The beginning of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta as an independent school are usually connected to Rāmānuja (traditional dates 1017–1137), both in India and in Western scholarship (e.g., in the work of the eminent Viśiṣtādvaita Vedānta scholar and former director of the IKGA institute Gerhard Oberhammer). Rāmānuja was indeed the first one to write a new commentary on the Brahmasūtra, thus robustly collocating his school within Vedānta. Again both Indian and Western scholars agree also on the pivotal role of Veṅkaṭanātha (also known with the honorific title of Vedānta Deśika ‘teacher of Vedānta’, traditional dates 1269–1370). My research (see, e.g., Freschi’s Veṅkaṭanātha/Vedānta Deśika, forthcoming on IEPh) suggests that this role is even more important than it has been recognised so far. Veṅkaṭanātha’s systematising efforts have not just re-shaped Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta but, have in fact, shaped it into the school we are familiar with now. It was Veṅkaṭanātha, for instance, to include the heritage of the Tamil saint poets, the Āḻvārs, within Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, and to recognise as authentic the works on devotion attributed to Rāmānuja. It is indeed true that traces of each of these tendencies can be detected also before Veṅkaṭanātha, but the very idea of looking for such faint traces testifies of how the concept of what should belong to Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta has been influenced by Veṅkaṭanātha’s own philosophical synthesis. In other words, it is because of this synthesis, that both devotees and scholars agree about the importance of devotion, of the Āḷvārs’ sentimental expression of a self-oblivious love for God, of Pāñcarātra ritualism, of the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā hermeneutical tools etc., within Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta.

Thus, any appreciation of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta must focus on the impact of Veṅkaṭanātha, since it is only through such an analysis that one will be able to recognise innovations and continuities in “Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta” before and after him.

Veṅkaṭanātha was a very prolific author, to whom more than one hundred works in three different languages have been attributed (no reason for scepticism concerning this attribution is known to me). As for his philosophical works, Srinivasa Chari has started some decades ago a series of monographs dedicated to a paraphrase and analysis of many of them. More recently, a monograph on Veṅkaṭanātha’s concept of time by another researcher working at the IKGA, namely Marcus Schmücker, will soon be released. Nothing at all, by contrast, has been dedicated to Veṅkaṭanātha’s confrontation and eventual absorption of the much more ancient and influential school of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā within Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, although the link to Pūrva Mīmāṃsā can be read (see Freschi’s Śrī Vaiṣṇavism: The making of a theology) as the key factor distinguishing Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta from the other concurrent school within Vedānta, namely Advaita Vedānta. Against Advaita Vedānta, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and Pūrva Mīmāṃsā share key tenets, such as the belief in personal souls, in the relevance of following Vedic prescriptions even once one has surrendered to God, etc.

(this post is meant to be a general introduction to the topic, accessible to non-initiated readers. Should you find something in it not understandable, please let me know with a comment below.)

How did this change occur? Is it due to external stimuli (e.g., to the need to answer objections), so that everything was already there with Rāmānuja and only needed to be spelt out? Was it due to an inner and ”natural” development? Was it due to a precise strategy? The scarcity of data about Viśiṣṭādvaita between Rāmānuja and Veṅkaṭanātha allows for multiple interpretations.

More specifically, several distinct component are constitutive of what we now know to be Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and are not present at the time of Rāmānuja:

1. 1. The inclusion of the Āḻvār’s theology in Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta
2. 2. The Pāñcarātra orientation of both subschools of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta
3. 3. The two sub-schools
4. 4. The Vedāntisation of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta
5. 5. The impact of other schools

The inclusion of the Āḻvārs’ theology
The first point to take into account is the fact that also the Āḻvārs do not represent a uniform theological perspective and that they differ also as far as the presence of Sanskrit terminology (e.g., in Nammāḻvār) is concerned.
Having granted this, some authors of the so-called Śrīraṅgam school such as Tirukkurukai Pirāṉ Piḷḷan (1060–1161) and Nañjīyar (1113–1208) wrote commentaries on Nammāḻvār in a style influenced by Rāmānuja’s choices. Does it mean that Rāmānuja (who was according to the tradition Pirāṉ Piḷḷai’s teacher) favoured this development? Or rather that the Śrīraṅgam community was —independently of its Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta faith— close to the Āḻvārs’ heritage?

