Sri Madhusūdana Sarasvatī

The man

Sri Madhusūdana Sarasvatī is the teacher Advaita sends into the ring when the argument gets hard. In the centuries after Sri Śaṅkara the school's chief opponents were no longer Buddhists or ritualists but other Vedāntins, above all the followers of Sri Madhva, whose great logician Sri Vyāsatīrtha had written a book called the Nyāyāmṛta, “the nectar of reasoning,” to show that the world is real, that souls are many, and that the non-dualist cannot even say what he means by calling the world false. Sri Madhusūdana answered it, point by point, in the Advaitasiddhi, “the establishment of non-duality,” and the answer became the school's standard. The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha's volume on the preceptors of Advaita calls it “one of the accepted masterpieces of the Vedanta philosophy, the Advaita-siddhi, for refuting the objections raised against Advaita by Vyasatirtha, a follower of the dualistic school of Madhva”. The historian Surendranath Dasgupta, no partisan, called it “probably the last great work on Vedanta”.

That would be enough for one life. But the same man wrote a treatise on devotion as a flavour of the mind, a commentary on the Bhagavad-gītā that reads the poem as a river with two banks, and a hundred verses to the child Kṛṣṇa; and he opened the commentary that made him famous with a verse the Kanchi chapter puts at the head of its account of him: “kṛṣṇāt paraṃ kim api tattvam ahaṃ na jāne” — “I know of no reality whatever higher than Kṛṣṇa.” The chapter asks the obvious question in its first sentence: “How can an ardent follower of Sankaracharya who believed and proclaimed that there is only one ultimate reality, that is, the nirguna Brahman, which is devoid of any attribute, be also an ardent devotee of Sri Krishna?”

This page is about the man who held both, and about how little is actually known of him. Nearly everything the tradition says of his life — his birth in Bengal, his friendship with the poet Tulsīdās, his audience with the emperor Akbar, his death at Hardwar at a hundred and seven — comes down as tradition, some of it first written down in the twentieth century, and the scholars who have sifted it disagree about his dates by more than a hundred years. The page tells what is told, says who tells it, and then turns to the one thing about him that is not in doubt: the books, which are printed, scanned, and free to read, and which show a mind of extraordinary range holding the sharpest logic of its age and the tenderest devotion in the same hand.

The sources for this page, and what each can bear

Six kinds of document stand behind this page, and they carry very different weights.

• His own works, in the scanned editions linked at the foot of the page: the Advaitasiddhi in the Sanskrit of the Nirṇaya Sāgar Press (1937) and in the English of Mahāmahopādhyāya Gaṅgānātha Jhā's Indian Thought series (1917), whose opening verses and first chapter are quoted here; the Gūḍhārthadīpikā in the Benares printing of 1908; the Vedāntakalpalatikā in the Sarasvatī Bhavana edition of 1920; and the Prasthānabheda. Where a work is described but not quoted, the description is the Kanchi chapter's or Dasgupta's.
• The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha's Preceptors of Advaita (1968), chapter 41 on Sri Madhusūdana himself and chapter 52 on Sri Brahmānanda Sarasvatī, the commentator who completed his work. Chapter 41 is the tradition's own account of him, and it is quoted at length, including the passage in which its author speculates about a Kerala or Udupi connection that no other source shares.
• Surendranath Dasgupta's A History of Indian Philosophy, volume II (1932) for the life and the list of works, volume I (1922) for the place of the Advaitasiddhi, and volume IV (1949) for a whole chapter on the controversy between Sri Vyāsatīrtha and Sri Madhusūdana, from which the argument about falsity below is taken. All three are scanned and linked.
• Two English translations of the Siddhāntabindu, by P. C. Divanji (Gaekwad's Oriental Series, 1933) and P. M. Modi (1929), whose introductions are the fullest modern sifting of the traditions about his life and date. They are still in copyright and are cited by name, not linked.
• J. N. Farquhar's article “The Fighting Ascetics of India” in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library (July 1925), the printed source of the Akbar tradition, scanned and linked. Farquhar himself says where he got the story, and the page quotes him saying so.
• Mahāmahopādhyāya Gaṅgānātha Jhā's preliminary note to his translation (1917), which sets the Advaitasiddhi in the series of polemical works exchanged between the two schools.

Every quotation on the page is taken word for word from one of these, and each is linked at the foot of the page where it is free to link. Where the scanned books have been misread by the machine that copied them, the printed words have been restored and every restoration is recorded, as the closing note explains. Where the sources disagree — and on this life they disagree about his century, his birthplace, and which of the stories about him are history — both accounts are given and neither is quietly dropped.

Where the life was lived

The life the tradition tells runs from the rivers of eastern Bengal to the Ganges at Benares and ends where the Ganges leaves the hills. Divanji's sketch of 1933, following a Bengali family tradition, places the birth at Kotalipada in the Faridpur district of what is now Bangladesh, in a family of Kanauj Brahmins who had migrated to Navadvīpa and then eastward; Dasgupta cites the same family genealogy, the Kula-pañjikā of Kotalipada, which names his father and three brothers. Navadvīpa, the university town of the new logic, is where the tradition sends him to study. Benares is where every account puts his adult life: his sannyāsa under Sri Viśveśvara Sarasvatī, his Vedānta studies under Sri Mādhava Sarasvatī, and the Gopāla Maṭh on the Catuḥṣaṣṭhī Ghāṭ where, Divanji says, he wrote his books. Prayag is where the life of Sri Vallabhācārya, as the Kanchi chapter reports it, has the two men meet. Hardwar is where the tradition says he died.

Two cautions belong beside the map. The first is that none of these places is fixed by a document of his own time. The Bengal birth rests on family tradition and a genealogy; Benares rests on the near-unanimous agreement of the later accounts and on his own verses naming Benares teachers; Hardwar rests on a tradition Divanji reports without a source. The second is that the Kanchi chapter's author was not sure of Bengal at all. Noting that Sri Madhusūdana names in the Vedāntakalpalatikā a deity called “nilachalanayaka, the lord of the blue mountain”, he observes that “Arbitrarily many north Indian scholars have not only identified the nilachalanatha, the lord of the blue mountain with Lord Jagannatha of Puri, but also Madhusudana as a resident of Puri.” and then offers his own guess: “There is also every probability of Madhusudana being either a native or a resident of Guruvayur in Kerala or Udipi in South Canara.” No other source used here shares that view, Divanji explicitly rejects a South Indian birth, and the map does not pin it; but the reader should know that the tradition's own volume entertained it.

