Rāmānuja

Rāmānuja (traditionally 1017–1137) was the great theologian of South Indian Vaiṣṇavism and the founder of Viśiṣṭādvaita, “qualified non-dualism” — the most influential theistic school of Vedānta. Against Ādi Śaṅkara‘s Advaita, which held that Brahman is an attributeless absolute and the world an appearance, Rāmānuja argued that Brahman is a personal God, Viṣṇu–Nārāyaṇa, full of infinite good qualities; that the selves and the world are real, forming God’s body; and that liberation comes through loving devotion and surrender to God’s grace, not through the dissolution of the self into an impersonal absolute. He gave philosophical rigour to the ecstatic Tamil devotion of the Āḻvār poets, reorganised the worship of the great temple at Śrīraṅgam, and opened the path of devotion to people of every caste. His critique of Advaita, especially the “seven untenabilities” of māyā, is a landmark of Indian philosophy, and his thought prepared the ground for the devotional movements that transformed Hinduism in the second millennium.

Life

Our knowledge of Rāmānuja’s life comes from hagiographies written centuries later, such as the Tamil Guruparamparāprabhāvam and the Sanskrit Prapannāmṛtam; their details are traditional, not historical. The traditional dates, which give him a life of 120 years, are certainly stylised; scholars place his activity in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.

Youth and the break with Advaita

Rāmānuja was born, the story goes, at Śrīperumbudūr, near modern Chennai, to a Brahmin family. He married young and went to Kāñcīpuram to study Vedānta with Yādavaprakāśa, a teacher of a non-dualist school. Teacher and pupil soon clashed. When Yādavaprakāśa explained the Chāndogya Upaniṣad’s description of the golden person in the sun “whose eyes are like a kapyāsa lotus”, glossing kapyāsa as “a monkey’s bottom”, Rāmānuja wept at the insult to God and offered a different reading: “like a lotus opened by the sun”. The hagiographies say Yādavaprakāśa grew jealous and plotted to drown him in the Ganges on a pilgrimage; Rāmānuja escaped through the forest, guided by a hunter and his wife who turned out to be Viṣṇu and Lakṣmī.

At Kāñcī, Rāmānuja became devoted to Kāñcīpūrṇa (Tirukkacci Nambi), a non-Brahmin devotee who was said to converse with the deity of the Varadarāja temple. Rāmānuja wished to eat the food Kāñcīpūrṇa left; Kāñcīpūrṇa, conscious of caste, avoided it. When Rāmānuja’s wife insulted the saint by purifying the house after he ate there, and later quarrelled with the wife of another teacher over caste, Rāmānuja renounced his marriage and became a saṃnyāsin.

Yāmuna’s three wishes

The great Śrīvaiṣṇava teacher Yāmuna of Śrīraṅgam had heard of Rāmānuja’s brilliance and sent for him, but died before he arrived. When Rāmānuja reached Yāmuna’s body, he saw that three fingers of the right hand were folded. He understood them as three unfulfilled wishes — to write a commentary on the Brahma Sūtras according to Viṣṇu-devotion, to honour the sage Parāśara (author of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa), and to honour Nammāḻvār — and vowed to fulfil them. As he spoke each vow, a finger uncurled.

The mantra from the tower

Rāmānuja sought initiation into the secret meaning of the eight-syllable mantra oṃ namo nārāyaṇāya from the teacher Goṣṭhīpūrṇa (Tirukkoṭṭiyūr Nambi), who made him come eighteen times before teaching him, and then warned that whoever revealed it to the unworthy would go to hell. Rāmānuja immediately climbed the tower of the temple at Tirukkoṭṭiyūr and proclaimed the mantra to the crowd below. Confronted by his angry teacher, he said that if so many could be saved, he would gladly go to hell. Goṣṭhīpūrṇa embraced him and called him Emperumānār, “our lord”. The story — whether historical or not — symbolises the opening of salvation to all.

Śrīraṅgam

Rāmānuja became head of the Śrīvaiṣṇava community at Śrīraṅgam, on an island in the Kāverī river, where the vast temple of Raṅganātha (Viṣṇu reclining on the serpent Ādiśeṣa) still stands. He reorganised its administration and worship, wrote his major works — the Śrī Bhāṣya, the Vedārthasaṅgraha, the Vedāntasāra and Vedāntadīpa, the Gītābhāṣya, and three prose hymns of surrender, the Gadyatraya — and travelled across India debating Advaitins and Śaivas.

