Who Was Ramanuja?

Three centuries or so after Shankara had made non-dualism the towering voice of Vedanta, a teacher in the Tamil south rose to answer him, and the answer reshaped the devotional life of half of Hinduism. Where Shankara had taught that the plural world dissolves into one undifferentiated Brahman and that the personal God is real only at a lower level of truth, Ramanuja insisted that the God you love and the soul that loves are both, finally, real. He did not soften Vedanta into sentiment; he built devotion a rigorous philosophical body and gave the philosophers’ absolute a face that could be loved. He gave the heart its metaphysics.

A long life, much of it legend

Tradition places Ramanuja’s life across an extraordinary span, conventionally given as 1017 to 1137 of the Common Era. A lifespan of some hundred and twenty years should be held with the caution one gives any traditional account, and here the caution has hardened into a genuine scholarly alternative. Working from temple records and regional evidence outside the Sri Vaishnava hagiographies, a strand of modern scholarship shifts the whole life forward by sixty years, to roughly 1077 to 1157, which yields a still long but far more plausible span of about eighty years. John Carman, whose study of Ramanuja is the standard one, weighs this revised dating carefully and calls it reasoned but not finally provable; both frames are in honest use, and neither the tradition nor the archive has closed the question. This article gives ranges rather than false precision, and adjudicates neither.

What is not in doubt is the shape of the life. He was born at Sriperumbudur, near modern Chennai, into a Tamil Brahmin family, and from a young age he is remembered for a liberal impatience with the barriers of caste. He studied Vedanta at Kanchipuram under a teacher named Yadavaprakasha, whose reading of the Upanishads leaned toward an impersonal absolute, and the two fell out precisely over whether Brahman has qualities or none. Ramanuja broke with him and found his own tradition in a line that runs back through the teacher Yamuna, called Alavandar, and Yamuna’s own teacher Nathamuni before him, to the Alvars, the Tamil poet-saints whose songs of love for Vishnu were the soil his philosophy grew in. Yamuna died before the two could meet; the tradition tells that Ramanuja arrived to find the body, three fingers curled, and pledged himself to the unfinished work the curled fingers signified — chief among them a proper Sanskrit commentary on the Brahma Sutra. He is bound, above all, to the great temple of Sri Ranganatha at Srirangam, whose worship he is said to have reorganised, and where he lived out most of his long career.

The most cherished story about him is almost certainly legend, and it tells you exactly what the tradition prized in him. It concerns Goshthipurna, known also as Tirukkottiyur Nambi, one of the five acharyas from whom Ramanuja is said to have received the different limbs of the teaching. Goshthipurna, so the account runs, made him walk the long road to Tirukkottiyur again and again — five times, or seventeen, the tellings vary — before he would part with the sacred mantra of surrender to Narayana, and then gave it only under a vow of strict secrecy, warning that to divulge it was to earn hell. Ramanuja climbed the temple tower and shouted the mantra to the whole crowd gathered below, accepting hell for himself so that the many could be saved. When his teacher confronted him, the tradition has Ramanuja answer that he would gladly go to hell if a multitude went to heaven. Whether or not it happened, the story is the man. His whole theology is an argument that the door to God should be open to everyone.

Two inheritances made one

Before the metaphysics, the synthesis, because it is the thing that makes Ramanuja Ramanuja. Two streams of religious life met in him, and he was the first to weld them into a single school.

The first was the ecstatic Tamil devotion of the Alvars, twelve poet-saints whose thousands of verses — collected as the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, the Four Thousand — sang of a helpless, tearful, intensely personal love for Vishnu, in Tamil, in the idiom of the land and not the Sanskrit of the schools. The second was the austere Sanskrit tradition of Vedanta, the disciplined exegesis of the Upanishads and the Brahma Sutra. These two had run in separate channels: the Alvars had feeling without a system, the Vedantins a system that had, in Shankara’s hands, argued the personal God down to a provisional truth. Yamuna and Nathamuni before Ramanuja had begun to bring them together; Ramanuja completed the fusion and gave it a name in all but word.

