Of other forms of Vedantism, the best known is the system of Ramanuja generally called Visishtadvaita.[780] It is an evidence of the position held by the Vedanta philosophy that religious leaders made a commentary on the Sutras of Badarayana the vehicle of their most important views.  Unlike Sankara, Ramanuja is sectarian and identifies his supreme deity with Vishnu or Narayana, but this is little more than a matter of nomenclature.  His interpretation is modern in the sense that it pursues the line of thought which leads up to the modern sects.  But that line of thought has ancient roots.  Ramanuja followed a commentator named Bodhayana who was anterior to Sankara, and in the opinion of so competent a judge as Thibaut he gives the meaning of Badarayana in many points more exactly than his great rival.  On the other hand his interpretation often strains the most important utterances of the Upanishads.

Ramanuja admits no distinction between Brahman and Isvara, but the distinction is abolished at the expense of abolishing the idea of the Higher Brahman, for his Brahman is practically the Isvara of Sankara.  Brahman is not without attributes but possessed of all imaginable good attributes, and though nothing exists apart from him, like the antithesis of Purusha and Prakriti in the Sankhya, yet the world is not as in Sankara’s system merely Maya.  Matter and souls (cit and acit) form the body of Brahman who both comprises and pervades all things, which are merely modes of his existence.[781] He is the inner ruler (antaryamin) who is in all elements and all human souls.[782] The texts which speak of Brahman as being one only without a second are explained as referring to the state of pralaya or absorption which occurs at the end of each Kalpa.  At the conclusion of the period of pralaya he re-emits the world and individual souls by an act of volition and the souls begin the round of transmigration.  Salvation or release from this round is obtained not by good works but by knowledge and meditation on the Lord assisted by his grace.  The released soul is not identified with the Lord but enjoys near him a personal existence of eternal bliss and peace.  This is more like European theism than the other doctrines which we have been considering.  The difference is that God is not regarded as the creator of matter and souls.  Matter and souls consist of his substance.  But for all that he is a personal deity who can be loved and worshipped and whereas Sankara was a religious philosopher, Ramanuja was rather a philosophic theologian and founder of a church.  I have already spoken of his activity in this sphere.

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