The Pāñcarātra orientation of both subschools of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta
Why did the two trends, later to be identified as two subschools of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta both agree on adopting the Pāñcarātra Sacred Texts? One might suggest that there is no (unitary) Pāñcarātra theology and that consequently the adoption of Pāñcarātra Sacred Texts only amounts to the adoption of their rituals. But, nonetheless: Why adopting them? The question is even more urgent if one reflects on the early history of the two subschools, which appears to be quite divergent, and on the probably Kaśmīrī origin of the rituals prescribed in the Pāñcarātra texts. Mumme suggests that the adoption of Pāñcarātra was due to the “more liberal Pāñcarātra method of worship” (Mumme 1988, p. 8) but does not elaborate on it. Could we imagine that the Śrīraṅgam school first adopted an Ekāyana-Veda orientation, thus somehow forcing other Vaiṣṇavas (the ones of the so-called Kañcī school) to try to steer Vaiṣṇavas towards a more pro-Vedic attitude by adopting themselves Pāñcarātra texts, but of a different orientation?

This post is a revised summary of the introduction I held at my panel at the World Sanskrit Conference. For a pdf of my presentation, see here. For a summary of the panel in general, see here.

Accordingly, each study on the making of Śrīvaiṣṇavism needs to take into account several distinct moments in the development of Śrīvaiṣṇavism: on the one hand its pre-Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta Tamil existence and on the other its theological evolution within Sanskrit (or Sanskritised) philosophy and as Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta. The main referents for the first phase need to be the Āḻvārs, the poet-saints whose work has been preserved in the Divyaprabandham.

For the second phase, one needs to deal with the formation of a philosophical school in the work of the predecessors of the first teachers of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, namely Nāthamuni and Yāmuna and then with Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta as found in the work of Rāmānuja, Śrī Sudarśana Sūri and Veṅkaṭanātha (and other scholars).

The necessary connection of these two phases has been stressed again and again by the authors of the second phase, who —from a certain moment of time onwards (possibly from the time of Veṅkaṭanātha)— enumerated the Āḻvārs among their teachers and forerunners and even tried to connect their tradition directly with that of the Āḻvārs. Neevel (Neevel 1977, p. 11) has for instance convincingly argued that the life-spans of the most important authors of the philosophical formation of a Viśiṣṭādvaita school have been prolonged in order to connect them to each other and to link the first of them, Nāthamuni, to the Āḻvārs, although this led to the attribution of a lifespan of 330 to 340 years to him.

To sum up, Śrīvaiṣṇavism became what is known to us as Śrīvaiṣṇavism through the heritage of the Āḻvārs, the ritual contribution of the Pāñcarātra Saṃhitās and the philosophical contribution of Nāthamuni and Yāmuna first and of the Vedāntic reshaping by Rāmānuja thereafter. Veṅkaṭanātha might have been the attraction pole completing the puzzle of all these loose elements.

On Pāñcarātra and Vedānta, see this post. On the Āḻvārs see this post.

In the former works, Clooney conforms to the common rules of academic writing (disembodied, impersonal, “scholar”), although an attentive reader might detect also in them a hue of the latter Clooney (for instance, in his insistence on listening to Jaimini’s voice and detecting it within the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā Sūtra). The “theological” Clooney is passionate, engaged in what he writes and sensitive to the transformative enterprise of writing. One even gets the feeling that he might think that writing is a performance on something yet-to-be-estbalished (sādhya, to go back to the Mīmāṃsā terminology), rather than a description of already settled (siddha) conclusions.

Consequently, as a reader of His hiding place is darkness one is split by two different feelings. On the one hand the positive feeling on being on a journey with someone who is also on the same path, on the other the frustrating feeling not to be able to come to a scholarly sound conclusion. The book is, in fact, programmatically unsettled and unsettling. Nor could it be differently, since it puts side by side the Old Testament’s Song of Songs and the Tamil Tiruvāymoḻi (“The holy word of mouth”), song 1.4 and 1.5, without having previously established any essential similarity between the two. Rather, Clooney just chose them out of inspiration, in a way which could be compared to J. Derrida’s approach to texts in themselves, without the safeguard of their historicisation, without a safety net and in fact Clooney starts the book with two long juxtaposed excerpts of the two texts. And similarly ungrounded is also the juxtaposition of Jorie Graham’s poetry in the first chapter (tellingly called “Act One”). The Tamil text comes from the Tiruvāymoḻi, which is part of the Divya Prabandham, the collection of songs of the Āḻvārs, poet-saints who composed their mystical poems in South India, in the first millennium of the CE (the date is very controversial, also due to the desire of the Śrī Vaiṣṇava community to directly link the Āḻvārs to Nāthamuni, traditionally recognised as the compiler of the Divya Prabandham and whose date of death seems to have been 923).

