Shrivaishnava

Southern Indian religious community
who are devotees (bhakta) of the god
Vishnu and Shri (Lakshmi), and whose
religious life is rooted in the devotional
hymns of the Alvars, a group of twelve
poet-saints who lived in southern
India between the seventh and tenth
centuries. All the Alvars were devotees of
Vishnu, and their stress on passionate
devotion (bhakti) to a personal god,
conveyed through hymns sung in the
Tamil language, transformed and revitalized Hindu religious life. Two centuries later, the Alvars’ devotional outpouring was organized and systematized by the philosopher Ramanuja,
considered the Shrivaishnava founder.
Ramanuja was convinced that Brahman,
or Supreme Reality, was a personal
deity, rather than an impersonal
abstract principle, and was also convinced that devotion was the most
important form of religious practice.
Vishishthadvaita Vedanta, his philosophical position, stressed both of these
convictions, and thus opposed the
Advaita Vedanta school founded by the
philosopher Shankaracharya, which
stressed that the Supreme Being was
impersonal and that realization (jnana)
was the best spiritual path. In the time
after Ramanuja the Shrivaishnava community split into two smaller groups, the
Tengalai and the Vadagalai. The schism
stemmed from a disagreement over
whether human action was necessary to
attain final liberation, or whether the
hope came in complete surrender (prapatti) to God’s grace; the Vadagalais held
the former position, and the Tengalais
the latter.
In practice, the Shrivaishnava community has been strongly influenced by
the doctrine of divine “emanations”
originated by the Pancharatra religious
community, particularly the notion that
a properly consecrated image becomes
a form of the deity itself. Shrivaishnava
piety has tended to center around
temples, and particularly the service of
the temple’s image, which is considered
a genuine form of the deity. Given
this stress on learning and templebased worship, it is not surprising
that the community has been dominated
by brahmins, and the few nonbrahmins in the community have
distinctly inferior status. For further
information see K. Rangachari, The
Sri Vaisnava Brahmans, 1931; and
644
Shrishaila
John Braisted Carman, The Theology of
Ramanuja, 1974.