The names: Kamalajanayana, Madhusūdana, Sarasvatī

Madhusūdana, “slayer of the demon Madhu,” is a name of Kṛṣṇa, and it is the name he took at his sannyāsa. Sarasvatī is the name of his order, one of the ten branches of the Daśanāmī sannyāsins; his teachers Sri Viśveśvara and Sri Mādhava were Sarasvatīs too, and so was the pupil, Puruṣottama Sarasvatī, who commented on his Siddhāntabindu. The name he was born with is given by the Kanchi chapter as tradition: “It is also said that his name was Kamalajanayana in the purvasrama and that he was a native of Bengal.” Divanji gives it as Kamalanayana, “lotus-eyed,” and Dasgupta's genealogy has Kamalajanayana as one of four brothers. All three forms mean the same thing.

The Kanchi chapter is candid about how little the works themselves tell: “From his works we cannot say with any degree of certainty where he was born or by which name he was called before becoming a sannyasin. His commentators like Brahmananda also have not given us any hint to ascertain the native place of Madhusudana.” What the works do tell is whom he learned from. In a verse the chapter transcribes, he bows to three teachers: “śrīrāmaviśveśvaramādhavānāṃ praṇamya pādāmbhujapuṇyapāṃsūn / teṣāṃ prabhāvād aham asmi yogyaḥ śilāpi caitanyam alabdha yebhyaḥ” — “bowing to the holy dust of the lotus-feet of Sri Rāma, Sri Viśveśvara and Sri Mādhava, by whose power I am made fit, and from whom even a stone would have received consciousness.” Jhā's translation of the same verse, where it opens the Advaitasiddhi, runs: “Salutations to the dust of the feet of the blessed Rama, Vishvesvara and Madhava, who have realised the real nature of the supreme God, as identical with themselves, — the dust that shakes off the darkness of ignorance!”

Of the three, Sri Viśveśvara is the one the tradition knows best; the chapter says “he was ordained to sannyasa by Visvesvarananda Sarasvati” — the chapter's form of the name; his own verses, quoted above, say Viśveśvara — and Dasgupta simply calls him “a pupil of Visvesvara Sarasvati and teacher of Purusottama Sarasvati”. Sri Mādhava Sarasvatī is the teacher under whom, by his own verses, he studied Vedānta; Divanji says he is named as “the one through whose favour he became versed in the meanings of the Scriptures”. “Sri Rāma” is the puzzle. Divanji reports a Bengali oral tradition identifying him with Hari Rāma Tarkavāgīśa, a teacher of logic at Navadvīpa, and adds that “Some believe that this Hari Rama was his Paramaguru i. e. Guru’s Guru.” The page leaves him as the verse leaves him: a revered name, first of three.

The age he lived in: the new logic and the Madhva challenge

Whatever his exact dates, Sri Madhusūdana wrote in an India where philosophy had become a contest between schools that all accepted the Veda and argued about what it meant. The Kanchi chapter on Sri Brahmānanda sets the scene in three sentences: “In the history of Indian philosophy, the influence of Buddhism waned by the end of the tenth century and Advaita definitely triumphed over all the other schools — both heterodox and orthodox. Later, the theistic and pluralistic schools of Sri Ramanuja and Sri Madhva developed and they turned against Advaita in a pronounced manner. Among the followers of the Madhva School, Sri Vyasatirtha is the most prominent. Adopting the Navya-nyaya method, he opposed the philosophy of Sri Sankara in his work Nyayamrita.”

Two things in that passage shaped his whole career. The first is the Navya-nyāya, the “new logic” of Gaṅgeśa and his successors at Navadvīpa and Mithilā, a technical language of astonishing precision for stating exactly what a cognition is about, what a relation relates, and where a definition fails. Sri Vyāsatīrtha wrote in it, and anyone who wished to answer him had to write in it too. The tradition that sends the young Kamalanayana to Navadvīpa to study logic before he ever touched Vedānta is, whatever its evidence, a statement about what the age required. The second is that the attack was now internal to Vedānta: Sri Vyāsatīrtha accepted the Upaniṣads, the Gītā and the Brahma-sūtra as fully as any Advaitin, and argued that they teach a real world, a real God, and real, many, dependent souls. Against such an opponent one could not simply cite scripture; one had to show that scripture, reason and experience all cohered on one's own side and not on his.

Jhā, in 1917, described the book that resulted as one of a chain: “The Advaitasiddhi is one of a series of highly polemical works exchanged between the representatives of the ‘Shankara’ and the ‘Madhva’ Vedanta. The entire series we have not yet been able to trace. But between the Advaitasiddhi of Madhusudana (Shankara) and the Nyayamrita of Vyasa Yati (Madhva), the polemical inter-relation is quite manifest. The very names of the Prakaranas are identical in the two works.” The chain did not end with him: Sri Vyāsatīrtha's follower Rāmācārya answered the Advaitasiddhi in the Taraṅgiṇī, and, generations later, Sri Brahmānanda Sarasvatī answered the Taraṅgiṇī in his commentary on the Advaitasiddhi. On this site that chain is described from the Advaita side, because this is an Advaita site; but the reader should know that the Madhva side regards its own champions as having had the better of it, and that the contest was conducted, on both sides, by men of the first rank.

When he lived: the reckonings, and why they differ

No document of his own time dates him, and the card for this page gives a range with a warning rather than a pair of years. The Kanchi chapter lays out the older opinions: “About the date of Madhusudana there are different opinions. Professor Burnouf and Professor Lassen assigned Madhusudana to the middle of the 14th century A.D. But Mr. Telang holds the view that he must have flourished about the end of the 15th century or the beginning of the 16th century. For Madhusudana has quoted a number of passages from Vidyaranya’s Panchadasi and Jivanmuktiviveka. Professor Winternitz also fixes his date as the beginning of the 16th century.” Dasgupta heads his section “Madhusūdana Sarasvatī (A.D. 1500)” and says he “in all probability flourished in the first half of the sixteenth century”.

The chapter then argues for the early sixteenth century from three traditions. One is the meeting with Sri Vallabhācārya: “In the life of Vallabhacharya it is mentioned that once Sri Vallabhacharya went from Varanasi to Prayag where he stayed for a number of days performing the parayanam of the Bhagavatapurana and there he happened to meet a very learned sannyasin named Madhusudana Sarasvati, who was not only an advocate of mayavada but also an ardent devotee of Sri Krishna and who showed him his work called Bhaktirasayana and his commentary on Sankara’s bhashya on the Gita. Impressed by the great qualities of Madhusudana, he entrusted his son Vitthalnath to the care of Madhusudana for studying the various sastras. Vitthalnath was born in samvat 1572 or 1516 A.D.” Another is the line of pupils: “one of the students of Madhusudana named Seshagovinda was the guru of Bhattoji Dikshita who studied Vedanta from Appayya Dikshita”, which would make him “senior to Appayya Dikshita”. The third is a verse about the great logician Gadādhara: “navadvīpe samāyāte madhusūdanavākpatau / cakampe tarkavāgīśaḥ kātaro’bhūd gadādharaḥ” — “when Madhusūdana, lord of speech, arrived at Navadvīpa, Tarkavāgīśa trembled and Gadādhara was afraid” — from which the chapter concludes he “must have been an elder contemporary of the famous logician Gadadhara”.

