Ramanuja and Qualified Non-Dualism

Vishishtadvaita is a school of Hindu philosophy whose name means "non-dualism of the qualified (whole)," systematised by the great theologian Ramanuja (traditionally 1017-1137) in southern India. It occupies a middle ground between the strict non-dualism of Shankara's Advaita and the outright dualism of Madhva's Dvaita. Ramanuja agreed with Advaita that reality is ultimately one, there is a single supreme Brahman, identified with Vishnu-Narayana, but he denied that the world and individual souls are illusory or that their distinctions vanish in liberation. Instead he taught that Brahman is a qualified unity: the individual souls (chit) and the material world (achit) are real and are related to God as the body is to the soul that indwells and rules it.

God is thus the inner self of all things, and all things are his modes or attributes; the one reality is genuinely differentiated, not a featureless absolute. Against Advaita, Ramanuja argued that Brahman is a personal God full of auspicious qualities, that knowledge is always of something, and that the everyday world of distinctions is not error but the real self-expression of God.