Ramanuja (1017-1137)

Key dates

Childhood at Sriperumbudur and the break with Yādava Prakāśa

Ramanuja was born into a Tamil Brahmin family at Sriperumbudur, a locality near present-day Chennai, on a date that Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition fixes in 1017 but that modern academic research seriously debates^[13]. His Vedantic training led him to Kāñchipuram, where he studied under Yādava Prakāśa, a proponent of a reading close to Advaita (monist non-dualism) or bhedābheda (difference-and-non-difference), already systematized a century and a half earlier by Shankara. The disagreements between master and pupil over the exact interpretation of the Upaniṣads recurred until they caused an open break, documented by the traditional biographies as well as by contemporary academic research, which nevertheless notes the difficulty of disentangling, in these late accounts, the historical kernel from legendary elaboration^[14].

It was in this context that Ramanuja received his first truly devotional initiation, not from his learned master, but from Kāñcīpūrṇa, a devotee of low caste whose holiness of life impressed the young scholar so deeply that he wished to make him formally his guru — a request that Kāñcīpūrṇa declined, precisely because of the caste distinctions which, he thought, made the thing socially improper^[15]. This episode, reported consistently by tradition, prefigures a central trait of all Ramanuja's later work: the conviction that authentic devotion cuts across social hierarchies rather than submitting to them.

The masters of devotion: Yamunācārya and the spiritual succession

At the end of his life, Yamunācārya, leader of the nascent Śrī Vaiṣṇava community at Śrīraṅgam and grandson of the reformer Nāthamuni, designated Ramanuja as his successor — although the two men, according to tradition, never met in person, Yamunācārya dying before Ramanuja could reach him^[16]. It was Mahāpūrṇa, a direct disciple of Yamunācārya, who then oversaw Ramanuja's formal initiation into the monastic order of renouncers (saṃnyāsin). This spiritual filiation through successive intermediaries, rather than by direct transmission from a single master, lastingly shaped the identity of Śrī Vaiṣṇavism as a lineage (guru-paramparā) rather than as a school founded by a single man.

The mantra shouted from the top of the temple

The most often told episode of Ramanuja's spiritual formation concerns his second master of devotion, Goṣṭhīpūrṇa (also called Tirukkoṭṭiyūr Nambi), guardian of the sacred eight-syllabled mantra (Aṣṭākṣara, invocation to Nārāyaṇa). Tradition reports that Goṣṭhīpūrṇa consented to transmit this mantra to Ramanuja only after eighteen refusals, not out of cruelty but to test the sincerity of his request; he ended by entrusting it to him, but with a formal prohibition: never to divulge it to anyone, on pain of going himself to hell^[17]. According to the traditional account, Ramanuja, judging that accepting his own damnation was worth the price of the liberation of multitudes of souls, at once gathered the crowd without distinction of rank and proclaimed the mantra from the top of the temple tower so that all could hear it and repeat it together^[18]. Goṣṭhīpūrṇa, at first angered by this disobedience, is said to have finally been moved by his disciple's compassion and to have given him the title by which tradition still designates him today: Emperumānār, "our master"^[19].

This episode, transmitted by a hagiography composed generations after the events and therefore unverifiable in its precise details, nonetheless remains doctrinally significant: it condenses, in the edifying-narrative register proper to Indian tradition, Ramanuja's conviction that salvation could not be the reserved property of a learned or social elite — a conviction he would later translate, institutionally and in documented fashion, in his reform of the pañcasaṃskāra.

Kūreśa and the price of fidelity

The Śrī Vaiṣṇava hagiographies place, in the second half of Ramanuja's life, an episode of persecution attributed to a Shaivite Chola ruler, designated in tradition by the pejorative nickname Krimikaṇṭha ("worm-throated")^[20]. Modern academic research is cautious about the exact historical identification of this king — historian K. A. Nilakanta Sastri proposes identifying him as Adhirājendra Chola or Vīrarājendra Chola rather than the broadly designated figure of legend^[21]. The traditional account holds that the king demanded from Ramanuja a doctrinal acknowledgement he refused to grant; his disciple Kūreśa, famed for his prodigious memory, is said to have presented himself in his stead dressed in his master's robes to protect him, and to have paid for this substitution with the price of his own eyes, burned out on royal orders^[22]. Tradition reports that Ramanuja, back in Śrīraṅgam, implored the temple deity to restore his sight — a healing the hagiographical account presents as miraculous^[23].