The two translators of the Siddhāntabindu reached different answers from much the same material. Modi, in 1929, argued for a life from about 1495 to 1585, or on another computation from 1490 to 1602. Divanji, in 1933, reviewing the pupils and their pupils, settled on about 1540 to 1647 and noted his agreement with the editor of the Vedāntakalpalatikā, Rāmajña Pāṇḍeya, who had proposed 1540 to 1623; another scholar had put him as late as the middle of the seventeenth century. The differences matter because they decide which stories can be true. A Sri Madhusūdana born in 1540 could have met Akbar in his prime and been the friend of Tulsīdās; one born in 1490 could have taught Sri Vallabhācārya's son. He could not easily have done both, and the traditions, taken together, ask him to. This page reports each tradition with its date, and the card gives Divanji's range as the most fully argued, with the dispute marked.

Bengal: a father, four sons and a river

The Bengali tradition of his birth is the fullest account of his early life, and it should be read as what it is: a family's memory, written down in the twentieth century, with a genealogy behind it. Dasgupta gives the genealogy in a footnote: “It is also pointed out that in a family genealogy (Kula-pañjikā) of Kotalipara of Faridpur, Bengal, Madhusudana’s father is said to have been Pramodapurandara Acarya, who had four sons — Srinatha Cūḍāmaṇi, Yādavānanda Nyayacarya, Kamalajanayana and Vagisa Gosvamin.” He also gives the argument the editor of the Vedāntakalpalatikā had made from a surname: “Ramajna Pandeya in his edition of Madhusūdana’s Vedanta-kalpa-latika suggests that he was a Bengali by birth. His pupil Purusottama Sarasvati in his commentary on the Siddhanta-bindu-tika refers to Balabhadra Bhattacarya as a favourite pupil of his, and Pandeya argues that, since Bhattacarya is a Bengali surname and since his favourite pupil was a Bengali, he also must have been a Bengali.”

Divanji, who examined the tradition most closely, sets out the family's history as its members told it: the ancestor a Kanauj Brahmin of the Kāśyapa gotra who settled at Navadvīpa; a grandfather who moved east; and a father who migrated to “Kotalipada in the Faridpur district and built there a temple of Dakshinamurti Kalika”. Of the sons, “Yadavananda and Kamalanayana thereout turned out to be brilliant”. He records the memorials the village keeps: “the memory of our author’s father Purandaracharya is found still preserved by a temple of his family goddess Dakshinamurti Kali and a tank facing it. A popular reading room and library have also been founded in 1920 in the native village of our author and given the name “Madhusudana Saraswati Mandir” in order to keep his memory green” — and adds, pointedly, that “No such relics are preserved and no such memorials are known to have been raised in any part of Southern India.”

The tradition has its miracle, and it is a river. Divanji tells it in the same breath as the genealogy: “the river Madhumati in the Faridpur District which Madhusudana was, according to that tradition, able to cross through the favour of God Varuna, while it was in an overflooded condition when he started on his journey to Benares for getting himself initiated into the order of Sannyasins, is still believed to have received that name on account of the above miracle and the members of the family of the author still believe that they are immune from being drowned in that river owing to a boon conferred by that God on the said occasion”. The river is real; the Madhumatī still flows through the Faridpur country. That its name is his is what the family believes, and this page reports the belief as a belief.

Navadvīpa and the road to Benares

The tradition sends the young man first to the logicians. Divanji reports, on the authority of an editor of the Bhaktirasāyana, that Kamalanayana “studied Nyaya under Hari Rama Tarkavagisa who is identified with Sri Rama, the first of the three Gurus mentioned in the Advaitasiddhi and Gudharthadipika”. Navadvīpa in the sixteenth century was the great school of the new logic, and the story that a Vedāntin trained there first fits the books: the Advaitasiddhi is written throughout in the technical idiom of that school, and no one could have written it who had not been drilled in it.

Why he left home is told as a small injustice. Divanji's account is that “He took Sannyasa shortly after the completion of his study on realizing the futility of doing works for the sake of gain when the” local chief “under whose protection his father lived declined to make a grant of a piece of land to his father in recognition of the attainments of his said two sons and repaired to Benares”. It is a very human story: a father slighted, a son who concludes that a life spent earning recognition is not worth living, and a decision made young and kept. The Kanchi chapter, which does not know this story, agrees on the one point that matters: “All that we come to know about him from these prefaces is that he took to sannyasa very early in his life”.

The road ran west. Whether or not the Madhumatī parted for him, the tradition and the verses agree that he came to Benares, the city where, for the next century and more, the greatest Sanskrit learning of northern India would gather, and that there he found the teacher who gave him his name.

Benares: Sri Viśveśvara, Sri Mādhava and the Gopāla Maṭh

In Benares, Divanji says, “he came in contact with Visvesvara Saraswati who is referred to in 7 works of his as his Guru and got himself initiated into the fourth order and received the name Madhusudana Saraswati”. The “fourth order” is sannyāsa, the fourth and last stage of a Brahmin's life, taken here by a young man who skipped the two in between. Then came the Vedānta: “Thereafter he studied the Vedanta works under Madhava Saraswati who is referred to in the Advaitasiddhi and Gudharthadipika as his third Guru”. The Kanchi chapter transcribes the verse in which he thanks him: “śrīmādhavasarasvatyo jayanti yamināṃ varāḥ / vayaṃ teṣāṃ prasādena śāstrārthe pariniṣṭhitāḥ” — “victory to Sri Mādhava Sarasvatī, best of the self-controlled; by his grace we are grounded in the meaning of the scriptures.”

The place where the books were written is named by Divanji alone among the sources used here: “While living at Gopala Math on Chatuhshashthi Ghat in Benares he established his reputation as a venerable saint and a profound scholar and composed the works above-noted which won for him a permanent and prominent place amongst the exponents and the defenders of the Advaita doctrine and attracted friends and followers.” The Catuḥṣaṣṭhī, “sixty-four,” Ghāṭ is still one of the bathing-steps on the Benares riverfront, a little downstream of the Daśāśvamedha. A Gopāla Maṭh — a monastery named for Kṛṣṇa the cowherd — is exactly where a Kṛṣṇa-devotee among the Sarasvatīs would be expected to live, and the detail has the ring of something remembered rather than invented; but it is a tradition, and the page marks it as one.

