(First published in Philosophy East and West Volume 56, Number 4 (2006), pp. 665-670.

Page numbers in the printed journal are indicated in the text below in square brackets.)

An Introduction to Mādhva Vedānta. By Deepak Sarma. Ashgate World Philosophies

Series. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. xiii + 159. Paper.

Robert Zydenbos
Universität München

[665] The school of Vedānta philosophy founded by Madhva (1238-1317 C.E.) is pop-
ularly known as Dvaita, a name Madhva himself never used and which is somewhat
misleading, as it suggests a dualism while Madhva’s philosophy is rather a pluralistic
one. The adjective Mādhva, derived from Madhva’s name, is used to designate the
followers of Madhva’s Vaiṣṇava variety of brahminical Hinduism, and may be used to
unambiguously identify this kind of Vedānta. Although this school plays an important
role in the history of Indian thought, it has been sadly neglected by modern Vedānta
scholarship, which tends to focus on Advaita and Viśiṣt ̣ādvaita. The first serious mod-
ern study, written in German by Helmut von Glasenapp, was Madhva’s Philosophie des
Vishnu-Glaubens (Bonn, 1923), of which the English translation by S. Shrothri, Ma-
dhva’s Philosophy of the Vishnu Faith (Bangalore, 1992), is not beautiful but has the
merit that a few minor errors in von Glasenapp’s pioneer work have been corrected in
footnotes. In the well-known histories of Indian philosophy, Surendranath Dasgupta’s
treatment of Madhva (A History of Indian Philosophy, vol. 4) is considerably better than
the rather scanty one by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (Indian Philosophy, vol. 2, ch. 10,
sections 6-14).
The amount of Sanskrit writing in the tradition of Madhva is considerable, and in
this still very living tradition there is a huge production of literature in modern Indian
languages, almost all of it in Kannada, the tradition having originated and still having
its stronghold in what today is the Kannada-speaking state of Karnataka in southern
India (Madhva was a native speaker of Tulu, a language spoken in southwestern Kar-
nataka, which has hardly any written literature). Among modern authors writing in
English, the best known is B.N.K. Sharma (The Philosophy of Sŕ i ̄ Madhvācārya; A History
of the Dvaita School of Vedānta and Its Literature), most of whose writings unfortunately
suffer from a polemically sectarian outlook. As a general historical and systematic
introduction to Madhva, his works, and his thought, the French La doctrine de Madhva
by Suzanne Siauve (Pondichéry, 1968) remains unsurpassed. More recently, the most
important studies of Madhva’s works that appeared outside India are again in German,
by Roque Mesquita: Madhva und seine unbekannten literarischen Quellen (Vienna, 1997;
now also available in an English translation as Madhva’s Unknown Literary Sources:
Some Observations. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 2000) and his superb translation and
study of one of Madhva’s most important works, Madhva: Viṣṇutattvanirṇaya (Vienna,
2000).
Madhva’s doctrine is considered one of the three main currents in Vedānta, next to
Viśiṣt ̣ādvaita-Vedānta (the monistic doctrine formulated by Rāmānuja) and the vari-
ety that is best known in the Western world, Advaita-Vedānta (the illusionistic [666]

Review of Sarma: An Introduction to Mādhva Vedānta, p. 1 of 6

monism that received its classical form at the hands of Sá ṅkara). According to the
hagiography, Madhva grew up in an Advaitin environment but came to consider the
Advaitins his main philosophical opponents, because monism, and particularly one that
essentially denied the reality of the phenomenal world, did not support his Vaiṣṇava
(recognizing Viṣṇu as the supreme being) devotional religiosity. He therefore sought
to establish a pluralistic philosophy that did not dismiss phenomenal reality as illusory.
Dvaita- or Mādhva-Vedānta is actually much more than the exegesis, sometimes
rather imaginative, of the standard set of mainstream brahminical texts which one
would expect from Vedānta. Madhva was a creative thinker, and his doctrine is an
intellectual tour de force which seeks to combine elements from several sources and
currents of religious and philosophical thought into one coherent whole: a philosophi-
cal terminology from Vedānta; ritualism from the Pāñcarātra āgamas; mythology from
the Vedas, Upanishads, the great epics and the purāṇas (Madhva wrote an extensive
commentary on the Bhāgavatapurāṇa); and an ontology and epistemology that reveal
the influence of Jainism.
It is unfortunate that the book under review, An Introduction to Mādhva Vedānta, by
Deepak Sarma, perhaps due to its limited size, largely ignores all these facets, which
make Madhva’s philosophy so interesting and which, for most followers, still give Ma-
dhva his religious relevance. The book gives a brief sketch of the history of the tra-
dition, which is followed by chapters on epistemology, ontology, soteriology, and one
on philosophical debate. The book closes with a glossary, three indexes, and a bibli-
ography.
In his preface the author proudly writes:

