Devotion, the Sri Tradition and Reach

Because souls are real and eternally distinct from, yet utterly dependent on, God, Vishishtadvaita makes loving devotion (bhakti) and self-surrender (prapatti) to Vishnu the path to liberation, which it understands not as absorption but as eternal, blissful communion with and service of the Lord in his heaven. Ramanuja gave philosophical form to the ecstatic devotion of the Tamil Alvar poet-saints, whose hymns the tradition reveres alongside the Sanskrit scriptures, and he became the pre-eminent teacher of Sri Vaishnavism, the devotional community centred on Vishnu and his consort Sri (Lakshmi), who is understood as the compassionate mediator between God and the soul.

As head of the temple at Srirangam he also worked to open devotional religion more widely across caste lines. The tradition he shaped remains a major living form of South Indian Vaishnavism, later dividing into the Vadakalai and Tenkalai sub-schools, and it deeply influenced the wider history of Hindu bhakti. Scholars rank Vishishtadvaita, with Advaita and Dvaita, as one of the three classical schools of Vedanta, and as the most influential philosophical foundation for theistic, devotional Hinduism.