Ramanuja: Thou Art HIS

Shankara read "that thou art" as pure oneness: you simply are the one Reality, and the world is a shimmer. It is a mighty vision. But to many devoted hearts it felt cold. If I am just the One, who is left to love God? Who is left to be loved? The second master rose to answer exactly that.

His name is Ramanuja, and with him the philosophy grows warm. He would not say the world and the soul are mere appearance. They are real, he said, fully and truly real. You are not a trick of the light. But you are not on your own, apart from God, either.

His school has a longer name: Vishishtadvaita, "qualified non-dualism." Do not let the big word scare you. It means this. Reality is still one, but it is one the way a living being is one. You are one person, yet you have a self and a body. They are not two separate things, and they are not simply the same thing. The body belongs to the self, lives by it, cannot be torn away from it.

That is his great picture. All the countless souls, and all of matter, are God's body. Real, distinct, each truly itself, yet living wholly within God and by God, as your hand is truly yours and yet never lives apart from you. God dwells inside all of it as its inmost ruler. So the many are real, and God is one, and the two are bound in love, not melted into a blank. Brahman^[2]

Now watch him read the old line a second way. To Ramanuja, "that thou art" does not erase the difference between you and God. It holds you together. "That" and "thou" name the one same Brahman, but seen from two sides: "that" is God the all-knowing source of all, and "thou" is that very same God as having you, the soul, for his body. Hear it in his own careful words.

"A Brahman distinguished by difference." So you really are joined to God, truly one with him, and yet you remain yourself, a soul who can love and be loved. That small word "difference" is what saves the lover and the beloved. It is the difference that lets there be a song at all.

And Ramanuja's God is no blank Absolute. He is the personal Lord, Vishnu-Narayana, full of every good and lovely quality, beside his consort Sri. This matters for the whole age. It means the saints who sang to a God with a name and a face, the Alvars and all who came after, were not singing to a lesser truth. They were singing to the highest Reality there is.

So how do we reach such a God? Not chiefly by cold knowledge, says Ramanuja, but by bhakti, by love. And love ripens into something even simpler: prapatti, total surrender, falling at God's feet with empty hands and saying, I cannot do this myself; I am yours. After that, grace does what we cannot. This is the most open door in all the schools, for surrender asks no Sanskrit, no high birth, no learning. It asks only a willing heart.^[2]

There is even a gentle old debate among his followers about how grace works. Does it work like a mother monkey, where the baby must cling on with its own small hands? Or like a mother cat, who simply lifts the kitten by the scruff, while it hangs limp and trusting? Some lean to the monkey's little effort, some to the kitten's pure surrender. Both, you see, agree the mother does the carrying.

So Ramanuja gave the whole singing tide its backbone of thought. The heart had been crying out in love for centuries. Now there was a clear and beautiful philosophy that said: yes, that love is the truest path, and the God you love is real, and so are you. Remember bhakti. Here it is given its mind.