I am a member of the Mādhva tradition and I come from a family of Mādhva devotees whose
forefathers were Mādhva priests and lay people. Consequently, my interest in writing this book
emerges not simply from the need to address the deficiency in Western scholarship although doing
so is important, but I also wish to provide a much-needed English textbook for lay Mādhvas.
With its publication, this book becomes a part of a lineage of Sanskrit textbooks on Mādhva
Vedānta composed by Mādhva scholars for Mādhvas. . . [T]he number of Mādhvas who have little
or no knowledge of Sanskrit and hence are unable to learn about Mādhva Vedānta, is growing
rapidly. . . My book is for them and for the Mādhva saṃ pradāya, community (p. ix).

In other words, the book is not merely meant for a “wide audience with interest in
Hinduism”, as the back cover of the book says, but is also something of a pastoral
effort for present-day lay believers, a presumably comprehensive textbook by a Sanskrit
scholar who has access to traditional learning that remedies deficiencies in Western
scholarship as well.
Such claims invite the reviewer to look into the author’s linguistic abilities, his
grasp of the discussed doctrine, the book’s relevance for contemporary society, and
how the book compares with earlier Western publications. On all these counts, the
book is very disappointing.
Nowadays one apparently must expect an Indological book published in an Anglo-
Saxon country to contain errors whenever non-English appears in it. This [667] book
has errors in the references to French and German publications in the incomplete bibli-
ography, and the one French quote in the book (p. 16) contains one as well. But shock-
ingly many Indian words are misspelled as well. This becomes particularly painful

Review of Sarma: An Introduction to Mādhva Vedānta, p. 2 of 6

when the names of Indian scholars who have helped the author are misspelled (see
p. xi, with one single name containing four errors), including the consistent misspelling
of the name of the author’s own guru, who gave him “taptamudhra” (sic) (ibid.). Tap-
tamudrā is the branding of Vaiṣṇava symbols on the arms of a devotee.
It is customary in modern scholarly writing to use Sanskrit words, names, and titles
in their uninflected dictionary form, but Sarma is highly whimsical in this matter. Com-
pound words (as also found in titles) should be written as single words, and here, too,
there is no consistency, which suggests that Sarma uncritically followed the examples
of the more popular kind of Indian publications on religious and philosophical topics
in English. Thus, he mentions the Vyāsatrayam (with a final m) (p. 18), but Nyāya
Sudhā and Brahma Sūtra Bhāsỵ a, yet Pramāṇapaddhati (p. 17), et cetera. The technical
term sākṣin is throughout spelled sākṣi ̄, in the nominative form, but nityasaṃ sārin is in
the dictionary form. These are just a few examples. Such muddledness does not meet
academic standards. In a listing of the four classes of brahminical society, brahmin
is an anglicized word, and vaiṣya is crooked Sanskrit (both on p. 81), as is sarveśam ̄
(p. 81 n. 20). Retroflex and palatal sibilants take each other’s places, and macrons
and short vowels mysteriously appear or are absent, like in anirvācani ̄ya (pp. 44-6,
119), tattvika and atattvika (p. 23), ānanada (p. 54), et cetera. Dodumma (pp. xii and
122) is presumably the Kannada and Tulu word doḍdạ mma, “aunt,” and Karnāt ̣aka (if
one wishes to use diacritics and not write the usual Latinized form without them) is
today properly written with a dental nasal, not a Sanskritizing retroflex (p. 1), because
it is not a Sanskrit word. The author’s evident ignorance of Kannada explains why
not a single item from the huge Kannada-language wealth of literature on the Mādhva
tradition is referred to.
Seeing such linguistic incompetence, one should not be surprised that the author
has problems handling the philosophical and religious concepts that are communicated
through language: appendix C, the glossary, is not just riddled with orthographic er-
rors but is ridiculous. It is not a matter of fumbling with word-processing software, but
of serious difficulties with Indian languages as well as with the subject matter that is
expressed in those languages. The Sanskrit, Kannada, and Tulu are faulty; some San-
skrit terms are randomly Kannadized or Hindified; common words like “hagiography”
are explained while numerous Indian terms, presumably unknown to most readers, ac-
quire puzzling or absurd definitions. A few examples: piśaca (sic) is a “ghastly lurker”;
bhūtārādhana is “worship of apparitions” (actually, it is a cult of worship of the spirits
of deceased persons and certain animals in south-western Karnataka); pa (which is not
a word, but a word-building suffix) becomes “protectors of the world”; prasthānatraya
becomes “three-fold systems”; and Vi ̄raśaivism becomes “a nāstika tradition of Hin-
duism”, a remark which many Vi ̄raśaivas will resent. Still worse is “dayivagal ̣u: wor-
ship of apparitions (in Tul ̣u)”: the Tulu word for ‘spirit’ is wrongly spelled, with a Kan-
nada plural suffix, and the odd definition for bhūtārādhana added (p. 122). But first
prize goes to pauruṣeya, [668] which, according to Sarma, means “sentences and/or
texts having human authorship, śruti” (sic) (p. 125): apart from the adjective being
ungrammatically equated with nouns, traditional Vedāntin thinkers believe that the
class of scripture called śruti precisely does not have a human author and is therefore
apauruṣeya. This is plainly very bad work.
Coming to the more abstract, doctrinal matters, one finds more problems. Mā-

