This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Every school of Vedanta is required to write a commentary, a bhashya, on the same triple canon, the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, which raises an obvious question: how did three philosophers reading the same texts, with the same reverence for the same authority, arrive at three incompatible metaphysics. The answer lies less in what each read than in what each was determined to preserve. Shankara, writing in the eighth century, was committed above all to the Upanishads' declarations of identity, tat tvam asi, that thou art, and built Advaita Vedanta's strict nondualism to honor them, treating the texts' language of difference, a devotee worshipping a personal God, a self distinct from the world, as a lower, provisional level of truth beneath the ultimate one. Ramanuja, three centuries later, thought this cost too much: a religious tradition built around loving devotion to a personal God, bhakti, cannot survive a doctrine that ultimately dissolves both the devotee and God into an undifferentiated absolute. His Vishishtadvaita, qualified nondualism, kept Brahman as the one ultimate reality but treated individual selves and the material world as real, eternal modes or attributes of Brahman rather than illusory appearances, real the way a body is really part of a person without being identical to the whole person. Madhva, in the thirteenth century, went further still, arguing that even qualified identity conceded too much to nondualism, and that the texts, read without Shankara's or Ramanuja's prior commitments, actually teach five eternal, irreducible differences, between the self and God, between different selves, between self and matter, between God and matter, and between different material things. His Dvaita Vedanta is frankly dualist, and frankly devotional, since a God genuinely distinct from the worshipper is a God who can genuinely be loved and served rather than ultimately identical with the one doing the loving. The dispute never resolved, because it was never only textual, each commentator brought a different judgment about what a coherent religious and philosophical life required the texts to mean, and Vedanta as a whole is best understood not as one doctrine but as the standing argument between these three answers.