Page:Hindu Gods and Heroes.djvu/109

Rh was preached with still greater skill and success by his famous successor Rāmānuja, who died in 1137. Rāmānuja's greatest works are his commentaries on the Brahma-sūtra and Bhagavad-gītā. In them he expounds with great ability the principles of his school, namely, that God, sentient beings or souls, and insentient matter form three essentially distinct classes of being; that God, who is the same as Brahma, Vishṇu, Nārāyaṇa, or Kṛishṇa, is omnipotent, omnipresent, and possessed of all good qualities; that matter forms the body of souls, and souls form the body of God; that the soul attains salvation as a result of devout and loving meditation upon God, worship of him, and study of the scriptures; and that salvation consists in eternal union of the soul with God, but not in identity with him, as Śaṃkara taught. The scriptures on which Rāmānuja took his stand were mainly the Upanishads, Brahma-sūtra, and Bhagavad-gītā; but he also acknowledged as authoritative the Pāñcharātra Saṃhitās, in spite of their divergences in details of doctrine, and it is from them that his church has derived the worship of Śrī or Lakshmī as consort of Vishṇu, which is a very marked feature of their community and has gained for them the title of Śrī-vaishṇavas. But Rāmānuja was much more than a scholar and a writer of books; he was also, a man of action, a "practical mystic." Like Śaṃkara, he organ-