Review of Sarma: An Introduction to Mādhva Vedānta, p. 3 of 6

dhva soteriology is essentially deterministic, distinguishing between three categories
of souls: those destined for salvation, those for damnation, and those for an unending
number of rebirths. On p. 77, where these kinds of souls are discussed, one reads
that according to Madhva, they are mukti-yogya (“destined to ... earn the ... grace,
of Viṣṇu”, i.e., to attain liberation), nitya-saṃ sārin (“destined to remain in the cycle”,
i.e., to be reborn forever), and tamo-yogya (“destined to reside for eternity in Hell”).
But in the next paragraph one regrettably reads: “Tamo-yogyas, unable to understand
the true nature of universe,... will remain in the cycle”—a faulty contradiction of the
given definitions.
Madhva uses two terms for grades of pramāṇas or sources of knowledge: upaji ̄vya
(lit., ‘nourishing,’ ‘by which one lives’), which Sarma translates as “foundational,” and
upaji ̄vaka, “dependent” (lit., ‘living upon’) (p. 42). What is meant by these terms is
that certain sources of knowledge are considered inherently superior (Madhva uses the
word bali ̄yas, ‘stronger’) to others; for example, inference is weaker than perception,
because inference is based on what we perceive and therefore cannot overrule per-
ception. This is an important argument against Advaitin illusionistic monism, where
logic is used to undermine faith in perceivable phenomenality. On page 44 the author
again fumbles, and the two Sanskrit terms suddenly acquire their respective opposite
meanings.
The question of khyātivādas or theories of error figures prominently in the self-
representation of Indian schools of philosophy and is of interest for the ontological
and epistemological issues involved. The author has problems also with this matter
(pp. 44-49). Here Madhva’s doctrine resembles that of the much older Nyāya school of
thought, in which error is anyathākhyāti, ‘knowing [the object] otherwise [than it is].’
In Nyāya, one thing is mistaken for another (the classical example is that of seeing
a rope but mistaking it for a snake) while both the actual object (the rope) and the
object for which it is mistaken (the snake) exist; but in this example the snake exists
elsewhere, not where the rope is, and herein lies the error. Madhva innovated this
doctrine to abhinavānyathākhyāti (the prefixed word abhinava can be translated by the
prefix ‘neo–’), the innovation being that the object which one mistakenly believes to
perceive need not actually exist, but may be a figment of the imagination. Sarma
has completely misunderstood this when he says abhinavānyathākhyāti occurs when
one mistakes George Bush senior for George Bush junior because the real difference
between them is thought to be nonexistent (p. 48). This is completely beside the point,
and it cannot be an illustration of the novelty of Madhva’s position, because both the
Presidents Bush are real. Sarma’s illustrative diagrams with smiley faces and double-
headed arrows make matters more confusing rather than clearer.
Although the book is titled an introduction to Mādhva Vedānta, almost all atten-
[669]tion is given to Madhva himself, and hardly any to later authors and develop-
ments in the Mādhva tradition. My own attempts at understanding the origination of
Madhva’s system within the wider context of Indian philosophy, including its indebt-
edness to Jainism, and Roque Mesquita’s critical philological study of the beginnings
of the Mādhva literary tradition are briefly mentioned, along with the not very to-the-
point critiques by B.N.K. Sharma, but not discussed. (Mesquita has soberly and fac-
tually refuted this criticism in an immediate rejoinder to a similar critique by Sharma
in the same issue of Asiatische Studien / Études asiatiques [vol. 57 (1) (2003), pp. 195-

