Ramanuja was a Hindu philosopher and theologian who exerted considerable influence on the tradition of thought known as Vedanta1 and who led a community that revered him for his saintly example and inspiration. His philosophy is a questioning and critical development of the monistic teaching of Sankara2 and is described as Visistadvaita, or qualified nondualism.
Ramanuja espouses nondualism in so far as he maintains that the soul and God are fundamentally one but he qualifies that claim in holding that the soul retains self-consciousness and so is capable of an external relationship with God. His views provided an impetus for theism3 and the development of ‘the way of devotion’, in contrast to ‘the way of knowledge’ which had been established two and a half centuries earlier by Sankara. A century after his death, Ramanuja’s thought was developed by Madhva into an unequivocal dualism and theism. These three philosophers, Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva, represent the most influential doctrines of medieval Vedantism.
Ramanuja was the last in a succession of three great acaryas, or teachers, the first being Nathamuni, and the second Yamuna, grandson of Nathamuni. There are sources that attribute a life of 120 years to Ramanuja and there is some uncertainty about the date of his birth, but it is likely that he was born around 1016 at Bhutapuri in southern India. He was married at 16 and then went to Kanci (Conjeevaram) to study. He was to have sat at the feet of Ramuna in Srirangam, but Ramuna died before Ramanuja arrived. Ramuna’s disciples taught him the five aspects of Yamuna’s doctrine and then, after being sworn to secrecy on eighteen separate occasions, Ramajuna ceremonially received the secret knowledge of the meaning of the mantra, or ritual, of his community, the Sri Vaisnavas. Tradition has it that on the day after he had sworn the final vow of secrecy, Ramanuja ascended to the balcony of the temple and shouted the secret to the Sri Vaisnavas assembled below. Subsequently he acknowledged to his teacher, Yadavaprakasha, that his disobedience should be rewarded by condemnation to hell; at the same time he remarked that the people to whom he had revealed the secret would be saved by their contact with the more faithful of Ramuna’s disciples. This observation so impressed his teacher that Ramanuja was immediately recognized as a leader capable of reforming and inspiring his community. Ramanuja’s subsequent work of transforming and reconstructing the tradition he inherited was based on scholarship, wide consultation and practical reorganization. At around the age of 30 he renounced domestic life and began to travel as a religious teacher, working in both northern and southern India and founding a monastery at Puri. He was persecuted by a Saivite king, Rajendracola, and so fled to the Hoysala region, but in due course he was able to return to Srirangam where he remained until his death.
Ramanuja’s thought is best understood as a kind of loosening of Sankara’s somewhat rigid monism. Sankara had maintained that Brahman, the Supreme Power of the universe, is without form and that all differentiations and cognitional forms imposed on Brahman are illusory and false: they are appearances which are generated by ignorance and which vanish once a knowledge of true reality is achieved. Ordinary, everyday experience, according to Sankara, is flawed and is inferior to knowledge of the one because it is made up of distinctions, differences and separations. His condemnation of the pluralism of ordinary experience is summed up in the following declaration:
Eternal, absolutely non-changing consciousness, whose nature is pure nondifferentiated intelligence, free from all distinctions whatever, owing to error illusorily manifests itself . . . as broken up into manifold distinctions – knowing subjects, objects of knowledge, acts of knowledge.4
As already indicated, Ramanuja’s challenge to Sankara’s view does not take the form of a direct opposition to it; his doctrine is not dualistic but a ‘qualified nondualism’. He maintains that Brahman, matter and the individual souls of the cosmos are indeed an ultimate unity, since matter and souls constitute the body of Brahman and have no existence apart from Brahman. But matter and souls, he says, are essentially different from, even though not independent of, Brahman. There is not a dualism of Brahman and the world, but a nondualism that is qualified by a certain kind of plurality. He rejects Sankara’s doctrine of maya, or illusion, concerning reality and maintains instead that the world of change and distinctions is entirely real.
Ramanuja offers some detailed and systematic criticism of Sankara’s doctrine. He argues that there can be no proof of Sankara’s claim that Brahman is unqualified, because all proof depends on the making of qualifications and on the necessarily qualified experience of the experiencer. He argues that to say that Brahman is pure consciousness, infinite, and so on, is to ascribe properties to Brahman. When we assert something – for example, ‘This is a basin’ – we assign characteristics; perception necessarily reveals something that has characteristics and there is no source of perception or knowledge that can reveal something that has no characteristics.
