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: qualified non-dualism and an aesthetic
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Philosophy Highlight: Qualified Non-Dualism
From a philosophical perspective, arguably the three most famous Hindu philosophers of the Middle Ages were Adi Sankaracharya, Sri Madhvacharya, and Sri Ramanujacharya, reflecting the advaita (non-dualism), dvaita (dualism), and vishishtadvaita (qualified non-dualism) philosophies respectively. We did a large feature on dualism with links to resources in our Week 24 issue, while also featuring Govardhan Math, a non-dualist institution in Week 6. Kinchitkaram Trust, an organization we featured in Week 17, takes heavy inspiration from Ramanujacharya.
The most famous exponent of Vishishtadvaita was Ramanujacharya, an 11th century theologian, saint, and philosopher. He was influenced by the advaita vedanta tradition as well as the azhwar Tamil Vaishnavite saints of the Middle Ages, drawing on them to discover a new philosophy within Hinduism. He published many Sanskrit texts, including a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita (available here in full pdf) and is widely regarded as one of the most influential Hindu philosophers. The modern Hindu organization BAPS also traces some of its intellectual roots to Vishishtadvaita.
The characteristics of Brahman/”God” here are: Reality, Knowledge, Infiniteness, Bliss, and Purity and Brahman manifests in five forms: (1) Transcendental, (2) Divine (as Vasudeva, Sankarshana, Pradyumna and Aniruddha), (3) Incarnations, (4) as manifest in the offerings of devotees, and lastly (5) as residing in the hearts of living entities. The goal is liberation and the paths to liberation are through bhakti and praptti, the latter being total surrender to the Lord
There are three fundamental concepts to the Vishishtadvaita worldview:
aprthaksiddhi - all entities have attributes, and that the attributes of an entity cannot be separated from the understanding of an entity.Something with no attributes is a non-entity. This differs from the advaita conception of “God”, which can be simplified down to formless.
Sarira-atma-bhava - IndiaFacts explains this as: “When you think of the body and the soul, they can be differentiated mentally but not physically and, in the same way, the identity (non-duality) of Brahman can be understood taking the body and soul together, while duality too can be accepted differentiating by seeing the body as different from the soul”
Ananya-arha-sesatva - Devotion to the Lord and no one else.
To learn more about the Vishishtadvaita worldview here are a few resources below:
IndiaFacts longform article on the philosophy and actions of Sri Ramanuja
Ramanuja.org website, with links to texts, temples, and classes
Aesthetic: A Highlight on @OGSaffron
OGSaffron was a popular twitter account that posted Hindu aesthetics and frankly the inspiration for this section of our newsletter. He unfortunately passed away in a car crash recently. Om Shanti.
In memory of his works, Sukarma has posted a great twitter thread highlighting some of his posts that we encourage readers to explore:
Another collection of OGSaffron material is below:
