Madhvacharya left an Advaita monastery to argue soul and God are forever distinct
Trained in a monastery that taught the soul and God are ultimately one, the young monk Madhva kept arguing with his guru until he walked out. The dualist Dvaita school he founded became one of Vedanta's three great traditions, insisting the self depends on God but can never merge with him.
Even his century is unsettled: many sources give 1238 to 1317, others 1199 to 1278. He was born Vāsudeva in a Brahmin family at Pajaka, near Udupi on the Karnataka coast, and started school after his sacred-thread ceremony at seven. In his teens, over his father's initial objections, he became a renunciant under the guru Achyutapreksha, receiving the name Pūrṇaprajña; he is also known as Ānanda Tīrtha.
Studying the Upanishads and Advaita texts, he could not accept their claim that the individual soul and ultimate reality are identical. His alternative, which he called Tattvavāda, holds that the self and Brahman, identified with Vishnu, are two separate, unchanging realities, the soul always dependent and never the same. Liberation comes only through God's grace. That set him against both Shankara's nondualism and Ramanuja's qualified nondualism. In the theory of knowledge he accepted three valid means: perception, inference and reliable testimony, which for him included the Vedas.
He travelled India repeatedly, debating at Badrinath, Varanasi, Dwaraka, Kanyakumari and elsewhere, and in 1285 founded the Krishna Mutt at Udupi around an image brought from Dwarka. Thirty-seven Sanskrit works are credited to him, written with extreme compression, among them commentaries on the Brahma Sutras, the Gita and the chief Upanishads. In several texts he presented himself as the third incarnation of the wind god Vayu, after Hanuman and Bhima, and followers' biographies credit him with miracles such as eating 4,000 bananas at one meal.
Critics have long raised a harder problem: many scriptures he quoted cannot be traced to any known text. In the sixteenth century Appayya Dīkṣita accused him of citing spurious sources. Still, the Dvaita school shaped Vaishnavism and the medieval Bhakti movement, carried on by scholars such as Jayatirtha and Vyasatirtha. The scholars Kulandran and Kraemer sum up his influence on Hinduism as beneficial but not broad.
Source: Madhvacharya
