Ramanuja challenged Shankara and opened temple worship to castes long kept outside
Tradition says Ramanuja lived for 120 years; historians prefer roughly 1077 to 1157. Either way, this Tamil philosopher broke with his teacher, argued that liberation comes through devotion to a personal Vishnu, and welcomed people treated as untouchable into temple life, calling them Tirukulattar, those of noble descent.
He was born into a Tamil Brahmin family at Sriperumbudur, near modern Chennai, under the Chola empire, a period when Vaishnava, Shaiva, Buddhist and Jain communities flourished side by side. Most of his story comes from hagiographies written from the 12th century to as late as the 18th, and scholar Paul Syndor warns that rebuilding his real life is nearly impossible.
At Kanchipuram he studied under Yadava Prakasha, but the two clashed over how to read the Upanishads and parted. Legends add that the jealous teacher plotted to kill him on a trip to the Ganges, that a cousin warned him, and that the teacher later became his disciple. Ramanuja hoped to meet the Sri Vaishnava leader Yamunacharya, his great-grandfather through a granddaughter, but arrived at Srirangam after the old man had died. A non-Brahmin disciple of Yamunacharya named Mahapurna later initiated him at a roadside meeting in Maduranthakam.
His school, Vishishtadvaita or qualified non-dualism, holds that souls are distinct from Brahman yet united with it, and that devotion to a personal God is the path to release. When scripture calls God without qualities, he argued, it means God lacks flaws such as pain and ageing. Alongside Shankara's Advaita and Madhva's dualism, it became one of the three most influential Vedanta systems of the second millennium, and it fed the wider Bhakti movement.
Later accounts say a hostile Chola king drove him into the Hoysala kingdom for 14 years, where he converted the Jain king Bitti Deva, renamed Vishnuvardhana, and built a temple at Melukote. His reorganisation of worship at Srirangam raised the standing of non-Brahmin groups such as weavers. The question of caste later split his followers into the northern Vadakalai and southern Tenkalai sects.
Source: Ramanuja