Friends and pupils: Tulsīdās, Puruṣottama, Balabhadra, Śeṣagovinda

Divanji continues: “A prominent one from amongst his friends was the famous Hindi poet Tulsidas and from amongst his followers, Purushottama Saraswati whose commentary has been published in this Volume.” The friendship with Gosvāmī Tulsīdās, author of the Rāmcaritmānas, is one of the best-loved stories about him in northern India, and it is a tradition: no document of either man records it, and it is not in the Kanchi chapter or in Dasgupta. It is worth telling because of what it says about how the tradition saw him — the greatest Sanskrit dialectician of his age as the friend of the poet who put the story of Rāma into the people's language — and it fits a man who wrote a hundred verses to Kṛṣṇa as well as the Advaitasiddhi. Whether the two men ever met is not something this page can say.

The pupils are better attested, because they wrote. Puruṣottama Sarasvatī's commentary on the Siddhāntabindu survives and was printed with Divanji's translation; Dasgupta names him as the direct pupil. Balabhadra is the pupil for whom the Siddhāntabindu itself was written, as the Kanchi chapter says: “The Siddhantabindu is a commentary on Sankara’s Dasasloki and is written by him for the benefit of his pupil Balabhadra.” And Śeṣagovinda, the grammarian who taught Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita, left the verse the chapter transcribes: “yatprasādādhīnasiddhipuruṣārthacatuṣṭayam / sarasvatyavatāraṃ taṃ vande śrīmadhusūdanam” — “I salute Sri Madhusūdana, an incarnation of Sarasvatī, on whose grace the attainment of the four aims of life depends.” To be called an incarnation of the goddess of learning by the teacher of the greatest grammarian of the age is the kind of praise that is not given lightly.

The Akbar tradition, and what it rests on

The most famous story about him is also the one with the shakiest footing, and the page tells it with its footing showing. In 1925 the missionary-scholar J. N. Farquhar published an account of how the Daśanāmī sannyāsins came to have armed, fighting branches. He set the scene in the reign of Akbar, and went on: “At that time there lived in Benares a well-known sannyasi scholar called Madhusudana Sarasvati. His books are well known to Sanskrit scholars to-day. He decided to try to persuade Akbar to do something to save sannyasis from these outrages. He therefore went to court and had an audience with the Emperor. Raja Birbal, as a trusted adviser on Hindu questions, was present at the interview. Madhusudana stated the grave danger in which sannyasis stood, since they were themselves defenceless, while there was no possibility of getting their enemies punished by law. Raja Birbal then suggested that Madhusudana should initiate large numbers of men of non-Brahman caste as sannyasis and arm them, so that they might be ready at all times to defend Brahman sannyasis from attack. The Emperor agreed to the proposal and promised that fighting sannyasis should be immune from prosecution, precisely like faqirs. I am inclined to date the interview about 1565 A.D.”

Farquhar then said, with a candour later retellings have not always kept, where the story came from:

“Readers will not find this agreement between Akbar and Madhusudana Sarasvati mentioned in any historical work. So far as I know, it has not been recorded anywhere. I picked up the information from the lips of sannyasis, who told it me to explain how large numbers of their order came to be fighting men. But, though it has come down to us only by tradition, there can be no doubt about its truth. All sannyasis in North India hold the tradition”

“There can be no doubt about its truth” is Farquhar's judgement, not a document, and he offered as corroboration only that Akbar is recorded, in 1567, watching a battle between two companies of armed ascetics at Thanesar — which shows that fighting sannyāsins existed by then, not who made them. Divanji, in 1933, took the story from Farquhar and retold it without adding a source. A modern history of the fighting orders consulted for this page does not mention Sri Madhusūdana at all. So the reader should hold the story as the sannyāsins of Farquhar's day held it: as their own account of their origins, with a great name attached. What can be said is that the tradition itself is a tribute. When the monks of northern India wished to explain how their order had come to defend itself, the man they named as its author was the scholar of the Gopāla Maṭh.

The end: Hardwar, and a hundred and seven years

Of his death there is one sentence in the sources used here, and it is Divanji's: “It is not known when and for what reason this saint left Benares but it is found recorded that he left his mortal tenement at Hardwar at the advanced age of 107 years.” He does not say where it is recorded. Hardwar, where the Ganges comes down out of the Himalaya onto the plain, is a place sannyāsins have always gone to die, and a life that began beside one sacred river and ended beside the greatest of them has the shape a tradition likes. A hundred and seven is the kind of age tradition gives to men it reveres. This page repeats the tradition because it is the only account there is, and marks it as tradition.

What is certain is the silence after him. No pupil wrote his life; no maṭha claims his samādhi; no seat of the Daśanāmīs counts him among its heads. He belongs, like most of the great post-Śaṅkara ācāryas, to the company of men who left books rather than institutions. The Kanchi chapter's judgement is the tradition's: “In the firmament of Advaita philosophy getting light only from Sankara who was resplendent like the sun, Madhusudana shone like the moon excelling all the other philosophic stars and enlightening the people with ambrosial teachings worthy of his name.” The name means “slayer of Madhu”; madhu is also honey, and “ambrosial” is the chapter's play on it.

The works: what he wrote, and in what order

Here the ground is firm. The Kanchi chapter gives the list: “Madhusudana wrote a number of works on bhaktimarga and also on the Advaita Vedanta as propounded by Sankara. His works are Anandamandakini, Bhaktirasayana, Isvarapratipattiprakasa, Mahimnastotra-vyakhya, Harilila-vyakhya, Bhagavataprathamaslokatika, Vedantakalpalatika, Siddhantabindu, Samkshepasariraka-vyakhya, Gudarthadipika, Advaita-siddhi and Advaita-ratna-rakshana.” It warns that “There were also some others having the name of Madhusudana who were the authors of works like Anyapadesasatakam and a commentary on Mahanataka, but one can easily find out the difference between the works of Madhusudana who is a Vedantin and others bearing the name of Madhusudana.” Dasgupta's list adds the Prasthānabheda, the short survey of the systems of Indian learning that is often printed on its own, and it is included below on his authority.

The works fall, roughly, into three groups, and the chapter's remark that the Ānandamandākinī “was his maiden attempt” suggests the order in which he came to them.

