________________
CHAPTER XXI
THE NIMBARKA SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY
Teachers and Pupils of the Nimbārka School. NIMBĀRKA, Nimbāditya or Niyamānanda is said to have been a Telugu Brahmin who probably lived in Nimba or Nimbapura in the Bellary district. It is said in Harivyāsadeva's commentary on Daśa-ślokī that his father's name was Jagannātha and his mother's name was Sarasvati. But it is difficult to fix his exact date. Sir R. G. Bhandarkar, in his Vaisnavism, Saivism and Minor Religious Systems, thinks that he lived shortly after Rāmānuja. The argument that he adduces is as follows: Ilarivyāsadeva is counted in the Guru-paramparā list as the thirty-second teacher in succession from Nimbārka, and Bhandarkar discovered a manuscript containing this list which was written in Samvat 1806 or A.D. 1750 when Dāmodara Gosvāmī was living. Allowing fifteen years for the life of Dāmodara Gosvāmī we have A.D. 1765. Now the thirty-third successor from Madhva died in A.D. 1876 and Madhva died in A.D. 1276. Thus thirty-three successive teachers, on the Madhva line, occupied 600 years. Applying the same test and deducting 600 years from A.D. 1765, the date of the thirty-third successor, we have 1165 as the date of Nimbārka. This, therefore, ought to be regarded as the date of Nimbārka's death and it means that he died sometime after Rāmānuja and might have been his junior contemporary. Bhandarkar would thus put roughly eighteen years as the pontifical period for each teacher. But Pandit Kiếoradāsa says that in the lives of teachers written by Pandit Anantarām Devācārya the twelfth teacher from Nimbārka was born in Samvat 1112 or A.D. 1056, and applying the same test of eighteen years for each teacher we have A.D. 868 as the date of Nimbārka, in which case he is to be credited with having lived long before Rāmānuja. But from the internal examination of the writings of Nimbārka and Śrīnivāsa this would appear to be hardly credible. Again, in the Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Private Librarics of the North Western Provinces, Part 1, Benares, 1874 (or N.W.P. Catalogue, MS. No. 274), Madhva-mukha-mardana, deposited in the