Whatever the exact share of legendary elaboration in this account composed several generations after the events, historian Paul Sydnor aptly sums up the documentary difficulty inherent in any biographical reconstruction of Ramanuja: "reconstructing his 'historical life' is virtually impossible"^[24], the available sources — the Śrīraṅgam guru-paramparā (Koil Olugu) and the hagiographies of the Vadakalai and Tenkalai schools — having been written centuries after his death and each pursuing distinct theological and institutional interests.

The Karnatakan exile and the conversion of King Bitti Deva

Faced with this pressure, Ramanuja and some of his disciples left the Tamil country to take refuge in the Hoysala kingdom of Karnataka, where they remained, according to traditional accounts, twelve to fifteen years^[25]. It was there that the most consequential event of this exile occurred on the political and religious plane: the local king, Bitti Deva, of Jain confession, converted to Vaishnavism under Ramanuja's influence and took the name Vishnuvardhana^[26]. Tradition places the origin of this conversion in the healing of an affliction striking the king's daughter, interpreted as a sign of the power of Vaishnavite devotion^[27] — an account whose historicity, as with the Kūreśa episode, belongs to the register of hagiography rather than documented history, but whose political consequence is attested: with the support of the converted king, Ramanuja had the great Thirunarayanaswamy temple built at Melukote, now in Mandya district^[28]. Ramanuja kept so deep an attachment to this place that tradition reports he wished his own spirit to remain attached to the temple's processional image sculpted in his likeness^[29].

The return, death and the debate over dates

After the death of the persecuting ruler, Ramanuja returned to the Tamil country and resumed the spiritual direction of the great temple of Śrīraṅgam, whose worship he durably reorganized — notably by admitting, against the reluctance of certain Brahmanical circles, the castes traditionally kept outside the sacred enclosure^[30]. The temple lineage texts (Koil Olugu) and the late hagiographies (Guru-paramparā-prabhāva, Vadakalai and Tenkalai) describe his death as a serene and deliberate departure: warned of his approaching end, Ramanuja is said to have agreed, at his disciples' request, to remain three more days, during which he consecrated a statue destined to receive his spiritual essence, before dying with his head resting on the knees of his disciple Embar and his feet on those of Vaduga Nambi, while listening to the recitation of the Tamil hymns of the Divya Prabandham and meditating on the sandals of his master Yamunācārya^[31].

Tradition fixes this death in 1137, which, set against a birth traditionally dated to 1017, would give Ramanuja a life of one hundred and twenty years — a figure the traditional sources accept without any particular embarrassment, but which modern historical research receives with caution. Drawing on 11th–12th-century temple records and regional literature outside the Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition, historian John Carman proposes an alternative chronology: birth around 1077, death around 1157, reducing his life to about eighty years, a span far more consistent with the known demographic data of medieval India^[32]. This dating itself remains hypothetical, however — hence Sydnor's already-cited remark about the "virtually impossible" character of any certain biographical reconstruction^[33]. Ignispedia retains both datings here, traditional and academic, without artificially deciding between them.

Against Advaita: common-sense logic versus pure monism

The heart of Ramanuja's philosophical contribution lies in his systematic refutation of the Advaita Vedānta defended, a century and a half before him, by Shankara — the position according to which Brahman is, in the final analysis, strictly one and without a second (advaita), all perceived plurality — souls, world, gods — belonging to a cosmic illusion (māyā) to be dispelled by knowledge alone. Ramanuja, in his Śrī Bhāṣya and his Vedārthasaṃgraha, attacks this thesis through a twofold argumentative strategy. On the one hand, a properly logical critique: he reproaches his adversaries for treating the perceived difference between things as fundamentally unintelligible, whereas this conclusion contradicts the most elementary common sense — a position he illustrates with a formula that has remained famous:

"[One who thus denies the reality of difference] is no better than a man who would claim that his own mother never had a child." — Ramanuja, Śrī Bhāṣya, I.1.1^[34]

On the other hand, an epistemological critique: if, as the proponents of Advaita claim, all ordinary knowledge is by nature tainted with error, then this very assertion, being itself knowledge, should likewise be erroneous — which contradicts its own claim to truth^[35]. Ramanuja finally insists on the doctrinal unity of the Veda: his adversaries, in his view, arbitrarily privilege the Upaniṣadic passages they deem bearers of an esoteric teaching on non-duality, while neglecting the many passages that affirm without ambiguity the real plurality of souls and of the world^[36].

