Sri Dharmarāja Adhvarīndra

The man

Sri Dharmarāja Adhvarīndra is known for one book, and the book is known to every serious student of Advaita. The Vedānta Paribhāṣā — the title means something like “the technical terms of Vedānta”, though its translator explains that “Here, however, it means a lucid exposition of the accepted principles of the philosophy.” — is the school's standard manual of how we know what we know: what a valid cognition is, how perception works, what inference can and cannot prove, how words carry meaning, and why the Upaniṣads count as knowledge rather than opinion. Swami Madhavananda, who translated it in 1942, called it “a very important manual of the Vedanta philosophy, and is the most widely read book on the subject next to Sadananda Yogindra’s Vedanta-Sara”. The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha's volume on the preceptors of Advaita calls it “the gateway for understanding the essentials of Advaita-vedanta, from the point of view of epistemology (pramanasastra)”.

Of the man himself almost nothing is known beyond what he says in the six verses that open the book: that his teacher was Sri Veṅkaṭanātha of Velāṅguḍi, that his teacher's teacher was a monk named Nṛsiṁha, that he had already written a commentary on the great textbook of the new logic and another on an older logic manual, and that he was writing this one “for the enlightenment of backward students”. The Kanchi chapter adds a village in the Tanjore district and a century. His son wrote the first commentary on the book, and in the son's commentary the father is otherwise silent.

What makes him matter is the argument the Kanchi chapter makes for him: “Dharmaraja’s work has brought to the forefront the fact ignored by many that Advaita is not based on mere facile intuition founded on scriptural declarations. It is a system of thought that can be logically sustained and interpreted so as to secure intelligibility to the reader.” Sri Śaṅkara had shown what the Upaniṣads teach; Sri Padmapāda and Sri Prakāśātman had worked out how a knower comes to know it; Sri Dharmarāja, writing in the technical Sanskrit of the seventeenth century, put the whole theory of knowledge into a form a student could learn in a season, and it has been learned that way ever since.

The sources for this page, and what each can bear

The sources for this life are few and of very unequal kinds.

• The Vedānta Paribhāṣā itself, in Swami Madhavananda's English translation with the Sanskrit text (Ramakrishna Mission Sarada Pitha, Belur Math, 1942), scanned and linked at the foot of the page. Everything on this page about his teachers, his earlier works and his purpose comes from the six opening verses as Madhavananda renders them, with his notes; everything about the teaching comes from the body of the book. A Sanskrit edition with the two oldest commentaries is also linked.
• The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha's Preceptors of Advaita (1968), chapter 42, by P. Nagaraja Rao. It is the tradition's own short account, and it is the only source used here that names his village.
• Surendranath Dasgupta's A History of Indian Philosophy, volume I (1922), which dates him and describes the book, volume II (1932), which places him in a lineage and lists his works, and Dasgupta's foreword to the 1942 translation, which passes a much harder judgement on the book's originality. All three are linked; the three do not agree with one another on every point, and the page says where.
• His son's commentary, the Vedānta-śikhāmaṇi, and Amaradāsa's gloss on it, the Maṇiprabhā, in the Sanskrit edition linked below. They are used here only through Madhavananda's and Dasgupta's reports of them.

Every quotation is word for word from one of these and is linked where the source is free to link. Where the 1942 scan has been misread by the machine that copied it — and the diacritical marks of a Sanskrit-heavy book are exactly what machines misread — the printed word has been restored and each restoration is listed in the closing note. There is no biography of him, no tradition of miracles, no seat that claims him and no portrait. This page is therefore shorter than most on this site, and it is shorter honestly: it says what the sources say and stops.

Where the life was lived

Two places can be put on a map, and both come with a caveat. The Kanchi chapter says: “He belongs to the village Kandramanikkam of the Tanjore district in South India.” The chapter does not say how it knows, and no other source used here names the village; the old Tanjore district is the Kāverī delta of what is now Tamil Nadu, for centuries one of the principal homes of Sanskrit learning in the south. The second place is his teacher's, from his own third verse: “I salute the world-teacher named Srimat Venkatanatha, resident of Velangudi, who was an expounder of all systems of philosophy.” Madhavananda's note on the place-name is a guess and says so: “Probably the cultured village called Vilangudi lying to the south of the Cauvery and east of Kumbakonam.” Both pins fall in the same delta country.

Beyond that, nothing. Madhavananda's summary is that the author “was a reputed scholar of Southern India, as we know from the introductory verses to the Paribhasa, as also from similar verses by his son and commentator”. Where he studied the new logic, whether he travelled north to Benares where its great commentaries were then being written, where he taught and where he died, the sources do not say. The map shows the two villages and the river between them, and no more.

The names: Dharmarāja, Adhvarīndra, Dīkṣita

Dharmarāja, “king of dharma,” is a name; it is also a title of Yama, the god of death and judgement, and of the eldest Pāṇḍava, and a South Indian Brahmin might carry it as a given name without irony. Adhvarīndra is not a name but a title, and Madhavananda's note on the sixth verse translates it: “Literally, ‘Prince of adepts in performing sacrifices.’” An adhvara is a Vedic sacrifice, an adhvarin a man qualified to perform one, and the delta Brahmin families who kept the great Vedic rites alive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wore the title as others wore Dīkṣita, “the consecrated.” Dasgupta, in fact, calls the son “Ramakrsna Diksita” in one place and “Ramakrsna Adhvarin” in another; they are the same man under two titles of the same kind.

