Acharyas & Saints
The great teachers and poet-saints: the Vedanta acharyas Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva, and the bhakti saints who sang of God in the people's languages.
The acharyas and saints are the teachers who, between the eighth century and the sixteenth, reorganised what a billion people would later believe. Shankara argued that the self and the absolute are one and the same, and left four monastic seats behind him. Ramanuja answered that the soul is real and distinct and loved. Madhva went further and said the difference is eternal. None of them founded a religion. Each of them founded a way of reading the same texts.
Beside the philosophers stand the poets. The bhakti saints wrote in Tamil, Marathi, Hindi and Bengali rather than Sanskrit, and they addressed God directly, often furiously, sometimes from outside caste altogether. Their verses reached further than any commentary.
These pages take both lines seriously, and treat the disagreements as disagreements rather than as stages on a path to one correct view. Dates are given where the record supports them. Where a life has been substantially rewritten by later hagiography, and most have, that is said plainly.