Ramanuja

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.

Traditional hagiographic accounts of Ramanuja, composed by later followers within his own lineage rather than by contemporaries, credit him with an unusually long life, commonly given as around one hundred and twenty years. Modern historians generally treat figures of this kind with real caution, since an extended lifespan of this sort recurs across the biographies of several major South Asian religious founders and is a recognisable hagiographic convention for signaling exceptional spiritual stature rather than a claim intended, or well suited, to be read as ordinary biographical fact. This makes reconstructing a reliable timeline of Ramanuja's actual career harder than the confident dates given in devotional sources suggest, and scholars generally treat the broad shape of his life and teaching career as more secure than the specific ages and durations recorded.

A related difficulty concerns his written legacy: several works are traditionally attributed to him, but establishing which texts represent his own direct composition and which were produced or substantially reworked by later disciples writing in his name and tradition is an ongoing question in Vedanta scholarship, complicated by the fact that the major biographical sources, works such as later guruparampara succession narratives, were themselves composed generations after his death specifically to establish and defend his lineage's authority.