Although the Aḻvārs were considered by the later tradition as inspired mystics, and revered as founders of the Śrī Vaiṣṇava religion, the songs chosen by Clooney are written from the perspective of a young girl who burns for love for God, Viṣṇu, but cannot find Him. She is desperate and in her desperation she blames herself for her sins, due to which she cannot come closer to Him, the people who do not pity her, and last even God Himself who, notwithstanding His merciful nature does not come to her. Clooney noticed the similarity in the religious application of the motif of a young girl’s passionate love and of her desolation once the lover has disappeared and put the text side by side with the portions of the Song of Songs in which the girl is left alone and laments her solitude.

Clooney offers helps and guidances, such as his translations of the Tamil text, his frequent reference to contemporary exegesis of the Song of Songs and, more importantly according to me, quotations and interpretations from religious commentaries of the one and the other text. Nonetheless, Clooney programmatically avoids to settle the issues he opens. There is no solution to why the girl in the Song of Songs at once sends her lover away at night, only to repent soon thereafter, nor to why the daughters of Jerusalem laugh at her. Even more disturbing is that there is no solution of the problem of the co-existence of two exclusivist religions which both see themselves as the only one but share striking similarities and coexist in a contemporary world in which exclusivist faith seems no longer possible —and probably not even desirable.

Notwithstanding the above, also an academic audience can profit of His hiding place is darkness. I have, for instance, appreciated Clooney’s ability to detect from the classical commentary on The holy word all elements which enabled one to see the purpose and meaning of seemingly merely decorative poetical elements. For instance, the reader discovers in this way that Viṣṇu is not by chance said to lie on his snake-bed. His lying on it means that He is not far, He is close to the world because He cares for it. Thus, His failing to soothe the loving girl appears even more cruel. Similarly, the girl’s pausing on the plumage of the cranes she chooses as the messengers of her love to Viṣṇu is a sign of her pausing on their capacity to reach Him fast.

More in general, Clooney’s way of seeing poetry as theology throws indirectly light on why so many Indian theologians decided to write poems and not (or not only) treatises. Theology enabled them different perspectives. If Clooney is right, at least one of the reasons for choosing the poetical medium is its theopoetic ability. The term comes from the theologian Urs von Balthasar and indicates a poem’s ability to dynamically enliven rather than represent.

This might also be the reason why, I believe, Veṅkaṭanātha chose to write also poems. What about other Indian authors?

For more on the probem of why Indian authors write in verses, have a look at the comments to this post.
(cross-posted on The Indian Philosophy blog)

1. the Vedāntic viewpoint
2. the emphasis on Pūrva Mīmāṃsā
3. the incorporation of Pāñcarātra
4. the incorporation of the Āḻvārs’ theology

The development of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta as a vedāntic school is clear as one looks back at Veṅkaṭanātha’s predecessors, but it is important to notice that what seems a posteriori like a clear Vedāntic school would not probably have appeared as such to its contemporaries. In fact, Yāmuna’s relation to Vedānta is complex. He quotes from the Upaniṣads in the Ātmasiddhi, and he starts it listing the Vedānta teachers he wants to refute (including Bhartṛhari and Śaṅkara), so that one might think that he is keener to “purify” Vedānta than he cares about “purifying” Nyāya. At the same time, at least in the Ātmasiddhi (see Mesquita 1971, pp. 4–13) Yāmuna accepts an anti-Vedāntic proof for the existence of God, namely the inference (whereas Pūrva and Uttara Mīmāṃsā agree that God can only be known through the Sacred Texts) and the Āgamaprāmāṇya seems to have a completely different focus. Rāmānuja is more straightforwardly part of a Vedāntic approach (this is, in my opinion, also the reason why he has been often considered the “founder” of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta —a term which he and Yāmuna still ignore). As for Nāthamuni, his relation to Vedānta can only be presupposed out of what we know of him through his successors, given that his works have been lost. Their titles focus, however, on Nyāya and Yoga (and not on Vedānta).