The pairing tells the reader something. The most rigorous theory of knowledge in the Advaita tradition was written by a man whose family title proclaimed him a performer of Vedic sacrifices, in a region where Advaita, Śaiva devotion and the Vedic ritual had grown together for centuries. He saw no tension in this, and neither did his tradition. The Paribhāṣā itself, in its eighth chapter, treats the question of whether householders as well as monks may hear the Vedānta, and reports both views.

The age he lived in: the delta, the new logic, and two Advaita schools

Madhavananda places the book in two intellectual worlds at once. The first is the split within Advaita itself: “of the two main branches of the Sankara school of Advaita Vedanta, founded by Padmapadacarya and Acarya Vacaspati Misra respectively, our author belonged to the former”. Those two branches — the Vivaraṇa school descending from Sri Padmapāda and Sri Prakāśātman, and the Bhāmatī school descending from Sri Vācaspati Miśra, both of whom have pages on this site — agreed on the goal and differed on the machinery: where ignorance rests, how the one consciousness appears as many knowers, whether the mind is a sense-organ. Sri Dharmarāja wrote as a Vivaraṇa man, and the Kanchi chapter notes that on the question of the mind “The two schools, Bhamati and Vivarana, hold different views on the subject.”

The second world is the logicians'. “In his discussions he has adopted the method and phraseology of Navya-Nyaya, introduced by Gangesa Upadhyaya in the fourteenth century.” Gaṅgeśa's Tattvacintāmaṇi had given Indian philosophy a new instrument, a way of stating with complete precision what a cognition is a cognition of and what relation binds its parts; by the seventeenth century no school could write for scholars without it. Sri Dharmarāja had not merely learned it: his fourth verse claims a commentary on Gaṅgeśa in which, as Madhavananda renders it, “he has smashed ten commentaries”. When he turned that instrument on Vedānta, the result was a book whose first six chapters, Madhavananda warns, “often contain refutations of other systems of philosophy, particularly Nyaya-Vaisesika. Being to some extent of a polemical character, these chapters are rather abstruse for the beginner. But once he has ascended these rugged steps, he is ushered into the realm of Vedanta proper in the last two chapters of the book”.

Dasgupta puts him in a particular Advaita lineage of the delta: “Nrsimhasrama had a pupil Dharmarajadhvarindra, who wrote a Vedanta-paribhasa, a commentary called Tarka-cudamani on the Tattva-cintamani of Gangesa, and also on the Nyaya-siddhanta-dipa of Sasadhara Acarya, and a commentary on the Panca-padika of Padmapada.” Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama, the subject of the Kanchi volume's chapter 37, was one of the great Advaita teachers of the sixteenth century, and Dasgupta describes his time as one “in which people were more interested in Vedanta as a whole and felt no hesitation in accepting all the Vedantic ideas in their works”. Sri Dharmarāja's own second verse makes Nṛsiṁha his teacher's teacher rather than his teacher: “I salute that prince of monks, my teacher’s teacher, named Nrsimha, whose pupils have routed dualists, as lions do elephants.” Whether Dasgupta's “pupil” is loose or the two Nṛsiṁhas are different men, the page cannot say; it reports both.

When he lived: 1550 or the seventeenth century

The Kanchi chapter is brief: “He is assigned to the 17th century A.D.” Madhavananda agrees: the author “seems to have flourished in the seventeenth century”. Dasgupta, in the first volume of his history, wrote “Dharmarajadhvarindra (about 1550 A.D.)”; in the second he speaks of “the exposition of the Vedanta-paribhasa of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra in the sixteenth century” on one page and, on another, of authors who “had also written separate works bearing the name Vedanta-paribhasa after the Vedanta-paribhasa of Dharmaraja in the seventeenth century”. The lineage helps a little: if his teacher's teacher was the Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama of the sixteenth century, then he himself belongs to its end or the beginning of the next, and a date around 1600 or a little after reconciles the accounts as well as anything can. The card for this page gives “c. 17th century CE” and the reader now knows what lies behind it.

One more inconsistency should be recorded, because it is the kind of slip that hardens into fact if no one notices it. Dasgupta's second volume describes “Dharmaraja Adhvarindra, son of Ramakrsna Adhvarin, in his Sikha-mani commentary on the Vedanta-paribhasa”. Every other statement in the sources — including Dasgupta's own, a few pages earlier — makes Rāmakṛṣṇa the son and the Śikhāmaṇi the son's commentary on the father's book; Madhavananda says plainly “the Vedanta-sikhamani by the author’s son, Ramakrsna Adhvarin”. The sentence in Dasgupta is a slip of the pen, and it is left as printed.

The teachers: what the opening verses say

Everything personal that survives of him is in the verses with which the Paribhāṣā opens, and they are worth reading as the nearest thing to his voice. After a first verse of salutation, he bows to his lineage:

“I salute that prince of monks, my teacher’s teacher, named Nrsimha, whose pupils have routed dualists, as lions do elephants.” “I salute the world-teacher named Srimat Venkatanatha, resident of Velangudi, who was an expounder of all systems of philosophy.”

