A Permanent Ranking Among Souls

Beyond holding that individual souls remain eternally distinct from God and from one another, Dvaita Vedanta teaches taratamya, a graded ranking among souls that Madhva held to be permanent and built into their basic nature rather than a temporary condition any soul eventually outgrows. On this account souls differ from each other in kind, not merely in the degree of progress each has made toward liberation, so that the ranking is part of the structure of what exists in the same sense the five eternal differences are, not a stage every soul passes through on a shared path. The History of the Dvaita School of Vedanta describes Madhva's system as sorting souls into distinct classes according to their inherent capacity, some destined for liberation, others bound to endless transmigration without ever reaching it, a scheme the tradition presents as consistent with its wider insistence that difference, including differences of ultimate destiny, is real rather than provisional. This doctrine sets Dvaita apart even from other schools that otherwise share its rejection of Advaita's nondualism, since most currents within Hindu thought, whatever their disagreements over the nature of liberation, have assumed that some path to it remains open to every soul eventually, an assumption taratamya explicitly denies for at least a portion of souls by its own internal logic.