As for No. 2, we know nothing about Nāthamuni’s relation to Mīmāṃsā, but we know that at least one trend within Vedānta (as testified by Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Brahmasūtra) claimed that the study of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā was not necessary. Yāmuna’s relation to Pūrva Mīmāṃsā is double-faced, but Pūrva Mīmāṃsā authors seem to be his targeted objectors in the sense that he wants to convince them of the legitimacy of the Pāñcarātra transmission (although often recurring to their same arguments) and he by and large adopts Nyāya strategies (such as the reference to God as the authoritative source of the epistemologic validity of the Pāñcarātra, or the use of inference to establish God’s existence). The situation changes, perhaps during Yāmuna’s own life, certainly with Rāmānuja, who steers in direction Vedānta and, thus, comes closer to the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. So close that he programmatically states at the beginning of his commentary on the Brahmasūtra that not only the Brāhmaṇa part of the Veda needs to be studied, but that its study is part of the same teaching with the Vedānta. Veṅkaṭanātha takes advantage of this (perhaps causal) remark and understands its deep implications: he can thus state that the whole of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and the whole of Uttara Mīmāṃsā constitute a single teaching (ekaśāstra).

No. 3 and 4: Furthermore, Veṅkaṭanātha used the same model, I think, to incorporate into the system further elements. He reaches back to the Pāñcarātra, which had been defended by Yāmuna but rather neglected by Rāmānuja and, more strikingly, to the hymns of the Āḻvārs. It is in this sense more than telling that Veṅkaṭanātha (as first among the first teachers of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta) decided to write also in Tamil and to write theology also in poetical form, as the Āḻvārs had done.

Did you ever try to reconstruct what had happened in a single school within some generations of teachers and pupils? What did you find out?

On Yāmuna’s role in what came to be known as Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, check this post, on Pāñcarātra and Vedānta, see this post. For more on Veṅkaṭanātha, check this tag.

1. One can treat it as if it were Western philosophy and discuss, e.g., of monotonic or non-monotonic logic in Nyāya,
2. One can deal with it in its own terms, e.g., by describing the inner-Mīmāṃsā controversy about whether one has to study the Veda because of the prescription to study it or because of the prescription to teach it (since, in order for someone to teach, someone else must be learning from him),
3. One can attempt a compromise, looking for how a certain topic is configured in Sanskrit philosophy.

In the case of the topic of free will, it is hard to avoid the third approach. In fact, whereas the topic of free will is one of the major Leitmotivs running throughout the whole history of Western Philosophy, on a pair with ontological issues, it is not formulated as such in Sanskrit philosophy (see Freschi in the volume edited by Dasti and Bryant). Nonetheless, one can look for implicit treatments of it in theological contexts and in in philosophy of action ones.

Veṅkaṭanātha (also known with the honorific title Vedānta Deśika, traditional dates 1269–1370) is one of the most prolific and multi-faceted personalities of Indian philosophy. He attempted to create a philosophic system which should have broadened Rāmānuja’s Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and make it into a more comprehensive philosophical system. Due to its ambition of comprehensiveness, it is legitimate to expect from Veṅkaṭanātha’s system that it deals also with questions relating to the nature of action and of our contribution to it, and, thus, ultimately with the issue of free will.

What do we have at Veṅkaṭanātha’s background?

On the one hand, Veṅkaṭanātha’s relation towards (Pūrva) Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta (and other Indian philosophical systems), on the other his relation with the Vaiṣṇava religious literature he considers authoritative (Pāñcarātra, hymns of the Āḻvārs). Given the fact that most researches on Indian philosophy focus on Sanskrit texts, one runs the risk to neglect the latter component, which is predominant in Veṅkaṭanātha’s non-Sanskrit production.

The Mīmāṃsā background
The Mīmāṃsā school did not explicitly deal with the topic of free will. Nonetheless, its theory of action presupposes that there are real agents and that these can be held responsible for their actions. In this sense, its concept of duty and of responsibility takes free will as self-assumed.

The Vaiṣṇava background
The Vaiṣṇava texts follow a different path, since many of them emphasise the worthlessness of the poet (the Āḻvār) or of his poetical figura (often a woman) and his/her desperate need of God’s mercy, which is the only thing which could save him/her. Interestingly enough, even in these texts, free will is not denied, but rather superseded by God’s intervention. The protagonist is desperate because of her/his sins and states that s/he cannot achieve anything on his/her own. The possibility to achieve salvation through other ways (most notably, through the bhaktimārga, which is based on one’s love for God) is not ruled out. One could theoretically be able to love God and to be saved through that. De facto, however, the protagonists of the Āḻvārs’ hymns feel unable even to do that. Even their love is not perfect, only their surrender is.

Thus, free will seems to remain a pre-condition. But God’s grace can supersede it and save even unworthy ones. Or do Tamil-conversant readers have a better appreciation of what is at stake?

(cross-posted also on the Indian Philosophy blog)