The Madhva sampradaya (Brahma sampradaya)

What the Madhva sampradaya is

In Madhva’s view reality has two classes: the independent (svatantra), which is God (Vishnu) alone, and the dependent (asvatantra), that is souls and the material world, which are real but depend on God. The world is not illusion, and even in liberation the soul does not become one with God. That is why the philosophy is called Dvaita, and its followers call it Tattvavada, “the doctrine of reality”.

Vayu, the wind god, has a special place in the sampradaya: he is held to be the intermediary between God and souls. In some of his works Madhva calls himself the third avatar of Vayu, after Hanuman and Bhima, and the tradition regards him so.

History in brief

According to B. N. K. Sharma, Madhva was born into a Tulu Brahmin family at the village of Pajaka, about eight miles south-east of Udupi, and his first name was Vasudeva. At about sixteen he took sannyasa from Achyutapreksha and received the name Purnaprajna; later, on becoming head of the matha, he was called Anandatirtha. His teacher belonged to the Advaita tradition; Madhva set out a view of his own, distinct from Shankara’s Advaita, and Achyutapreksha later accepted it too.

He travelled in the south to Thiruvananthapuram, Kanyakumari, Rameshwaram and Srirangam, and in the north to Badrinath. By tradition he met Vedavyasa at Badari and, inspired by him, wrote his commentary on the Brahma Sutra. Back at Udupi he installed an image of Sri Krishna in his matha, which became the centre for his followers. Tradition tells of the image’s finding in several forms, the commonest being that it was found inside a lump of gopichandana clay on a ship coming from the direction of Dwarka.

According to Sharma, in his last years Madhva appointed eight sannyasi disciples for the worship of Krishna at Udupi, and from their lines of disciples grew the eight mathas of Udupi: Palimaru, Adamaru, Krishnapura, Puttige, Shiroor, Sode, Kaniyooru and Pejavara. They are counted in four pairs (dvandva). By tradition Madhva passed from sight on Magha Shukla Navami, which is kept as Madhva Navami.

The swamis of the eight mathas serve in turn as chief priest of the Sri Krishna Matha for two years each, in an order that begins with Palimaru and ends with Pejavara. This handover is called the Paryaya and takes place with a great festival in the early hours of 18 January in even-numbered years. According to Sharma the system in its present form was set up in the 16th century by Vadiraja Tirtha of the Sode Matha; under the earlier arrangement, made by Madhva, the turn lasted two months.

From the line of Madhva’s disciple Padmanabha Tirtha came the mathas outside Udupi, chief among them the Uttaradi, Vyasaraja and Raghavendra mathas (together called the Mathatraya). Jayatirtha and Vyasatirtha were its leading philosophers. The Haridasas, who sang devotional songs in Kannada, such as Purandaradasa and Kanakadasa, belonged to this tradition; the story of the “Kanakana Kindi” window at Udupi is linked with Kanakadasa.

Beliefs and practice

The five differences: according to the first chapter of Madhva’s Mahabharata-tatparya-nirnaya, the world is real and five differences always hold in it: between God and soul, between soul and soul, between God and matter, between matter and matter, and between soul and matter. Souls are also held to be graded in nature and capacity, which is called taratamya, and this difference remains even among liberated souls.

According to Dasgupta, in Madhva’s view liberation comes only through devotion and God’s grace, and devotion means love of God together with full knowledge of his greatness. In the mathas of Udupi, Krishna is worshipped by the procedure Madhva laid down in his Tantrasara. According to Sharma, Madhva stressed a strict fast on Ekadashi for his followers and prescribed an animal made of flour (pishtapashu) in place of a live one in sacrifice.

Main centres

The Sri Krishna Matha at Udupi is the centre of the sampradaya; the eight mathas stand around it, with the temples of Anantheshwara and Chandramouleeshwara nearby. Devotees see Sri Krishna through a window with nine openings, the Navagraha Kindi. At Pajaka, by tradition, Madhva’s family home is still preserved. Beyond Udupi the Uttaradi, Vyasaraja and Raghavendra mathas are major centres, and in Bhandarkar’s time (1913) the followers lived mainly in the Kannada districts and along the coast from Goa to South Kanara.

Where the sources differ

• Madhva’s dates: B. N. K. Sharma holds 1238–1317 to be the most satisfactory, and according to Wikipedia most sources give it; some sources give 1199–1278 (the 1894 South Canara district manual gives a birth “about 1199”); Bhandarkar and Dasgupta take the Shaka year 1119 in the matha lists as the year of birth and so place his birth in 1197 and his death about 1276.
• Birthplace: Sharma and Wikipedia give Pajaka; the 1894 South Canara manual and Bhandarkar (following the Imperial Gazetteer) give Kalyanpur in the Udupi taluk, and Dasgupta writes that the birthplace, Rajatapitha, was probably Kalyanpur. Sharma calls Kalyanpur plainly wrong.
• Who set up the eight mathas and the Paryaya: the Wikipedia articles and the 1894 manual say Madhva founded the eight mathas; according to Sharma, Madhva appointed eight sannyasis and the mathas grew from their lines later, and the two-year Paryaya was begun in the 16th century by Vadiraja Tirtha (before that the turn was two months); Wikipedia’s article on Vadiraja also calls him the founder of the Paryaya system.
• The story of the Krishna image: Wikipedia’s article on the Udupi matha speaks of its being found in a lump of gopichandana, and its article on Madhva of its coming from Dwarka; the 1894 manual writes, following tradition, that the image was made by Arjuna and reached Madhva from a ship wrecked on the Tulu coast.
• Line of teachers: the Madhva tradition gives a list from Hamsa (Narayana), Brahma, the Sanakadi Kumaras and Durvasa down to Achyutapreksha, in which Sharma notes a gap of about four hundred years; the Prameya-ratnavali of the Gaudiya teacher Baladeva Vidyabhushana gives a line from Krishna, Brahma, Narada and Vyasa to Madhva. According to Dasgupta, Baladeva’s list does not match the lists of the Madhva mathas after Jayatirtha.

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