102 CONCEPTIONS OF ULTIMATE REALITYAdvaita Vedanta Hinduism
Three major philosophers of Vedantic persuasion, with generally suggested
dates, are Shankara (788–820CE), Ramanuja (1017–1137CE), and Madhva
(1197–1276CE). Shankara holds to Advaita Vedanta or Unqualified Non-
Dualism; Ramanuja holds to Vsistadvaita or Qualified Non-Dualism; Madhva
holds to Dvaita or Unqualified Dualism.
It may be helpful to understand Shankara’s views in contrast to those of
Ramanuja and Madhva. Let the world be all bodies and all minds other than
God. Ramanuja holds that God and the world are in a relationship of
asymmetric dependence – the world depends on God but not God on the
world. He then takes the world to be God’s body in a somewhat technical sense
of body. The world is God’s body in the sense that God can affect any part of
the world without having to do so by affecting some other part of it. One
might think of one’s own body as the part of the physical world that one can
move without having to move anything else in order to move it; in order
otherwise to affect the physical world, one has to move one’s body. All
dependent minds and bodies are related in this way to God; for any mind or
any body, God can affect it without having to make use of some other mind or
body in order to do so. Madhva rejects the notion that the world is God’s body,
thinking that this makes it sound as if God were dependent for existence and/
or action on the world, whereas he holds that God exists independently and is
capable of thought without needing any world for his self-conscious activities.
Strictly, the disagreement between Ramanuja and Madhva here seems to lie in
how one is to understand the notion of God’s body; understood as Madhva
takes it, Ramanuja too would reject the idea.
What Ramanuja and Madhva have in common – the notion that there
exists an independent God and a dependent world – Shankara rejects. What
exists for Shankara is nirguna or qualityless Brahman, though what appears
to exist is a multiplicity of physical objects and persons and a personal God.
Shankara sometimes explains his view by using analogies with sensory
perception. For example, suppose it is the case that:
1 There is no man in the shadows.
2 Bimal (a typical perceiver) sincerely reports, based on his sensory
experience, “I see a man in the shadows.”
3 What really is in the shadows is only a coat hanging on a hook.
Then
4 There is something that Bimal sees.