• Devotional and literary. The Ānandamandākinī, “an original poem of more than one hundred slokas in praise of Lord Krishna”; the Bhaktirasāyana, his treatise on devotion; the Bhāgavata-prathama-śloka-ṭīkā, a commentary on the first verse of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa; the Harilīlā-vyākhyā; and the Mahimnastotra-ṭīkā, in which, the chapter says, “He has exhibited his great skill by interpreting the slokas in praise of Siva as praising Lord Krishna.” Devotees of Śiva may smile at that, and the chapter, written for a Śaiva pīṭha, records it without complaint.
• Expository Advaita. The Vedāntakalpalatikā, “a small treatise on the Advaita Vedanta”; the Siddhāntabindu, his commentary on Sri Śaṅkara's Daśaślokī; the Saṁkṣepaśārīraka-sārasaṁgraha, his commentary on Sri Sarvajñātman's verse summary of Sri Śaṅkara's Brahma-sūtra commentary; the Gūḍhārthadīpikā on the Gītā; the Īśvarapratipattiprakāśa; and the Prasthānabheda.
• Polemical Advaita. The Advaitasiddhi, which the chapter calls “his masterpiece”, and the Advaitaratnarakṣaṇa, “His last work”.

Nearly all of this is in print, and the principal works are free to read in the scanned editions linked at the foot of the page. Anyone who wants to test what this page says about him can do so.

The Advaitasiddhi: what was at stake

Jhā, who had already translated Sri Harṣa's Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya before he turned to this book, placed it in a triad: “‘Khandana — Advaitasiddhi — Chitsukhi’ constitute the triple ‘hard nut’ of the Neo-Vedantin, to the kernel whereof, in the language of the Pathshalas, the ‘beak of intelligence’ finds it difficult to reach.” The three “hard nuts” — Sri Harṣa's Khaṇḍana, Sri Citsukha's Tattvapradīpikā and this book — are the works a student of Advaita in the traditional schools met last, when everything else had been mastered, and the image of a beak that cannot reach the kernel is the students' own.

The book's plan is announced in its first sentence, which Jhā renders: “The proof of the truth of Non-duality follows from the proof of the unreality of all duality (or plurality). Hence at the very outset, it becomes necessary to prove this Unreality.” Everything hangs on that. If the world of many things is real in the full sense, then Brahman is one thing among many and the Upaniṣads' “one without a second” is a figure of speech. If the world's many-ness can be shown to be mithyā — false, in the precise sense the school gives the word — then non-duality stands. Sri Vyāsatīrtha had argued that the Advaitin cannot even define the word; the Advaitasiddhi begins by defining it, five times over, and defending each definition.

Dasgupta summarises the first exchange, and it is worth following closely because it shows the whole method: “Five principal definitions have been adduced by the old Vedantists; of these the first is that falsehood is that which is the absence of being as well as the absence of non-being”. That is: a false thing is neither simply existent, like Brahman, nor simply non-existent, like the horn of a hare. Sri Vyāsatīrtha objected that “since one of these is the negation of the other, joint assertion of them both will be against the Law of excluded middle and therefore will be self-contradictory”. Sri Madhusūdana's reply, as Dasgupta gives it, is “that the Law of excluded middle does not apply to every case of the relation between being and non-being. Thus the false-appearances have being so far as they appear and non-being so far as they are non-existent; exclusion of being does not necessarily lead us to non-being, and vice versa.” The mirage has enough being to be seen and not enough to quench thirst; to say it “neither is nor is not” is not to break logic but to describe exactly what a mirage is like.

And the argument did not stop there. Dasgupta adds the Madhva rejoinder: “To this the retort given by the author of Tarangini is that the Sankarites themselves say that, if a thing has no being, it cannot appear, which shows that they themselves admit the Law of excluded middle”. This site presents the Advaita answer as its own, because it is an Advaita site; it does not pretend the other side fell silent. The chapter of Dasgupta from which this is taken runs to sixty pages of such exchanges, and the reader who wants the whole match will find it linked below. What the sample shows is the temper of the book: nothing is asserted that is not defined, and nothing is defined that is not then defended against the sharpest objection its author could find.

The Siddhāntabindu and the Vedāntakalpalatikā

If the Advaitasiddhi is the fortress, the Siddhāntabindu is the door. Sri Śaṅkara's Daśaślokī is ten verses, each ending in the refrain that the Self is “the one auspicious that remains”; Sri Madhusūdana's commentary on them, written, as the chapter says, “for the benefit of his pupil Balabhadra”, became a standard introduction to the school's disputed points. The chapter describes it: “In this work, he has refuted the views of other schools, established the views of the Advaita School and has also presented the views of the various Advaitic acharyas on important concepts of Advaita without going into details.” “The views of the various Advaitic ācāryas” is the point. By the sixteenth century the school had developed several accounts of what ignorance is, whose it is, how many souls there are, and how the one Self appears as many; the Siddhāntabindu lays them side by side, and it is from it that generations of students learned that Advaita is not one doctrine but a family of them agreeing on the one thing that matters. It was this text, small enough to translate, that both Modi and Divanji chose to put into English.

The Vedāntakalpalatikā, “the wish-fulfilling creeper of Vedānta,” is described by the chapter as “a small treatise on the Advaita Vedanta. He has discussed the nature of the Absolute, refuted the conception of liberation according to other schools, explained how the avidya ceases to exist by the direct apprehension of Brahman arising out of hearing the mahavakyas and ultimately explained the concept of moksha according to Advaita.” It is the work in which he bows to the “lord of the blue mountain,” the phrase from which the chapter's author spun his guesses about Puri, Guruvayur and Udupi. Its 1920 edition by Rāmajña Pāṇḍeya in the Sarasvatī Bhavana series — the edition whose introduction argued for his Bengali birth — is scanned and linked below; the scan is a hard one to read.

The Gūḍhārthadīpikā: the Gītā as a river with two banks

His commentary on the Bhagavad-gītā is called Gūḍhārthadīpikā, “the lamp on the hidden meaning,” and it is the one work of his that ordinary readers of the Gītā still meet, usually printed beside Sri Śaṅkara's commentary. The chapter describes it as “a commentary on Sankara’s bhashya on the Bhagavadgita upholding Sankara’s interpretation but in some places deviating while advocating the path of devotion taught in the second six chapters. Bhakti and jnana are the two banks of the river of Gita according to him.” That last image is his. The eighteen chapters of the Gītā fall, in his reading, into three groups of six: the first six on action and the self that acts, the last six on knowledge, and the middle six on devotion to the Lord who is the subject of both. Knowledge and devotion are the two banks; the river of the poem runs between them, and it is one river.

The chapter explains what he was doing with the devotion: “In his Gudarthadipika, a commentary on Sankara’s bhashya on the Bhagavadgita, he believes the main teaching of the Gita to be that nirguna Brahman could also be attained through loving devotion to the Lord.” This is where he “in some places deviating” from his master: not on what the goal is, which is the attributeless Brahman, but on whether a road that starts in love of Kṛṣṇa arrives there. He held that it does. The 1908 Benares printing of the commentary is linked below; the modern English translation by Swami Gambhirananda (Advaita Ashrama, 1998) is in copyright and is cited by name.

