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Contrasting the five Vedanta schools

Madhava-K08, 5126 K.E.

V.S.Ghate’s book “The Vedanta” provides an excellent bird’s eye view of the five major schools of Vedanta:-

by comparing their commentaries on the Brahma Sutras.

The following is excerpted from pg 36-37:

Thus we see that these five schools of Vedanta agree in holding

  1. that Brahman is the supreme cause of the universe;
  2. that Brahman is all-pervading and eternal;
  3. that the Upanisads in the first instance and the Brahma-sūtras and the Gītā are the basis of their doctrines ;
  4. that in supersensuous and purely metaphysical matters like Brahman, the scriptures (ṡabda-pramāṇa) are the first authority and reasoning (anumāna) is to be accepted as long as it does not go against the Revelation; reasoning has a jurisdiction over them, but owing to its limitations, the Revelation is the final court of appeal;
  5. that actions (karma) are subordinate to knowledge (jn̄āna) or devotion (bhakti); they are efficacious only for the purification of the mind or as a preparation for the right path, renunciation of them being quite necessary for final beatitude;
  6. that deliverance from this beginningless saṃsāra is the final goal (mukti).

Ṡaṅkara’s doctrine is distinguished from the rest in-as-much as:

  1. he admits Māya, which the other four schools agree in pretending to discard;
  2. he insists on knowledge (jn̄āna) as the sole means of mōkṣa; while the rest insist on bhakti or devotion.

The four Visnuite schools alike maintain

  1. that Bhakti is the means of attaining mōkṣa;
  2. that Brahman is Īṡvara, possessed of an infinite number of auspicious attributes;
  3. that the individual souls and the inanimate world are all as real as Brahman itself;
  4. that their individual distinctions can never be completely lost;
  5. that the individual souls are atomic, infinite in number, all possessed of the attributes of knowing and acting.

The school of Madhva stands apart in that

  1. it maintains absolute duality, while all the rest try to reconcile duality and unity in one way or another;
  2. it holds that Brahman is only the efficient cause and not the material cause of the universe; while all the rest agree in holding that it is both; and that
  3. consequently its admission of the authority of the Upanisads and Sūtras in particular is rather in theory than in practice.

As for the mutual relations of the three entities of Brahman, cit and acit, each of the five schools has its own doctrine, which has given each its distinctive character and name.

So who’s right?

You the read Chapter 3 Conclusion yourself. Here, I only quote a few relevant remarks:

Madhva

To begin with, the commentary of Madhva is evidently inferior in character and is a performance of little or no merit. His interpretations differ from those of the rest very widely and in a very large number of cases; but the reader has seen that in a majority of instances, his explanations are far-fetched, fantastic and too sectarian in character; the scriptural passages he refers to for discussion more often belong to the Saṃhitās than to the Upanisads, a procedure which can be easily explained by the fact that it is very difficult for him to find in the Upanisads a support for his own doctrine.

Ṡaṅkara

The distinction between the higher (pāramārthika) and the lower Brahman (vyāvahārika) not finding any support in the sūtras, it naturally follows that the idea of Māyā in the sense in which Ṡaṅkara understands it cannot have any place in the doctrine of the Sūtrakāra.

Thus the sūtras lend no support to the two main points in Ṡaṅkara’s doctrine, viz. (1) the relation between the Brahman and the jīva which is according to him absolute unity and (2) the nature of jīva which is omni-present, which is of the nature of knowledge (and not knower) and which is without activity (kartṛtva).

Thus we are quite justified in arriving at the conclusion that Ṡaṅkara’s doctrine is out of count so far as the sūtras are concerned, whatever be its value as a philosophical system, and whatever be its merit as an attempt to draw a system from the Upanisads.

Vallabha

It is very difficult to assert dogmatically whether Vallabha’s doctrine receives or does not receive any support from the sūtras; but so much may be said that his commentary strikes us many times not as a very creditable performance, being in places very sectarian or unsatisfactory, although one can point out instances where he is brilliant or reasonable and where he offers very interesting criticisms of the views of others. It is to be observed, however, that his special references to Gokula, the pusṭimārga and the maryādā-mārga, and his manner of reconciling the mutually contradictory passages) in the Upaniṣads by postulating the miraculous and incomprehensible greatness (aiṡvarya) of the Brahman, and his assertion of pure monism without any reference to plurality make it far from possible that his doctrine could have been the one propounded by the Sūtrakāra.

Ramanuja and Nimbarka

Now, there remain for consideration Ramanuja and Nimbarka. Their doctrines are very similar to each other. The main point of distinction between them is that plurality according to Ramanuja is an attirbute of unity, or in other words, the intelligent (cit) and non-intelligent world (acit) forms the body and the distinguishing attribute (viṡeṣana) of the Brahman; whereas the school of Nimbarka refuses to admit this idea of viṡeṣana, there being nothing from which the Brahman needing to be distinguished. Unity and plurality are both true and are on an equal level without any idea of subordination of plurality to unity, an idea implied in the doctrine of Ramanuja. Apart from this, there is little or no difference as far as the meta-physical part is concerned.

Verdict

What distinguishes these four Visnuite schools from each other is in the first place the theological part of their doctrines. Thus the Highest Self is called Vāsudeva by Ramanuja, Kṛṣṇa by Nimbarka and Vallabha, and Viṣṇu by Madhva. But the sūtras provide us with no indications whatsoever on this and other allied points;

we have also to say that the system of Ramanuja or in other terms the Bhāgavata system which Ramanuja upholds in 2.2.42-45, is far from being the system of the sūtras: there being no indications in them that they support the essential dogmas of the Bhāgavata system and the very words like Vasudeva, Vyuha, etc. being absent from them.

Unfortunately, on these points the Sutrakara provides us with indication of a very vague character, so that it is very difficult to dogmatise that the Sūtrakāra favours one particular view out of these… All these instances of the employment by the Sūtrakāra of vague and general words, not capable of being explicitly defined, lead us to believe that the sutras, though they were in the first instance intended to formulate a system from the Upanishads, reconciling the contradictions which meet us at every step, represent a stage of transition from the freedom and absolute want of system of the Upanishads to the cut and dry systematisation of the commentaries.

Or, if at all we insist on seeing in the sūtras one of the five systems under discussion, it cannot be at the most the ‘bhedabheda’ system of Nimbarka, according to which both bheda and abheda are equally real, without the idea of any subordination of one to the other (Ramanuja subordinates bheda w.r.t. abheda).

My remarks

Ghate’s evaluates the schools on a spectrum:

Sūtrakāra > Nimbarka (closest) > Ramanuja > Madhva > Vallabha > Shankara (farthest)

It needs hardly to be remarked that the more advanced a system is in the degree of systematisation and the elimination of contradiction, the farther removed it is from the system of the sutras, whatever that be. In any case the sūtras are absolutely unware of the particular dogmas enunicated by each of the different Vedanta schools of the later times.