My Gita

by Devdutt Pattanaik

The first wave involved Sanskrit ‘commentaries’ (bhasyas) by Vedanta scholars, the most celebrated of whom were Adi Shankara from Kerala in the eighth century followed by Ramanuja from Tamil Nadu in the eleventh century and Madhva Acharya from Karnataka in the thirteenth century. They were concerned about the nature of God, and the relationship of divinity and humanity. Was God within or without? Was God embodied (sa-guna) or formless (nir-guna)? Their language was highly intellectual. What is significant is that all three commentators were celibate monks, who either did not marry or gave up marriage and established Hindu monastic orders (mathas), suggesting very clearly that Hinduism, once champion of the householder’s way, had ended up mimicking the hermit’s way of Buddhism it had previously always mocked. It contributed to the gradual separation of the more intellectual Vedanta from the more sensory Tantra, with the former becoming more mainstream and the latter being seen more as the occult.