Madhavananda's notes gloss the second: “This was his own teacher.” and, of “all systems,” “Not Vedanta alone.” So the picture is of a village scholar of the delta, Sri Veṅkaṭanātha, who taught every system to his pupils and had himself been taught by a monk whose school was famous for defeating dualists in debate. That last phrase is the only trace of polemical fire in the verses; it is directed at the dualist schools with which the Advaita monks of the age debated, and nothing here should be read as belittling them — their positions are described with respect on this site's Other Schools page. It was an age of debate, and every side kept score.

The name Nṛsiṁha is common among the Advaita monks of the period, and Dasgupta, as the previous section noted, identifies this one with Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama, the sixteenth-century author of the Bhedadhikkāra and other works, whom the Kanchi volume treats in its chapter 37. If that is right, Sri Dharmarāja belongs to the third generation of a school that included some of the most productive Advaita writers of the century. If it is wrong, he belongs to a lineage that has otherwise left no trace. The page cannot decide between them.

The other works: a logician before he was a Vedāntin

The fourth and fifth verses are a list of what he had already written, and they show a man who came to Vedānta from logic rather than the other way about:

“He who has written a commentary on the Cintamani called Tarkacudamani, in which he has smashed ten commentaries, and which has been appreciated by scholars” … “Who has also written an illuminating commentary for the students on Sasadhara, and has besides expounded the Pancapadika by construing its words”

The Cintāmaṇi is Gaṅgeśa's Tattvacintāmaṇi, which Madhavananda's note calls the work of “the founder of the new school of Hindu logic”; the Kanchi chapter confirms that “His works include a commentary on Gangesa’s Tattvachintamani.” “Smashed ten commentaries” is a boast, and it tells the reader how the new logicians talked about one another. Śaśadhara is an older logician, author of the Nyāyasiddhāntadīpa, and Madhavananda names Sri Dharmarāja's commentary on him: “Called Nyayaratna.” The Pañcapādikā is Sri Padmapāda's commentary on the opening of Sri Śaṅkara's Brahma-sūtra commentary, the founding text of the Vivaraṇa school; “construing its words” means a close, phrase-by-phrase exposition. Madhavananda adds that the fifth verse “does not occur in many of the printed editions”, so the Pañcapādikā exposition rests on a single verse of uncertain standing, and none of these three works is known to survive in print. The Kanchi chapter says only that he “wrote a number of works some of which have not yet been traced”.

Then the sixth verse, which is his statement of purpose: “That Dharmaraja Adhvarindra is composing this Paribhasa based on Vedantic teachings, for the enlightenment of backward students.” “Backward students” is Madhavananda's rendering of the Sanskrit manda, the slow; the sense is not contempt but the teacher's ordinary modesty about the book he is writing for beginners. That the beginners' book turned out to be, as the Kanchi chapter says, one that “on occasions baffles the expert” is a fact about the subject rather than the author.

The son: Sri Rāmakṛṣṇa Adhvarin and the Śikhāmaṇi

Madhavananda writes: “The popularity of the Vedanta-Paribhasa is testified by the number of commentaries written on it and printed, beginning with the Vedanta-sikhamani by the author’s son, Ramakrsna Adhvarin, which again has got a gloss named the Vedanta-maniprabha by Amaradasa.” The Śikhāmaṇi, “the crest-jewel,” is a full commentary and is nearly always printed with the text; the Sanskrit edition linked below carries both it and the Maṇiprabhā, “the light of the jewel,” which glosses the gloss. Dasgupta adds that the son “had also written a commentary on Rucidatta’s Tattva-cintamani-prakasa, called Nyaya-sikhamani, and a commentary on the Vedanta-sara” — so the son, like the father, worked in both logic and Vedānta, and wrote on the one other beginners' manual of the school, Sri Sadānanda's Vedāntasāra.

The son's commentary is also where the father's difficulties show. Dasgupta, in his foreword to the 1942 translation, remarks on “traces of confusion which his son vainly tried to justify or to explain away in his commentary on the Vedanta Paribhasa”, and in his second volume he describes the son conceding a point to critics and then trying “he tries to justify Dharmaraja Adhvarindra by pointing out that he was forced to define visaya-gata-pratyaksatva as non-distinction of the object from the subject, since this view was taken in Prakasatman’s Vivarana and also in other traditional works on Vedanta”. A son defending his father's definitions against the logicians, and grounding the defence in the school's founding texts, is a small picture of how the tradition worked: the book was not a monument but a living text, argued over within the family that produced it.

The Vedānta Paribhāṣā: the plan of the book

The book is divided into eight chapters, and the division itself is the argument. The first six are named for the six means of valid knowledge the school accepts; the Kanchi chapter lists them: “The system has accepted six instruments of knowledge. 1) pratyaksha (perception), 2) anumana (inference), 3) sabda (verbal testimony) 4) upamana (comparison) 5) arthapatti (presumption) and 6) anupalabdhi (apprehension of non-existence). Each of the pramanas is treated in detail.” The seventh chapter is on the subject-matter of Vedānta, that is, Brahman and the self, and the eighth on its aim, which is liberation. Madhavananda describes the turn: after the “rugged steps” of the first six, the reader “is ushered into the realm of Vedanta proper in the last two chapters of the book”.

