Sri Madhvacharya

Life and work

Madhva was born as Vasudeva at Pajaka Kshetra near Udupi in 1238 CE to a Tulu brahmin couple. A precocious child with prodigious physical strength as well as scriptural learning, he took sannyasa at sixteen from the Advaita acharya Achyutapreksha but soon broke with his guru on doctrinal grounds, holding that the Vedic and Bhagavata teaching points not to non-dual Brahman but to Sri Hari as the absolute personal deity entirely distinct from the souls and the world. He undertook two long all-India yatras including a journey to Badrinath where Vedavyasa himself, in his Himalayan ashram, is said to have given him a personal commission to deliver the Brahma Sutras from their non-dual misreading. He returned to the Tulu coast, retrieved a black-stone Krishna murti from the sea at Malpe beach near Udupi, and consecrated the Udupi Sri Krishna Matha which became the founding institution of his lineage. He set up eight subsidiary mathas around the Krishna temple, each headed by a direct disciple of his, and instituted the paryaya system whereby each matha takes the principal seva of the Lord for two years in rotation — a system still followed unbroken seven centuries later. His thirty-seven Sarvamula granthas codified the Dvaita Vedanta theology of the pancha-bheda — the fivefold eternal distinction between God, souls, matter, and their permutations. Tradition holds that at the end of his life he ascended bodily into Badrikashrama to remain in the perpetual presence of Vedavyasa.