Udupi

A coastal Karnataka temple town where Madhva was born and where he founded the eight monasteries that still administer his Krishna temple and preserve his Dvaita philosophy of eternal, irreducible difference between soul and God.

Udupi is on the Karnataka coast, and the Krishna temple Madhva founded there is still run by the eight monasteries he established, their heads taking the administration in turn on a fixed cycle. Madhva argued for real and permanent difference: between God and soul, between one soul and another, between soul and matter. In a philosophical culture that mostly treated unity as the higher truth, he built an entire system on the claim that things are genuinely separate and stay that way.