The three realities: Īśvara, cit and acit

To this negative critique, Ramanuja opposes a positive metaphysics, structured around three fundamental realities (tattva-traya): Īśvara, the supreme Lord, identified with Vishnu-Nārāyaṇa, essentially united with his consort Śrī-Lakṣmī; cit, the multitude of individual conscious souls (jīva), eternal and really distinct from one another; and acit, the insentient matter that makes up the world^[37]. Unlike Advaita, for which this plurality has reality only at the provisional level of ordinary experience, Ramanuja maintains that these three realities are equally and fully real, none of them being reduced, at the ultimate level, to a mere appearance of the other two.

The doctrine of God's body (śarīra-śarīrī-bhāva)

Ramanuja's most original concept for reconciling this real plurality with the unity affirmed by the Upaniṣads is the doctrine of body and soul (śarīra-śarīrī-bhāva): the entire universe — individual souls and matter — serves as body to God, who is its soul, exactly as the human body, with all its diversity of limbs and organs, is animated and unified by a single soul that inhabits it without merging with it^[38]. This image, grounded in a passage of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad ("he who, dwelling in all things, is distinct from all things, whom all things do not know, whose body is made up of all things, who controls all things from within, [is] your own immortal Self, the inner controller")^[39], allows Ramanuja to affirm both that "Brahman is the Self of all" — without this meaning that each person's individual personality is numerically identical with that of Brahman^[40]. This is, on this precise point, the solution Ramanuja brings to the famous Upaniṣadic formula "Tat tvam asi" ("Thou art That"): where Shankara reads in it a strict identity between the individual soul and the Absolute, Ramanuja sees a relationship of organic dependence, comparable to that of the limb toward the body it constitutes without exhausting it.

Karma, ignorance and the real plurality of souls

For Ramanuja, individual souls are, like God and matter, eternal — they are neither created nor destroyed — but they remain covered by an ignorance (avidyā) produced by the residues of their past actions (karma), which obscures their true nature as knowing creatures dependent on God^[41]. Unlike Advaita, for which ignorance in a sense produces the very illusion of individuality, Ramanuja objects that ignorance logically presupposes an already distinct subject affected by it: Brahman, being by nature perfect knowledge, could not himself be the seat of this ignorance, which must therefore affect individual souls really distinct from him and logically prior to their own self-misunderstanding^[42].

Bhakti as lived knowledge

Ramanuja's most original contribution to Indian epistemology is his doctrine according to which devotion (bhakti) is itself a state of knowledge. For him, true knowledge of Brahman is not a matter of mere belief in an abstract proposition, but of a direct perceptual relation between the knower and the known object^[43]. Yet, according to the IEP's synthesis after the Vedārthasaṃgraha and the Śrī Bhāṣya, such knowledge remains insufficient if it stays purely theoretical: theoretical knowledge alone of the nature of Brahman does not suffice to bring about liberation^[44].

The remedy he proposes, drawing directly on the Bhagavad-Gītā, is what he calls bhakti-yoga, the discipline of devotion that comprises both the disinterested fulfilment of one's duties (karma-yoga) and a constant offering to God of the fruits of one's action^[45]. When this devotion takes deep root, it becomes parabhakti, devotion of the highest order, which constitutes according to Ramanuja a direct and conscious knowledge of the nature of Brahman, a genuine form of perception (jñāna) and not a mere abstract meditation^[46].