Ramanuja names three sources of knowledge: perception, inference and scripture. He distinguishes between indeterminate and determinate perception. The former is the first perception of something, in which its characteristics are not fully grasped; the latter is subsequent perception in which previously discerned features are reconsidered and more fully comprehended. He argues that perception cannot, as Sankara had maintained, provide us with knowledge of unqualified being because
if perception made us apprehend only pure being, judgements clearly referring to different objects – such as ‘Here is a jar’, ‘There is a piece of cloth’ – would be devoid of all meaning. And if through perception we did not apprehend difference . . . why should a man searching for a horse not be satisfied with finding a buffalo? . . . If all acts of cognition had one and the same object only, everything would be apprehended by one act of cognition.5
Ramanuja points out that inference, understood as knowledge derived from a principle, is founded on perception and accordingly is as much dependent on qualities and characteristics as perception is: ‘its object is only what is distinguished by connection with things known through perception and other means of knowledge’.6 Scripture, although absolutely authoritative, is similarly grounded in distinctions. It is an arrangement of words; and a word, Ramanuja writes, ‘originates from the combination of a radical element and a suffix, and as these two elements have different meanings it necessarily follows that the word itself can convey only a sense affected with a difference’.7 Thus, according to him, none of the forms of knowledge can provide us with knowledge of the unqualified oneness of pure being asserted by Sankara. Knowledge involves distinctions and discrimination and can never be of an undifferentiated object.
Ramanuja makes a careful analysis of the concept of the self. He argues that the self always persists in its own being, never losing its identity in pure consciousness. Once again, this is a view that is contrary to that of Sankara, who had maintained that the entity referred to as ‘I’ has two parts of which one is pure consciousness and the other the individual ‘ego’ which is dependent on the pure consciousness. Ramanuja, in contrast, denies that there is a self that is also pure consciousness. He argues that the self is simply the individuated ego that persists through times of consciousness and unconsciousness, and that consciousness itself cannot also be the subject that is sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious. He writes:
we clearly see that this agent [the subject of consciousness] is permanent [constant], while its attribute, i.e. consciousness, not differing here from joy, grief, and the like, rises, persists for some time, and then comes to an end . . . The judgement ‘I am conscious’ reveals an ‘I’ distinguished by consciousness; and to declare that it refers only to a state of consciousness – which is a mere attribute – is no better than to say the judgement ‘Devadatta carries a stick’ is about the stick only.8
Ramanuja’s insistence not only on the reality of the distinction between subject and object but also on their fundamental non-duality means that he has to demonstrate both the logical feasibility of that conception of reality and its consonance with holy writ. He has to show that Brahman is transcendent as well as immanent and that such conclusions are derivable from the scriptures, which, he holds, are fully coherent and consistent when properly understood.
He therefore starts by affirming the supreme reality of Brahman. We cannot comprehend the glory of Brahman, he says, because it is infinite; it is free from limitation and from any constraints of substance, time and place, and it is unchangingly perfect. The world is the body of Brahman and the texts that deny Brahman’s possession of attributes are denying only false or finite attributes. What such texts are repudiating, he points out, is the notion of any reality that is separate from the unified reality of Brahman. At the same time he rejects the interpretation of the famous scriptural pronouncement ‘That art thou’ (tat tvam asi)9 that takes it to be a declaration of the absolute oneness of Brahman with the individual soul. He argues that if there were not some difference between the two it would not be possible to assert their union: they are two meanings belonging to one substance. This kind of thinking is the basis of Ramanuja’s theism. The distinction between Brahman and the individual soul ascribes personhood to the power that is Brahman and provides a basis for a devotional relationship between God and the souls of the world.