Review of Sarma: An Introduction to Mādhva Vedānta, p. 4 of 6

212], in response to S. Rao and B.N.K. Sharma [on pp. 181-194 of that journal]). Many
Mādhva authors presented their school of thought either in splendid isolation or in bit-
ter opposition to others, while in reality there was considerable dialogue and mutual
borrowing between them.
An Introduction to Mādhva Vedānta also includes three short texts by Madhva along
with English translations. These are the Kathālakṣaṇa, a brief description of types of
philosophical debate (Sarma seems to be under the impression that polemics and philo-
sophical debate are something special for Madhva’s school. One can more profitably
read the first chapter of B.K. Matilal’s Logic, Language and Reality for a good intro-
duction to this topic), followed by the Māyāvādakhaṇdạ na and Upādhikhaṇdạ na, two
writings that criticize the central Advaitin concepts of māyā and upādhi. These latter
two texts are popular among present-day pundits who wish to project Dvaita as a kind
of anti-Advaita rather than a full-fledged independent Weltanschauung (a tendency
which in the reviewer’s view is partly based on socioeconomic rivalry with other brah-
min castes). The translations are not badly done and are the most useful part of the
book; in view of the author’s evident problems with Sanskrit, one may assume that
he had somebody else do the translations of these short texts (nineteen to twenty-five
verses in length) for him. The Sanskrit text (appendix E, pp. 138-142) again contains
errors.
The nearly total lack of historical and comparative perspective in this book makes
it difficult for the reader to place Madhva and his tradition in the broader context of
Indian philosophy and to appreciate Madhva’s real contributions. It also leaves ques-
tions concerning some inner necessities of the doctrine unanswered. Sarma writes
that Madhva’s theology is “founded on the importance of tāratamya” or hierarchy
(p. 13); I disagree, but hierarchic thinking does notably permeate Madhva’s writings,
also where social issues are involved. There can be little doubt that to some extent
Madhva’s Vaiṣṇavism is a politically reactionary phenomenon, aimed against the egal-
itarian sociopolitical reforms brought about in Karnataka by Vi ̄raśaivism. Madhva’s
frequent emphasizing of hierarchies clearly serves the purpose of undoing the emanci-
patory effects of Vi ̄raśaivism and strengthening the discriminatory brahminical social
order. Thus also, the backing of today’s Hindu fundamentalist politicians by certain
Mādhva religious leaders (most notably by Sarma’s guru Sŕ i ̄ Viśveśati ̄rtha—thus prop-
erly spelled—who participated in the agitations that led to the destruction of the Babri
Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992) becomes understandable. It is remarkable that such mat-
ters are not even mentioned in what the author considers a “much-needed textbook”
with contemporary relevance.
[670] To summarize: although Madhva’s philosophy is a highly interesting and
important part of the Indian intellectual heritage, and the publisher deserves praise
for including a volume on this subject in this series, the book is disturbingly bad. It is
philologically totally unreliable and contentwise flawed, and it does not offer any im-
provement over the above-mentioned works by Siauve, von Glasenapp and Dasgupta,
which as first general introductions to Madhva’s school are incomparably better. The
author’s introductory self-laudatory remarks about himself as a Mādhva scholar who
supposedly addresses deficiencies and as a supposed insider to the tradition through
his forefathers are quite shameless in view of his evident difficulties with the Indian
source languages and with the more abstract aspects of Madhva’s teachings. This book

Review of Sarma: An Introduction to Mādhva Vedānta, p. 5 of 6

proves that whatever one’s forefathers may have been, one does not automatically in-
herit learning along with blood. In Kannada, the Sanskritic expression paṇdị taputra,
‘son of a pundit,’ is used to indicate that one is not a pundit but merely the son of one,
and that one lacks qualification as a scholar in one’s own right—an expression the au-
thor presumably does not know. This book, regrettably, serves neither the saṃ pradāya
nor modern scholarship.

Review of Sarma: An Introduction to Mādhva Vedānta, p. 6 of 6