Prapatti and Śaraṇāgati: total surrender to God

Alongside — or perhaps beyond — the long devotional path of bhakti-yoga, tradition attributes to Ramanuja the doctrine of prapatti or śaraṇāgati: the total surrender of the soul to God, grounded in the recognition that it has "no other refuge"^[47]. This doctrine finds its most intense expression in the Gadya Traya, the three prose poems attributed to Ramanuja, in which the speaker addresses Śrī-Lakṣmī and Nārāyaṇa directly in a movement of supplication and self-surrender:

"I am Thy servant; I have placed myself entirely in Thy hands; rescue me, me Thy servant, O Lord!" — Translation circulated after the edition of M. R. Rajagopala Ayyangar, The Gadya-Traya of Sri Ramanujacharya, Madras^[48]

Academic commentators note that this insistence on surrender as the sole and sufficient path to liberation, characteristic of the Gadya Traya, contrasts somewhat with the emphasis placed, in the three major philosophical works (Śrī Bhāṣya, Vedārthasaṃgraha, Gītā Bhāṣya), on bhakti-yoga as a long-term discipline — to the point that scholar Robert C. Lester argued that the doctrine of prapatti as a sole and immediate means of salvation would in fact be absent from the certain philosophical works and proper only to the Gadya, whose very authenticity would then be open to question^[49]. A more unitive reading, holding the majority within the Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition itself, maintains on the contrary that bhakti and prapatti designate one and the same path under two complementary aspects, rather than two distinct and competing doctrines^[50].

Comparative table: the three great interpretations of Vedānta

Ramanuja was neither the first nor the last great commentator on the Brahma-sūtra. The following table situates his doctrine between that of his predecessor Shankara and that of his successor two centuries later, Madhva:

The Śrī Bhāṣya, a summa on the Brahma-sūtra

Ramanuja's major work is the Śrī Bhāṣya, a complete commentary on the Brahma-sūtra attributed to Bādarāyaṇa, which constitutes his magnum opus and the scriptural foundation of Viśiṣṭādvaita^[51]. Translated into English as early as 1904 by the Indologist George Thibaut for Oxford's Sacred Books of the East series, this text remains the philosophical reference through which Western academic scholarship long discovered Ramanuja's thought^[52].

The Vedārthasaṃgraha and the commentary on the Bhagavad-Gītā

The Vedārthasaṃgraha ("Summary of the Meaning of the Vedas"), regarded as his first major work, systematically sets out the principles of his doctrine and serves, for the most part, as an overall commentary on the Upaniṣadic passages most disputed among the Vedāntic schools^[53]. The Gītā Bhāṣya, a commentary on the Bhagavad-Gītā, develops for its part the doctrine of bhakti-yoga that permeates all the later devotional theology of Śrī Vaiṣṇavism^[54].

The Gadya Traya, the three poems of surrender

The Gadya Traya ("prose trilogy") brings together three short devotional texts, in a tone very different from the properly philosophical works: the Śaraṇāgati Gadya, a dialogue of supplication addressed to Śrī and to Nārāyaṇa; the Śrīraṅga Gadya, a prayer of submission at the feet of the deity of Śrīraṅgam; and the Vaikuṇṭha Gadya, a contemplative description of the heavenly kingdom of Vishnu^[55].

Disputed authenticity of the minor texts

Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition attributes a total of nine Sanskrit works to Ramanuja, but modern academic scholarship recognizes assured authenticity only for the Śrī Bhāṣya, the Vedārthasaṃgraha, the Gītā Bhāṣya and, with the methodological reservations already mentioned, the Gadya Traya; three shorter texts — the Vedāntadīpa, the Vedāntasāra and the Nityagrantha, a manual of daily worship — remain of disputed attribution among specialists^[56].

The pañcasaṃskāra: initiation beyond castes

Beyond his strictly philosophical contribution, Ramanuja undertook a liturgical and social reform whose scope extended beyond scholarly circles: he instituted the pañcasaṃskāra, a five-stage rite of initiation open not only to Brahmins but also to non-Brahmin faithful, thus allowing populations traditionally excluded from scholarly circles to receive formal initiation into Śrī Vaiṣṇavism^[57]. This institutional openness, documented by tradition as a lasting innovation, extends onto the ritual plane the conviction already expressed in the episode of the mantra shouted from the top of the temple: devotion to God cannot be the exclusive property of an elite of birth.

