Appearance
9.9 — The Answers to Shankara: Ramanuja, Madhva, and the Bhakti Turn
Shankara's system is rigorous and it has a hole in it, and two people put their fingers in it.
Ramanuja
Eleventh to twelfth century, from Tamil country, and his system is called Vishishtadvaita — "qualified non-dualism."
The claim: there is one reality, and it has parts and qualities.
The objections to Shankara
And they are good, and they are worth having.
On maya. If it is real, then there are two things and non-dualism is false. If it is unreal, it cannot produce the appearance of a world. Where does it reside — in the ultimate reality, which would make that reality flawed, or in the individual self, which is itself supposed to be produced by it? Ramanuja presses this hard and Shankara's tradition never fully answers it.
On the texts. The Upanishads say tat tvam asi, and they also say a great deal about a personal God, about devotion, and about a relationship between the worshipper and the worshipped. Shankara treats that material as provisional teaching for those not ready for the higher truth. Ramanuja's objection: you are choosing which half of your scripture to take literally, and the choice is doing the work rather than the text.
And on the ethics. A system in which individual selves are not finally real cannot take another person's suffering seriously enough, and the devotional relationship it dismisses as provisional is what actually changes people.
His alternative
The image is a body.
The individual selves and the material world are the body of God, and God is the self of that body.
One reality — the body and the self of a body are not two things. And genuinely differentiated — your hand is not your liver and neither is you, and all three are one organism.
So: you are not identical with God and you are not separate from God. You are a real, distinct part of one whole.
And the practical consequence is the point: a relationship is possible. You cannot love something you are identical with, and Ramanuja's system is built to make devotion coherent.
He also did something institutionally significant. He opened temple worship and instruction to groups excluded by caste, and the tradition records him doing it against considerable opposition — including, in one famous story, climbing a temple tower and shouting a secret initiation formula to everybody assembled below, having been told it would send him to hell for revealing it. His reported answer was that if his going to hell saved all these people, it was a good exchange.
Madhva
Thirteenth century, and he goes all the way to the other end.
Dvaita — dualism. There are two, and they are permanently distinct.
God is one thing. Individual selves are other things. Matter is another. They are eternally different and no amount of realisation makes you identical with God.
Madhva lists five eternal distinctions: between God and self, God and matter, self and self, self and matter, and matter and matter.
And his position on liberation is that it is a relationship of eternal service and joy, not a merging.
One genuinely unusual feature: Madhva holds that souls have inherent natures and that some are permanently unqualified for liberation — a position with no real parallel elsewhere in Indian thought and one that most of the tradition found unacceptable.
The three positions, seen together
And notice what the argument is actually about. All three read the same texts. The disagreement is about which passages are the final teaching and which are preparatory, which is the standard shape of every interpretive dispute in every tradition.
The bhakti movement
And then the thing that mattered more than all three of them put together.
From roughly the sixth century in Tamil country, and spreading north over the following thousand years, a movement of devotional poets.
They were not philosophers. They wrote in the local languages rather than Sanskrit — Tamil, then Kannada, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi — and they addressed God directly, personally, and frequently with complaint.
And the social composition is the point.
The Tamil Alvars and Nayanars included a farmer, an outcaste, and a woman. Basava in Karnataka rejected caste and temple worship outright. Kabir was a weaver, raised Muslim, who attacked both Hindu and Muslim orthodoxy and is claimed by both. Mirabai was a Rajput princess who left her marriage to sing to Krishna and was persecuted for it. Tukaram was a grain-seller. Ravidas was a leatherworker, at the very bottom of the caste order, whose verses are in the Sikh scripture. Nanak founded a religion out of it (9.11). Chaitanya in Bengal produced ecstatic public singing that anyone could join.
What they had in common:
No qualification required. No Sanskrit, no priest, no ritual, no birth.
A personal, direct, emotional relationship, frequently in the language of love, longing or complaint. The Radha material (4.6) is this movement's central image.
And explicit attack on the ritual establishment. Kabir's verses on the futility of pilgrimage, of ritual bathing, and of the pretensions of both priests and mullahs are savage and very funny.
Why bhakti won
Because it solved the problem Shankara's system created.
Advaita requires philosophical capacity. Bhakti requires nothing.
And it addressed a need the other systems structurally could not. A person in grief does not need a persistence test (9.8). They need somebody to talk to — and that is exactly what 4.7's gopis told Uddhava when he brought them the philosophy.
The Gita had already provided the theological warrant (5.7): a leaf, a flower, a fruit, water; and the door open to everybody regardless of birth.
The bhakti poets took that verse seriously and built a religion on it.
The honest assessment
Three things.
Bhakti was the most socially liberating movement in Indian religious history, and it is where the tradition's own best arguments against caste were made — not by reformers importing an external standard, but by devotees inside it (6.10 for the Buddhist parallel).
And it did not abolish caste. The movements repeatedly re-hardened into sects with their own hierarchies within a generation or two of their founders, which is what happens to every such movement everywhere.
And philosophically it is thin, on purpose. The poets were not making arguments and would have said so. What they produced was a body of poetry of extraordinary quality and a demonstration that the religious life did not require anybody's permission.
What to carry from this page
Ramanuja's objection is the one to remember: if maya is real there are two things, and if it is unreal it cannot produce anything. The strongest argument against the most successful system.
Ask which passages a tradition treats as literal and which as provisional. That choice, not the text, is where the disagreement actually lives.
A movement that requires no qualification will always beat one that requires philosophical capacity, and it will always re-harden into a hierarchy within two generations.
And the poets were right about one thing above all: a person in trouble does not need an argument. They need somebody to talk to, and the philosophy has no answer to that.
Next: 9.10 — the school that said all of it was invented by priests to make a living, and which was argued with seriously for two thousand years.