Madhvacharya: The Acharya Who Insisted on Difference

Madhva's position is stated most compactly in a verse summarising the pancha bheda, the five differences, and it is the clearest entry into the school.

The five eternal differences:

• Between God and the soul
• Between God and matter
• Between one soul and another soul
• Between soul and matter
• Between one piece of matter and another

All five are real, and none of them ever ends.

What that rejects. Everything the other schools do with difference.

• Advaita holds the difference between soul and Brahman to be finally unreal, produced by ignorance
• Vishishtadvaita holds souls and matter to be real but to be the body of Brahman, so distinct and inseparable
• Madhva holds them to be simply and permanently distinct, with the soul dependent on God but never merging

The technical term. Bheda, difference, and the school is Dvaita, dualism, from dvi, two.

What the soul's liberation is, then. Since it cannot be merger.

• The soul is eternally distinct and eternally dependent
• Moksha is the removal of bondage and the soul's realisation of its own nature
• The liberated soul enjoys bliss according to its own capacity, in the presence of God
• It does not become God, does not merge, and does not acquire God's powers

Taratamya. The gradation, and this is distinctive.

Madhva holds that souls differ from each other inherently and permanently, in capacity and in the degree of bliss they can hold.

So liberated souls are not equal. Each is liberated to the extent of what it is, and there is a hierarchy which the tradition sets out in detail: Lakshmi, then Brahma and Vayu, then the other deities in order, then the rishis, and so on.

Why he holds this. Because he takes the scriptural descriptions of differing capacities literally rather than as provisional, and because a real difference between souls follows from difference being real at all.

The three classes of souls. This is the part that draws the most objection and it should be stated plainly.

Madhva divides souls into three:

• Mukti yogya: those fit for liberation
• Nitya samsarin: those who neither achieve liberation nor fall to permanent darkness, and remain in samsara indefinitely
• Tamo yogya: those destined for permanent darkness

That third category is unique to Dvaita among the Vedanta schools, and it amounts to a doctrine of permanent damnation for some souls, determined by their inherent nature.

How to handle it. Directly, since it is a real feature of the school.

What the school says:

• The classification is by inherent nature, svarupa, not by conduct alone
• It is discoverable only by God, not by any person
• No human being can assign anybody, including themselves, to a category
• The practical instruction is therefore unchanged: do the practice, since you cannot know and the effort is what is available

What a reader should note:

• It is a hard doctrine and it has been criticised extensively by the other Vedanta schools since the fourteenth century
• It is not a licence to treat anybody as damned, and the school is explicit that no person can make the determination
• Most Madhva practice, in households and temples, does not turn on it at all

The rest of the school's content is a highly developed realist metaphysics, an epistemology, a theory of the divine attributes, and a very substantial devotional tradition, and the classification of souls is one element in a large system.

It is worth setting out the case for Dvaita on its own terms, because it is usually presented as the odd one out and its arguments are strong.

The argument from experience:

• Difference is what is given. Every experience is of things being distinct from each other and from the experiencer
• The claim that this is illusory requires an explanation of the illusion, and every such explanation has to use difference to state itself
• If difference is unreal, then the difference between bondage and liberation, between the teacher and the student, and between the scripture and the reader is also unreal, and the whole enterprise dissolves

The argument from scripture:

• The texts are full of statements of dependence, worship, service and relation, all of which presuppose two parties
• The Gita's whole structure is a conversation between two people, one of whom instructs the other
• Reading the identity statements as final requires reading a very large body of relational statements as provisional, and the reverse is equally available

The argument from devotion. This is the one that matters practically.

If the soul and God are ultimately identical, then bhakti is a stage on the way to knowledge and is superseded by it.

If they are eternally distinct, then bhakti is not a stage. It is the permanent condition, and it does not end at liberation. The liberated soul continues to worship, serve and enjoy the relation forever.

That is a strong position for anybody whose actual religious life is a relationship rather than a metaphysical realisation, and it is why Dvaita produced the devotional literature it did.

The Haridasa movement. Which is the practical outcome.

Madhva's philosophy in Karnataka produced the Haridasa tradition: Purandara Dasa, Kanaka Dasa, Vijaya Dasa, Jagannatha Dasa and many others, who composed devotional songs in Kannada for ordinary people rather than treatises in Sanskrit for scholars.

That literature is the foundation of Carnatic music, since Purandara Dasa is called its pitamaha, and it is what most people in Karnataka actually encounter of the tradition.

The comparison, fairly stated:

Advaita offers: the final identity of the self and reality, the dissolution of the problem rather than its solution, and a very powerful account of why the world appears as it does.

Vishishtadvaita offers: real souls, a real world, a personal God, and a relation that is both real and inseparable.

Dvaita offers: everything real, the relation permanent, devotion as the final state rather than a means, and no dissolution of the individual at any point.

What people actually choose. Usually not by argument.

Most people belong to the tradition of their family, region and teacher, and the philosophical positions are received rather than selected.

What is worth knowing is that all three are serious, all three have answers to the others' objections, the debate has run for eight hundred years, and nobody has won it.

