Sri Mediates Between the Soul and Vishnu

The Sri Vaishnava tradition takes its own name from Sri, the goddess Lakshmi, whom it holds as eternally and inseparably united with Vishnu rather than as a separate deity who happens to accompany him. The Theology of Ramanuja describes Sri and Narayana, another name for Vishnu, as addressed together as a single divine pair, so that approaching one without the other is, in the tradition's own terms, not a coherent option for a worshipper. Her distinctive theological role is purushakara, mediation or intercession: the soul's act of surrender, prapatti, to Vishnu is understood to proceed through her, and her presence is described as softening Vishnu's justice with a mercy of her own, the way a queen might intercede with a king on behalf of a petitioner who could not otherwise approach him directly. This mediating role gives Sri a functional importance in the tradition's soteriology that goes well beyond that of a consort figure in most other Vaishnava schools, since without her intercession the tradition's account of how surrender actually reaches Vishnu would be missing a necessary step. Sri Vaishnava temple iconography makes the pairing visually explicit, showing her seated permanently on Vishnu's chest as Sridevi, a placement the tradition reads as making his very heart the seat of the compassion she supplies to soften his judgment of the soul who approaches him.

Exactly how far Sri's mediation goes is one of the questions on which the Sri Vaishnava tradition's own two schools divide, a dispute John Carman's study traces to differing readings of what her intercession requires from the soul. The Vadakalai school, following Vedanta Desika, holds that Sri's mediation, while genuinely effective, still leaves the soul's own effort a necessary part of surrender, illustrated by the markata nyaya, the logic of the monkey, whose infant must actively cling to its mother's body as she carries it. The Tenkalai school, following Manavala Mamuni and the earlier teacher Pillai Lokacharya, holds prapatti as accomplished entirely through Sri and Vishnu's own grace with no effort required of the soul at all, illustrated by the marjara nyaya, the logic of the cat, whose kitten is carried passively in its mother's mouth. Bound up with this same disagreement is the further question, unresolved between the schools, of whether Sri is herself divine in the same sense Vishnu is or a soul of an exceptionally exalted kind, since the two positions imply different accounts of how her mediation could work without either compromising Vishnu's supremacy or reducing her intercession to a merely symbolic role.