Karnataka is the southwestern Indian state whose religious history is best described as a long argument about the relation between the individual soul and God, conducted in the same region by people who knew one another's positions.
Sringeri, in the Western Ghats, is one of the monastic seats traditionally attributed to Adi Shankara, whose Advaita Vedanta holds that the soul and the ultimate reality are not two things. At Udupi on the coast, Madhvacharya in the thirteenth century taught the opposite: a Dvaita or dualist Vedanta in which the difference between God, souls and the world is real and permanent, with a devotional practice centred on Krishna. The Udupi temple's system of rotating administration between eight monasteries founded by his disciples has run continuously since.
Alongside the Vedanta schools, the twelfth-century movement associated with Basava rejected the entire apparatus: temple, priesthood, caste and pilgrimage. Its followers, called Virashaiva or Lingayat, wear a small linga on the body as the only image required, bury rather than cremate their dead, and produced a body of short Kannada prose poems, the vachanas, written by men and women of many occupations. Whether Lingayats are a Hindu community or a separate religion has been argued politically as well as theologically, and remains open.