Vedanta and its Schools

If you have visited a Hindu temple, attended a Gītā class or heard a swami speak, you have almost certainly met Vedānta. It is the most widely followed of the classical philosophies — so widely followed that people sometimes speak as if it were Hinduism’s only philosophy, and as if Vedānta had only one voice. It has many. This page is a map: what the schools share, the single question on which they divide, and the teachers who answered it.

The end of the Veda

Vedānta means “the end of the Veda.” The phrase works in two ways. The Upanishads stand at the end of each Veda, after the hymns, the ritual manuals and the forest books (see Layers of a Veda). And they are its end in the sense of its goal: the knowledge toward which everything else points. The Upanishads already use the word of themselves:

The tradition also calls Vedānta Uttara Mīmāṃsā, the “later inquiry,” beside the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, the “earlier inquiry” into Vedic ritual (see Mīmāṃsā). Both are methods of reading the Veda; they differ over which part of it carries the final message. For Mīmāṃsā, the Veda is above all a command to act. For Vedānta, its heart is the knowledge of Brahman, the reality from which everything comes. How the two inquiries relate is itself disputed: Shankara treats them as separate, while Ramanuja reads them as one continuous science.

Three starting points

What makes a school “Vedānta” is not a doctrine but a library. Every Vedāntin accepts the authority of the prasthānatrayī, the “three starting points”: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gītā and Bādarāyaṇa’s Brahmasūtra (see A Map of the Texts). A teacher who wanted to found a school was expected to show, in commentaries, that all three taught his view. The Brahmasūtra above all became the field of battle, because its threads are so terse that they can be read in more than one way — The Sutras shows three readings of its opening lines.

Some schools added a fourth source. Śrīvaiṣṇavas read the Tamil hymns of the Āḻvārs alongside the Sanskrit Upanishads. Vallabha counted the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as a fourth authority, and Caitanya’s followers held it to be the Brahmasūtra’s natural commentary. Shaiva Vedāntins read everything in the light of the Āgamas (see Agamas & Tantras).

Beyond the library, the schools share a great deal. All accept that the Veda is a valid means of knowing what the senses cannot reach. All accept rebirth and moksha. All hold that Brahman is the source of the world — though Madhva, as we will see, denies that Brahman is its material. And all agree that the Self is not the body.

The one question

Where they part is on a single question, which every school must answer: how is Brahman related to the individual souls and to the world? The difficulty lies in the Upanishads themselves. Some passages seem to say plainly that there is only one reality:

Others seem to say just as plainly that God and souls are many and distinct:

Both verses are scripture; neither can simply be thrown away. Every school of Vedānta is, in the end, a strategy for holding them together. One strategy takes the statements of oneness as final and the statements of difference as true only from the standpoint of the world. Another takes difference as final and reads the oneness passages as speaking of dependence or likeness. Ramanuja pointed to a third group of passages — such as the Bṛhadāraṇyaka’s “inner controller,” who dwells in the self and has the self as his body — and argued that these “connecting texts” show how both kinds can be true at once.

From that single question come the others. Is the world real, or an appearance (see Maya & Lila)? Is the liberated soul one with Brahman, or eternally in its presence (see Samsara & Moksha)? Is the way there chiefly knowledge, or devotion and grace?

From identity to difference

One way to picture the schools is as points along a line, from those who say Brahman and the soul are simply identical to those who say they are eternally different. Tap each step. Seeker’s synthesis

The teachers

The schools are remembered by their founders, but each founder stood in a line of teachers, and each was followed by generations of commentators. Dates before about 1200 are approximate; where tradition and historians differ, both are given.

1. c. 2nd c. BCE – 5th c. CEBādarāyaṇa’s BrahmasūtraThe threads that every later teacher had to explain. Tradition identifies Bādarāyaṇa with Vyāsa.
2. c. 6th c.GauḍapādaHis verses on the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad are the oldest surviving work of Advaita. Tradition makes him the teacher of Shankara’s teacher, Govinda.
3. c. 700ShankaraThe oldest complete commentary on the Brahmasūtra to survive. Older textbooks give 788–820 CE (a date drawn from a late verse and popularised by 19th-century scholars); many scholars now prefer c. 700–750; some maṭhas place him in the 5th century BCE.
4. c. 8th–9th c.BhāskaraA sharp early critic of Shankara, defending difference-and-non-difference and the union of knowledge with ritual.
5. c. 10th–11th c.Nāthamuni and YāmunaNāthamuni gathers the Tamil hymns of the Āḻvārs; his grandson Yāmuna defends the Vaishnava Āgamas in Sanskrit and prepares the way for Ramanuja.
6. trad. 1017–1137RamanujaViśiṣṭādvaita’s great systematiser, at Srirangam in Tamil Nadu. Some historians place him a few decades later.
7. c. 12th c.?Śrīkaṇṭha and NimbārkaBoth dates are uncertain. Nimbārka’s followers place him far earlier; historians suggest between the 7th and the 13th centuries.
8. 1238–1317MadhvaFounder of Dvaita at Udupi, in today’s Karnataka. An older reckoning gives 1199–1278.
9. 14th–16th c.The great debatesVedānta Deśika for Viśiṣṭādvaita, Vidyāraṇya for Advaita, Jayatīrtha and Vyāsatīrtha for Dvaita, and Madhusūdana Sarasvatī’s Advaita reply.
10. 1479–1531 · 1486–1534Vallabha and CaitanyaTwo Krishna-devotional Vedāntas, in western India and Bengal, born within a decade of each other.
11. 19th–20th c.Modern VedāntaVivekananda, Ramana Maharshi, Aurobindo and others carry Vedānta into a modern, global conversation.

Four lineages of Vishnu

Among Vaishnavas a well-known scheme counts four authorised lineages (sampradāyas), each traced back to a divine founder. Traditional scheme

The scheme is old enough to be widely repeated but young compared with the schools it organises: it seems to have taken shape in north India in the 16th and 17th centuries, partly so that newer devotional movements could claim an ancient pedigree. The Advaita lineage — the order of renunciants that traces itself to Shankara — sits outside it, as do the Shaiva and Śākta Vedāntas. Many Hindu families, especially among Smārta Brahmins of the south, follow Advaita in philosophy while worshipping several deities at home.

Modern Vedānta

In the 19th and 20th centuries Vedānta found new voices, and a new audience far beyond India. These teachers drew on the classical schools — mostly Advaita — but read them in fresh ways:

Community In Malaysia, modern Vedānta arrived with the Tamil diaspora and the missions that followed it. Swami Sivananda worked as a doctor in Malaya for about a decade before his renunciation, and the Divine Life Society he founded later, together with the Ramakrishna Mission and the Chinmaya Mission, runs Gītā and Vedānta classes in Malaysian towns today.

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Sources & further reading

• Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation (Oxford University Press, 1998) — Chāndogya 6, Muṇḍaka, Śvetāśvatara.
• Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy, 5 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1922–1955) — vols. 1–4 on the Vedānta schools.
• M. Hiriyanna, Outlines of Indian Philosophy (George Allen & Unwin, 1932).
• Ayon Maharaj (ed.), The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedānta (Bloomsbury, 2020).
• Andrew J. Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (Columbia University Press, 2010) — on Bhedābheda and on how the schools came to be classified.
• John B. Carman, The Theology of Rāmānuja (Yale University Press, 1974).
• B. N. K. Sharma, History of the Dvaita School of Vedānta and Its Literature (1960–61; Motilal Banarsidass, 1981).
• The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Advaita Ashrama); Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine; Ramana Maharshi, Who Am I? (Sri Ramanasramam).