Advaita, the non-dualism taught by Śaṅkara, holds that only one thing is finally real: Brahman, pure consciousness without qualities. The self is identical with it, and the world of many persons and things is an appearance produced by ignorance. That is how Advaita reads the Upanishads, the closing portion of the Vedas. Rāmānuja, a Brahmin teacher from the Tamil south of India, came some centuries after Śaṅkara and argued through all three of his large works that the reading was wrong. On his account Brahman is a personal God, Vishnu, with good qualities beyond number. The selves and the material world are real, and they belong to God as a body belongs to the self that lives in it. What frees a person is loving devotion to that God, answered by his grace.
Almost nothing about his life can be checked. The record is his own writing; the rest comes from biographies written by his followers in the generations after his death. They place his birth at Śrīperumbūdūr, near modern Chennai, in 1017 and his death at Śrīraṅgam in 1137, a life of 120 years. Historians place him later, at about 1077 to 1157. The tradition says that he studied at Kāñcīpuram under Yādavaprakāśa, a teacher of Vedānta, the philosophy built on the Upanishads. The pupil quarrelled with his teacher over the meaning of scripture, it says, and left him. It says that Yāmuna, who led the Śrīvaiṣṇava community of Vishnu worshippers at Śrīraṅgam, hoped for him as a successor but died just before Rāmānuja reached him, and that five of Yāmuna's disciples taught him instead. One of the five, the tradition says, swore him to silence before disclosing the community's secret formula; Rāmānuja then shouted it from the temple balcony to the worshippers below, accepting hell for himself if they were saved. It also tells of his giving up his household to become a renouncer, of his reorganising worship at the great temple of Śrīraṅgam, and of years spent in the Hoysala kingdom, in the region of Mysore, after he fled a Chola king devoted to Shiva.
Three works are securely his: the Vedārthasaṃgraha, a treatise whose title means "Summary of the Meaning of the Vedas" and probably his earliest work; the Śrībhāṣya, his main work, a commentary on the Brahma Sūtra, the aphorisms in which Vedānta sums up the Upanishads; and the Bhagavadgītā-bhāṣya, a verse-by-verse commentary on the Bhagavadgītā. The treatise and the Gītā commentary each carry an opening verse of homage to Yāmuna. The treatise answers three rival readings of the Upanishads and names none of their authors. One of them, that Brahman is both different and not different from the selves, is the one scholars usually identify as Yādavaprakāśa's. Yādavaprakāśa's writings on Vedānta are lost, and most of what is known of his views comes from Rāmānuja, who refuted them.
Against Advaita, Rāmānuja argued that the doctrine undoes itself. If every means of knowing is infected with error, then so is scripture, and so is the knowledge that all is error. Knowledge, he held, is always of something real and always of a thing with qualities. Perception and inference cannot reach God, which is why scripture counts for him as a source of knowledge in its own right. The Upanishads say to a student "that you are", and Advaita takes the sentence as a plain identity. Rāmānuja read it through the body: a word for a body reaches through to the self within it, so "you" names God as the inner self of the hearer. The school is called Viśiṣṭādvaita, usually translated as qualified non-dualism: Brahman is one, and the many are real as its body.
In the generations after his death his followers came to teach surrender to God, prapatti, as a path in its own right. Their disagreement over whether surrender needs any human effort was among the disputes that divided the community into a northern and a southern school. Scholars still dispute whether his three large works teach surrender as a separate path at all. Madhva, the thirteenth-century founder of the dualist school of Vedānta, rejected even the qualified identity of self and God that Rāmānuja had kept. In Śrīvaiṣṇava temples and homes, worship still follows the order ascribed to Rāmānuja.