The Kanchi chapter counts differently: “He develops the theory of knowledge portion in seven chapters and in the last two chapters he describes the ontological categories.” The printed book, in Madhavananda's edition and in the Sanskrit editions, has eight chapters, six on the means of knowledge and two on Vedānta proper; the chapter's “seven” is most likely a slip, and both counts are recorded here. Its list of the questions the book answers is a fair map of it: “What is the nature of knowledge? What is its origin? How does it arise? What are its instruments? How is the sense-object related to the cognizer? What is the test of the validity of cognition? What causes illusion? How is non-existence known? What is the way to the knowledge of ultimate Reality?”

The book opens by asking why any of this matters, and the answer is the school's: “Among the four kinds of human ends in this world, called righteousness (dharma), wealth, objects of desire and liberation, it is liberation that is the supreme human end, for that alone is known to be eternal from such Sruti texts as,” — and he quotes the Chāndogya. A theory of knowledge is written, in this tradition, because liberation comes through knowledge and one must therefore know what knowledge is. The Kanchi chapter puts the same point in modern words: “It is the “portal to metaphysics.” What the pramanas cannot teach us is not knowledge in the normal sense. Scripture becomes authoritative only because its truth gets affirmed by experience.”

Valid knowledge, and what makes it valid

The first thing defined is the thing the whole book is about. Madhavananda renders the definition: “Now the word ‘means’ stands here for the instrument of valid knowledge (prama). Here, if recollection is excluded from it, then valid knowledge would mean that knowledge which has for its object something that is not already known and is uncontradicted; while if recollection is included in it, it would mean that knowledge which has for its object something that is uncontradicted.” Two conditions, then, for a cognition to count as knowledge: it must tell us something we did not already know, and it must never be overturned by a later cognition. The second is the one that carries the weight. The rope-snake is not knowledge because the rope overturns it; the world of many things is, in the end, not the highest knowledge because the knowledge of Brahman overturns it; the knowledge of Brahman alone is never overturned by anything.

Dasgupta, comparing this with the definition given by Sri Rāmādvaya two centuries earlier, noticed what it commits the school to: “though want of contradiction (Dharmaraja Adhvarindra’s condition) and want of wrong representation (Ramadvaya’s condition) may mean the same thing, yet in the former case the definition of truth becomes more subjective than in the latter case; for want of wrong representation refers to an objective correspondence”. That is the point exactly. For Sri Dharmarāja truth is not a match between a thought and a thing out there; it is the property of never being cancelled. It is a definition built for a philosophy whose last word is that the thing out there is itself to be cancelled, and it is one of the places where the book is not a neutral manual but an Advaita one.

The book also holds, in its sixth chapter, that the validity of knowledge is intrinsic and self-evident: a cognition is taken as true the moment it arises, and only its falsity needs a further cognition to show it. Dasgupta records the refinement: “Dharmaraja Adhvarindra defines validity (pramanya) of knowledge as an awareness that characterizes an object as it is (tadvati tat-prakaraka-jnanatvam), while self-validity (svatah-pramanya) is defined as the acceptance by the underlying saksi consciousness of this validity”. The “witness” consciousness, the sākṣin, accepts what the mind presents unless something contradicts it; doubt is the exception, not the rule. Against the Naiyāyikas, who held that every cognition needs a second to certify it, this is the Vedāntin's and the Mīmāṁsaka's common ground, and Dasgupta noted elsewhere that in these matters “Dharmarajadhvarindra accepted the Mimamsa view”.

Perception: the water of the tank

The chapter on perception is the longest and, the Kanchi chapter says, “The chapter on perception is the most difficult.” Its central image, though, is one any reader can hold. In Madhavananda's rendering:

“Now, as the water of a tank, issuing through a hole, enters in the form of a channel a number of fields, and just like them assumes a rectangular or any other shape, so also the luminous mind, issuing through the medium of the eye etc., goes to the space occupied by objects such as a jar, and is modified into the form of a jar or any other object. That very modification is called a state (vrtti).”

The mind goes out. That is the Vivaraṇa school's theory of perception in a sentence, and it is the opposite of what a modern reader expects. Light does not come in and make a picture; the mind flows out through the eye like water through a sluice, reaches the jar, and takes its shape. Madhavananda summarises the doctrine in his introduction: perception “takes place when these three occupy the same space, by the mental state issuing through the organ and spreading over the object so as to assume the same form — like the water of a tank reaching a field through a channel and being shaped like the field” — the “three” being consciousness as limited by the knower, by the object, and by the mental state itself. When the three coincide, the veil over the object is lifted and the one consciousness, which was always there, shows the jar. The Kanchi chapter puts it more briefly: “When the vritti coincides with the object we have knowledge.”