Exile in Karnataka

The hagiographies tell that a Cōḻa king, a fanatical devotee of Śiva, demanded that Vaiṣṇava scholars sign a declaration that “there is nothing higher than Śiva”. Rāmānuja’s disciple Kūrattāḻvān went in his place, refused, and was blinded. Rāmānuja fled to the Hoysaḷa kingdom in Karnataka, where he is said to have converted the Jain king Biṭṭideva, who took the name Viṣṇuvardhana and built the great temples of Belur. At Melkote he rediscovered a lost image of Viṣṇu, and — the story says — admitted outcastes, whom he called Tirukkulattār, “the sacred clan”, to the temple for a day each year. After about twelve years, when the Cōḻa king died, he returned to Śrīraṅgam, where he died at a great age. His body, according to tradition, is preserved seated in a shrine within the temple.

Philosophy

Against Advaita

The Śrī Bhāṣya opens with one of the longest and most famous critiques in Indian philosophy, directed at the Advaita doctrine of māyā. Rāmānuja first states the Advaitin view at full strength (the “great prima facie view”, mahāpūrvapakṣa), then demolishes it. His arguments, later summarised as the seven untenabilities (sapta-anupapatti), ask:

1. Where is ignorance located? Not in Brahman, which is pure knowledge; not in the individual self, which Advaita says is a product of ignorance — so it would have to exist before itself.
2. How can ignorance conceal Brahman, which is self-luminous? To conceal light is to destroy it.
3. What is its nature? To call it “indescribable” — neither real nor unreal — is to abandon logic.
4. What proves it? Not perception, which shows a real world; not inference; not scripture, which speaks of God’s real creation.
5. What removes it? Knowledge of an attributeless Brahman is impossible, since all knowledge distinguishes.
6. If knowledge removes ignorance, what removes the knowledge? Either it is real, and non-duality fails, or unreal, and it cannot act.
7. Ignorance cannot be ended at all, since the Advaitin’s one Brahman would have to be its permanent seat.

God, selves and the world

Against this, Rāmānuja presents reality as God together with his modes: conscious selves (cit) and unconscious matter (acit), real and eternal, related to God as body to soul. All three are real; none is illusion. God is both the material and the efficient cause of the world: in dissolution, selves and matter exist in a subtle state as his body; in creation, they become gross and differentiated. God’s own nature is untouched by the defects of the world. See Viśiṣṭādvaita.

Reading the Upaniṣads

Rāmānuja’s hermeneutic principle is that scripture must be read as a whole: texts of difference (God is the ruler of selves) and texts of identity (tat tvam asi) must both be true. The body–soul relation reconciles them, through the grammatical principle of co-ordinate predication (sāmānādhikaraṇya): two words with different meanings can refer to the same thing, as “the blue lotus” refers to one thing qualified by two properties. “That thou art” means that God, who is the cause of the world, is the same God who is embodied in you.

Devotion and grace

The way to God is bhakti, which Rāmānuja understood intellectually as well as emotionally: a continuous meditation on God, like an unbroken stream of oil, so vivid it becomes a kind of seeing. For those who cannot sustain it, there is prapatti, complete surrender, in which God himself becomes the means. Rāmānuja’s own Śaraṇāgati Gadya, a dialogue in which he surrenders to God and Śrī and God answers “you have nothing more to fear”, is still recited daily.

Legacy

Rāmānuja is the third of the great ācāryas of Vedānta, between Śaṅkara and Madhva. His school remains the living theology of millions of Śrīvaiṣṇavas. His influence passed north through Rāmānanda (14th–15th century), who preached devotion to Rāma to all castes, and whose disciples were said to include Kabīr and Ravidās. In 2022 a 216-foot seated bronze statue of Rāmānuja, the “Statue of Equality”, was unveiled near Hyderabad, celebrating his message of the equality of all before God. His relationship to Śaṅkara is one of the great debates of Indian thought: see Śaṅkara vs. Rāmānuja.

Rāmānuja in conversation

His critique of Advaita reduces to one sharp question — whose ignorance is māyā? And the story of the mantra shouted from the tower captures his conviction that salvation cannot be a secret for a few.