The Bhaktirasāyana: devotion for its own sake

The Bhaktirasāyana, “the elixir of devotion,” is the work in which he faces the question that the chapter opens with, and the chapter's summary of its answer is the clearest account of his position:

“both bhakti and jnana are the means to moksha, but both differ as regards their nature, their means, their goal and the persons entitled to both (adhikarins). Bhakti is of the nature of a conditional modification of the mind experiencing beatification, while Brahmavidya is of the nature of a condition-less modification of the inflexible mind illumined by the second-less Atman. The means of bhakti is the hearing of the innumerable merits of the worshipful, while that of Brahmajnana is the mahavakyas like tat tvam asi. Their fruits are respectively intense love for God and the disappearance of ignorance which is the prime cause of all evils. All beings are eligible for bhakti, but only sannyasins having the four-fold aid are fit for Brahmavidya.”

Two things in that are his own. The first is the doctrine of who may walk which road: “To Madhusudana, all beings including beast and birds are entitled to bhakti, but only the sannyasins having the four-fold aid are fit for jnanamarga.” The “fourfold aid” is the classical set of qualifications for Vedānta study — discrimination, detachment, the six virtues, and the longing for freedom — and his point is that where the gate of knowledge is narrow, the gate of devotion is open to every creature that can hear. The second is that devotion is not merely useful: “He also considered bhakti as one of the aims of life, bhakti for bhakti’s sake which is identical with Brahmananda.” The chapter adds his proof: “In his Bhaktirasayana he quotes the sloka from the Bhagavatapurana that even sages who enjoy Brahmananda and who are far from the shackles of samsara dedicate themselves spontaneously to Vishnu without any aim or purpose. Or in other words even jivanmuktas are devoted to God.” A man freed while living has nothing left to gain; if he still loves God, then love was never only a means.

The chapter also notes that in this work “devotion is mentioned as superior; because it accelerates the realisation of the truth more quickly than jnana and that there is no difference in the conception of moksha achieved through either”, and it is careful to add that “the knowledge of Brahman is as essential for a devotee as it is for pursuing the path of knowledge”. He did not lower the goal for the devotee; he held that devotion carries the devotee to the same knowledge by another route. Lance Nelson's 1986 study and translation of the work is in copyright and is cited by name only.

The Prasthānabheda and the Advaitaratnarakṣaṇa

Two smaller works round out the picture from opposite ends. The Prasthānabheda, “the division of the approaches,” is a short and remarkably even-handed survey of the whole field of Indian learning — the Vedas and their limbs, the Purāṇas, the law-books, and the six systems of philosophy together with the heterodox ones — that explains what each is for and how, in his view, they all serve the one end. It is often the first Sanskrit text a student of the systems reads, and its tone, which finds a place for every school, is worth remembering when one comes to his polemics. It is in Dasgupta's list of his works; the Kanchi chapter does not name it, and the scan linked below is of the Sanskrit alone.

The Advaitaratnarakṣaṇa, “the protection of the jewel of non-duality,” is the other end. The chapter says: “His last work is Advaita-ratna-rakshana where he has answered the unjust attacks of the Naiyayikas and followers of Dvaita School in a vehement manner at times in abusive words.” The tradition's own volume records this, and this page does not soften it. Polemic in sixteenth-century Sanskrit was a blood sport on every side, and the Madhva writers gave as good as they got; but a reader who comes to Sri Madhusūdana through the Bhaktirasāyana should know that the same pen could be sharp, and a reader who comes through the Advaitaratnarakṣaṇa should know that the same man wrote a hundred verses to a child with a flute.

The teaching: Kṛṣṇa and the attributeless

How could the man who wrote “I know of no reality higher than Kṛṣṇa” also hold that the highest reality has no attributes at all? The Kanchi chapter's answer is the tradition's, and it is precise: “Madhusudana’s ardent devotion for Sri Krishna was not at all affected by his belief that Brahman which itself took incarnations did so through maya. The incarnations were those of the nirguna Brahman itself, but they were all unreal. Madhusudana criticised all those who held the view that Brahman is eternal and yet assumes real incarnations, as unreasonable and groundless.” “Unreal” here has the technical sense the Advaitasiddhi spends its first chapter defining: not nothing, but not the final fact. Kṛṣṇa is Brahman appearing; the appearing is by māyā; the one who appears is the attributeless itself. To love the appearance is therefore to love the only thing there is, under the only form in which love can reach it.

The chapter is careful to say that this was not his invention: “In the synthesis of bhaktimarga and the path of knowledge he followed the famous Sarvajnatmamuni, the author of Samkshepasariraka who has offered salutation to nirguna Brahman called Murari in the very first verse of his work”, and concludes: “So nirguna-bhaktimarga cannot be called a new innovation of Madhusudana.” Sri Sarvajñātman, whose page is on this site, had opened his own summary of Sri Śaṅkara by saluting the attributeless Brahman under the name of Kṛṣṇa the enemy of Mura; Sri Madhusūdana wrote a commentary on that very work. The line from the one to the other is direct.

The chapter also admits a strain: “There seems to be some apparent contradiction in his works about the path of devotion and the path of knowledge as means to moksha.” In the Gītā commentary devotion leads to the attributeless; in the Bhaktirasāyana it is an end in itself, identical with the bliss of Brahman; in the Advaitasiddhi neither is mentioned, and the whole weight falls on knowledge. Readers have reconciled these in different ways, and the chapter's own reconciliation is that “He fully concurred with Sankara’s conception of jagat, jivatma and Paramatma and also the path of knowledge as directly leading to moksha” while holding that devotion brings the devotee to that knowledge. Whether the three books are one doctrine or one man's three moods, they were written by a single hand, and the tradition has never felt obliged to choose between them.

The teaching: what “false” does and does not mean

Because so much of his fame rests on the argument about falsity, it is worth saying in plain words what the argument is not. It is not the claim that the world is a hallucination, or that suffering does not happen, or that a table is not there when one puts a cup on it. The five definitions of falsity Dasgupta reports all turn on one idea: that a false thing is one that is experienced and then cancelled by a truer experience, as the mirage is cancelled by the sand and the rope-snake by the rope. Until it is cancelled it works exactly as if it were real, and the school's whole ethics, worship and practice are addressed to it as it works. The first definition — “the absence of being as well as the absence of non-being” — says only that the world is neither the final fact nor a mere nothing. That is a modest claim dressed in fierce logic, and the fierceness was forced on it by opponents who argued, with equal skill, that any third status between being and non-being is incoherent.