Why build so strange a machine? Because the alternative divides the world into a knower in here and things out there and then has to explain how the two ever meet. On this account there is one consciousness, and what we call knower, object and knowing are that one consciousness marked off three ways; the Kanchi chapter draws the moral: “The fact that a single consciousness principle is delimited as object and as subject and as the knowing process leads to the avoidance of the problems of dualism.” Dasgupta, less sympathetically, thought the machinery “was in all probability borrowed from the Samkhya doctrine of cic-chayapatti in perception, which was somehow forced into Sankara’s loose epistemological doctrines”. The reader may weigh the two judgements; the page reports both. What is not in dispute is that this is where the tradition's theory of perception was finally set down in a form that could be taught, and that it is Sri Dharmarāja's form that is taught.

The chapter goes on to the hard cases the theory must handle: how one perceives one's own cognitions and feelings, which have no place outside for the mind to flow to; how the witness perceives; what happens in dream; and what error is. On the last the school's answer is that error is not a cognition of nothing but a cognition of something — silver — presented where it is not, and cancelled when the shell is seen; the chapter gives the nature of error a section of its own. It is the same account of falsity that the Advaitasiddhi defends with heavier weapons; here it is stated for students.

The other five means: inference, comparison, testimony, presumption, non-apprehension

The remaining five chapters on the means of knowledge are shorter, and each does a particular job for the system. The chapter on inference defines it as knowledge that rests on invariable concomitance — smoke never without fire — and then does something unexpected with it. Its last section is headed “Inference Proves the Unreality of the Universe: Definition of Unreality”, and the argument is set out as a formal syllogism: “All that is other than Brahman is unreal, because it is” “other than Brahman; whatever is such (other than Brahman) is like this (unreal), as silver in a nacre.” The definition that follows is the one Sri Madhusūdana had defended a generation earlier: “Unreality consists in something being the counterpositive of the absolute non-existence that abides in whatever is supposed to be its substratum.” In plainer words: a thing is unreal if, in the very place where it seems to be, it is finally found not to be — as the silver is finally not in the shell. The Paribhāṣā states in a paragraph what the Advaitasiddhi defends in a chapter, and it states it for students.

The chapter on verbal testimony carries the heaviest load of all, because the Upaniṣads are testimony and everything rests on their being knowledge. Sri Dharmarāja distinguishes his school from both its neighbours: “Now, according to the logicians, the Vedas are means of valid knowledge because they are produced by God, who is eternal and omniscient. According to the Mimamsakas, who deal with sacrifices, the Vedas are means of valid knowledge because they are eternal and as such free from all human defects. In our view, however, the Vedas are not eternal, for they have an origin, which is proved by such Sruti texts as, “The Rg-Veda, Yajur-Veda, Sama-Veda, Atharva-Veda are (like) the breath of this infinite Reality”. The Vedas are the breath of Brahman, produced afresh at each creation in the same form, and not the work of any person: that is the position the chapter defends against both the theist who wants an author and the ritualist who wants eternity. The Kanchi chapter's gloss is that “Scripture becomes authoritative only because its truth gets affirmed by experience.”

Comparison, presumption and non-apprehension are the three means the logicians denied and the Vedāntins, following the Mīmāṁsā, kept. The Kanchi chapter notes that “The necessity for regarding upamana, arthapatti and anupalabdhi as independent pramanas is discussed along with the arguments to prove that they cannot be brought under inference or perception.” Comparison is knowing that the wild ox is like the cow from having been told so; presumption is knowing that a man who is fat and never eats by day must eat by night; and non-apprehension is the knowledge of an absence — that there is no jar on the floor — which Sri Dharmarāja defines as “the extraordinary cause of that apprehension of non-existence which is not due to knowledge as an instrument”. That last one matters to an Advaitin more than it might seem: the school's whole account of ignorance as something that is removed depends on absences being knowable. It is also in this sixth chapter that the book sets out, as its table of contents puts it, why “The Validity of Knowledge is Intrinsic and Self-evident”.

The subject and the aim: Brahman, and liberation

The seventh chapter turns from the means to the object. Its first move is to divide the validity of the means themselves: “The validity of the means of knowledge that have been described in the above manner is of two kinds — as setting forth conventional reality and as setting forth absolute reality. Of these, the validity of all means of knowledge except that which apprehends the true nature of Brahman is of the first variety, since their objects are free from contradiction during the phenomenal state of existence.” Perception, inference and the rest are valid, then, in the way that matters for daily life; only the Vedāntic texts teaching the identity of the self with Brahman are valid in the way that is never overturned, “for the thing they teach, viz., the identity of the individual self with the Supreme Self, is uncontradictable for all time — past, present and future”. The chapter then works through the meaning of “That” and “thou” in the great sentence “Thou art That,” the order of creation and dissolution, and the three states of waking, dream and sleep, and ends, as the table of contents says, with “The Identity of the Meanings of ‘That’ and ‘Thou’”.

The eighth chapter is on the aim, and its definition of liberation is the shortest sentence in the book: “The attainment of Brahman, which is Bliss, as also the cessation of pain is liberation; for we have Sruti texts like, ‘(He who knows that Supreme) Brahman becomes Brahman Itself’” and “Going to another world, or the joy derived from objects consequent on that, is not liberation, for, being a product, it is ephemeral, and this would lead to a return of the liberated.” Heaven is not the goal; heaven ends. The chapter then sets out how knowledge arises: rites purify, and “Similarly hearing, reflection and meditation also are means to knowledge”, each defined — “Hearing is a mental activity leading to the conviction that the Vedantic texts inculcate only Brahman, the One without a second.” — and then the aids that fit a person for them.

