Madhva Quotes on Life

Madhva (1238–1317) — the South Indian Vaishnava theologian who founded the Dvaita (dualist) school of Vedanta in opposition to the Advaita non-dualism of Shankara — gave classical Indian philosophy its most influential personalist alternative to the dominant monistic Vedanta. The central project, developed across commentaries on the Brahma Sutras, the principal Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the late Anuvyakhyana, treats the individual self as an irreducibly distinct reality eternally dependent on but not identical with the supreme personal God Vishnu — and the corresponding analysis of the well-lived life is the practice of devotion (bhakti) through which the individual self comes into right relation with the divine reality on whom it constitutively depends. The framework shaped the later Vaishnava devotional traditions, including the Gaudiya Vaishnavism of Chaitanya, and remains the principal classical Indian philosophical alternative to Shankara’s Advaita.