The Madhva school's position deserves to be stated in its own terms, and on this site it is: Sri Madhva and Sri Vyāsatīrtha held that the world is real, that God, souls and matter are eternally distinct, and that devotion to a real Lord by a real soul is the whole of religion. Nothing on this page should be read as calling that view foolish. The Advaitasiddhi exists because the Nyāyāmṛta was strong enough to require it, and the Advaita tradition has always honoured the opponent who made its greatest polemic necessary. The Other Schools page of this site says more.

Legacy: from Gauḍa to Gauḍa

His books did not end the argument; they set its terms for the next two centuries. Dasgupta records that “The Advaita-siddhi has three commentaries, Advaita-siddhy-upanyasa, Brhat-tika, and Laghu-candrika, by Brahmananda Sarasvati.” The Kanchi chapter on that commentator traces the chain: “Sri Madhusudana Sarasvati in his Advaita-siddhi answered all the objections raised by Sri Vyasatirtha. Later, the views set forth in the Advaita-siddhi have been criticized by Sri Rama Tirtha in his work Tarangini. And, Brahmananda answered the criticisms raised in the Tarangini in his commentary on the Advaita-siddhi known as Laghuchandrika. This work is also known as Gauda-brahmanandiya. Criticizing this work from the stand-point of the Visishtadvaita, Anantalvar wrote a work called Nyaya-bhaskara.” Dasgupta names the author of the Taraṅgiṇī as Rāmācārya; the Kanchi chapter calls him Sri Rāma Tīrtha; the page reports both. The Laghucandrikā, the chapter adds, “is widely read by all the students of Advaita”, and Sri Brahmānanda also wrote the Nyāyaratnāvalī on the Siddhāntabindu. So the two works of Sri Madhusūdana that mattered most to the schools each acquired, a century and more after him, the commentary through which they are still read.

That commentator, Sri Gauḍa Brahmānanda Sarasvatī — whom the Kanchi chapter on him places in “the last decade of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century”, on the strength of an editor’s dating of his teacher Sri Nārāyaṇa Tīrtha to 1790; the dating is not otherwise fixed — is a different man from Swami Brahmānanda Saraswatī, the twentieth-century Śaṅkarācārya of the Jyotir Maṭha, whose page is also on this site; the shared name and shared order have confused more than one reader. The Kanchi chapter on the commentator ends with a saying the tradition uses of the whole school: “In the Advaitic tradition, it is often said that the systematic explanation of the Advaita starts from Gauda and ends with Gauda: gaudadi gaudantam vedantadarsanam.” Gauḍa is Bengal. The first Gauḍa is Sri Gauḍapāda, the author of the Māṇḍūkya verses; the last is Sri Brahmānanda, the Bengali who finished the Advaitasiddhi's defence. If the Bengali tradition of Sri Madhusūdana's birth is right, the man in the middle was a Gauḍa too.

Beyond the schools, his influence ran through the Gītā. Wherever Sri Śaṅkara's commentary is printed with a second commentary beside it, the second is usually his, and his reading of the poem as a river between knowledge and devotion has shaped how the Gītā has been taught in the Advaita tradition ever since. The Kanchi volume that gives him a chapter of his own was published to mark the diamond jubilee of a Śaṅkarācārya of Kanchi; the Jyotir Maṭha and Sringeri traditions read him too. Among the post-Śaṅkara ācāryas, only Sri Vidyāraṇya and perhaps Sri Appayya Dīkṣita are as widely read across the school's branches.

Timeline

Every date below is a reckoning, and the page has said whose. Where the sources differ, the differences are shown rather than averaged.

• Mid-fourteenth century — the dating of Burnouf and Lassen, as reported by the Kanchi chapter; no later scholar has accepted it.
• c. 1490 or 1495 — birth, on Modi's reckoning (1929); Dasgupta heads his section “A.D. 1500.”
• 1516 — birth of Viṭṭhalnāth, son of Sri Vallabhācārya, who by the Vallabha tradition was entrusted to Sri Madhusūdana at Prayag; the Kanchi chapter uses this to place him in the early sixteenth century.
• c. 1540 — birth, on Divanji's reckoning (1933) and Pāṇḍeya's (1920).
• c. 1565 — the date Farquhar assigned to the audience with Akbar, on the strength of an oral tradition among sannyāsins.
• Undated — study of logic at Navadvīpa (tradition); sannyāsa at Benares under Sri Viśveśvara Sarasvatī; Vedānta under Sri Mādhava Sarasvatī; residence at the Gopāla Maṭh on the Catuḥṣaṣṭhī Ghāṭ (Divanji); composition of the Ānandamandākinī first and the Advaitaratnarakṣaṇa last (Kanchi).
• c. 1585 or 1602 — death, on Modi's two computations.
• c. 1623 — death, on Pāṇḍeya's reckoning.
• c. 1647 — death at Hardwar aged 107, on Divanji's reckoning of the tradition.
• Late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, on the Kanchi chapter’s reckoning — Sri Gauḍa Brahmānanda Sarasvatī's Laghucandrikā and Nyāyaratnāvalī, through which his two chief works are still read.
• 1892–1893 — the Advaitasiddhi with Sri Brahmānanda's commentary printed at Benares and at Kumbakonam; 1917 Jhā's English translation begins; 1937 the Nirṇaya Sāgar edition.

Questions a reader may ask

Was he from Bengal or from the South? The family tradition of Kotalipada, with a genealogy behind it, says Bengal, and Dasgupta, Pāṇḍeya, Modi and Divanji all accept it. The author of the Kanchi chapter thought a Puri, Kerala or Udupi connection “every probability” on the strength of one epithet in one book. No document of his own time settles it. This page follows the weight of the evidence to Bengal and reports the other view.

Did he really meet Akbar? The story was first printed in 1925 by Farquhar, who says he “picked up the information from the lips of sannyasis”. It is a living tradition of the Daśanāmī orders and it is not a documented event. The page tells it as the former.

Was he a devotee or a non-dualist? Both, and he saw no conflict. The Kanchi chapter's formula is that “The incarnations were those of the nirguna Brahman itself”: to love Kṛṣṇa is to love the attributeless in the one form in which love can reach it. The Bhaktirasāyana holds that all beings may love God and that even the liberated do.

Is the Advaitasiddhi readable by a non-specialist? Honestly, no; it is written in the technical language of the new logic and was the last text a traditional student met. Jhā's translation, linked below, gives an English reader a real taste of its method. The Siddhāntabindu, the Prasthānabheda and the Gītā commentary are far more approachable.