On sectarian argument. The same note as elsewhere in this series.

These schools argued vigorously and produced enormous polemical literatures. Vyasatirtha's Nyayamrita and Madhusudana Saraswati's Advaitasiddhi, the great Dvaita and Advaita works arguing against each other, are among the most technically demanding works of Indian philosophy.

That is intellectual life. It becomes a problem only when people who have not read any of it treat the positions as identities to defend.

The Krishna temple at Udupi is what Madhva established and it is where the tradition is centred.

The image. The story of how it came.

• A ship was in difficulty off the coast near Malpe
• Madhva went to the shore and, by tradition, calmed the situation, and the ship came in safely
• The captain offered him whatever he wanted from the cargo
• He asked for two lumps of gopichandana, the sacred clay used for tilaka, which were being carried as ballast
• Inside one was an image of Krishna as a child, holding a churning rod and a rope
• Tradition holds it had been made by Vishvakarma and worshipped by Rukmini at Dwaraka, and had been buried when Dwaraka went under the sea
• He carried it to Udupi himself and installed it

What the image is:

• Bala Krishna, the child, standing
• Holding a churning rod, the mantha, and a rope
• Not the flute playing Krishna of the northern traditions
• It is a domestic image: a child caught in the middle of helping with the butter

The window. The famous feature.

The image is worshipped through a window, the navagraha kindi, a nine holed silver plated opening, rather than through an open door.

Why. The Kanaka Dasa story, which belongs to a later saint and is treated in his own entry.

In brief: Kanaka Dasa, of the Kuruba shepherd community, was not admitted, sang from outside behind the temple, and the image turned round and the wall opened so that he could see.

The Kanakana Kindi, Kanaka's window, is shown, and it is on the west side.

Whether that is what happened is a matter of tradition, and the sociological reading is that a widely loved saint from an excluded community had to be accommodated somehow and the architecture records the accommodation.

Either way, the deity at Udupi faces west, which is unusual, and is seen through a window.

The eight mathas:

• Madhva established eight monasteries at Udupi and appointed eight of his disciples to head them
• They rotate the worship of the Krishna image between them
• The rotation is the Paryaya, in which each matha takes charge for two years
• The Paryaya ceremony, held every two years in January, is a major event

The eight mathas and their arrangements are described in more detail elsewhere in this app.

What Udupi is like:

• A coastal town in Udupi district, Karnataka, around 60 kilometres north of Mangaluru
• The Krishna Matha at its centre, with the Chandramouleshwara and Anantheshwara temples adjoining, both older
• The Madhva Sarovara, the tank
• The rathabeedhi, the four car streets around the temple
• Very substantial annadanam, feeding, which runs continuously

Udupi food. Worth its own note because the town's name is on restaurants everywhere.

The temple kitchen tradition of Udupi produced a vegetarian cuisine, without onion or garlic, that spread across India through Udupi run restaurants in Mumbai and elsewhere from the early twentieth century.

Masala dosa is credited to it, and the whole Udupi hotel category is a direct descendant of a temple kitchen.

Nearby:

• Malpe beach and St Mary's Island, with its columnar basalt formations, which is a geological site of some importance
• Pajaka, Madhva's birthplace, around 12 kilometres
• Kollur Mookambika, around 80 kilometres
• Sringeri, around 100 kilometres, the Advaita matha, which makes an interesting pairing
• Karkala and Venur, with their Bahubali monoliths, Jain sites
• Dharmasthala, around 100 kilometres

When to go:

• Krishna Janmashtami, which is the principal festival
• The Paryaya, every two years in January
• October to March; the coastal monsoon is very heavy
• The Vitla Pindi and the temple's own festival calendar

The Dvadasha Stotra. What most people actually recite.

• Twelve short hymns by Madhva himself
• In Sanskrit, metrically striking, and set to music
• Composed, by tradition, on the installation of the Krishna image at Udupi
• Sung daily at the Udupi matha during the food offering
• Available with translation and recordings

It is the accessible entry into Madhva, as against the philosophical works, which are extremely difficult.

Daily practice in the tradition:

• Gopichandana or mrittika tilaka, the twelve urdhva pundras applied on the body at named points, each with a name of Vishnu
• Tapta mudra dharana, the branding of the shankha and chakra marks on the shoulders, taken from a sannyasi at initiation, which is a distinctive Madhva and Sri Vaishnava practice and is voluntary
• Nama sankirtana, particularly the Haridasa songs
• Ekadashi, observed strictly, and the Krishna Janmashtami fast
• The Vishnu Sahasranama
• Bhagavata reading

On the tapta mudra. It should be described honestly since it involves being branded.

The marks are applied with heated metal seals by a sannyasi, generally at the annual Chaturmasya, and it is a voluntary practice within the tradition undertaken by adults who choose it.

It is painful briefly and leaves marks. Anybody considering it should discuss it with the matha and with a doctor if they have any skin condition or are diabetic, since burns heal differently.

It is not required in order to be a devotee, and a great many people in the tradition do not take it.

