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Concept
Vedarthasamgraha
Summary
The Vedarthasamgraha (वेदार्थसंग्रह), also rendered Vedarthasangraha, is a treatise by the Hindu philosopher Ramanuja, comprising his exegesis of a number of Upanishadic texts. The first of his three major works, Ramanuja propounds the doctrine of the Vishishtadvaita philosophy in this work and offers a discourse on the concepts of Brahman, bhakti, and moksha in Vedanta philosophy.
Vedarthasamgraha literally means "summary of the meaning of the Veda" in Sanskrit.
The Vedarthasamgraha begins with the exaltation of the deity Vishnu, traditional in Vaishnava works of his period.
The work is noteworthy for its criticism of Adi Shankara's Advaita philosophy. He offers a number of arguments to oppose the postulations of Advaita:
Ramanuja argues that since Advaita claims that all is mithya (illusory), there is nothing that is required to be known. He regards this to be incompatible with the Advaita notion that all things are known with the knowledge of Brahman; either the Brahman and its effect are both real or both unreal. Instead, he supports the ontology of Vishishtadvaita, which claims that everything in the world possesses Brahman as the central aspect of its self, making these two statements compatible.
He offers scriptural evidence from Shruti texts that Brahman possesses attributes such as knowledge rather than being a force of pure consciousness, rejecting the non-dualism of Advaita in favour of the qualified non-dualism of Vishishtadvaita.
He opposes the notion that the nature of Brahman is clouded by avidya (ignorance), positing that avidya as a concept would not be able to explain its illusory nature on its own; if avidya were real, the non-duality of the philosophy would no longer stand true. He uses the same argument to oppose the notion that avidya is eliminated with the knowledge of Brahman (nivritti anupapatti) or knowledge obtained from Vedanta (nivartaka anupapatti).
He attempts to refute the notion of a single JivaJiva (life force), called eka jiva vada, arguing that since Advaitins hold that the individual self and all bodies as distinct from Brahman are illusory, the existence of a single Jiva would also be illusory.
Official source
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