RĀMĀNUJA

RĀMĀNUJA (1017–1137), Hindu philosopher-theologian and the most influential exponent of a theistic interpretation of Vedantic philosophy that opposed the earlier monistic teaching of Śaṅkara. Within the Śrī Vaiṣṇava community Rāmānuja's importance comes from his authoritative exposition of the Vedānta, his leadership of the community in a period of formative growth that brought Tamil devotion together with Sanskrit philosophy and ritual, and, above all, his decisive mediation of divine grace to Śrī Vaiṣṇavas of all subsequent generations.

Accounts of Rāmānuja's life figure prominently in many Tamil and Sanskrit hagiographies. Two purport to be by contemporaries of Rāmānuja, but the earliest that can be dated with certainty was written more than a century after his death. Rāmānuja is presented as the last of the three great ācārya s, the first of whom was Nāthamuni, and second, his grandson Yāmuna. Rāmānuja just failed to meet Yāmuna before the latter's death, but during his own lifetime he was able to carry out Yamuna's unfulfilled wishes for establishing the community on a firm footing. Yāmuna's extant writings do in fact anticipate major tenets of Rāmānuja's philosophy; they also provide a spirited defense of the Pāñcarātra system of ritual, and express in Sanskrit verse some of the sentiments of the earlier Tamil hymns of the Ᾱlvārs.

Rāmānuja had to be instructed in five aspects of Yāmuna's teachings by five of the latter's disciples. The one who was to teach Rāmānuja the secret meaning of the fundamental ritual formula (mantra) of the community made Rāmānuja come to see him eighteen times before he swore the bright young convert to silence and disclosed the secret. The very next day, however, Rāmānuja went up onto the temple balcony and shouted down the secret to the Śrī Vaiṣṇavas below. Cheerfully acknowledging that for disobeying his teacher he would go to hell, he added, "But because of their connection with you these souls will be saved!" The teacher was so impressed with Rāmānuja's concern for the welfare of others that he recognized him as Yāmuna's successor and the new leader of the community. This well-known story, along with many other stories in the hagiographies, suggests a gradual shift in emphasis from a secret yoga passed on to a small number of disciples to a more open teaching shared with a community jointly worshiping Lord Viṣṇu and his consorts, incarnate in temple images.

Rāmānuja is responsible for many innovations in the Śrī Vaiṣṇava community. He reorganized the central Śrī Vaiṣṇava temple at Śrīrangam to accommodate his growing band of disciples, traveled widely to other temples to try to persuade them to adopt a more strictly Vaiṣṇava liturgy, and went all the way to Kashmir to consult ancient commentaries. He then composed new commentaries intended to convince brahman scholars all over India of the theistic Vaiṣṇava interpretation of the Sanskrit scriptures.

Much of the latter part of Rāmānuja's life was spent in the Hoysala kingdom to the north where he fled to escape the persecution of the Śaiva-oriented Cōḻa king. Indeed, the earliest "hard evidence" for Rāmānuja's historical reality is a stone carving and inscription showing him with the Hoysala king he is said to have converted from Jainism.

In general, the hagiographers put less emphasis on Rāmānuja's intellectual prowess than on his fervent devotion to Lord Viṣṇu, his lifelong efforts to establish Yāmuna's teaching, and his skill in awakening the loyalty and utilizing the distinctive talents of his disciples and scholarly converts. The success of his efforts to persuade many of his own relatives and other brahmans to join the multicaste community of Viṣṇu worshipers had a double effect: The leadership of the community passed still more completely into brahman hands, while Brahmanic Hinduism itself was transformed so that forever after caste ranking, in principle if not always in practice, has been subordinated to the quality of devotion. The story about Rāmānuja's renouncing his wife and becoming an ascetic does not imply that it is necessary in general for devotees to leave their life in society, but in this particular case Rāmānuja's wife stood in the way of his spiritual progress. She was unwilling to subordinate caste ranking to spiritual preeminence and therefore thwarted Rāmānuja's desire to honor his lower-caste teacher.

Nine writings have consistently been attributed to Rāmānuja since the earliest hagiographies and biographical compendia. Three are commentaries on the Vedānta Sūtra : the famous Śrībhāṣya and the briefer Vedāntadīpa and Vedāntasāra. One, perhaps his earliest work, is an independent summary of his philosophical position, called the Vedārthasaṃgraha. A fifth is his commentary on the Bhagavadgītā, in which his mood is at least as devotional as polemical. The remaining four works are very much in the devotional mood and are sufficiently different from the major works that their authenticity has recently been challenged. One is a manual of daily worship called the Nityagrantha. The other three are hymns in prose, the Śaraṇāgatigadya, Śrīrangagadya, and Vaikuṇṭhagadya. The first of these has been interpreted as Rāmānuja's own conversation with the Lord during the solemn ceremony of "taking refuge" (śaraṇāgati), and is taken by the tradition to provide a clear warrant for replacing the path of disciplined meditation with the path of "humble approach" or "surrender" (prapatti). (The text itself seems not to diverge so radically from the philosophical works as either the renowned teacher Vedānta Deśika or modern critics maintain. In this author's opinion all these minor works are genuine.)

Rāmānuja's epistemology is hyperrealistic. The first two sources of knowledge are perception and inference, and they are trustworthy notwithstanding general human subjection to "beginningless ignorance." Knowledge is always of the real, even in dreams, and error is a disordered perception or faulty inference concerning what is really there. The third source of knowledge is the testimony of scripture, or more strictly, śabda ("eternal sound"), which helps to establish much that is uncertain on the basis of sense perception and inference, notably the existence and nature of the ultimate reality (brahman ), who is also the Supreme Person and personal Lord. In explicit contrast to Śaṅkara's doctrine of two levels of truth in scripture, Rāmānuja maintains that scriptural texts are all at the same level; apparent discrepancies or contradictions must therefore be resolved without placing one side or the other on a lower level. The emphasis on unity in some texts and duality or plurality in others is resolved by noting the synthetic principle in a third group of texts: radical distinction and inseparable connection coexist in the relation between the self (whether finite or infinite) and the body that it ensouls, and likewise in the relation between a substance and its mode.