Is the Brahmānanda who commented on him the Śaṅkarācārya of Jyotir Maṭha? No. Sri Gauḍa Brahmānanda Sarasvatī was a Bengali scholar whom the Kanchi chapter places around the turn of the nineteenth century; Swami Brahmānanda Saraswatī was the twentieth-century head of the Jyotir Maṭha. Both have a place on this site; they are two men.

Why does this page give his dates as “disputed”? Because the most careful students of his life, working from the same traditions, have placed his birth anywhere between about 1490 and 1540, and his death between about 1585 and 1647. The card gives Divanji's range, the most fully argued, and says it is disputed.

A note on pictures, names and dates

No portrait of Sri Madhusūdana Sarasvatī exists from his lifetime, and the pictures that circulate are modern imaginings. This site shows a lamp in place of an invented face. His name is given in the form the school uses, Madhusūdana Sarasvatī; the Kanchi chapter spells it Madhusudana Sarasvati and Divanji Madhusudana Saraswati, and quotations keep their sources' spellings. His birth-name appears as Kamalajanayana (Kanchi, Dasgupta) and Kamalanayana (Divanji); both are given. The verses transcribed in the Kanchi chapter in plain roman letters have been re-transcribed here with the standard diacritical marks, and the translations that follow them are this page's own and are so marked by their position outside the quotation marks. The dates on the card follow Divanji and are marked as disputed; the page above gives every alternative it found.

The scanned books quoted here were copied by machine, and where the machine misread a word — tho for the, ono for one, Benarea for Benares, and the like, most heavily in the 1917 and 1933 volumes — the printed word has been restored inside the quotation and every restoration is listed in the closing note. Where a source's own spelling or punctuation is unusual, it has been left as it stands. Two passages in the 1933 introduction were so badly copied that a phrase had to be restored from context; both are in the closing note, and the reader may check them against the scan of the original, which is in copyright and is therefore cited by name rather than linked.

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 (48 places in the Kanchi volume's chapter 41, 1 place in Dasgupta, volume II, 12 places in the Kanchi volume's chapter 52, 1 place in Jhā's 1917 translation, 1 place in Farquhar's 1925 article, 2 places in Dasgupta, volume IV) 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: “Brhat-tlka” to “Brhat-tika” (Dasgupta, volume II); “tho dust” to “the dust” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “Saras- vati” to “Sarasvati” (Dasgupta, volume II); “Pammaguru” to “Paramaguru” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “The Adouit'tfiid Ihi is ono” to “The Advaitasiddhi is one” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “the‘Shaiikara’ and tho ' Madhva ’ Vedanta” to “the 'Shankara' and the 'Madhva' Vedanta” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “Tho entire series wo have” to “The entire series we have” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “Advaita- siddhi of Madhusu lana” to “Advaitasiddhi of Madhusudana” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “Ni/uyamrita” to “Nyayamrita” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “tho polemical” to “the polemical” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “Tho very nanus of the Prii/camnas” to “The very names of the Prakaranas” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “vidyaranya’s” to “Vidyaranya's” (the Kanchi volume's chapter 41); “( Kula-pahjika )” to “(Kula-pañjikā)” (Dasgupta, volume II); “Ctidamani” to “Cūḍāmaṇi” (Dasgupta, volume II); “Yada- vananda” to “Yādavānanda” (Dasgupta, volume II); “Madhustidana’s” to “Madhusūdana's” (Dasgupta, volume II); “Kotalip^a” to “Kotalipada” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “a a temple” to “a temple” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “Daks'iuamurti Ealika” to “Dakshinamurti Kalika” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “Yadav&nanda” to “Yadavananda” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “author s father Purandarachftrya” to “author's father Purandaracharya” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “Daks'iii&murti” to “Dakshinamurti” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “facing it A popular” to “facing it. A popular” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “Madliti* Tfik aUdaiMi, wai$> to that traditioo, able to crocus” to “Madhusudana was, according to that tradition, able to cross” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “the order ‘ of Sannyasins” to “the order of Sannyasins” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “Tarkavagis'a” to “Tarkavagisa” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “S'ri Rama” to “Sri Rama” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “Advaiiaaiddhi and Qu^hd/rikciklpikd” to “Advaitasiddhi and Gudharthadipika” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “tinder whose” to “under whose” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “attain*^ inents” to “attainments” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “Benarea” to “Benares” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “carae” to “came” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “Vis'wesVara” to “Visvesvara” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “M&dhava” to “Madhava” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “Advaitaaiddhi and OUdhd- rthadipikd” to “Advaitasiddhi and Gudharthadipika” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “Chatuh* shashthi” to “Chatuhshashthi” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); “Madhustdana Sarasvati. His” to “Madhusudana Sarasvati. His” (Farquhar's 1925 article); “Madhusidana stated” to “Madhusudana stated” (Farquhar's 1925 article); “Madhustdana should” to “Madhusudana should” (Farquhar's 1925 article); “sannyAsis” to “sannyasis” (Farquhar's 1925 article); “in- clined” to “inclined” (Farquhar's 1925 article); “1565 a.D.” to “1565 A.D.” (Farquhar's 1925 article); “Madhusiidana” to “Madhusudana” (Farquhar's 1925 article); “| picked up” to “I picked up” (Farquhar's 1925 article); “age- of” to “age of” (Divanji's 1933 introduction); ““ Khanhmn — Adoaitasiddhi — OhitsnlJchi ” constitute?” to “‘Khandana — Advaitasiddhi — Chitsukhi’ constitute” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “‘‘hard nut”” to “‘hard nut’” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “Patlishalas, tlio ‘ beak of intelligence’” to “Pathshalas, the 'beak of intelligence'” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “Non-dual ihj” to “Non-duality” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “from tho proof” to “from the proof” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “at tho very” to “at the very” (Jhā's 1917 translation); “ex- cluded” to “excluded” (Dasgupta, volume IV); “Sahkarites them- selves” to “Sankarites themselves” (Dasgupta, volume IV). Sanskrit verses transcribed in plain roman letters by their sources have been re-transcribed with standard diacritical marks, with no change of wording: “Krishnatparam kimapi tattvamaham na jane” (the Kanchi volume's chapter 41); “sriramavisvesvaramadhavanam pranamya padambhujapunyapamsun tesham prabhavad ahamasmi yogyah silapi chaitanyam alabdha yebhyah” (the Kanchi volume's chapter 41); “navadvipe samayate madhusudana vakpatau chakampe tarkavagisah kataro’bhut gadadharah” (the Kanchi volume's chapter 41); “srimadhavasarasvatyo jayanti yaminam varah vayam tesham prasadena sastrarthe parinishthitah” (the Kanchi volume's chapter 41); “Yatprasadadhinasiddhipurusharthachatushtayam sarasvatyavataram tam vande srimadhusudanam .” (the Kanchi volume's chapter 41). 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.