Madhvacharya

A five-year-old boy named Vasudeva was playing on the slope above the Papanashini river at Pajaka, a hamlet of red laterite soil and areca palms a few miles from the temple town of Udupi on the Malabar coast, when a great black serpent reared up in front of him. The other children scattered screaming. Vasudeva did not move. He pressed the snake down with his foot until it lay still, and it was only afterward, so the Pajaka households still tell it, that anyone dared to look closely and see that this had been no ordinary cobra but a demon named Manimat wearing a serpent's body. Down the hill his mother Vedavati had heard the screaming and stood frantic at the foot of the slope, too frightened to climb up and too far away to see her son clearly. Vasudeva, sensing her fear, simply leapt: one bound of some eight hundred yards from the high ground to where she stood, landing so hard that the rock underfoot gave way like wet clay and took the print of his feet. That footprint is shown at Udupi to this day. It is usually the first story anyone tells about the boy who would become Madhvacharya, and it works less as a marvel to gawk at than as an overture, because everything the tradition wants said about him is already folded into it: unhesitating force, a child's love for his mother, and the sense that whatever walked around in that small body did not belong to an ordinary child.

His own community would eventually say Vasudeva was not merely gifted but the third earthly descent of Vayu, the deity of breath and life-force, called Mukhya Prana, who is held to serve Vishnu with a devotion so complete that he takes birth in every age so the world does not forget its Lord. In the Treta age that service wore the form of Hanuman; in the Dvapara age it wore the form of Bhima, the Pandava of terrible strength; and now, in the Kali age, it had entered a Tulu Brahmin household at Pajaka, born to Vedavati and her husband of the Madhyageha family, most likely in the year 1238, though a handful of scholars place his life nearly a century earlier. Whatever the exact year, everyone agrees on the coastline: this was Tulunad, the strip of Karnataka between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, thick with monsoon and temple bells, and it was here that the boy grew up restless in a way his parents could not quite manage. He ate prodigiously and tired never. He could recite back a verse after hearing it once. And from very early he wanted only one thing, which was to leave the household altogether and take up the ochre cloth, a wish his father resisted for years because Vasudeva was the son meant to keep the family line going.

The father lost that argument, as fathers in these stories generally do. In his early teens Vasudeva walked to the matha attached to the Ananteshwara temple at Udupi and asked to be initiated by its head, a renunciate named Achyutapreksha, an old and respected teacher of the Ekadandi order who taught the nondual Vedanta of Shankaracharya, in which Brahman alone is real and the entire visible world, along with the individual self's sense of being someone in particular, is finally māyā, an appearance to be seen through rather than a truth to be reckoned with. Achyutapreksha gave the boy the name Purnaprajna, one whose wisdom is complete, and set him to the standard course of study. It did not stay standard for long. Purnaprajna absorbed the Upanishads and the Brahma Sutras faster than any student his guru had taught, and then, instead of settling into the conclusions he had been given, he began to press on them. He would sit through a lecture on the illusoriness of the world and afterward ask, gently but without letting go, how an illusion could be sustained with such perfect regularity for beings who were themselves supposed to be unreal, and what exactly was left over, in that scheme, of Vishnu as someone a soul could love and serve rather than dissolve into. Achyutapreksha did not have an answer that satisfied his own student, and to his lasting credit he did not pretend to. Over time the roles in that room quietly reversed, until the older man asked to be taught by the younger, and eventually initiated him with a second name, Anandatirtha, the one whose stream is bliss, an act that was less a guru's formality than an old teacher's admission that something larger than a disciple had arrived in his classroom.

What Anandatirtha taught, once he began teaching on his own account, is remembered as Tattvavada, the doctrine of things as they truly are, though history knows it better by the name of its central claim: Dvaita, twoness. Where Advaita held that the difference we perceive between the soul, the world, and God finally collapses into a single undivided Brahman, Anandatirtha insisted that difference is not a mistake awaiting correction but the very grain of reality, eternal and five-fold: between the individual soul, the jiva, and God; between one jiva and another; between the jiva and inert matter, jada; between God and matter; and between one portion of matter and another. Souls are many, forever distinct from each other and forever distinct from Vishnu, who alone is purna, whole and lacking nothing, and on whom every jiva depends completely, a dependence he called paratantra. It is not a philosophy built to console the ego. Anandatirtha taught that souls differ from one another in their very capacity to know and love God, a doctrine called taratamya, gradation, and he did not flinch from its harder implications. But underneath the metaphysics lay something closer to the heart of bhakti than his Advaita opponents ever credited him with: if the soul cannot become God, cannot dissolve into an undifferentiated absolute and lose the very self that does the loving, then the relationship between the devotee and Krishna is not a temporary illusion to be outgrown on the way to liberation. It is eternal. Moksha, in his teaching, is not annihilation into sameness but arrival into an unending intimacy with Vishnu that difference itself makes possible, the way two people who love each other need to remain two in order to keep loving.

Anandatirtha carried this teaching, and the temperament that went with it, on foot across the subcontinent. He walked north through the Deccan to the Himalayas and up to Badrinath, and tradition says that on the way he crossed swollen rivers without so much as wetting the hem of his cloth, walking across water the way another man walks across a courtyard. At Badarikashrama he is said to have gone alone into the high forest near Vyasa's ancient hermitage and there met the sage himself, not as a legend from the Puranas but as a living presence who taught him the deeper intent of the Brahma Sutras and instructed him to set that intent down in a bhashya of his own, since existing commentaries had, in Vyasa's own judgment, missed it. Anandatirtha returned from that encounter and wrote at astonishing speed: a commentary on the Brahma Sutras, then the Anuvyakhyana in poetic verse to defend and expand it, then bhashyas on the Bhagavad Gita and on each of the principal Upanishads, until his output settled into what his tradition calls the Sarvamoola, thirty-seven works in all, covering the entire Prasthanatraya along with a Mahabharata Tatparya Nirnaya and a commentary on the Bhagavata Purana, an output so large and so early in his life that later scholars have simply had to accept it as fact and move on.

