Rāmānuja

Key ideas

1. Brahman is a personal God. Brahman is the Highest Person, Viṣṇu or Nārāyaṇa, together with his consort Śrī, free from all imperfection and possessed of countless auspicious qualities. Rāmānuja denies that Brahman is an undifferentiated consciousness without attributes.
2. The world is God's body. Souls and matter are real, and they stand to Brahman as a body to its self, or as modes to what they qualify. Since they cannot exist or be conceived apart from him, all things are Brahman, and yet they are distinct from him.
3. Persons are real and distinct. Individual selves are real and distinct from God and from one another, though wholly dependent on him. Each shares with Brahman the nature of a knower.
4. Against Advaita. Where does the Advaitin’s ignorance reside? Not in the individual self, which exists only through it, and not in Brahman, who is self-luminous knowledge and so opposed to ignorance. Rāmānuja adds that consciousness is always consciousness of something, so pure consciousness without difference cannot exist.
5. All knowledge is of the real. Even an illusion has a real object. In the shell mistaken for silver the shell really contains some silver-element, since everything shares in the nature of everything else; the error is a partial apprehension, not an apprehension of nothing.
6. Knowledge becomes devotion. The knowledge that frees is not one act of insight but steady meditation, which he calls bhakti, devotion, in which God is dear above all things. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds that his bhakti yoga joins duty, karma yoga, with constant worship.
7. Liberation without merging. The freed self remains distinct. Its greatest good is to be ever aware of its true nature as a mode of Brahman and of Brahman’s nature, not to dissolve into an undifferentiated reality.

Rāmānuja was a South Indian teacher of Śrī Vaiṣṇavism and the chief philosopher of Viśiṣṭādvaita (viśiṣṭādvaita, “non-duality of the qualified”), the school of Vedānta that holds Brahman to be a personal God, Viṣṇu or Nārāyaṇa, with souls and the world as his body. He is the main Vedāntic opponent of the Advaita of Śaṅkara, and he gave devotion, bhakti, an intellectual foundation. He is often called Rāmānujācārya.

When did Rāmānuja live?

Tradition says that he lived 120 years, from 1017 to 1137 CE. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) notes that recent scholarship places his life from 1077 to 1157, a life of eighty years. The biographies were composed from the twelfth century into the seventeenth or eighteenth, each Śrī Vaiṣṇava community telling the story in its own way, and Paul Sydnor, as Wikipedia reports, calls any reconstruction of his historical life nearly impossible.

What do we know of his life?

By tradition he was born at Sriperumbudur and studied in Kāñcīpuram under Yādavaprakāśa, who is traditionally said to be an Advaitin but was probably a Bhedābheda scholar. The two disagreed over the Upaniṣads, and Rāmānuja followed instead the tradition of the Tamil Ālvārs and of the teachers Nāthamuni and Yāmunācārya. The tradition says that he tried to meet Yāmuna, who died before they fully met. He left household life and was initiated into the community by Mahāpūrṇa, settled at Srirangam, travelled and debated, and reformed temple worship. The IEP says that he showed liberal attitudes towards caste.

Which works are his?

The IEP names three major works as authentic: the Śrībhāṣya, his commentary on the Brahma Sūtras of Bādarāyaṇa, the Vedārthasaṅgraha and the Bhagavad Gītā Bhāṣya. The shorter commentaries Vedāntadīpa and Vedāntasāra, and the three prose Gadyas, have been questioned, though the case is a minority view.

What is Viśiṣṭādvaita?

Rāmānuja’s commentary defines Brahman as the highest Person, “free from all imperfections” and possessing “numberless classes of auspicious qualities of unsurpassable excellence”, in Thibaut’s translation. The IEP adds that for Rāmānuja Brahman is the union of Viṣṇu, or Nārāyaṇa, and his consort Śrī, or Lakṣmī.

The world is Brahman’s body. In Thibaut’s translation, “the universe inclusive of intelligent souls is the body of Brahman”, and Brahman is its self. A body is a mode of the self it belongs to, and a mode exists and is known only with the thing it qualifies. The school calls this inseparability apṛthaksiddhi. So everything is Brahman, as the Upaniṣads say, and the plurality of selves and matter is real. On this view the ātman is a real and distinct knower, wholly dependent on God.

Why does he reject Advaita?

Take the Advaitin at his strongest. The world is superimposed on non-differenced consciousness by beginningless ignorance, which can be called neither being nor non-being, as a snake is imagined on a rope. The rope and the snake is the Advaitin’s example, which Rāmānuja cites in stating the view before he replies.

His first reply, in Thibaut’s translation, is a question: “What is the substrate of this Nescience which gives rise to the great error of plurality of existence?” Nescience is Thibaut’s word for avidyā. It cannot be the individual soul, which exists only through that ignorance, nor Brahman, which is self-luminous knowledge and so opposed to it. He also argues that consciousness is always of an object, and that if all means of cognition involve error, we could never know that they do. He therefore rejects a Brahman without qualities, nirguṇa, and the ignorance or māyā of the Advaitin.

His own theory of error is that all cognition has a real object. “We have thus proved that all cognition is true”, the commentary concludes. On his view the shell mistaken for silver does contain some silver-element, and the mistake is a partial apprehension. Advaita Vedānta has its replies, and the two schools have competed ever since.

How does one reach liberation?

Not by a single act of knowledge. Thibaut’s rendering calls the means “steady remembrance”, “designated by the word ‘devotion’ (bhakti)”, and he cites the Kaṭha Upaniṣad: “Whom the Self chooses, by him it may be gained”. Mokṣa is not a merging: the freed self remains a distinct mode of Brahman, aware of itself and of God. Whether surrender, prapatti, is a separate means or implied by bhakti is debated, and the later Vaḍagalai (northern) and Teṅkalai (southern) schools differed on grace.

What was his influence?

J. A. B. van Buitenen, as Wikipedia reports, credited him with giving bhakti an intellectual basis, and his school is counted with the Advaita of Śaṅkara and the Dvaita of Madhva as the three leading Vedāntic philosophies of the second millennium.

How should you start reading Rāmānuja?

Read the first lines of the Śrībhāṣya in Thibaut’s translation, which begin with a prayer: “May my mind be filled with devotion towards the highest Brahman”. The library has his critique of the Advaita doctrine of ignorance. Set it beside the opposing case in Śaṅkara’s passage on superimposition, and read the Bhagavad Gītā, on which he wrote one of his three major works. For the school, see Viśiṣṭādvaita.