The seventy-four successors

To ensure the lasting spread of his teaching, tradition reports that Ramanuja instituted seventy-four simhāsanādhipati ("throne-holders"), charged with propagating Śrī Vaiṣṇavism in different regions of India, foremost among them his nephew Mudaliandan and the learned Brahmin Kūreśa, renowned for his prodigious memory^[58]. The figure of seventy-four is explained by tradition with reference to an image attributed to Nāthamuni, who is said to have compared Ramanuja to an immense lake fed by seventy-four mouths — a sign, in the symbolic register proper to this literature, of the lasting fruitfulness of his teaching^[59].

The cat and the monkey: two theologies of grace

About two centuries after Ramanuja's death, the Śrī Vaiṣṇava community he founded divided into two great schools, whose disagreement concerns precisely the correct interpretation of the doctrine of grace and surrender (prapatti) just set out above^[60]. The Northern school, or Vadakalai, which takes the theologian Vedānta Deśika as its reference, holds that divine grace remains conditioned on real effort on the part of the faithful — the image of the baby monkey which must itself actively cling to its mother's back to be carried; the Southern school, or Tenkalai, which claims Manavāḷa Māmuni, holds on the contrary that grace is freely bestowed by God, without any condition of prior effort — the image of the mother cat which herself seizes her kitten by the scruff of the neck, without it having to do anything to be saved^[61]. This debate, known under the learned names of markata-nyāya ("monkey logic") and marjāra-nyāya ("cat logic"), continues to structure, to this day, the communal and ritual life of Śrī Vaiṣṇavism^[62].

Śrī Vaiṣṇavism today

According to Karl Potter, a recognized specialist in Indian philosophy, the tradition stemming from Ramanuja represents "one of the main arteries through which [Vedāntic] philosophy reached the masses"^[63], to the point that Viśiṣṭādvaita may well be, in actual numbers of the faithful if not in claimed label, one of the most living philosophies of contemporary India. Harold Coward describes Ramanuja for his part as the "founder-interpreter of Śrī Vaiṣṇava scripture"^[64]. His memory remains alive well beyond scholarly circles: on 5 February 2022, a two-hundred-and-sixteen-foot-high "Statue of Equality" (Statue of Equality), commemorating his reform of the castes, was inaugurated near Hyderabad in the presence of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi^[65].

What the Church can recognize

A Catholic can recognize, without excessive reservation, the real greatness of several of Ramanuja's intuitions. Against the impersonal absolute of Advaita, he defends a personal God, endowed with moral and relational attributes, to whom one can speak, from whom one can receive help and grace, and who loves in return those who turn to him — a position theologically far closer to classical theism than the monism of his predecessor. The Second Vatican Council, in its declaration Nostra Aetate, offers the framework through which the Catholic Church regards this authentic religious quest: "Thus in Hinduism, men contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry. They seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through ascetical practices or profound meditation or a flight to God with love and trust."^[66]. This last phrase — "a flight to God with love and trust" — describes with remarkable aptness what Ramanuja himself calls prapatti, the trusting surrender to a personal Lord. The same document adds a general principle that also applies to Ramanuja's work: "The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from what she holds and sets forth, nevertheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men."^[67]

A Catholic can likewise welcome Ramanuja's social reform, the opening of sacred initiation to castes kept at a distance: on the concrete terrain of Indian religious practices, it meets a conviction that the Gospel carries with its own radicality — that of the equal dignity of every human person before God, whatever their social birth.

Ramanuja and Thomas Aquinas: a real but limited academic comparison

Several modern scholars have noted the structural kinship between Ramanuja's theological enterprise and that of Thomas Aquinas in the Christian West: two systems which, each within its own scriptural universe, undertake to reconcile a personal and transcendent God with rigorous rational reflection on nature, knowledge, and grace^[68]. The Anglican theologian John B. Carman, in his landmark work The Theology of Ramanuja: An Essay in Interreligious Understanding (Yale University Press, 1974), was the first to propose an in-depth comparative study of the two thinkers^[69]. More recently, the Dominican Martin Ganeri devoted a scholarly article to this comparison, "Knowledge and Love of God in Ramanuja and Aquinas" (Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, vol. 20, 2007), examining precisely the points of convergence and divergence between Ramanuja's doctrine of the direct vision of Brahman through bhakti and the Thomist doctrine of the beatific vision received by grace^[70].

