Madhwa Philosophy

Shri Madhwacharya's philosophy 
- By Vidvan. M.R.Gopalacharya

The individual soul can NEVER become identical with God; at best he will reach a status similar to that of God in that he will be free from the cycle of births and deaths. Even in the final state of redemption, the liberated souls are infinitely graded in their spiritual bliss. Still every jeeva gets whatever he wants. He is free from moral turpitude. He rejoices to see his spiritual superiors and comrades. All live in full amity and comity. The measure of happiness is determined in consonance with intention and extension of spiritual service. God was perfect, is perfect and will ever remain perfect. The individual soul was never perfect, is still imperfect and will ever remain imperfect. Still neither is thinkable without the other. The perfect God is unthinkable without the imperfect universe and the imperfect world of souls. The idea of perfect God (Paramatama) having no jeevatmas to rule is as absurd an abstraction as the idea of a king having no subjects to rule. We honestly know ourselves to be imperfect and our imperfect selves are unthinkable, except as standing out against the background of perfect one.


Madhwa employs his heavy artillery to explode atheism, monism, pantheism and other hostile theories and at the same time proves that the arguments of the opponents sound fierce and formidable, but they are blank cartridge. It should be kindly noted that Madhwa conducts his logical or metaphysical contests with a remarkable balance of mind in the sportsmanlike spirit of the best swordsman. He fights for truth. There is the least attempt at the personal vilification of the opponent. He shows at length that these theories do not have a scrap of evidence and that they rest entirely upon faulty arguments and misinterpreted Vedic texts. The so-called school of logic that claims itself to be rationalist is shown to be irrationalistic in the extreme. The principle of "Unity in diversity" is true in the case of Madhwa, in the sense that the Supreme Thing controls the vast multiplicity of things that are widely different from one another, just as one thread of the necklace controls numerous pearls.


Therefore, Madhwa tries to bring everything under the aegis of this Supreme Principle, Vishnu.  Madhwa has no sympathy with "Nirguna Brahman". He demolishes the theory of "Brahma-Saguna Nirguna" and he discusses all logical possibilities and disproves them. He admits that Brahma is Nirguna in the sense that He transcends the three Gunas of Prakriti, not in the sense that He is characterless absolute. The Nirguna Brahman is conceived by the monist to be featureless, characterless, utterly inactive, and apparently incapable of any description. It is devoid of all ethical content. Madhwa says that this principle can excite neither affection nor aversion. It neither attracts nor repels. It is set forth as a trinity of negations--- negation of non-existence, negation of ignorance, and negation of misery. Strict warning is given by the monist that it is not positively existent and that it does not have positive happiness and knowledge. So Brahma is non-entity, described in circumlocutive language. He takes no share in the thoughts and feelings of His creation. Therefore we cannot devoutly worship the Divine Being, which is no more than an abstraction denuded of every vestige of personality. Nirvishash Brahmawada –the theory of Absolutism---holding that the Supreme is Absolute, one without a second, tries to prove that everything except it, is a mental construction, a figment of imagination, a mere appearance. Madhwa says that, strangely enough, Shankara attempts to solve the problem by denying the very existence of the problem. The world of sense can never be a mental construction. That it is a real existence and not a fictitious abstraction can be proved by sound commonsense, inferential knowledge, perpetual experience and scriptural authority. If God were featureless, we cannot rise strengthened and ennobled when we emerge from our prayer to Him. For we want our God to be at least what we ideally wish to be. It can be said with an approximation to truth that God is the most exquisite expression of the loftiest aspirations of the greatest human beings in their sublimest moods, i.e. He is at least goodness, power, at the loftiest point to which the greatest of all human beings of all times can ever aspire to project himself.