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Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Hinduism and Tribal Religions

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Indian Religions ((EIR))

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Synonyms

Śrī Vaiṣṇavism, Rāmānuja School

Definition

In its full-fledged form, the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta is a Vedānta school, that is, it recognizes a form of God as brahman (on the various ways of understanding God in India, see [6]), it accepts the authority of a given set of texts (the Upaniṣads, the Brahmasūtra, and the Bhagavadgītā), and explicitly grounds its tenets in the exegesis of textual passages out of the above works.

The full-fledged Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta also accepts further groups of texts, namely, the Pañcarātra (a group of Vaiṣṇava texts prescribing personal and temple rituals (see [9]) and on their role within Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, [7]) and, more importantly, the Tamil devotional poems collected in the Divyaprabandham. These poems were composed in Tamil by poet-saints called āḻvārs, and they highlight various personal traits of the various aspects of Viṣṇu.

The Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta flourished predominantly in South India, especially in the second millennium CE and...

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia, Austrian Academy of Sciences and University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Elisa Freschi

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  1. Elisa Freschi
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Correspondence to Elisa Freschi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept of Anthropology, The University of North Texas Dept of Anthropology, Denton, Texas, USA

    Pankaj Jain

  2. The Graduate Theological Union , Berkeley, California, USA

    Rita Sherma

  3. Jamia Millia Islamia, Centre for the Study of Comparative Reli Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

    Madhu Khanna

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Freschi, E. (2018). Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta. In: Jain, P., Sherma, R., Khanna, M. (eds) Hinduism and Tribal Religions. Encyclopedia of Indian Religions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1036-5_197-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1036-5_197-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-024-1036-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-024-1036-5

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