The Haridasa songs. The practical devotional content.

• Purandara Dasa, Kanaka Dasa and the others, in Kannada
• Sung in households and in concerts
• Available in enormous quantity in recordings
• They are simple, direct, in the spoken language, and were composed for people who could not read Sanskrit

If you want the Madhva tradition as a devotional practice rather than a philosophy, that is where it is, and it is covered in its own entries in this series.

The Ashta Matha food. Worth mentioning since it is the tradition's most visible public service.

The Udupi mathas run continuous annadanam, feeding very large numbers daily, free, to anybody who comes. The Paryaya transitions involve feeding on a very large scale.

That is the tradition's public face and it is available to any visitor.

Reading Madhva:

• The Dvadasha Stotra, first
• The Gita Bhashya and Gita Tatparya, in translation
• Jayatirtha's commentaries, if you want the philosophy opened up
• Secondary works on Dvaita in English are available and are the practical route for most readers

A note on studying the philosophy. It is genuinely hard.

Madhva's own prose is terse to the point of obscurity, the tradition's technical vocabulary is extensive, and the debate literature with Advaita assumes a full training in Nyaya logic.

A reader who wants to understand Dvaita should start with a good secondary account rather than the primary texts, and there is no shame in that.

Places

• Udupi, the Krishna Matha
• Pajaka, his birthplace, 12 kilometres away
• Mantralayam, in Andhra Pradesh, for Raghavendra Swamy, the tradition's most widely venerated later figure
• Sode, Kaniyoor, Pejawar and the other matha seats
• Badrinath, which he visited twice

A closing thought

A very large, very strong young man from a village near the Karnataka coast studied Vedanta under an Advaita teacher and disagreed with him about the first thing and every subsequent thing.

He argued that the difference between you and God is real, that it never ends, that you never become God, and that this is good news rather than bad, because it means the relationship is permanent.

His teacher eventually agreed with him.

He installed a small image of a child holding a churning rod in a coastal town, and eight hundred years later it is still there, worshipped through a window that opened for a shepherd who was not let in.

The Dvaita tradition after Madhva is substantial and produced figures who are covered separately in this series.

The philosophers:

• Jayatirtha, fourteenth century, whose commentaries made Madhva readable and who is called Tikacharya
• Vyasatirtha, fifteenth to sixteenth century, at the Vijayanagara court, author of the Nyayamrita, and one of the most formidable logicians in Indian philosophy
• Vadiraja Tirtha, of Sode, sixteenth century, a philosopher and poet
• Raghavendra Swamy of Mantralayam, seventeenth century, the tradition's most widely venerated later figure

Vyasatirtha deserves a note. He was rajaguru at Vijayanagara under Krishnadevaraya, one of the great logicians of the period, and the teacher of Purandara Dasa and Kanaka Dasa.

So the philosophical and devotional wings of the tradition meet in him: the man writing the technical refutation of Advaita was also the teacher of the people writing Kannada songs for villagers.

The Haridasas:

• Sripadaraja, generally taken as the first
• Vyasatirtha
• Purandara Dasa, called the pitamaha of Carnatic music
• Kanaka Dasa
• Vijaya Dasa, Gopala Dasa, Jagannatha Dasa and the later Dasa Kuta

Each is covered in their own entry in this series.

What the Haridasas did:

• Composed in Kannada, the spoken language, not Sanskrit
• Wandered, sang, and taught in villages
• Reached people the philosophical tradition could not
• Created the musical forms that became Carnatic music's pedagogical foundation

Purandara Dasa's contribution to music. Worth stating.

He is credited with systematising the teaching of Carnatic music: the sarali varisai, the janta varisai, the alankaras, and the beginning of instruction in Mayamalavagowla.

Every Carnatic student anywhere still begins with his exercises. That is an eight hundred year old curriculum in daily use.

The tradition now:

• The Ashta Mathas at Udupi, with the Paryaya rotation
• Uttaradi, Vyasaraja and Raghavendra mathas, the three principal mathas outside Udupi
• Mantralayam, which draws very large numbers
• A living scholarly tradition with substantial publication
• The Haridasa repertoire, in continuous performance

Where a reader should go next. Depends what you want.

For the philosophy: a secondary account of Dvaita, then Jayatirtha in translation.

For the devotion: the Dvadasha Stotra, and then the Haridasa songs, particularly Purandara Dasa.

For the place: Udupi, at Janmashtami or at a Paryaya.

For the music: any recording of Purandara Dasa's compositions, and then the observation that the exercises every Carnatic student learns first were written by a Vaishnava saint who gave away a jeweller's fortune and walked around Karnataka singing.

A last note on the three Vedantas. Since this series has now covered all three founders.

Shankara said the difference is not finally real. Ramanuja said the difference is real and inseparable. Madhva said the difference is real and permanent.

They are answering the same question and they cannot all be right.

What they agree on, entirely, is that the question matters, that the texts are the authority, that argument is the method, and that the practical instruction while you work it out is the same: worship, serve, keep company with people who are doing the same, and say the name.