrīkaṇṭha; Sri Appayya Dīkṣita, 1520–1593	Śiva qualified by His energy, souls and world	Attaining Śiva's nature	Brahma-mīmāṃsā-bhāṣya
Kashmir Śaivism	Sri Vasugupta, c. 900; Sri Abhinavagupta, c. 950–1016	One free consciousness, Śiva, really appearing as all	Recognition of oneself as Śiva	Śiva Sūtras; Tantrāloka
Śaiva Siddhānta	Sri Meykaṇḍār, 13th century	Lord, souls and bonds, all eternal	Union with Śiva without identity, by grace	Śivajñānabōdham
Vīraśaivism	Sri Basavaṇṇa, c. 1131–1196	Śiva as the liṅga worn on the body; no caste	Union through six stages of devotion	The vachanas; Śūnya-sampādane

How to hold all this

Three things seem worth saying to a reader who has come this far. The first is that the arguments between these schools were real, were conducted at the highest level of which the human mind is capable, and are not settled; anyone who tells you that one side "won" has not read the other. The second is that they were conducted, for the most part, with a courtesy that is itself a teaching: Sri Appayya Dīkṣita wrote the standard textbook of a school he did not belong to; Sri Vidyāraṇya set out the materialist's case before answering it; Sri Chaitanya spent a rainy season in a Śrīvaiṣṇava household at Srirangam, and Sri Ramaṇa Maharṣi's ashram stands under a Śaiva Siddhānta mountain, and no one thought either odd. The third is that they agree about more than they dispute — that the life we are living is not the whole story; that the self we take ourselves to be is not what we are; that there is a way out and that teachers have walked it; and that the way, whatever it is finally called, passes through stillness, honesty, study and love.

This site is an Advaita site, and it will go on saying, every morning, that you are what you are looking for. It says so in the knowledge that Sri Rāmānuja would have replied that you are His, that Sri Madhva would have said the difference is eternal, and that Sri Basavaṇṇa would have asked what temple you had built with your own body today. Read them. They will make you a better reader of Advaita, and they are worth reading for themselves.

A note on the pictures and the dates

No portraits of any of these teachers are shown here or elsewhere on this site, and none will be generated; the map is drawn from present-day coordinates. Dates before the sixteenth century are the traditions' own, and are given as such; where scholars differ substantially from a tradition, the text says so. Every institution named links, below, to its own pages, and every text to a complete edition that can be read for nothing.