Grace and self-effort in Vaishnavism

Within Sri Vaishnavism, the South Indian tradition stemming from Ramanuja, the relation between divine grace and human effort produced a division that has lasted since the fourteenth century, and it is remembered by two animal images that have travelled far beyond the tradition that coined them.

The Tenkalai, or southern school, takes the cat: a kitten is carried in its mother's mouth and does nothing at all, not even hold on. On this reading, prapatti, self-surrender to God, is not a means the devotee employs but the abandonment of all means, and grace is entirely unconditioned. Divine mercy is spontaneous and independent of anything in its recipient, salvation is in no degree earned, and to treat surrender itself as a qualifying act would smuggle merit back in through the door it was meant to close.

The Vadakalai, or northern school, takes the monkey: the infant clings to its mother, who carries it, but it must hold on. Grace is decisive but not unilateral, and surrender is a real act with real conditions. God's mercy is conditioned in the sense that it responds to something in the devotee, and the school gives correspondingly more weight to Sanskrit scriptural authority, to prescribed observance, and to the ordinary disciplines of knowledge and action alongside surrender.

The division is associated with Pillai Lokacharya and Manavala Mamunigal on the Tenkalai side and with Vedanta Desika on the Vadakalai, and it extended well beyond soteriology. The schools came to differ over the relative authority of the Sanskrit Veda and the Tamil hymns of the Alvars, over ritual particulars including the form of the sect mark worn on the forehead, and over the control and liturgy of major temples, disputes that have been litigated in colonial and modern Indian courts, sometimes for decades.

The underlying question is not confined to India, and the convergences are striking. Japanese Pure Land Buddhism contrasts jiriki, self-power, with tariki, other-power, and Shinran's position corresponds closely to the cat, holding that even the calling of the Buddha's name is the Buddha's work and not the practitioner's. Christian debates over grace and free will, from Augustine and Pelagius through the Reformation to the De Auxiliis controversy, cover much of the same ground. Whether the parallels reflect anything beyond the internal logic of the problem is disputed, and there is no evidence of historical contact between the Indian and Japanese formulations; what they show is that a tradition which affirms both a gracious God and a responsible agent will sooner or later have to say how the two fit together.

The Tenkalai-Vadakalai division described elsewhere in this collection is a later development; neither school claims that Ramanuja himself resolved the question its two positions later disputed, and both trace their authority to the same eleventh and twelfth century teacher, reading his synthesis in different directions.

Ramanuja, the principal systematizer of Vishishtadvaita, "qualified non-dualism", taught that the individual soul and the material world are real and related to the supreme God, Vishnu-Narayana, as a body is related to its indwelling soul, dependent and inseparable, while remaining genuinely distinct from it, a position framed against the Advaita teaching that self and ultimate reality are simply one and that the world's multiplicity is a form of ignorance.

Within this framework Ramanuja taught prapatti, surrender to God, as a valid and complete path to liberation alongside the older triad of karma, jnana and bhakti, but his own writings do not settle with technical precision how much the devotee contributes to that surrender and how much is purely divine initiative, the very question later commentators split over. His successors developed the implications of his teaching along the two lines that hardened into the cat and monkey schools only in the centuries after his death, chiefly among teachers active at Srirangam, the tradition's most important temple center.

The retrospective character of the split is philosophically significant: both schools present themselves as the correct unfolding of Ramanuja's own position rather than as a departure from it, which is why the disagreement has persisted as an internal argument about interpretation rather than a division between two independently founded traditions.