Madhva 1199 – 1278

Madhva was an Indian theologian and the founder of Dvaita, or dualistic Vedanta. Against Adi Shankara's non-dualism and Ramanuja's qualified non-dualism, he taught that there is an absolute and irreducible distinction between Brahman, individual selves, and matter, and that liberation comes through devotion to Vishnu rather than through identification with him. He composed thirty-seven works, including commentaries on the Brahma Sutras, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita, and founded the Sri Krishna Matha at Udupi, still a major center of Vaishnava devotion.

Madhva — also called Anandatirtha or Purnaprajna — was born around 1199 at Pajaka, near Udupi on the coast of Karnataka, into a Tulu Brahmin family. Tradition reports him as an exceptionally precocious child who took monastic ordination as a teenager and undertook two long study tours across India before returning to Udupi to teach.

He composed thirty-seven works (Sarvamula) including commentaries (bhashyas) on the principal Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras, and the Bhagavad Gita; the Anuvyakhyana, his longer reasoning on the Brahma Sutras; the Mahabharata Tatparya Nirnaya, an interpretive summary of the epic; and the polemical Tattvaviveka and Tattvodyota directed against the Advaita of Shankara. He installed the celebrated icon of Krishna at Udupi and organized the eight monasteries (ashta mathas) that continue to manage the temple in rotation.

Against the non-dualism of Shankara and the qualified non-dualism of Ramanuja, Madhva taught Dvaita — a thoroughgoing metaphysical pluralism in which the supreme God Vishnu, the individual selves, and the world are eternally distinct, and in which liberation consists in the loving service of God by the qualified soul. His school has remained one of the three great traditions of Vedanta and the dominant religious tradition of much of coastal Karnataka. He is reported to have departed from Udupi in 1278.