Sriperumbudur

A temple town near modern Chennai, traditionally held as the birthplace of Ramanuja, who would leave to build Vishishtadvaita Vedanta into the great theistic rival of Shankara's stricter non-dualism.

Sriperumbudur is a temple town on the road west out of Chennai, and tradition places Ramanuja's birth there in the eleventh century. The stories about his early life turn mostly on conflict with his teacher, who held the strict non-dualism Ramanuja would spend his career opposing and who is supposed to have plotted to have him killed. Whatever the truth of it, the system he built made room for a God one could love as another, which Shankara's had made difficult.