Most Famous Vedanta Philosophers
Vedanta is one of the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, centered on the metaphysical inquiries of the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras, and the Bhagavad Gita. Its central question is the relationship between the individual self (atman) and ultimate reality (Brahman). The most influential sub-school, Advaita Vedanta, holds that this relationship is one of non-dual identity. Vedanta has shaped Indian philosophical and religious thought for more than a millennium and remains a living tradition.
Philosophers in this tradition
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Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet, philosopher, musician, and educator and the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born into a prominent Bengali fa...
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Adi Shankara
Adi Shankara was an Indian philosopher and theologian who consolidated the doctrine of Advaita Vedanta, the school of non-dualism. Working in a brief but extraordinarily product...
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Ramana Maharshi
Ramana Maharshi was an Indian Hindu sage and one of the most influential teachers of Advaita Vedanta in the twentieth century. At sixteen he experienced a spontaneous identifica...
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Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was an Indian philosopher and statesman, the second President of independent India and one of the foremost twentieth-century interpreters of Indian phil...
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Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo was an Indian philosopher, yogi, poet, and anti-colonial revolutionary. After studies at Cambridge and early activism in the Bengali nationalist movement, he withd...
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Swami Vivekananda
Narendranath Datta, known as Swami Vivekananda, was an Indian Hindu monk and the principal disciple of the mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. His address at the Parliament of the W...
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Madhva
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...
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Ramanuja
Ramanuja was an Indian theologian and the most important exponent of Vishishtadvaita, or qualified non-dualism, in the Vedanta tradition. Against Adi Shankara's Advaita, he taug...