________________
384
OUTLINES OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY itself. We know that a similar synthesis is found in the Gitā where, as in the Visiştādvaita, it appears with the added feature that the theism is of the Bhāgavata type, not directly traceable to the Veda. The same also is found in one or other of its various phases of growth in the Mahābhārata, especially in the section known as the Nārāyaṇīya (p. 100) and in the Puranas such as the Vişnu-purana. Only, in the time of Rāmānuja there was a fresh circumstance, viz. the reaction against the purely absolutist philosophy of Sankara and its seeming negations calling for a new formulation of this old synthesis. There was, for instance, the advaitic identification of the jiva and Brahman which explains the Visişțādvaita assertion of the reality of the individual or its attempt to give the Hindus their souls back, as Max Müller has put it. It was as a protest against views like these that the doctrine was given out in the South about 1000 A.D., and systematized somewhat later by Rāmānuja.
The sources of authority for the doctrine are two-fold, for which reason it is described as Ubhaya-vedānta; one, the Veda including the Upanişads and works like the Purāņas. which are for the most part based upon it; the other, the literature of the South found in Tamil which, though largely indebted to Vedic teaching, undoubtedly contains elements of non-Vedic thought. Of the immediate predecessors of Ramānuja in this work of synthesis we may mention Nāthamuni (A.D. 1000), none of whose writings, however, has yet been discovered, and his grandson Alavandār or Yamunācārya (A.D. 1050), whose several works form splendid manuals of the essentials of the Višiştādvaita as they were understood before Rāmānuja took up the work of systematization. They are Agama-prāmánya, Mahapurusa-nirnaya which is designed to show the supremacy of Vişnu as against Siva, Gitartha-sangraha, Siddhi-traya and two hymnsSri-stuti and Vişnu-stuti. Rāmānuja or the 'prince of ascetics' (xati-rāja), as he is described, is reputed to have been his pupil's pupil and his commentary on the Vedānta-sútra, known as the Sri-bhäşya, that on the Bhagavadgita and his Vedārtha
SS. P. 189. * The Upanişads were not explained by him separately and that work was left for a much later hand-Rangaramanuja.
