Madhva, the thirteenth century founder of Dvaita Vedanta, taught that reality is structured by five distinct and permanent differences, pancha bheda, that no amount of spiritual advancement or philosophical insight ever dissolves: the difference between God and each individual soul, between God and unconscious matter, between one soul and another, between soul and matter, and between one material thing and another. Madhva stated the doctrine as a direct rejection of Advaita's claim that such differences are ultimately illusory appearances superimposed by ignorance, holding instead that scripture, properly read, describes a world in which distinction is part of the fundamental structure of what exists rather than a mistake correctable by insight. The History of the Dvaita School of Vedanta and Its Literature presents the five differences as the organizing claim of Madhva's entire system, since his theory of liberation, his reading of scripture and his account of God's relationship to the world all follow directly from insisting that difference, not unity, is what is finally real. Because God and soul remain eternally distinct on this account, liberation for Madhva is never absorption into or identity with the divine, the goal Advaita describes, but a state of blissful nearness to a God who remains, permanently and by the doctrine's own definition, someone other than the liberated soul itself.