Madhva’s thought marks the third stage of the development of Indian Vedantic philosophy as it moved from the monism of Sankara to the qualified nondualism of Ramanuja and thence to Madhva’s own conception of a fundamental dualism of God and souls and a plurality of world substances.2
Madhva maintained that God created all souls and substances and that each soul is changeless and uniquely different from all others. He held that although souls may exhibit some properties which they share with some other souls, there is no universal property that serves as the basis of all souls. He saw reality as consisting of an infinite number of substances, each uniquely different from all others. Accordingly, his thought is much concerned with drawing distinctions and this feature of it established the conditions for a theology of a devotional relationship between God and individual souls, thereby imparting to his philosophy a characteristic not found in the earlier Vedantic tradition as exemplified by Sankara.
Madhva wrote thirty-seven works of various kinds, known collectively as Sarva-Mula. Among them are commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, on the Upanisads, and on the first forty hymns of the Rig Veda. 3 His metaphysics, logic and epistemology are expounded in ten short monographs, Dasa-Prakaranas. There is general agreement that his style is somewhat terse, but the difficulties of understanding his works have been eased by commentaries written by Jayatirtha4 in the fourteenth century.
Madhva was born near Udipi, not far from Mangalore on the west coast of India south of Bombay. As a young man he was famed for his prodigious gift for reciting the scriptures and for his inspirational teaching and interpretation of them. He travelled extensively in southern India, debating theological and philosophical issues and developing his own stringent opposition to the monistic doctrine of Sankara. Subsequently he toured in North India where he endured a measure of persecution for his views, including the burning of his books. He established a temple at Udipi and with it a doctrinal tradition that has been passed down through a long line of disciples and successors and that flourishes still.5 Many commentators have detected a Christian element in his life and teachings and have sought, without success, to discover evidence of some contact with Christian influences.6 There is little doubt that he was a charismatic teacher who was profoundly devout, learned and inspiring. His death has been described as follows:
Charging his disciples with his last message in the closing words of his favourite Upanisad, the Aitareya, not to sit still but to go forth and preach and spread the truth among the deserving, Sri Madhva disappeared from view, on the ninth day of the bright half of the month of Magha.7
The monistic doctrine of Sankara which Madhva rejected had postulated an ultimate reality that was an undivided and spiritual whole. Sankara had explained the variety and multiplicity of the physical universe by describing it as the appearance, rather than the reality, of God, or Brahman. In rejecting this account, Madhva did not deny that reality was one in the sense that the world is Brahman’s world but, in opposition to Sankara, he maintained that the physical universe and its individual beings are ultimately and fully real, and not merely appearances of Brahman: there is a dualism of God and God’s universe, yet, at the same time, an ultimate unity that is grounded in the fact that the physical order is entirely dependent on God. He says: ‘There are two orders of reality, the independent and the dependent.’8
Madhva develops his metaphysical system by employing a series of distinctions. He first identifies three main elements of reality: God, souls and matter, the latter two together comprising the dependent element in a fundamentally dualistic reality. He then names a fivefold set of differences that obtain between the three elements. These differences are between God and the individual soul, between God and matter, between individual souls and matter, between soul and soul, and between material thing and material thing. Again, these differences are not merely apparent, as Sankara would have deemed them to be, but are willed by God and are therefore real and perceivable. The profound difference between souls and God is that souls are wholly dependent on God while God is an entirely independent reality. Madhva cites some words from the Garuda Purana: ‘There is no equality in experience between the Lord and the self; for the Lord is all-knowing, all-powerful, and absolute; while the self is of little understanding, of little power and absolutely dependent.’9 Souls and God are nevertheless alike in that, despite the material and external aspects of the former, both are fundamentally unchanging. God determines what each individual soul is and from the unique constitution of each soul there flow the particular MADHVA 78 life and events that follow logically from it: the course of an individual life is the necessary consequence or realization of what God has ordained. This aspect of Madhva’s thought bears a resemblance to the philosophy of the seventeenth-century western philosopher Leibniz, who held that each individual is an aggregate of unique monads each of which necessarily unfolds in a way already contained within its constitution.
