- Length
- 800 pagesThibaut's English, Sacred Books of the East vol. 48, 1904
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Sri Bhasya
The reply that non-dualism never fully answered. Ramanuja agreed that reality is one and denied that oneness means the absence of difference, and he opened his case by asking where exactly the ignorance that Shankara's system depends on is supposed to be located. Four centuries separate the two commentaries and they are on the same five hundred and fifty-five aphorisms.
- Date
- c. 1100-1120
- Author
- Ramanuja
- Region
- Srirangam, southern India
- Language
- Sanskrit
- 1904 English, George Thibaut Sacred Books of the East 48; public domain and still the only complete English version Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Commentary
- Method
- Sutra and commentary — A compressed root text carried by its commentary
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 375 years
The philosophical foundation of Srivaishnavism, a living tradition with millions of adherents, and the most serious internal challenge non-dualist Vedanta has faced.
What the book says
A commentary on the same five hundred and fifty-five aphorisms Shankara had commented on four centuries earlier, written to show that they teach something else. It opens with an extended attack rather than an exposition: before offering his own reading, Ramanuja sets out a series of objections to the doctrine of ignorance on which non-dualism rests, asking where such ignorance could reside, what its nature could be, what could conceal a reality that is by definition self-luminous, and how knowledge could remove something that was never a thing. Having cleared the ground, he proposes his own account. Brahman is one, and is the only reality, but it is not undifferentiated: souls and matter are real, and they stand to brahman as body stands to a self - genuinely distinct, entirely dependent, never separate. The world is not an appearance to be seen through but the body of God, and to know it correctly is not to dissolve it. Liberation is not the removal of an error but the attainment of an eternal relation, reached through devotion and divine grace rather than through knowledge alone. Every one of the sutras is then construed to support this.
What it argues
That brahman is a unity qualified by real distinctions rather than a unity that excludes them. Souls are genuinely many and genuinely conscious; matter is genuinely there; and both are related to brahman as a body is related to the self that animates it - dependent for their existence, incapable of acting independently, but not illusory and not identical. This lets Ramanuja take the Upanishadic statements of identity seriously without denying the world, since a self can truly say that the body is itself while the body remains distinct. It also makes devotion intelligible: if the individual soul is simply brahman under a misapprehension, there is nobody to love God, and Ramanuja regards that consequence as a decisive objection.
What it answered
Shankara's doctrine of ignorance, at the point where it is weakest. The objections are pressed in sequence and each is hard: ignorance cannot inhere in brahman, which is pure awareness and would then be ignorant; it cannot inhere in the individual soul, since that soul's separate existence is what ignorance is invoked to explain; it cannot be real, or non-dualism collapses into a dualism of brahman and ignorance; it cannot be unreal, or it could not produce anything; and it cannot be indeterminable, since that is a description of a difficulty rather than an answer to it.
How it argues
By refutation first and construal second, which is a deliberate reversal. Rather than presenting his reading and defending it against objections, Ramanuja begins by dismantling the established interpretation, and only then offers his own - an order that treats the rival position as the thing standing in the way rather than as one option among several. The commentary that follows is patient and thorough, taking each aphorism in turn and showing that his construal handles it without strain, which is the standard by which Vedantic commentaries are judged.
The moment
Twelfth-century southern India, in a devotional culture centred on temple worship and on Tamil hymns of intense personal attachment to God. Ramanuja's achievement was to give that devotion a Vedantic philosophy adequate to it, in Sanskrit and on the tradition's own terms, and the school he founded is inseparable from the temple institutions it grew in. His biography is better attested than Shankara's, though still heavily overlaid with hagiography.
How it travelled
Within its own tradition, robustly, and outside it hardly at all until recently. Srivaishnavism has been continuously institutionalised in southern Indian temples since Ramanuja's lifetime and its scholarly production has never stopped. But Western study of Indian philosophy encountered Shankara first and took non-dualism as the Indian position, so this school arrived late and is still comparatively unknown - Thibaut's 1904 translation remains the only complete English version, which for a work of this importance is a striking gap.
The strongest objection
That the body-self relation does the same work ignorance did and is no easier to state. If souls and matter are real, distinct and dependent, then brahman is not one in the sense the Upanishads seem to require, and calling the relation inseparable does not by itself show how a genuinely distinct thing can be inseparable from what it is distinct from. Non-dualists press exactly here: the analogy with a body is illuminating only if we already understand how a self relates to a body, which is itself an unsolved problem. Ramanuja has bought intelligibility about devotion and the world at the cost of a relation his opponents say is no clearer than the ignorance he rejected.
Why read it
For the opening objections, which take a few pages and are the most concentrated piece of destructive argument in Vedanta - and then for the constructive account, which offers something rare: a philosophy in which the world is real, God is personal, and none of this requires giving up the claim that reality is ultimately one.
- First printed
- 1888
- First in English
- 1904
- Digitised
- Partial
The commentary generated its own tradition of subcommentaries, principally by Sudarsana Suri and Vedanta Desika, and the school has remained textually productive without interruption since.
Thibaut's 1904 English is public domain. There is no widely available modern complete English version, which is one reason the school is less known in the West than its importance warrants.
Where it stands
Live in every sense: a functioning religious tradition, a continuing commentarial literature in Sanskrit, and a philosophical position that recent comparative work has begun to treat as a serious alternative to the non-dualism that has dominated the Western picture of Vedanta.
On quoting this book
The Sanskrit is public domain and Thibaut's English is too, but the technical vocabulary in that version is rendered in terms now regarded as misleading. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Ramanuja's dates are traditional and impossible as given. How much of the Sri Bhasya draws on the lost work of the earlier commentator Bodhayana, whom Ramanuja names as his authority, cannot be determined, since that work does not survive. Whether his reading of the sutras is closer to Badarayana's intention than Shankara's is argued, with some modern scholars inclined to think it is. And whether the seven objections actually defeat the doctrine of ignorance or only show that it cannot be stated in the terms Ramanuja demands is the standing dispute between the two schools, and remains open.