Shankara and Ramanuja: Contexts and Key Beliefs

Overview

Recall questions on Advaita and Vishishtadvaita, maya, the relation of atman to Brahman in each, and the role of devotion.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Where do Shankara and Ramanuja sit within Vedanta?

   Model answer

   Vedanta is not one school but a family of commentarial systems, all claiming to expound the same foundational texts. Shankara, active around the eighth century, founded the classical statement of Advaita, non-dualism. Ramanuja, traditionally dated 1017 to 1137, produced Vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism, and Madhva in the thirteenth century argued for outright dualism. They are rivals within a shared enterprise, which is why their disagreement takes the form of competing readings rather than competing scriptures.

2. 2

   Describe the setting in which Shankara worked.

   Model answer

   Tradition places his birth in Kerala and describes a short life of travel and public debate. He worked in an intellectual environment shaped by Mimamsa ritualism, which he had to answer because it treated Vedic action rather than knowledge as the point of the Veda, and by Buddhist philosophy, whose analyses he engaged closely enough that later opponents accused him of being a Buddhist in disguise. He is credited with founding monastic centres at the compass points of India and with organising the Dashanami order of renouncers, which gave Advaita an institutional base.

3. 3

   Describe the setting in which Ramanuja worked.

   Model answer

   The Tamil south, and specifically the Shrivaishnava community centred on the great temple at Shrirangam, of which he became the leading figure. That community had two inheritances he had to hold together: Sanskrit Vedanta, transmitted through the lineage of Yamuna before him, and the passionate Tamil devotional poetry of the Alvars, sung in temple worship and centred on love for Vishnu. He wrote as the theologian of a living devotional community rather than as a solitary commentator, which shapes everything about his system.

4. 4

   What sources did both thinkers have to work from?

   Model answer

   The same three: the principal Upanishads, Badarayana's Brahma Sutras, and the Bhagavad Gita, the set known as the threefold foundation. Establishing a Vedanta position meant expounding all three and showing that they cohere on your reading. This shared starting point is what makes the dispute genuinely philosophical, since neither can appeal to a text the other rejects; each must argue that the other has misread what both accept.

5. 5

   Besides the threefold foundation of scripture he shared with Ramanuja, what fed into Shankara's thinking?

   Model answer

   Gaudapada's verse commentary on the Mandukya Upanishad, which had already argued for non-origination and treated the world's appearance as unreal, and which tradition places in Shankara's teaching lineage. Behind that stand the Upanishadic great sayings that identify the self with Brahman, which he treats as the decisive statements the rest of scripture must be read to support. His readiness to use Buddhist-style analysis of experience is what earned him the charge of crypto-Buddhism from Ramanuja's tradition, a charge Advaitins reject on the ground that Shankara affirms an ultimate reality where the Buddhists do not.

6. 6

   Besides the Sanskrit scriptures of the threefold foundation, what fed into Ramanuja's thinking, and why does it matter?

   Model answer

   The Tamil hymns of the Alvars, the ritual texts of the Pancharatra Agamas, and puranic sources such as the Vishnu Purana, alongside the Sanskrit scriptures. It matters because his authoritative base is wider than shruti and includes vernacular devotional poetry, which no strict Vedantin was obliged to accept, and because that poetry already assumed everything he had to defend philosophically: a real personal Lord, a real worshipper, and a love between them that is not an illusion to be seen through. Historians of southern bhakti such as Brockington describe him as giving intellectual structure to a devotional movement that was already flourishing.

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