That passage is the one part of the book a reader who never opens the rest should know, because it describes the life the whole theory of knowledge is for:

“To stimulate a desire for liberation, the discrimination between eternal and transitory things, a dispassion for the enjoyment of sense-objects and their result here and hereafter, calmness, self-control, self-withdrawal, fortitude, concentration and faith are of use. Calmness is control of the mind. Self-control is mastery over the senses. Self-withdrawal is the absence of distractions. Fortitude is the bearing of the pairs of opposites such as cold and heat. Concentration is the one-pointedness of the mind. Faith is believing in the words of the teacher and Vedanta.”

And then, characteristically, he reports a dispute rather than settling it: “Here some say that the word ‘self-withdrawal’ means renunciation, so that only monks are qualified for hearing etc. Others, however, maintain that the injunction about hearing etc. is common to all the orders of life, because the word ‘self-withdrawal’ never signifies renunciation, and a mere absence of distractions is possible even in the case of householders, and also because even Janaka and others are reported to have held discussions on Brahman.” A man whose title proclaimed him a householder-sacrificer, writing a manual for students who were mostly not monks, lets the second view have the last word. He does not say it is his own.

The debt to Sri Rāmādvaya: a charge and a reply

The hardest thing said about the book was said by the man who wrote the foreword to its standard translation. Dasgupta, in 1942, after praising Swami Madhavananda, wrote: “The epistemological implications of the Panca-padika of Padmapada as interpreted in the Vivarana, had already been collected and worked out by Ramadvaya in his Vedanta Kaumudi. The work has not yet been published. When we compare the contents of the Vedanta Kaumudi with those of the Vedanta Paribhasa of Dharmarajadhvarindra, the indebtedness of the latter appears to be so colossal that its claim to originality vanishes.” Sri Rāmādvaya, the subject of the Kanchi volume's chapter 26, wrote his Vedāntakaumudī in the fourteenth century, and Dasgupta had read it in manuscript.

Two things should be set beside that judgement. The first is that Dasgupta himself, twenty years earlier, had called the Paribhāṣā “A work on Vedanta epistemology and the principal topics of Vedanta of great originality and merit”; reading the Kaumudī changed his mind, and the page records both verdicts as his. The second is that Dasgupta went on, in the same foreword, to grant the book what the tradition had always valued it for: “On the whole, this epistemological compendium on account of its brevity and lucidity of exposition has commended itself to the readers of Samkara Vedanta.” Madhavananda, in his own introduction, declined to rule on it: “The question as to how far the contributions of our author are original, or the question of his close indebtedness to any subsequent author, for example, Ramadvaya, as Dr. Dasgupta asserts, can be decided only when the works in question have been published. We leave the issue open, and trust that future research scholars will be in a position to settle the matter conclusively.” He had already said what kind of book he thought it was: “He has faithfully presented in a nutshell the traditional views on important questions relating to Vedanta, and it is rarely that he has put forward any views of his own”. This site leaves the issue open too, with one observation. A manual is not meant to be original. Sri Dharmarāja's sixth verse says he wrote “for the enlightenment of backward students”; that the material he arranged for them had been gathered before, by a teacher of his own school whose work was never printed, is exactly what one would expect of a manual and does not touch the reason it was written or the reason it lasted. Dasgupta's comparison of the two definitions of knowledge, quoted in an earlier section, shows in any case that the arrangement was not slavish.

Legacy: the commentaries, the translations and the universities

The measure of a manual is whether it is used, and this one has been used without interruption for three centuries. Madhavananda lists the commentaries in print in 1942: after the son's Śikhāmaṇi and Amaradāsa's Maṇiprabhā, “Other published commentaries on the book are the Arthadipika by Sivadatta, the Vedanta-paribhasa-prakasika by Pedda Diksita, the Asubodhini by Pandita Krsnanatha Nyayapancanana, the Paribhasa-prakasika by MM. Anantakrsna Sastri, as well as one by Pandita Jivananda Vidyasagara, B.A.” Seven commentaries in print by 1942, “All these have been consulted with profit in preparing this translation.” as Madhavananda adds, is the mark of a school text in continuous use.

The English history begins in Benares: “The only English rendering so far made of the book was that by Principal Arthur Venis, M.A., of the Sanskrit College, Benares, which appeared, with notes, serially in The Pandit in 1882-1885, but never came out in book form.” Then Madhavananda's of 1942, for which, he writes, “I have also received considerable help from Pandita Upendracandra Tarkacharya” “of the Belur Math Catuspathi, with whom I read the book” — a translation made, that is, in the old way, by reading the Sanskrit through with a traditional teacher; and S. S. Suryanarayana Sastri's, which the Kanchi chapter also names. The Kanchi chapter then records something unusual for a seventeenth-century Sanskrit manual: “The work of Dharmaraja has attracted the academic students of Advaita of our universities and it has been the subject of many English works.” It names “Professor Datta’s The Six Ways of Knowing (1932): Swami Satprakashananda’s Methods of Knowledge (according to Advaita) with an introduction from Dr. T.M.P. Mahadevan and foreword from Dr. Huston Smith (1965); N.K Devaraja’s An Introduction to Sankara’s theory of Knowledge (1962)”. When twentieth-century philosophers, in India and abroad, wanted to know what Advaita thinks knowledge is, this is the book they opened.