Madhva’s pluralistic ontology, which sees reality as consisting of an infinite number of different things or substances, gave rise to a doctrine known as the theory of relative particulars. Madhva rejected the view that universals are real entities and explained the use of universal terms such as ‘round’ or ‘triangular’ by saying that such terms serve to indicate similarities between things. Accordingly, he maintained, qualities are to be understood as aspects of substances rather than as distinct entities. However, this suggests that a quality is actually identical with the substance of which it is an aspect, and that if the quality disappears then the substance also disappears. Madhva counters this difficulty by saying that any substance is a conglomeration of an indefinite number of particulars, particulars being the kind of features we refer to when we say, ‘This is triangular’, ‘This is red’, and so on. Those particulars referred to in a description of a substance depend on the point of view from which the substance is described; thus they are particulars that are relative to the point of view. This theory is part of Madhva’s doctrine of visesa, or particularity, an ontological principle through which he sought to give an account of identity and difference in things. He wanted to maintain that there is no real inconsistency between affirming, on the one hand, a unique particularity for each thing and, on the other, a capability for identity within inseparable wholes, as in the case of a substance and its attributes. Visesa is the principle that accommodates such claims. In particular, it goes some way to providing a resolution of problems that assail theism concerning the exact relationship between God and God’s unlimited attributes.
In common with other schools of Indian philosophy, Madhva nominates three sources, or pramanas, of knowledge: sense-perception, inferential reasoning and scripture. Knowledge, he maintains, requires both a knower and an object that is known, and it is possible to have knowledge of things as they actually are. Truth is the exact agreement of knowledge with its object. He argues that we must accept that there is genuine knowledge, pointing out that if we do not, then we have nothing with which to contrast falsity and illusion. There is no reason to suppose that the truth of things is other than our tested views and the words of the scriptures affirm it to be, and he cites a passage from the Gita XVI.8.: ‘Without beginning or end (through eternity) this world has continued to exist as such. There is nothing here to be questioned. In no place or time was this world ever observed otherwise by anybody in the past, nor will it be, in the future.’10 He further maintains that when we are mistaken or deluded in our beliefs about the physical universe this does not mean that the physical universe is an illusion, but only that we are in error: we are making a mistake about something that does exist, thinking it is something it is not rather than conjuring something out of nothing. He describes ignorance, or avidya, as a kind of negative substance that clouds natural intelligence. It is not uniformly similar for everyone but is peculiar to each individual, the avidya of one person being different from that of another. Similarly, each person who is able to seek release from samsara, the wheel of life, has a particular way of apprehending Brahman and, accordingly, traverses an individual path to knowledge and salvation. For Madhva, senseperception, although limited in that it is able to yield knowledge only of a certain kind, is a valid form of knowledge provided that it is acquired under the correct conditions. He points out that it is absurd to name perception as a source of knowledge and then try to insist, as some Advaitins did, that it is ultimately falsifiable. However, he concedes that perception requires a MADHVA 79 final arbiter and invokes the notion of what he calls the ‘the inner witness’, or saksi, the intuitively perceiving agent capable of comprehending both the knowledge and its validity. We have to think of the saksi as a fundamental structure of the human mind: that element of consciousness that includes awareness of space, time and self, that can conceptualize the processes of perception and inference, and comprehend the validity of knowledge. The saksi itself is infallible and not subject to sublation or any other kind of correction;11 it is that which corrects the discrepancies of sense and memory. However, the saksi is not always able to be active. It includes the capacity to perceive space and distance; but if, for example, a particular distance is such that it affects the integrity of an individual’s perception then the judgement of the saksi is held in abeyance, thereby creating the condition we call doubt: it is unable either to confirm or disconfirm what is being perceived.