The result is what the tradition calls ubhaya-vedanta, the “dual Vedanta” — a religion that treats both the Sanskrit Veda and the Tamil hymns of the Alvars as scripture, a two-fold revelation. It is a striking fact, and one scholars have long noticed, that Ramanuja’s own surviving Sanskrit works never quote the Alvars by name; he was writing to win the pan-Indian schools, and to that audience he argued on their own ground, from the Upanishads. But the devotion he was defending was the Alvars’ devotion, and the community he built enshrined their Tamil verses beside the Sanskrit Veda in temple recitation, where they remain to this day. Ramanuja gave the Alvars’ love a rigorous philosophical body, and gave Sanskrit Vedanta a beating Tamil heart. The Vaishnava world that follows him never again has to choose between feeling and thought.

Reality as the body of God

Ramanuja’s philosophy is called Vishishtadvaita, and the awkward name hides a precise and beautiful idea. It is usually rendered “qualified non-dualism”, but a more exact translation is the non-duality of the qualified — the non-duality of a Brahman that really has qualities and really has parts. Reality is genuinely one, Ramanuja agrees with Shankara on that much. But it is one the way a living person is one: a single being that nonetheless truly contains a body, with all its distinct and dependent members.

Brahman, for Ramanuja, is not an attributeless absolute but the personal God, Vishnu-Narayana, full of infinite auspicious qualities — knowledge, power, love, beauty, mercy — and never tiring of them; the Vedartha-sangraha returns to God’s excellences on almost every page. And the whole universe divides, for him, into two real modes of this one God: chit, the realm of conscious souls, and achit, unconscious matter. Souls and world alike are the sharira, the body, of which Brahman is the shariri, the indwelling self.

That is the analogy on which the entire system turns, and Ramanuja defines it with care. A body, in his technical sense, is whatever a conscious self can wholly support, wholly control, and use entirely for its own purposes. By that definition my body is real, and distinct from me in that it is not my conscious self, yet it is wholly mine, wholly dependent, existing only to serve and express the self that animates it. Just so, the countless souls and the whole of matter are real, distinct from Brahman, and yet nothing apart from Brahman, whose body they are and whose ends they serve. God dwells within every soul and every atom as its inner ruler, the antaryamin of the Upanishads, the self of its self, directing it from within without ever being reducible to it.

The tie between them Ramanuja names aprithak-siddhi, inseparability — literally, incapability of being established apart. Souls and matter cannot exist, cannot even be conceived, in separation from the God who ensouls them, as the redness of a red thing cannot be prised off and set beside it. This single image does an enormous amount of work, and it does it by holding together two claims that lesser systems force apart. The souls and the world are real, not maya, because a body is not an illusion. Yet they are utterly dependent, inseparable, because a body is nothing without the self that animates it. So the world is neither a mirage to be seen through, as Ramanuja read Shankara to claim, nor a wholly separate second thing standing over against God. It is God’s own real self-expression.

And the souls themselves are real in a way Advaita could never grant. Each jiva is eternal, atomic — a monad of pure consciousness, not the all-pervading consciousness of Brahman — and genuinely distinct from every other and from God. It does not dissolve at liberation. It realises itself, rather, as what it eternally was: a real, beloved, constitutively dependent mode of God, and it enters into unending communion with him. Ramanuja pressed a sharp argument here against Advaita: ignorance, avidya, cannot be what produces the individual, because ignorance presupposes someone to be ignorant. Brahman, being pure knowledge, cannot be the ignorant one; so the sufferer of ignorance must be a real individual, whose individuality is therefore prior to any ignorance and cannot be explained away by it. Souls are eternally, constitutively dependent — but they are never unreal, and they never simply merge and vanish.

The sevenfold refutation of maya

Ramanuja did not merely propose an alternative to Shankara; he attacked the foundation of non-dualism head on, and the attack stands at the very opening of the Sri Bhashya, in the long section the tradition calls the Great Objection. Its centrepiece is the saptavidha-anupapatti, the “sevenfold untenability” — a systematic case that the doctrine of a single cosmic, world-concealing ignorance, the avidya or maya on which Advaita rests, collapses at seven distinct joints. It is one of the most famous pieces of polemic in Indian philosophy, and its force is cumulative: pull any one seam and the garment holds, but Ramanuja means to pull all seven at once.