The chapter's closing verdict is the tradition's: “Among the great interpreters of Advaita Dharmaraja occupies an illustrious position; and the study of his work confirms the rationality of the system and fullness of its treatment.” Dasgupta's, in the first volume of his history, is a historian's: “Dharmarajadhvarindra and his son Ramakrsna worked out a complete scheme of the theory of Vedantic perception and inference. This is in complete agreement with the general Vedanta metaphysics. The early Vedantists were more interested in” demonstrating the illusory nature of the world of appearance, he continues, “and did not work out a logical theory”. Between the two, the reader has the case for the book: that a school which had spent eight centuries saying what is true finally, in this man's hands, said clearly how it knew.

Timeline

Almost nothing in this life can be dated, and the entries below are the dates of the sources rather than of the man.

• Fourteenth century — Gaṅgeśa's Tattvacintāmaṇi founds the new logic; Sri Rāmādvaya's Vedāntakaumudī collects the Vivaraṇa school's theory of knowledge (Dasgupta).
• Sixteenth century — Sri Nṛsiṁhāśrama, whom Dasgupta makes Sri Dharmarāja's teacher and the opening verses make his teacher's teacher.
• c. 1550 — Dasgupta's date for him in volume I (1922).
• Seventeenth century — the date given by the Kanchi chapter, by Madhavananda, and by Dasgupta's volume II in one of its two statements; the card follows this.
• Undated — the Tarkacūḍāmaṇi, the Nyāyaratna and the Pañcapādikā exposition, written before the Paribhāṣā (opening verses); the Paribhāṣā itself; his son Sri Rāmakṛṣṇa Adhvarin's Śikhāmaṇi.
• 1882–1885 — Arthur Venis's English rendering appears serially in The Pandit, Benares.
• 1922 — Dasgupta's History, volume I, describes the book as one of “great originality and merit.”
• 1932 — D. M. Datta's The Six Ways of Knowing, the first of the university studies the Kanchi chapter lists.
• 1942 — Swami Madhavananda's translation published at Belur Math with Dasgupta's foreword.
• 1968 — the Kanchi volume Preceptors of Advaita gives him chapter 42.

Questions a reader may ask

Is anything known about his life? Only what his six opening verses say and one sentence in the Kanchi chapter about his village. There is no biography, no tradition of miracles, no samādhi. This page has not invented any.

Why does an Advaita site give a whole page to a textbook of logic? Because the Kanchi chapter's claim is right: the book shows that Advaita “is not based on mere facile intuition founded on scriptural declarations”. A reader who suspects that non-duality is a mood rather than a position can test the suspicion here.

Is the book readable? The last two chapters are, for anyone who has read a little Vedānta. The first six are hard; Madhavananda calls them “rugged steps”. The tank-and-channel image of perception, quoted above, is the one idea worth carrying away from them.

Was he original? Dasgupta said yes in 1922 and no in 1942, after reading Sri Rāmādvaya's unpublished Kaumudī. The page gives both verdicts and observes that a manual is judged by clarity, not novelty.

Did he think only monks could study Vedānta? He reports two views and gives the second, that “the injunction about hearing etc. is common to all the orders of life”, the last word, without declaring it his own.

What is the one thing to read? Chapter VIII, “The Aim of Vedānta,” under thirty pages in Madhavananda's translation, linked below. It says what liberation is, how knowledge arises, and what kind of person it arises in, in the plainest prose the tradition produced.

A note on pictures, names and dates

No likeness of Sri Dharmarāja Adhvarīndra exists, and this site shows a lamp in place of an invented one. His name is given as the school gives it; the Kanchi chapter's heading is Dharmarajadhvarin, Madhavananda's title-page Dharmaraja Adhvarindra, and quotations keep their sources' forms. His son is Sri Rāmakṛṣṇa Adhvarin or Dīkṣita; both titles appear in the sources and both are given. The century on the card is the one the Kanchi chapter and Madhavananda agree on, and the section on chronology gives Dasgupta's earlier date and his volumes' inconsistencies. The village is the Kanchi chapter's; the teacher's village is from the opening verses, and its modern identification is Madhavananda's guess and is marked as such.

The 1942 translation was copied by machine from a scan, and a book so full of Sanskrit terms in diacritics is exactly what machines misread. Where a word was plainly misread — Nrsiihha for Nṛsiṁha, imreal for unreal, hyphens left over from line-breaks — the printed word has been restored and every restoration is listed below; footnote markers that the scan attached to words have been dropped and are listed too. The translation's own renderings, including “backward students” and “prince of adepts in performing sacrifices,” are Madhavananda's and are left as his.

