Madhusūdana Sarasvatī

Madhusūdana Sarasvatī (c.1540–1640) was an Indian philosopher in the Advaita Vedānta tradition and devotee of Lord Krishna. He was the disciple of Viśveśvara Sarasvatī and Mādhava Sarasvatī, and is the most celebrated name in the annals of the great debate between Dvaita and Advaita schools of Vedanta. The Nyayamruta of Vyasatirtha, a text criticising the Advaita view, caused a furore in the Advaita community resulting in a series of scholarly debates over centuries. Madhusūdana composed Advaitasiddhi, a line-by-line refutation of Nyayamruta. In response to Advaitasiddhi, the Dvaita scholars, Vyasa Ramacharya, and Ananda Bhattaraka, wrote Nyayamruta Tarangini and Nyayamruta Kantakoddhara and challenged Madhusūdana Sarasvatī. Madhusūdana was born in a staunch Vaishnava Brahmin family in a village named Unashia situated in the present-day Kotalipara division of Gopalganj district near Faridpur in Bangladesh. His father was a Sanskrit scholar named Pramod Purandara Acharya, and originally called Kamalanayana. He was educated in the Navya-Nyāya tradition at Nabadwip under reputed scholars of those days like Harirama Tarkavagisha & Mathuranath Tarkavagisha, but later undertook sannyasa from an sannyāsi of Dashanami Sampradaya named Vishvesvara Sarasvati, and moved to Varanasi in order to study Advaita Vedanta. Madhusūdana wrote a number of works, all involving the defence and exposition of Advaita Vedānta, of which the largest and most respected is the Advaitasiddhi, which opposes the Dvaita Vedānta positions and arguments in Vyāsatīrtha's work Nyāyāmṛta. Madhusūdana also wrote at least nine other works, of which five were commentaries (on the Bhagavadgīta, on parts of the Bhāgavatapurāņa, and others). He wrote the Īśvarapratīpatti-prakāś, Vedāntakalpalatikā, Sārasangraha on Sarvajñātmā's Saṅkṣēpa-śārīrika, and the justly famous Siddhāntabindu on Śaṅkarācārya's Daśaślokī. A total of twenty-one books have been ascribed to Madhusūdana. Of them, nineteen books are undoubtedly his, but the authorship of the remaining two is doubtful.