Schools of Theology
Dvaita Vedanta
Also Known As Dvaita · Tattvavada (the doctrine of reality), the name Madhva himself gave the school, already named in its own description.
Vedanta Schools
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Origin 1238 to 1317
The dualist Vedanta of Madhva, who called it Tattvavada, the doctrine of reality, and who held that difference is not an appearance to be dissolved but the structure of what exists. Five differences are eternal and irreducible: between God and each soul, between God and matter, between one soul and another, between soul and matter, and between one material thing and another. Only Vishnu is independent; everything else exists in dependence on him, and the soul is his reflection or image, never in any condition identical with him, including after liberation. Madhva also taught a gradation among souls, so that different liberated souls enjoy different degrees of bliss according to their nature, and a doctrine found almost nowhere else in Hindu thought: that some souls are fit only for darkness and are eternally damned. Liberation comes by the grace of Vishnu, sought through devotion and through the mediation of Vayu, who is the god's chief agent and of whom Madhva held himself to be an incarnation.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin PeriodThirteenth to early fourteenth century CE, the lifetime of its founder Madhva (1238 to 1317). 2 Place of OriginUdupi, in coastal Karnataka 1 Origin of the NameSanskrit dvaita, "duality" or "twoness," for its doctrine that God, soul and matter remain eternally distinct rather than identical. 2 Practice
Liturgical Language Liturgical Language Belief
Defining Doctrinal PositionDvaita: God and the soul eternally distinct 1Tradition: Hinduism Defining Doctrinal PositionVishnu as the supreme reality 1Tradition: Hinduism Doctrinal Position DetailFive differences are eternal and irreducible: between God and each soul, God and matter, one soul and another, soul and matter, and one material thing and another. Only Vishnu is fully independent; liberated souls remain eternally distinct from him and from one another, differing even in their degree of blessedness. 2 Position Profile
Key TextMadhva's commentary (bhashya) on the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, and his Anuvyakhyana, a verse work defending his own reading of the Brahma Sutras. 2 History
Separation or DivergenceAdvaita Vedanta, against which Madhva's commentaries were written 1 Separation or DivergenceThe difference is doctrinal and each school kept its own mathas and lines of teachers 1 Date of Separation Organisation
GovernanceAuthority in monastic seats (mathas) and their heads 1 The eight mathas of Udupi, whose heads take the worship of Krishna in rotation. OrdinationOrdination is into a monastic order, not to a congregation 1 Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Learn More
Madhva and the Reality of Difference
Dvaita Vedanta is a school of Hindu philosophy founded by the theologian Madhva (Madhvacharya, traditionally 1238-1317) in the Kannada-speaking region of southern India. Its name means "dualism," and it stands as the great counter-position to the non-dualist Advaita of Shankara. Where Advaita teaches that the individual self and ultimate reality (Brahman) are finally identical and that plurality is illusory, Madhva insisted that difference (bheda) is real and irreducible. His system is sometimes called Tattvavada, the doctrine of reality, precisely because it affirms the full reality of the world and of distinctions within it.
Madhva taught five eternal differences: between God and the individual soul, between God and matter, between one soul and another, between soul and matter, and between one material thing and another. God, identified with Vishnu (and Narayana), is the wholly independent reality on whom all dependent realities, souls and matter, rely; the soul is genuinely distinct from God and remains so even in liberation. Madhva also held the unusual view, among Vedanta schools, of a fixed gradation of souls, some eternally destined for liberation and, controversially, some for perpetual bondage.
Devotion, Lineage and Reach
Because the soul is real, dependent and distinct, Dvaita makes loving devotion (bhakti) to Vishnu the heart of religious life and the means of liberation, which it understands not as merger with God but as eternal, blissful nearness to and service of him. Madhva's theology thus provided a rigorous philosophical foundation for personal theism and worship, and it fed directly into the wider currents of Vaishnava devotion in India. He established his tradition at Udupi in Karnataka, where he is said to have installed an image of Krishna and founded a set of monasteries (ashta matha) that continue to administer its worship in rotation to this day.
