The story is told in the hagiographies and has the ring of something that happened. Ramanuja receives a mantra from his teacher Goshthipurna, after considerable difficulty and repeated refusals, on the strict condition that it is not to be disclosed, since it confers liberation on whoever receives it. Ramanuja then climbs the tower of the temple and calls the mantra out to the crowd assembled below. Confronted by his furious teacher and told he will go to hell for the betrayal, he answers that if one man’s damnation secures liberation for so many, it is a good exchange.
The anecdote is consistent with the rest of his career. He worked to open temple entry to communities excluded from it, incorporated groups previously kept outside the ritual life into the running of the Srirangam temple, and referred to them by a term meaning those who are ours. His disagreements with Advaita were doctrinal, but the practical stakes were social: if the individual self is finally identical with the absolute without remainder, the devotional relationship is provisional, and so, arguably, is the community built around it.
That connection between metaphysics and practice is the reason his life is worth reading alongside his philosophy. A system in which selves are permanently real and permanently distinct requires an actual community of actual persons, and Ramanuja behaved as though he believed it. His doctrine of qualified non-dualism supplies the argument; the temple tower supplies the demonstration. He stands in a teaching lineage that he served by breaking one of its rules.
Ramanuja is the case for reading a philosopher’s conduct as part of the argument. To see the lineage he inherited and altered, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 42 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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