This academic comparison is real and fruitful: it shows that a rigorous theological system, founded on scriptural premises wholly foreign to biblical Revelation, can nevertheless arrive at formally analogous categories — a personal God, grace necessary for salvation, the insufficiency of mere theoretical knowledge, the necessity of an effective love. But the analogy of structure must never obscure the difference of content, which remains, on the following points, absolutely decisive.

What radically separates them: avatāra and Incarnation, cycle and resurrection

The first point of rupture concerns the very nature of God's coming to men. The Vaishnavite tradition, which Ramanuja inherits and systematizes theologically, professes the doctrine of the avatāra: Vishnu manifests himself through history in a multiplicity of successive descents — Rāma, Kṛṣṇa and many others — each responding to a particular crisis of the world, none ever definitive or exclusive of the others. Christianity confesses, on the contrary, a unique and unrepeatable Incarnation: the Word became flesh once, at a precise and non-repeatable point in history, in the concrete person of Jesus of Nazareth, born of a woman, dead and risen forever (Rom 6:9-10). Where the avatāra repeats itself at will according to the cyclical needs of the world, the Christian Incarnation commits God once and for all in human history, with no going back and no possible repetition.

The second point of rupture concerns the very goal of religious life. For Ramanuja, liberation (mokṣa) remains the definitive exit from the cycle of rebirths (saṃsāra): the soul, freed from matter, enjoys forever a contemplative communion with God, never taking on a body again. For Catholicism, the ultimate hope is not the escape from matter but the resurrection of bodies: at the end of time, each human person will recover, glorified, the very body that was theirs — not a dissolution nor an escape from the bodily condition, but its definitive fulfillment in glory. The distinction is decisive: Vishishtadvaita preserves, against Advaita, an eternal plurality of souls and a real communion with God, which brings it appreciably closer to classical theism; but it remains captive, like all Vedantic thought, to the cyclical cosmological framework of saṃsāra, which Christianity replaces with a linear history oriented toward a definitive and non-repetitive fulfillment: the Parousia and the general resurrection.

Why prapatti cannot substitute for the grace of Christ

The internal debate within Śrī Vaiṣṇavism between the Vadakalai school (grace conditioned by effort, image of the baby monkey) and the Tenkalai school (unconditioned grace, image of the baby cat) presents a striking, though distant, analogy with the great Christian controversies over the respective parts of merit and gratuitous gift in salvation. This structural convergence deserves to be noted with intellectual honesty: it shows that a religious tradition can, by its own resources, seriously pose the question of the gratuity of salvation. But prapatti, however radical in its vocabulary of surrender and self-abandonment, remains an act that the individual soul itself performs before a Lord who remains, in the very structure of the system and despite the doctrine of the avatāra, a personal God who neither came in the flesh once for all, nor was crucified, nor rose again for it. Christian grace, for its part, is never merely an inner disposition of surrender: it is the real, sacramental, and historical communication of the very life of the dead and risen Christ, the sole mediator between God and men (1 Tim 2:5) — a gift that does not merely ask to be received by the trust of the heart, but was concretely poured out, once for all, on the Cross.

That is why the legitimate admiration that Ramanuja's figure can inspire — his intellectual rigor, his social reform, his sincere doctrine of surrender to a personal God — never dispenses with recognizing what his system, however noble, could by its very construction neither contain nor anticipate: a God who does not merely receive the trusting surrender of his creatures, but who himself stooped down to them, once, in the flesh, to raise them with him forever.

• John B. Carman, The Theology of Ramanuja: An Essay in Interreligious Understanding, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974 — the landmark comparative study between Ramanuja and Western, notably Thomist, theology.
• Martin Ganeri, "Knowledge and Love of God in Ramanuja and Aquinas", Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, vol. 20, 2007, article 6.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Ramanuja" article — the standard academic synthesis on the doctrine, epistemology, and ethics of Viśiṣṭādvaita.
• George Thibaut (trans.), The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1904 ("Sacred Books of the East", vol. 48).
• Second Vatican Council, declaration Nostra Aetate on the relation of the Church to non-Christian religions, 28 October 1965, § 2.
• See also, in Ignispedia, the articles Hinduism, Adi Shankara and Madhva, which present the two other great classical readings of the Brahma-sūtra.