Welcome to Eternal Path Musings, a weekly newsletter for the modern and curious Hindu, featuring highlights around: religious texts, practice, history, politics, people, and ways to better our engagement and personal progress.
This issue features highlights on Dvaita philosophy and poetry as well as an aesthetic!
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Philosophy Highlight: Dvaita of Madhvacharya
Many may be familiar with the term Advaita (non-dualism), but the term Dvaita (dualism) often gets less attention. Dvaitas believe that a “God” exists, but that the universe “God” created exists as well, in contrast to the Advaita view of the physical world being maya, or an illusion. Furthermore, many Dvaitas would argue that the creation of the world is a desire of “God’s” conscious will to create. These basics underscore a belief that the universe is not one coherent entity.
Dvaita exists most clearly as a strand within the Vaishnavite sect. There are dvaita ideas in Saivite sects as well, but dvaita most popularly is associated with the teachings of Sri Madhvacharya. The patron saint of the Vijayanagara empire, Sri Vyasatirtha, was an exponent of dvaita as well.
Below are five defining differences between entities outlined in Dualist Hinduism:
Jiva-Ishwar - Between the individual souls (or jīvātman) and “God”
Jagat-Ishwar - Between matter (inanimate, insentient) and “God”
Jiva-Jiva - Between individual souls (jīvātman).
Jiva-Jagat - Between matter and jīvātman
Jagat-Jagat - Between various types of matter.
By far the most famous dvaita philosopher was Sri Madhvacharya of Karnataka (1238-1317 CE). He was a prolific writer and preacher, with famous commentaries (with links) on the Mahabharata (Mahabharata Tatparya Nirnaya) and Brahma/Vedanta Sutras (commentary). Along with Ramanujacharya and Adi Shankaracharya, he is seen as one of the three greatest Vedanta philosophers.
Madhvacharya’s vision of dvaita includes the end goal of Aparoksha-Jnana (direct vision of God) as coterminous with moksha, which is attainable in two ways: (1) complete renunciation of the world and meditation or (2) gradually accumulating knowledge through performing ones duties, as prescribed by the shastras - ie. karma-yoga.
For more resources on dvaita, please visit Tatvavada, Dvaita.net, Dvaita.org, or the official websites of the three most famous dvaita mathas (Uttaradi Math, Vyasaraja Math, Raghavendra Math). For social media, @MadhvaHistory on twitter is a great follow, and their YouTube channel “Anveshi” is absolutely worth subscribing to.
Poetry Highlight: Harikathamrutasara
About four centuries after Sri Madhvacharya, the poet Jagannatha Dasa, a scholar of Kannada and Sanskrit wrote the magnum opus known as Harikathamrutasara. It expounds upon dvaita philosophy and Vaishnava bhakti across 32 chapters and 988 stanzas in the Kannada language. As a piece of devotional literature, it had wide-ranging impact with multiple commentaries on it written in Kannada, Telugu, and even Sanskrit! Similar to Shakespeare’s use of Ionic pentameter, this text is written in a specific meter known as "Bhamini Shatpadi” - a special type of six-line poem (Prekshaa has a great piece on prosody that delves in further).
The content within Harikathamrutasara weaves together deep philosophical insights with uplifting commentary on bhakti. See a sample stanza below:
To hear a part of the text in musical form, watch the video below:
For discourses on the text, the Vyasaraja Matha has a fantastic Youtube playlist below:
Aesthetic: Indonesian Ganesh Murti