Scripture testifies to a supreme self who is the inner self of finite selves. Thus the finite self is to the supreme self as the material body is to the finite self. This is Rāmānuja's celebrated doctrine of śarīra-śarīri-bhāva : the relation of the self to the body, which corresponds to the relation between grammatical subject and predicate adjective, or substance and mode. It is the special characteristic of finite selves to be a mode in relation to God and substance in relation to material things, which are their bodies or instruments. The entire finite universe of souls and material bodies is also the body of God. Thus God is the only ultimately substantial reality, and reality may be viewed as viśiṣṭādvaita (the later philosophical label for this school of Vedānta, not used by Rāmānuja): the nondual reality of that which is (internally) distinguished.

Rāmānuja defines the self-body relation in terms of three subordinate relations, those between the support and the supported, the controller and the controlled, and the owner (ṣeṣī) and the owned (ṣeṣa). It is the third relation that is most distinctive, for ownership is understood to include the obligation of the slave to serve the master and the confident expectation that the master will look after the slave. In each case it is the Supreme Self who provides the defining instance; the finite self's relation to its body is only a limited approximation of complete supporting, controlling, and owning its body.

Rāmānuja assumes that there are three kinds of reality: nonsentient matter (acit ), sentient but finite selves (cit ), and the Lord (Īśvara), who is the Supreme Self. The world consists of material bodies controlled by finite selves. While the particular bodies are temporary, the basic matter of which they consist and the finite selves that they embody have no beginning in time. The bondage of many finite selves to "beginningless karman " causes their repeated return to the world in new bodies, but the entire world of material bodies and embodied souls is intended to glorify God, that is, to express in the finite realm his power and goodness. Those who escape the ignorance induced by karman can see that the finite world is now, along with God's infinite world, a realm of glory (vibhūti ). Despite his horror of linking God with anything defiling in the material world, Rāmānuja insists that the entire finite universe is the body of God.

Finite selves and the Supreme Self are similar but not identical in their essential natures: both have consciousness and bliss as their essential characteristics, but the finite self is limited in its power and extent whereas the Supreme Self is all-powerful and all-pervasive. Moreover, finite selves still "bound" to the material world have their secondary consciousness (that which they possess rather than are ) obscured by the ignorance produced by "beginningless karman."

The Vedānta is concerned with the proper knowledge of reality in order to find liberation from this bondage. In Rāmānuja's interpretation of Vedānta both performance of social and ritual duties and knowledge of reality are auxiliary means in seeking liberation, but the chief means is bhakti (devotion), a calling to mind of God's attributes with an attitude that should become as constant as the flow of oil, as vivid and immediate as sense perception, and so emotionally gripping that the devotee feels unable to live without the pervading presence of God.

The ultimate reality thus "remembered" in devotion is not an abstract principle but that most concrete and substantial reality who is the personal Lord, the Lord who escapes all self-confident seeking by finite selves but who chooses to become available to those who acknowledge their dependence. The Lord descends and condescends out of his great compassion to save, but those who most deeply feel their need for God's presence learn the deepest secret: the Lord also needs them. This emphasis on God's initiative along with the surprising secret that the Lord who owns everything needs his devotees' love leads to a second way of talking about the salvific process that is quite different from the first. Instead of loving devotion being the means to attaining the Lord's presence, the Lord is the means to enabling devotion that is a mutual participation of infinite and finite selves. The end has become the means, and the means has become the end. Rāmānuja seems to be able to move back and forth between the older concept of devotion as means and the implications of a radical doctrine of grace.

A century after his death, Rāmānuja was understood by his followers to have taught surrender (prapatti ) as a preferable alternative to the path of devotion, and they were beginning to differ as to whether some human response to grace was part of this surrender. That difference would gradually split the community in two, but for both groups it was Rāmānuja's own act of surrender that gave the assurance of divine grace for all his followers, a grace then mediated through the generations by a succession of teachers. It is as if they continue to say to Rāmānuja what he is purported to have said to the teacher whose secret he made public: "Because of their [our] connection with you their [our] souls will be saved."

See Also

Śrī Vaiṣṇavas; Vaiṣṇavism, article on Pāñcarātras; Vedānta; Yāmuna.

Bibliography

Buitenen, J. A. B. van., trans. Rāmānuja's Vedarthasamgraha. Poona, 1956.

Buitenen, J. A. B. van. Rāmānuja on the Bhagavadgita (1953). Reprint, Delhi, 1968.

Carman, John B. The Theology of Rāmānuja. New Haven, Conn., 1974.

Lester, Robert C. Rāmānuja on the Yoga. Madras, 1976.

Lott, Eric J. God and the Universe in the Vedantic Theology of Rāmānuja. Madras, 1976.

Raghavachar, S. S. Introduction to the Vedarthasangraha of Sree Rāmānujacharya. Mangalore, 1957.

Raghavachar, S. S. Śrī Rāmānuja on the Gita. Mangalore, 1969.

Yamunacharya, M. Rāmānuja's Teachings in His Own Words. Bombay, 1963.

New Sources

Veliath, Cyril. The Mysticism of Ramanuja. New Delhi, 1993.

John B. Carman (1987)

Revised Bibliography