Where, he asks first, could such an ignorance possibly reside — what is its locus? Not in Brahman, for Brahman is by Advaita’s own definition pure self-luminous consciousness, and light cannot be the home of the darkness that is its contrary. Not in the individual soul either, for on the Advaitin’s account the very existence of separate souls is itself a product of ignorance, so to lodge ignorance in the soul is to make it stand on its own shoulders. It has no locus. Second, the concealing: what could this ignorance even conceal? A self-luminous consciousness cannot be hidden, for to hide it would be to extinguish the luminosity that is its nature, and a Brahman whose self-luminosity is cancelled is no longer Brahman. Third, the nature: Advaita calls avidya anirvacaniya, “indescribable”, neither real nor unreal, and Ramanuja finds this simply unintelligible — everything whatever is grasped as either existent or non-existent, and a third category that is neither is not a subtle truth but a contradiction dressed as one. Fourth and fifth, the knowing: by what valid means of knowledge, what pramana, is this cosmic ignorance ever established, when perception, inference and scripture all report a real and differentiated world? And sixth and seventh, the removing: if all distinction is the work of ignorance, then the very knowledge said to dispel it — knowledge of a bare, distinctionless Brahman — is itself a distinction-bearing cognition and so itself a product of ignorance, which cannot then be the ignorance’s cure; and the promised “removal” of avidya generates fresh contradictions of its own.

The deeper objection beneath all seven is moral and devotional as much as logical. If the world and the self are finally unreal, then so, in the end, is the loving relationship between the soul and God, and so is the very scripture that teaches it, and so is the bondage from which release is sought. A God worth surrendering to must be really there, and so must the soul that surrenders, and so must the world in which the surrender is made. Ramanuja’s realism is not a cold metaphysical preference. It is the philosophical guarantee that devotion is not a beautiful mistake. For the full non-dualist reply to all this, the Advaita Vedanta article gives Shankara’s side; the tradition has never declared a winner, and later Advaitins answered the sevenfold refutation point by point. And a generation or so later a third great voice, Madhva, would judge even Ramanuja’s realism too gentle and push through to an outright dualism of God, souls, and world.

The works that carry it

The works that carry all this are real and well attested, whatever the haze around the life. The tradition holds that Ramanuja wrote nine works, all in Sanskrit. Three are the philosophical core, and their authenticity is beyond serious dispute.

The Sri Bhashya, his commentary on the Brahma Sutra, is his masterwork and the systematic statement of Vishishtadvaita, the direct reply to Shankara clause by clause. In its opening pages Ramanuja makes a striking claim about his own authority: he is not innovating but recovering, restoring the Vishishtadvaita reading of Vedanta as it had been set out long before in the vritti, the ancient gloss, of a teacher named Bodhayana. That work is lost, and we know it almost entirely through Ramanuja’s references to it, so scholars cannot check how faithful the recovery is; but the gesture matters. Ramanuja presents himself as the heir of a suppressed tradition of theistic Vedanta, not the founder of a new one. Alongside the great commentary stand the Vedartha-sangraha, “the summary of the meaning of the Veda”, which was probably his earliest work and which lays out the whole system while resolving the Upanishads’ apparent contradictions between unity and plurality; and the Gita-bhashya, his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, where he reads the text’s last word — give up all duties and take refuge in me alone — as the scripture’s own turn toward surrender to a personal Lord.

To these the tradition adds two shorter commentaries on the Brahma Sutra, the Vedantadipa (“the lamp of Vedanta”) and the Vedantasara (“the essence of Vedanta”), condensations of the Sri Bhashya for students; and three prose hymns known together as the Gadya-traya, the “triad of prose”. These last show the philosopher on his knees. The Sharanagati-gadya enacts a dialogue of surrender before Narayana and his consort Shri; the Sriranga-gadya is a prayer cast at the feet of Ranganatha at Srirangam; the Vaikuntha-gadya describes the eternal realm of Vishnu on which the liberated soul dwells. A minority of scholars have questioned whether Ramanuja himself wrote the smaller works and the hymns, precisely because the Gadya-traya leans so heavily on prapatti, surrender, a theme far less prominent in the three great commentaries — a scholarly doubt worth marking honestly rather than hiding. But the tradition receives all nine as his, and between the great commentary and the small hymns lies the whole man: the metaphysician who could refute maya at seven points, and the devotee who could only throw himself at the feet of Ranganatha.

A path for everyone

The practical heart of the teaching is its inclusiveness, and this is where philosophy becomes pastoral. If liberation depended on years of rigorous meditation or scholarly mastery, it would belong only to the few with the leisure and the capacity for it. The tradition Ramanuja founded held out another way: prapatti, also called sharanagati, total self-surrender to the grace of God. The devotee who can do nothing else can still cast themselves wholly on Vishnu’s mercy, in the knowledge that they have no other refuge, and that surrender, met by grace, is enough. Liberation becomes a gift received rather than a prize earned, and so it lies within reach of anyone who turns, in love and helplessness, toward Vishnu, regardless of birth or caste.