Ramanuja makes it clear that the individual soul is to be thought of not as a falsity or aberration but as something real, unique and eternal. It is distinct from the body although, in its human manifestation, it is bound to a body as knower and agent. It remains essentially unchanged even though it is born or reborn many times into the sensible world. It is an aspect of, though not identical with, Brahman. God, he argues, bestows free will on souls but also acts according to laws that are the expression of his own nature. These laws relate to the rewarding of virtue and the punishment of evil in accordance with righteousness. Kharma, the law governing the kind of rebirth a soul must undergo as a consequence of its previous existence, is not independent of God but expresses his will. God is therefore the source of everything, but not the cause of evil. In discussing this aspect of Ramanuja’s theology, the twentieth-century Indian philosopher Radhakrishnan cites the following scriptural passage:
The divine being . . . having engaged in sport befitting his might and greatness and having settled that work is of a twofold nature, good and evil, and having bestowed on all individual souls, bodies and sense organs enabling them to enter on such work and the power to control their bodies and organs, and having himself entered into their souls as their inner self, abides with them . . . The souls endowed with all the powers imparted to them by the Lord . . . apply themselves on their own part and in accordance with their own wishes to work out good and evil . . . The Lord then recognizing him who performs good acts as one who conforms to his commands, blesses him with piety and wealth, happiness and release, while he makes him who transgresses his commands experience the opposites of all these.10
According to Ramanuja, moksha, or the soul’s release from the body, is not the end of the self but the disappearance of limitations that were barriers to community with God. When release is obtained, all desire goes, so that return to samsara, the wheel, is impossible. The capacity for intelligence and holy joy is unimpeded and all souls become alike in that they are freed from the egoism of particular bodies. This does not mean that a soul loses its individuality but that the distinctions between animals, plants, men and gods no longer obtain. The liberated soul is able to give expression to its nature without the impediment of a body, thereby perfecting itself as an element in the whole which is at once a unity and an interrelated community of souls. The soul never becomes absorbed into God. For Ramanuja it is an atomic entity that retains its individual nature eternally, even in its ultimate perfection. He regards the longing of the mystic for a complete loss of personality in a union with God as an impossibility. Radhakrishnan has remarked: ‘In the nature of things, Ramanuja contends, evidence of such absorption into God is impossible. He who has become God cannot return to tell us of his experience: he who narrates his story cannot become God.’11
Ramanuja’s philosophy is a timely reminder of the fact that Hindu thought does not, as many are inclined to believe, adhere uniformly to a theory of abstract monism, which is the general view that only one substance is real and that the total absorption of the individual into the one is the only true value. In place of such a monism he expounds the theistic conception of a relationship between God and souls which allows for the full reality of both and the complete dependence of the latter on the former while denying the possibility of their identity.
Ramanuja’s theism exhibits the difficulties to which theism in general is subject: those of giving an account of the exact nature of the relationship of God’s attributes to God and of the relationships obtaining between the attributes themselves; that of describing the relationship between individual souls and God; in short, the difficulty of setting out the relationship between the finite and the infinite, the changing and the changeless. But his arguments commanded intellectual respect as well as intuitive agreement. His doctrine made room for the worship and adoration of the Supreme Power without abandoning either the possibility of union with the Lord or the fundamental monism so strongly asserted by Hindu scripture. At the same time he was able to offer a philosophical structure that many must have found more satisfying, more comprehensively explanatory, than the austere conclusions of Sankara.
1 Vedanta is one of the six main systems of Hindu philosophy. It is based on the Upanisads, the oldest Hindu scriptures.
2 For a fuller understanding of this development the essay on Sankara (pp. 68–72) should be read before or immediately after this essay.
3 The word ‘theism’ refers to any philosophical position that affirms a belief in a transcendent and personal God.
4 S. Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore (eds), A Source Book in Indian Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957, p. 543.
5 op. cit., p. 545.
6 ibid.
7 op. cit., p. 544.
8 op. cit., p. 547.
9 There are numerous interpretations of the meaning of the Sanskrit phrase ‘tat tvam asi’ (‘That are thou’), from the Chandogya Upanisad. It was invoked by Sankara to endorse his monistic doctrine. For a fuller exposition of Ramanuja’s arguments opposing a monistic interpretation see Radhakrishnan and Moore, op. cit., pp. 551–555.
10 S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, 2nd edn, 2 vols, Vol. II, London, Allen & Unwin, 1929, p. 694, footnote.
11 op. cit., p. 712.
Badarayana, Sankara, Madhva
Sribhasya (Great Commentary on the Vedanta Sutra)
Vedanta Sara (Essence of the Vedanta)
There is an Indian edition of Ramanuja’s works:
Sri-Bhagavad-Ramanuja-Grandha-Mala, ed. P. B. Annangara-charya Swamy, Kanchipuram, 1956
See also:
Thibaut, G. (trans.), The Vedanta Sutras, with the Commentary of Ramanuja, Vol. XLVIII, Pt III, Oxford, Oxford University Press, Sacred Books of the East series, 1964; Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1956
Dasgupta, Surendranath, A History of Indian Philosophy, 5 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1922–1955; repr. Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press 1975; Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1976
Puligandla, R., Fundamentals of Indian Philosophy, Nashville, NY, Abingdon Press, 1975
Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, Indian Philosophy, 2 vols, Vol. 2, London, Allen & Unwin, 1923–1927
Sharma, C., Indian Philosophy: A Critical Survey, New York, Barnes & Noble, 1962, ch.xvii
Ward, Keith, Images of Eternity, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1987