The Theologian Who Made a Place for Love within Vedanta

Ramanuja is the foremost theologian of Vishishtadvaita, the "qualified non-dualism" of Vedanta, and his historical importance is that he gave rigorous philosophical standing to devotion. Against Shankara's austere Advaita, in which the personal God and the worshipping self alike dissolve into an attributeless absolute, and plurality is finally illusion, Ramanuja argued for a reality that is genuinely one and yet genuinely differentiated.

The one Brahman is a personal God (identified with Vishnu-Narayana), possessed of infinite good qualities, and the individual souls and the material world are real, they are the "body" of which God is the "self," distinct from him yet wholly dependent on him. This "qualification" preserves both the unity the Upanishads proclaim and the difference that devotion requires, for one cannot love what one simply is. On this foundation Ramanuja legitimated bhakti, loving surrender to a personal God, and prapatti, self-surrender, as the path to liberation, and he reformed the worship and administration of the great Srirangam temple. His synthesis became the theological backbone of Sri Vaishnavism and shaped the whole later flowering of South Indian devotion.