Inference, according to Madhva, is a process that can organize, test and reinforce knowledge but cannot extend it. Like perception, it is unable to understand or penetrate the mysteries and meanings of the universe. For knowledge of the profundities of reality itself we must rely absolutely on the Vedic literature which Madhva regards as infallible and wholly authoritative in virtue of being uncreated by any personal author.
Madhva’s distinctions between independent and dependent reality provide the conditions of a devotional relationship between God and human souls. We know, he maintains, even though we cannot perceive God, that we are different from God; we declare the difference in acknowledging that God is to be worshipped. He cites the scriptures: ‘the Lord is said to stand (to be merely present) shining; while the self is subject to the experience of the consequences of his works: (thereby the difference between the Lord and the self is declared).’12 Since all individual souls are eternal, and since God, or Brahman, is eternal, the differences are also eternal. It follows that no individual soul, in achieving release from the wheel of life (samsara), can ever be identical with God in the way described by Sankara; that is, as an undifferentiated unity that precludes the possibility of a relationship between a soul and God.
Madhva’s rejection of the doctrine of the soul’s absorption into Brahman constitutes a radical and controversial element in his thought. It had significant implications for the way in which the scriptures were to be understood. In particular, it meant that Madhva must show that he was not denying what was declared in that best known of all scriptural pronouncements, ‘Tat tvam asi’ (That art thou), in which ‘Tat’ is generally taken to refer to Brahman so that the words are understood as an affirmation of the identity of the human soul with Brahman.13 Madhva’s treatment of this difficulty is an extended one, not to be explored in detail here but, broadly, he claims that ‘Tat tvam asi’ is not an assertion of the identity of God and soul but a statement that points out that the essence of the soul has qualities that resemble God’s qualities. His interpretations of other passages that seem to suggest that undifferentiated union is possible are similarly emendatory; they reject or qualify apparent claims to absolute oneness and offer instead an understanding of them in terms of close fellowship or devotional accord with Brahman. Madhva draws attention to scriptural passages and to commentaries on them, such as the following, that lend support to his view:
The supreme Lord is absolutely separate from the whole class of selves; for He is inconceivable, exalted far above the selves, most high, perfect in excellences and he is eternally blessed, while from that Lord this self has to seek release from bondage.14
Madhva is unique among the great Hindu thinkers in holding that not all souls, or jivas, are able to find release. He describes three kinds of jiva. The first kind comprises those that are eternally free; the second, those who have achieved release from samsara. The third kind includes both those destined to find release eventually and those who will never achieve it. These last will enter hell or darkness or be bound in continual rebirth to the wheel of samsara. According to Madhva, release is not the mere cessation of suffering but a positive experience of joy and liberation. Through the grace of Brahman it may be succeeded by moksha, the salvation that is possible once desires and ignorance have fallen away, and which restores the soul to its primordial condition of bliss.
Knowledge and devotion are the means by which the soul may aspire to moksha, and Madhva issues numerous prescriptions for the acquisition of knowledge and the practice of devotional meditation. Yet his advocacy of the life of striving and aspiration has to be seen in the context of his account of God as the maker and controller of the cosmos and as the one supreme Lord who determines the monadic constituents, and hence the development and destiny, the karma, of everything, including that of the souls who are to be eternally ignorant and irredeemable. Thus there is a tension in Madhva’s theology between his concept of a loving and devotional relationship linking a God of grace and human souls, and his predestinarian concept of God’s exertion of supreme power. The twentieth-century Indian philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrish-nan has commented on this tension in the following way:
the theory of election is fraught with great danger to ethical life . . . The moral character of God is much compromised and the qualities of divine justice and divine love are emptied of all meaning and value. Individual effort loses its point, since whether one believes oneself to be the elect or the non-elect, one is bound to lapse into indifferentism or apathy . . . In the absence of knowledge we may at least have hope. But this theory will overwhelm us in despair and raise the question: Is not God playing a practical joke on us, when he implants in us a desire for heaven while making us unfit for it?15
Madhva’s philosophy of dualism, realism and empiricism, although less widely known than Sankara’s spiritual monism, marks a high intellectual point in Vedantic thought and his teaching concerning the devotional aspects of Hinduism has been significantly influential. After his death his writings generated a profusion of dialectical literature which, over the centuries, has fostered and sustained a continuing interest in his philosophy and theology, and a critical appreciation of his scholarship, not only in the Madhva community of southern India but, increasingly, among a much wider community of scholars.