This is the doctrinal counterpart of the legend of the tower. The saving mantra proclaimed to the whole crowd below is prapatti made into a story: grace refusing to be hoarded, the door refusing to be kept for the few. That refusal is the thread running through the entire achievement. In an order still bound by caste, Ramanuja is remembered for admitting those the schools excluded, for honouring low-born devotees, for insisting that the humblest love reaches God as surely as the most learned meditation. Whether every such story is fact or pious memory, they all say the same thing, and it is the same thing his metaphysics says: the God who is the inner self of every soul cannot be the private possession of any caste.

The teacher who organised devotion

Ramanuja was, like Shankara before him, a builder as well as a thinker. He is the central acharya of the Sri Vaishnava tradition, and he is said to have appointed seventy-four simhasanadhipatis, “holders of the lion-seat”, lineage-heads sent out to carry the teaching across the land and knit the ecstatic devotion of the Alvars to the rigour of Vedanta into a single living school. He is remembered too for reorganising the daily worship at the great temple of Srirangam — its liturgy, its calendar, its administration, the very order of its recitations — on a footing so durable that his arrangements remain, in their essentials, the norm of Sri Vaishnava temple and household worship in India and abroad to this day. The philosopher who refuted maya was also the practical organiser who made sure the devotion he defended had temples to live in.

The later Sri Vaishnava community would itself divide, and the division is worth marking clearly, because it is a development roughly two centuries after Ramanuja and not his own doctrine. The two schools came to be called the Vadakalai, the northern, and the Tenkalai, the southern, associated respectively with the great teachers Vedanta Deshika and Manavala Mamuni. They split over several points — how far the Sanskrit Veda outweighs the Tamil hymns, how much ritual the surrendered devotee still owes — but the pivot was the fine question the doctrine of grace leaves open: does the surrendered soul contribute even the smallest effort of its own, or is grace utterly unconditional?

The tradition fixed the difference in two unforgettable images. The Vadakalai teach the “monkey-hold”, markata-nyaya: as the baby monkey must grip its mother’s belly as she leaps from branch to branch, the soul must cling, must make some answering effort of its own, and grace meets that effort. The Tenkalai teach the “cat-hold”, marjara-nyaya: as the kitten hangs limp in its mother’s mouth and is carried, doing nothing, contributing nothing, so the soul is saved by grace alone, and any effort of its own would only insult the completeness of the gift. As Patricia Mumme has shown in her close study of the debate between Vedanta Deshika and Manavala Mamuni, this was no idle quarrel of images; it turned on genuinely different theologies of how a free divine grace and a real human will can meet without one cancelling the other. Ramanuja himself held both the supremacy of God and the reality of surrendering effort together, and did not resolve the tension his heirs later drew apart. The two schools are the family he founded arguing, lovingly and for centuries, over his estate.

Supremacy and accessibility

The scholar John Carman, whose The Theology of Ramanuja remains the standard study in English, framed the whole system around a single polarity that Ramanuja held in taut balance: the paratva of God, his supremacy, infinitely exalted above all things, transcendent, the flawless absolute of the philosophers; and the saulabhya of God, his accessibility, his easy reachability, infinitely near, close enough to be grasped by the love of the humblest and the lowest. Everything in the theology lives in the space between those two poles. A God merely supreme would be worth nothing to love, too far to reach; a God merely accessible would not be worth surrendering to, too small to save. Ramanuja’s achievement was to refuse to trade either away — to keep the absolute of the metaphysicians and give it a face that weeps for its devotees, descends among them, and waits in the temple to be served.

Julius Lipner, in The Face of Truth, drew out the same double character on the side of knowing: Ramanuja’s Brahman is a being of whom real, positive, true things can be said, a God with a face and not a featureless void, so that the language of scripture and the language of love turn out to be describing the same reality rather than veiling it. This is the deepest reversal Ramanuja worked on the Vedanta he inherited. Where the non-dualist had read every positive word about Brahman as a concession to be transcended, Ramanuja read it as the plain truth: Brahman really is knowledge, really is bliss, really is the merciful Lord of all. The words point at the thing itself.

Shankara had said the world is appearance and the self is Brahman. Ramanuja answered that the world is real, the self is real, and God is realer than both, and near.

The non-dualist had emptied the world to find the One. Ramanuja filled it again, and found the One inside it.