Quotations. Every quotation on this page is verbatim from the source named beside it, and each was checked by machine against the text of the source before publication. Spacing around punctuation, apostrophes and hyphens, as it appears in the sources' web pages and scans, has been regularised (7 places in Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation, 13 places in the Kanchi volume's chapter 42, 12 places in Dasgupta, volume II, 1 place in Dasgupta, volume I) and nothing else changed by it. The scanned books were copied by machine, and where the machine misread the printed word it has been restored, as follows: “imreal” to “unreal” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “something^” to “something” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “non-existence^” to “non-existence” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “whatever®” to “whatever” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “supposed®” to “supposed” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Mimarhsakas” to “Mimamsakas” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “knowl- edge” to “knowledge” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Sdma-Veda” to “Sama-Veda” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “that^” to “that” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Brah- man” to “Brahman” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “— ^past” to “— past” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “''(He who knows that Supreme) Brahman becomes Brahman Itself'” to “'(He who knows that Supreme) Brahman becomes Brahman Itself'” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “discrimina- tion” to “discrimination” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “things,^” to “things,” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “result*” to “result” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “one- THE AIM OF VEDANTA 227 pointedness” to “one-pointedness” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “' self-with- drawal '” to “'self-withdrawal'” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “renunciation/” to “renunciation,” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “orders^” to “orders” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “renuncia- tion” to “renunciation” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “householders,®” to “householders,” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “episte- mological” to “epistemological” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Padmap>ada” to “Padmapada” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Rama- dvaya” to “Ramadvaya” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Kaumudl” to “Kaumudi” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Ve- danta” to “Vedanta” (Dasgupta, volume I); “com- pendium” to “compendium” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “subse- quent” to “subsequent” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “when b ( X ) the” to “when the” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Arthadipikd” to “Arthadipika” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “V edunta-pari- bhdsd-prakdsikd” to “Vedanta-paribhasa-prakasika” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Asu- bodhim” to “Asubodhini” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Nyayapan- canana” to “Nyayapancanana” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “the , Paribhdsd-prakdsikd” to “the Paribhasa-prakasika” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Sastii” to “Sastri” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “b.a.” to “B.A.” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “m.a.> ( xii ) of” to “M.A., of” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Catuspdthi,,” to “Catuspathi,” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “YogTndra's Veddnta-Sdra” to “Yogindra's Vedanta-Sara” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “secure, intelligibility” to “secure intelligibility” (the Kanchi volume's chapter 42); “Siimat Vehkatanatha,^” to “Srimat Venkatanatha,” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Velahgudi,^” to “Velangudi,” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “alP” to “all” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Kumba- konam” to “Kumbakonam” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Paribhdsd” to “Paribhasa” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “' Prince of adepts in performing sacri- fices.'” to “'Prince of adepts in performing sacrifices.'” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Dlksita” to “Diksita” (Dasgupta, volume II); “Gahgesa Upa- dhyaya” to “Gangesa Upadhyaya” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Dharmarajadhvarlndra” to “Dharmarajadhvarindra” (Dasgupta, volume II); “Pahca-padika” to “Panca-padika” (Dasgupta, volume II); “Nrsiihha” to “Nrsimha” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Dharmarajadhvarlndra” to “Dharmarajadhvarindra” (Dasgupta, volume I); “Vedanta- sikhdmani” to “Vedanta-sikhamani” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Cintdmani^” to “Cintamani” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Tarkacuddmani” to “Tarkacudamani” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “commentary^” to “commentary” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Sa^adhara/” to “Sasadhara,” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Pancapddikd^” to “Pancapadika” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Nydyaratna” to “Nyayaratna” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Adhvarindra^” to “Adhvarindra” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “com- posing” to “composing” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Paribhasa^” to “Paribhasa” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “teach- ings” to “teachings” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Veddnta-Parihhdsd” to “Vedanta-Paribhasa” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “V eddnta-maniprabhd” to “Vedanta-maniprabha” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “com- mentary” to “commentary” (Dasgupta, volume II); “Rucidatta’s Tattva-cintdmani-prakdsa” to “Rucidatta's Tattva-cintamani-prakasa” (Dasgupta, volume II); “Pari- bhasa” to “Paribhasa” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “(dharma),^ wealthy” to “(dharma), wealth,” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “instrument^” to “instrument” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “{prama).^” to “(prama).” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “Here/” to “Here,” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “uncontradicted'^ ;” to “uncontradicted;” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “recollec- tion” to “recollection” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “repre- sentation” to “representation” (Dasgupta, volume II); “Adhvarlndra” to “Adhvarindra” (Dasgupta, volume II); “aware- ness” to “awareness” (Dasgupta, volume II); “( tadvati tat-prakaraka- jhanatvam)” to “(tadvati tat-prakaraka-jnanatvam)” (Dasgupta, volume II); “Dharma- rajadhvarindra” to “Dharmarajadhvarindra” (Dasgupta, volume I); “Mimanisa” to “Mimamsa” (Dasgupta, volume I); “rect- angular” to “rectangular” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “luminous' mind” to “luminous mind” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “issuing*” to “issuing” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “a jar,,” to “a jar,” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “{vrtti) .” to “(vrtti).” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “— ^like” to “— like” (Swami Madhavananda's 1942 translation); “cic-chdyapatti” to “cic-chayapatti” (Dasgupta, volume II). Nothing else has been altered, including the sources' own spelling, capitalisation and punctuation; where a source misprint would have fallen inside a quotation, the quotation has been cut short instead.