The lineage produced influential later teachers, among them Jayatirtha and Vyasatirtha, and the Haridasa movement of devotional singer-saints such as Purandaradasa carried its spirit into Kannada song. Dvaita influenced the theology of later Vaishnava movements, including, through the Brahma-Madhva lineage it claimed, the Gaudiya tradition of Chaitanya. Today it remains a living school, strongest in Karnataka and among Madhva Brahmin communities, and it is studied across the scholarly world as one of the three classical schools of Vedanta, alongside Advaita and the qualified non-dualism of Ramanuja.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Branch Of
Dvaita reads them as genuinely two, the self dependent on a God who is other than it.
Contrasts With
Held Differently
Maya, Doctrines Madhva wrote at length to refute Advaita's Maya doctrine, holding the world and souls to be as eternally real as Brahman itself.
Tat Tvam Asi, Mantras Madhva splits the sandhi the other way and reads the sentence as that thou art NOT, because a real and permanent difference between the soul and God is the whole of his position.
Sat-Chit-Ananda, Doctrines Being, consciousness and bliss are held in Dvaita as real attributes of God.
Vedanta, Doctrines Dvaita reads Vedanta dualistically, holding a fundamentally different account of the relation between the individual soul, the world and Brahman than Advaita's nondualism.
Holds Element
Held in the Dvaita tradition, whose mathas have transmitted the office in unbroken succession since Madhva.
Recited daily, and read in this school as naming a God who is genuinely other than the one reciting.
Objects and Practices of This Tradition
Madhva's Gita Bhashya reads the Bhagavad Gita through Dvaita's dualist theology, distinct from Shankara's and Ramanuja's commentaries on the same text.
Madhva's dualist Brahma Sutra Bhashya reads this shared Vedanta text against Shankara's and Ramanuja's non-dual and qualified readings alike.
Dvaita, Madhva's dualist Vedanta, is this school's defining, denomination-naming doctrine.
Paramatman, the supreme personal self, is Dvaita Vedanta's God, Vishnu, eternally distinct from every individual soul.
Critiqued Here
Neti Neti, Doctrines Dvaita argues that a purely negative characterisation of Brahman is unusable: if the formula denied every attribute there would be nothing left for scripture to praise, and Madhva reads the negations as excluding limitation rather than qualities.
Madhva reads the great saying that Advaita takes as declaring identity in the opposite sense, dividing the words so that they assert the soul is NOT that. The reading is the sharpest single instance of the school's method, and it is a rival construal of the same sentence rather than a rejection of the text.
Originated In
Originates in Language
Position On
Non-injury is held in Dvaita.
The self is held in Dvaita to be real, eternal, plural and dependent, and different from God not accidentally but by its own nature.
Ignorance is held in Dvaita as the soul's real ignorance under God's will, not as a power that makes the world unreal.
Devotion is the means of liberation in Dvaita, and it is devotion informed by right knowledge of the difference between God and the soul rather than devotion alone.
Brahman is held in Dvaita to be Vishnu, the one wholly independent reality, on which souls and matter depend without ever being identical with it.
Giving is held in Dvaita.
Dharma is held in Dvaita.
The teaching lineage is central in Dvaita, and the Madhva monastic seats of coastal Karnataka carry it.
A chosen deity is held in Dvaita, and the choice is not open: Vishnu alone is supreme and the other gods are dependent beings ranked below him.
Knowledge is held in Dvaita and is not by itself the means of liberation: the knowledge that liberates is knowledge of difference, and it works through devotion and God's grace rather than instead of them.
Karma is held in Dvaita as really binding, and dependent throughout on God, who is the one independent reality.
The world as God's play is held in Dvaita, played with a world that is really there.
The supreme person is held in Dvaita, and the whole system is organised around God's complete independence and everything else's complete dependence.
Moksha as eternal proximity to God with an unbridgeable difference maintained, and a gradation of souls that not all are eligible for release.
Merit and demerit are held in Dvaita as really incurred.
Periodic dissolution is held in Dvaita.
Collected absorption is held in Dvaita as sustained meditation on God, never as the loss of the distinction between worshipper and worshipped.
Transmigration is held in Dvaita as fully real.
Latent impressions are held in Dvaita.
The three strands are held in Dvaita as the constitution of a really existing matter.
Related To
Sources
Essays About This Entity (1 essay)
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.