Sankara and Ramanuja: Double Celebration - Sankara & Ramanuja  

By Pranav Khullar  

Sankara and Ramanuja: Double Celebration - Sankara & Ramanuja  

Adi Sankaracharya and Ramanujacharya were great philosophers. Their road maps to the Absolute reflect the essence of Indian spiritual thought and tradition, although they held divergent views - while Sankara advocated monism or advaita, Ramanuja believed in vishishtadvaita, that contains elements of both advaita and dvaita philosophy.

Sankara's advaita is best summed up in the following verse: Brahma satyam jagan mithya jiva brahmaivah naparah - ''Brahman alone is real; the world is illusory and the individual and universal soul are one''. Ramanuja's vishishtadvaita focuses on the relation between the world and God.

The bhasyas of Sankara and Ramanuja were essentially treatises on the brahma sutras of Vyasa - 555 sutras, aphorisms containing the quintessence of Upanishadic thought. Their deliberations, like most of Vedantic philosophy, are triggered by the great call of the first sutra itself: "Atha to braham jignasa" - ''now therefore the enquiry into Brahman'', a call to free enquiry which sets the tone for all speculation. Ironically, both based their deliberations on the same text and started out with similar assumptions but they branched out in different directions, Sankara upholding an uncompromising monistic view and Ramanuja posing a theistic view of the Vedas.

Sankara's appeal lay as much in his erudition and dialectical skill as in his being a child prodigy. He lived for barely 30 years; yet he set ablaze the intellectual world of his times, redefining, revamping and revitalising old concepts not only with great strength but humility too. From the backwaters of Kaladi in Kerala to the northern Gangetic plains he took on all, scholars, sages and savants, engaging them in debates of the Yajnavalkya-Maitreyi kind. Equally, he was a rebel with a social cause - he insisted on performing the last rites of his mother despite being a sanyasi and that too in the backyard of his ancestral house. He authored simple but profound hymns like the Bhaja Govindam and Saundaryalahari which appealed to a large cross-section of people. Sankara believed his mission was cosmic.

Ramanuja, who lived to be more than 100 years, was deeply involved in the theological tradition. Inspired by the 12 Alvar poet-saints of South India and Vaishnavite theology, he identified the Absolute with God and differed fundamentally with the advaitic position of Sankara.

It is said that Ramanuja was inspired to write his commentary on the brahma sutras at the time of the death of his Guru when his attention was drawn towards the three folded fingers of the right hand of his Guru which signified his three unfulfilled desires, one of which was to write an authoritative commentary on the brahma sutras. Ramanuja wrote his magnum opus, the Sribha-shya, in response to his Guru's command.

Sankara had a two-level theory of Brahman, perceiving it as nirguna, without attributes, but manifesting itself with personal attributes, saguna. Nirguna being ultimately true and saguna false, Ramanuja contended that saguna and nirguna are one, related as body and soul. The Brahman-world relation in Sankara is explained in the snake and rope analogy where the illusion is caused by mistaking a rope for a snake.

Both Sankara and Rama-nuja were seminal thinkers; they were also great apostles of bhakti. Herein lay their mass appeal. Sankara's devotional outpourings were meant to inspire and arouse people to their innate divine self while Ramanuja was already a torch-bearer of the Vaishnava tradition.

(Today is the birth anniversary of Adi Sankaracharya and Ramanujacharya)

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See also: Sankara and Ramanuja, Spiritual Guidance, God and Religion, Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul)