Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Religious Studies – Anthology
202The most important of the Srivaisnavas is Ramanuja, like the previous two the
acarya, the authoritative teac her, of the c ommunity, and involved in the
administ rat ion of t he Srirangam t emple. He is t radit ionally said t o have lived from
1017 to 1137 A.D., but his birth has probably been artificially brought forward to
c onnec t direc tly with Yamuna, who is said to have died in 1038, for t he t radit ion is
that Ramanuja suc c eeded Yamuna as a young man to the headship of Srirangam.
The undoubted intellec tual link between the two is thus popularly turned into a
direc t link by suc c ession. Ramanuja is held to have travelled throughout India to
disseminate his system and according to tradition had to retreat from Srirangam
bec ause of the hostility of the ruler and went to Melkote in Karnataka, where he
organised a strong c entre of Vaisnava learning.
Ramanuja wrote nine works, all in Sanskrit (a move away from the Alvars’ use
of T amil in t he int erest s of a wider and more t radit ional audienc e); t hese c onsist of
three major philosophical works, two briefer commentaries, three devotional works
on the theme of surrender to the deity and a manual of daily worship. T he first of
Ramanuja’s three philosophic al works is designed to show that the Upanishads do
not teac h the stric t monism propounded by Sankara and strives to integrate a
Vedanta position with devotion to a personal deity. Ramanuja ’s standpoint is
essentially different from both Sankara’s and Bhaskara’s in assigning a definite and
ultimately valid reality to the world and its two components of matter (prakrti) and
souls (atman). T his is most fully expressed in his doc t rine t hat t he deit y st ands t o
the world of atman and prakrti in the relation of a soul to the body whic h forms its
attribute. Ramanuja develops this theme and others in his other two major
philosophic al works, c omment aries on t he Bhagavadgita and the Brahmasutra.
Ramanuja c onc entrates on the relation of the world to the deity, arguing that
the deity is real and independent but that souls are also real but totally dependent
on the deity. As the body of god, the world is his instrument and also part of his
self-expression, while, just as the soul c ontrols its body, so the deity is the inner
c ont roller of individual souls; Ramanuja nec essarily adopt s a broad definit ion of a
body as anything whic h c an be c ontrolled by and is subordinate to a c onsc ious
atman. The self-body analogy also serves to distinguish the deity, who for
Ramanuja is the fullest expression of the impersonal Absolute, Brahman, from his
dependent bodily parts or attributes, and the dependence of an attribute on its
substance is compared to the relation of an adjective to the noun it qualifies;
Ramanuja’s system as a philosophy is therefore known as the ‘qualified Advaita’,
Visist advait a. Sinc e atman and prakrti constitute the body of the deity, their
func tioning to further the realisation of Brahman or the deity is easily explic able on
t his analogy. Similarly Ramanuja int erpret s for example t he Upanisadic saying tat
tvam asi by dec laring t hat sinc e all spirit ual and mat erial ent it ies c onst it ut e t he
body of Brahman, Brahman thus embodied is denoted by all words and so both
pronouns refer to Brahman, tat ‘that’ as the absolute, the first c ause, and tvam
‘you’ as t he inner c ont roller modified by t he embodied soul.
The self-body analogy also emphasises the inseparable and organic
relationship between Visnu, or Narayana as Ramanuja more frequent ly c alls him,
and the world, as well as indic ating the total and eternal dependenc e of the world
on the will of the deity. Ramanuja also uses it to bring out the all-inc lusive nature
of the supreme self suggested in the Bhagavadgita. He thus simult aneously affirms
the reality of the world and therefore of individual selves and its subservience to
the divine purpose, whic h Ramanuja explains in terms of lila, lit erally t he deit y’s