The epics and Puranas contain philosophical discussions of considerable length which make little attempt at consistency.  Yet the line of thought in them all is the same.  The chief tenets of the theistic Sankhya-Yoga are assumed:  matter, soul and God are separate existences:  the soul wishes to move towards God and away from matter.  Yet when Indian writers glorify the deity they rarely abstain from identifying him with the universe.  In the Bhagavad-gita and other philosophical cantos of the Mahabharata the contradiction is usually left without an attempt at solution.  Thus it is stated categorically[783] that the world consists of the perishable and imperishable, i.e., matter and soul, but that the supreme spirit is distinct from both.  Yet in the same poem we pass from this antithesis to the monism which declares that the deity is all things and “the self seated in the heart of man.”  We have then attained the Vedantist point of view.  Nearly all the modern sects, whether Sivaite or Vishnuite, admit the same contradiction into their teaching, for they reject both the atheism of the Sankhya and the immaterialism of the Advaita (since it is impossible for a practical religion to deny the existence of either God or the world), while the irresistible tendency of Indian thought makes them describe their deity in pantheistic language.  All strive to find some metaphysical or theological formula which will reconcile these discrepant ideas, and nearly all Vishnuites profess some special variety of the Vedanta called by such names as Visishtadvaita, Dvaitadvaita, Suddhadvaita and so on.  They differ chiefly in their definition of the relation existing between the soul and God.  Only the Madhvas entirely discard monism and profess duality (Dvaita) and even Madhva thought it necessary to write a commentary on the Brahma-sutras to prove that they support his doctrine and the Sivaites too have a commentator, Nilakantha, who interprets them in harmony with the Saiva Siddhanta.  There is also a modern commentary by Somanaradittyar which expounds this much twisted text agreeably to the doctrines of the Lingayat sect.

In most fundamental principles the Sivaite and Saktist schools agree with the Visishtadvaita but their nomenclature is different and their scope is theological rather than philosophical.  In all of them are felt the two tendencies, one wishing to distinguish God, soul and matter and to adjust their relations for the purposes of practical religion, the other holding more or less that God is all or at least that all things come from God and return to him.  But there is one difference between the schools of sectarian philosophy and the Advaita of Sankara which goes to the root of the matter.  Sankara holds that the world and individual existences are due to illusion, ignorance and misconception:  they vanish in the light of true knowledge.  Other schools, while agreeing that in some sense God is all, yet hold that the universe is not an illusion or false