Ramanuja

About Ramanuja

Ramanuja (traditionally, 1017–1137 CE) was a Hindu theologian, philosopher, and scriptural exegete, born in a Tamil Brahmin family in the village of Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu. He is also known as Sri Ramanujacharya, Udayavar, Ethirajar (Yatiraja), Emberumannar and Lakshmana Muni. He is seen by Sri Vaishnavism as the most important acharya (teacher) of their tradition who followed Nathamuni and Yamunacharya, and by Hindus in general as the leading expounder of Vishishtadvaita, one of the classical interpretations of the dominant Vedanta school of Vedic philosophy.

Establishing dates

The traditional biographies of Ramanuja place his life in the period of 1017–1137 CE, yielding a lifespan of 120 years. Any chronology depends crucially on the major historical event mentioned in the traditional biographies: the persecution of Srivaishnavas under the Chola king Kulothunga and Ramanuja's subsequent years of exile in Melkote, in Karnataka.[citation needed]

In 1917, T. A. Gopinatha Rao proposed a chronology based on the traditional lifetime of 1017–1137. He identified the Chola king with Kulothunga Chola I (reigned 1070–1120), and dated the exile to Melkote from 1079 to 1126 CE (Rao 1923 cited in Carman 1974:45). However, this would extend the period of exile to 47 years, and in any case, Kulothunga I was not known for being an intolerate Shaivite.

A different chronology was proposed by T. N. Subramanian, an official in the Madras government (Subramanian 1957 cited in Carman 1974:45). This chronology identifies the Chola King with Kulothunga Chola II, who reigned from 1133–50 and was - also arguably - known for his persecution of Vaisnavites. It puts Ramanuja's exile from c. 1137 to 1148. Subramanian's hypothesis is aided by a fragment from the late Tamil biography Rāmānujārya Divya Caritai, which states that Ramanuja completed his most important work, the Śrībhāṣya, in 1155–56. Nevertheless, temple inscriptions in Karnataka indicate the presence of Ramanuja and his disciples before 1137. Carman (1974:45) hypothesizes that the traditional biographers conflated two different visits to Mysore into one. This later chronology has been accepted by several scholars, yielding a tentative lifetime of 1077–1157.

Whatever the precise dates of Ramanuja's lifetime, it seems clear that all three of the great Srivaiṣṇava acharyas lived under the relatively stable and non-sectarian climate of the Chola empire, before its decline in the late 12th and 13th centuries (Carman 1974, p. 27).