Not everyone accepted the teacher behind those texts so gracefully. The most famous resistance came from Trivikrama Panditacharya, a Sanskrit scholar of formidable reputation and, by some accounts, a royal preceptor, who arrived determined to expose the young renunciate's Brahma Sutra bhashya as amateur work dressed up in confidence. What followed was a debate that ran, by the accounts that have come down, for a full fortnight, the two men taking apart each sutra syllable by syllable while students and townsfolk crowded in to listen. Trivikrama had built his career on defending Advaita's reading of scripture, and he did not concede anything easily; but day by day the ground under his objections kept disappearing, until at the end of the fifteenth day he set down his own position, folded his hands, and asked to be received as a disciple instead of an opponent. He kept his scholarship and turned it entirely toward the new doctrine, writing the Tattvapradipa, later expanded by his own descendants into the Tattvaprakashika, one of the most important early defenses of Dvaita, composed by the very man who had come to bury it.

Others were less willing to lose with grace. A monk named Padmatirtha, eaten by jealousy at how quickly Anandatirtha's fame and following were spreading, arranged for the original palm-leaf manuscripts of his Sarvamoola works, then in the keeping of a scholar called Shankara Pandita at Kasaragod, to be stolen outright. Anandatirtha traveled to Kasaragod himself, confronted Padmatirtha, and bested him again in open debate on the very doctrines the stolen manuscripts contained, an argument that carried more weight than any accusation could have. The local ruler, Jayasimha of Kumbla, intervened, had the manuscripts recovered, and returned them to their author in a public ceremony of honor, which is remembered in the tradition less as a triumph over a thief than as proof that truth, once written down properly, has a way of finding its way back to the person who understood it.

The story most people who have never read a word of Dvaita philosophy still know is the one about the ship. Anandatirtha was standing on the beach at Malpe near Udupi when he saw a vessel out at sea caught in a storm and about to break apart, its crew certain they were about to drown. He is said to have waded into the surf and, simply by his presence, steadied the ship until it reached shore safely. The grateful captain, whose cargo included great blocks of gopichandana clay meant as ballast, offered him whatever he wished from the hold. Anandatirtha pointed to the clay. When his disciples broke it open on the sand they found, inside, a dark, radiant stone murti of the infant Krishna in the act of churning butter, a form the tradition holds was once worshipped by Rukmini herself at Dwaraka and lost to the sea over the centuries. He lifted it in his arms the way a father lifts a child, carried it to Udupi, and installed it there in the year usually given as 1285, the small temple that grew up around it becoming the Krishna Matha that still stands. To make sure the deity would never again go a day without proper worship, he appointed eight of his own sannyasi disciples to found eight mathas, ashta matha, who to this day take turns as head priest under a rotation called paryaya, an arrangement that has now run unbroken for more than seven centuries.

Anandatirtha never seemed to think that all this bore any weight, and the tradition preserves at least one story that reads almost as comic relief precisely because of that. During his travels through Goa, local skeptics who had heard exaggerated tales of his gluttony as a boy decided to test him and set an absurd quantity of food before him, four thousand bananas by the number usually quoted, along with some thirty pots of milk. He ate through it without apparent effort or strain, calm as a man finishing an ordinary meal, and the crowd that had come to mock him went home instead telling a very different story. It is not hard to see, underneath the exaggeration, the same idea the Manimat story planted in childhood: that a strength belonging to Bhima had simply come along for the ride in a body otherwise devoted to grammar, logic, and Vedanta.

On an evening remembered as the ninth day of the bright half of Magha, Anandatirtha was seated among his disciples expounding, as he loved to, the Aitareya Upanishad, when a rain of flowers began to fall over him: parijata, mandara, sougandhika, blossoms out of season and out of any season at all, piling up in drifts of fragrance until he had vanished entirely beneath them. When the startled disciples finally worked up the courage to clear the petals away, there was no one underneath. No body was ever found, no funeral held; the tradition simply says he returned, the way Vayu returns to the sky, to continue his eternal service to Vishnu at Badari, leaving behind his writings, his mathas, and a lineage of teacher-disciples that would run two centuries later into the great Haridasa singers of Karnataka, Vyasatirtha, Purandara Dasa, and Kanakadasa, and later still into Raghavendra Swami, whose shrine at Mantralayam draws pilgrims who have often never heard the word Dvaita in their lives.

An old Vaishnava verse remembers him alongside Ramanuja of the south as one of four great elephants who plant their feet at the four directions and, between them, keep the whole earth of bhakti from sinking, brothers in realization though centuries apart in birth. It is a fitting way to hold him, because what Anandatirtha spent his life insisting on, against the graceful logic of an Advaita that would have unmade him along with everyone else into a single undifferentiated light, was that the person who loves and the God who is loved are both, finally and forever, real, and that this permanence is not a wall between the soul and Vishnu but the very thing that lets the love between them last. A tired reader coming to him at the end of a long day might expect a philosopher's austerity and find instead a boy who leapt down a hillside for his mother, a teacher who lost every argument he was supposed to win, and a saint who, having eaten his fill and taught what he came to teach, let a shower of flowers carry him home.