Madhva

Madhva completed Vedanta's great three-way argument over the relationship between the self and the divine, taking the position furthest from Shankara's: where Shankara held that self and absolute are strictly one, and Ramanuja that they are one reality with real internal distinctions, Madhva's Dvaita, or dualism, insisted that God, souls, and matter are eternally, irreducibly distinct substances, and that no soul, however liberated, ever becomes identical with or absorbed into God. He organized this claim around a comprehensive theory of pancha-bheda, the five fundamental differences, between God and souls, God and matter, one soul and another, soul and matter, and one portion of matter and another, arguing that even liberation does not erase these distinctions but perfects the soul's proper, permanently subordinate relationship to a God who remains genuinely other. This gave devotional worship of a personal, supreme God, identified with Vishnu, an even sharper philosophical footing than Ramanuja's system had, since love and worship, on Madhva's account, are not a lesser stage before final absorption into the divine but the eternal, unending relationship liberation itself consists of. He wrote extensive commentaries on the Brahma Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Upanishads defending this position against both Advaita and Vishishtadvaita, and traveled widely across India, according to tradition even undertaking a pilgrimage to the Himalayas, before returning to found a cluster of eight monasteries at Udupi that still administer its Krishna temple and maintain his teaching lineage today, making him, alongside Shankara and Ramanuja, the third and most uncompromisingly theistic of the three commentators who defined the boundaries of classical Vedanta.