1 I have given a traditional birth date of 1199 CE for Madhva but there is considerable uncertainty about it and about the length of his life. Some have attributed to him a life of 95 years; more usually he is reported to have lived to the age of 79. There is also some evidence to suggest that he may have been born in 1238 CE.
2 A broad outline of the development of Vedantic philosophy may be obtained by reading the essays in this book on Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva in that order. See also the Introduction to Indian philosophy (pp. 39–42).
3 For further detail of the Hindu scriptures see the Introduction to Indian philosophy in this book (pp. 39–42). In general, the Vedantan thinkers regarded the Vedas as primary texts and all subsequent writings as secondary, but Madhva does not observe this distinction.
4 Jayatirtha (1365–1388 CE) dedicated many years of his life to the scholarly interpretation of Madhva. His commentaries are systematic, detailed and stylistically superb, and he possessed great dialectical skill. An account of his life and work is in B.N.K. Sharma, History of the Dvaita School of Vedanta and Its Literature, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1981.
5 Twentieth-century followers of Madhva are to be found in Karnataka. Many of them have the surname of Rao.
6 Ninian Smart, in Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy, London, Allen & Unwin, Muirhead Library of Philosophy, 1964, pp. 118– 119, has noted that there are legendary accounts of Madhva’s life that describe him as walking on water and as figuring in other incidents reminiscent of events recounted in the New Testament. The association is strengthened by the fact that there were early Christian settlements in the Mangalore area. A doctrine of predestination, otherwise uncharacteristic of Indian thought, is also attributed to Madhva and has been taken to be an indication of Christian influence. Nothing conclusive emerges from these conjectures.
7 Sharma, op. cit., p. 83.
8 See M. Sivaram, Ananda and the Three Great Acaryas, New Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1976, p. 132.
9 Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore (eds), A Source Book in Indian Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957, pp. 558–559.
10 ibid. pp. 562–563.
11 Sublation is a concept employed by Sankara to describe the progress from error to truth that takes place when experience gradually corrects errors of judgement. See the essay on Sankara in this book (pp. 68–72).
12 Radhakrishnan and Moore, op. cit., p. 560.
13 Tat tvam asi (‘That art thou’) is a Sanskrit phrase used as a mantra in Hinduism. Tat refers to Brahman, and tvam (thou) to the individual soul when it is understood as an aspect of Brahman and, as such, is known as Atman. The phrase is found in the Chandogya Upanisad VI.8.6.
14 From the Kausitaki Upanisad, quoted in Radhakrishnan and Moore, op. cit., p. 565.
15 Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, 2 vols, Vol. II, London, Allen & Unwin, 1932, pp. 750–751.
Of his thirty-seven works the following are the most important:
For a translation of some of his writings see Vedantasutras with the Commentary of Sri Madhwachanya, trans. S. Subba Rao, Tirupati, Sri Vyasa Press, 1936.
His minor works include verses in praise of Krishna, works on ritual and a compendium of daily conduct and religious practice.
Sankara, Ramanuja and the Introduction to Indian philosophy
Dasgupta, Surendranath, A History of Indian Philosophy, 5 vols, Vol. IV, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973
Lott, Eric, Vedantic Approaches to God, London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1980
Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, Indian Philosophy, 2 vols, Vol. II, London, Allen & Unwin, 1932
Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli and Moore, Charles A. (eds), A Source Book in Indian Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957