Aṇubhāṣya

Two teachers of Vedānta wrote a work called Aṇubhāṣya, the "brief commentary": Madhva in the thirteenth century and Vallabha, the founder of another Vaiṣṇava school, who lived around 1500. Madhva's is the shorter by far. It runs to some thirty verses in four short chapters, one for each of the four books of the Brahma Sūtras, the terse aphorisms ascribed to Bādarāyaṇa on which every school of Vedānta built its case. It is a digest in verse rather than a line-by-line commentary, and a verse at its close calls it a summary of the meaning of all the scriptures, Sarvaśāstrārthasaṃgraha, the name it also goes by. The tradition says Madhva wrote it for disciples who read his whole commentary on the Sūtras each day before they ate. The first chapter says that Vishnu alone is the one the Sūtras ask to be known, and that every word of scripture names him first and other things only secondarily. The second says that no tradition at odds with the Vedas, Sāṃkhya's account of a self-moving primal matter among them, can take his qualities away. The third and fourth turn to the path and the goal: knowledge of God, devotion that differs in degree from one soul to the next, and a liberation in which the freed keep their rank. Their bliss differs, and none of them gains the power to create a world. Its commentators include Jayatīrtha, the chief systematiser of Madhva's Dvaita, or dualist, school, and Rāghavendra Tīrtha, a seventeenth-century Mādhva teacher.