The Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition

Ācārya is the teacher in the full sense: one who has learned the sacred texts, lives by what they teach, and teaches it to others. The word is traditionally explained as one who gathers the meaning of the texts and establishes the pupil in right conduct, and who does so by living it himself. The title is also an honour borne in names such as Yāmunācārya.

In the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition the ācārya is the pupil's guide to the Lord. The ācārya gives the initiation and the sacred mantras, and recommends the pupil to the Lord, as Śrī does. The tradition remembers its line of ācāryas, beginning with the Lord Himself and Śrī, through Nāthamuni and Āḷavandār to Rāmānuja and the teachers who followed, and the pupil is taught to hold the ācārya in the highest honour.

The hymn itself calls the Lord the teacher in the name Kapilācārya (538), recalling the sage Kapila, born to Dēvahūti, who taught her the way to freedom. On the People page the ācāryas run from Nāthamuni to Parāśara Bhaṭṭar, who himself had Embār for his ācārya.

Advaita means 'not two'. It is the school of Vēdānta whose great teacher is Ādi Śaṅkara, whom historians place in the eighth century and the tradition of his own order much earlier. It holds that Brahman alone is finally real, that the many things of the world have a lesser reality, and that the self within each being is not other than Brahman.

Viśiṣṭādvaita, the school of Rāmānuja and of the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition, is also 'not two', but 'with distinctions': there is one Lord, Nārāyaṇa with Śrī, and the souls and the world, which are real, are His body, belonging to Him as the body belongs to the self. Both schools read the same Upaniṣads, Brahma Sūtras and Gītā and come to different understandings of the soul's relation to the Lord. In the one, the soul is finally not other than Brahman; in the other, it is the Lord's own for ever, and release is to serve Him in Vaikuṇṭha.

In this hymn the commentary attributed to Śaṅkara reads the names mainly as descriptions of the one Brahman, while Bhaṭṭar reads each as a quality of the Lord with Śrī. Each is a way of praising, and both reach a thousand names.

The Āḻvārs are twelve poet-saints of the Tamil country who sang their love of the Lord in the hymns the tradition calls the Divya Prabandham. Āḻvār is usually explained as 'one immersed': they were sunk deep in love of Him. The tradition places them in very ancient times; historians place them in the early medieval centuries, between about the fifth and the tenth of the common era. The tradition names them in the order set out below.

Āṇḍāḷ, the one woman among them, is not the Āṇḍāḷ Ammaṅgār of the People page, who was the wife of Kūrattāḻvāṉ and the mother of Parāśara Bhaṭṭar. The tradition tells that Nāthamuni gathered the Āḻvārs' hymns and gave them their place in the worship of the temples, and that Rāmānuja and the ācāryas who followed heard in them the Lord's own qualities. Bhaṭṭar's reading of the thousand names carries the same delight in the Lord's gentleness and nearness.

The Bhagavad Guṇa Darpaṇam, 'the mirror of the Lord's qualities' (darpaṇa is a mirror), is the commentary that Parāśara Bhaṭṭar of Śrīraṅgam, a teacher whom the tradition remembers as of the twelfth century, wrote on the Viṣṇu Sahasranāma. It is in Sanskrit and is the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition's own reading of the names. The tradition tells that it was asked of Bhaṭṭar, the elder of the twin sons of Kūrattāḻvāṉ.

As the title says, each name is a guṇa of the Lord, shown as in a mirror. Bhaṭṭar explains a name by its root and by scripture, then stays with what that quality means to the one who comes to Him: His gentleness, His ease of approach, His mercy to the devotee. Bhaṭṭar holds that a name which comes again is read afresh by the place where it stands, so that nothing in the hymn is a repetition. And Bhaṭṭar reads the names as a sequence: the first run of them describes the supreme Vāsudēva and answers Yudhiṣṭhira's first two questions, and the groups that follow are tied to the vyūha forms, the descents, the image in the temples and the Lord within the heart.

Bhaṭṭar teaches also that to say the names without their meaning is good, but that their meaning brings delight to the mind and purity to the heart. Wherever the meanings on these pages give a Śrīvaiṣṇava sense for a name, they follow Bhaṭṭar.

A commentary (bhāṣya, vyākhyāna) is the explanation a teacher gives of a text, opening it word by word and giving the sense that his school hears in it. In Indian learning much of the teaching is carried in commentaries, and the same scripture can be read in more than one way. Two commentaries on the Sahasranāmam are read above the rest. The first is attributed by the tradition to Ādi Śaṅkara, the great teacher of Advaita; the Advaita tradition holds it to be his own, though historians have not settled the question. The second is the Bhagavad Guṇa Darpaṇam of Parāśara Bhaṭṭar.

The two often take the plain sense of a name alike, and part in what they build on it. Śaṅkara's commentary dwells on the supremacy of the Lord, the One who rules all things and stands beyond them; Bhaṭṭar's stays with the nearness of that greatness, its gentleness and the ease with which it is reached. They divide a few names differently, hearing sthavirō dhruvaḥ as one name or as two, yet both reach a thousand. The Śrīvaiṣṇava reading of a name is Bhaṭṭar's; where the other commentary hears it differently, the difference is told plainly and without quarrel.

The Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition has great commentaries beyond this hymn. Rāmānuja's Śrī Bhāṣya explains the Brahma Sūtras and his Gītā Bhāṣya the Bhagavad Gītā, and later teachers, Vēdānta Dēśika among them, wrote on these in turn.

Perumāḷ is the Tamil word by which the Śrīvaiṣṇavas often speak of the Lord: 'the Great One' or 'the Great Person', from peru, great. In the Tamil country it was once a title of kings and chiefs, and in the hymns and in the temples it has become the Lord's own name. It is the word of the temple image: each shrine has its Perumāḷ, and the Lord of Śrīraṅgam is Periya Perumāḷ, the Great Perumāḷ. The tradition explains that name by saying that He is the Perumāḷ whom Śrī Rāma, who is also called Perumāḷ, worshipped.

Emperumān, the Lord who is ours, is the form in which the Āḻvārs and the ācāryas often address Him, and the tradition calls Rāmānuja Emperumānār. In the Śrīvaiṣṇava understanding the image in the temple is the Lord Himself, present there out of His mercy to be worshipped, and the Perumāḷ of a shrine is that presence. The Tamil hymns often praise the eyes of Perumāḷ, as the names of this hymn do the lotus-eyed Lord; why His eyes are called red is told under Lotus eyes and red eyes.

Śrīraṅgam is the temple-town of the Lord as Raṅganātha, reclining on the serpent Ādiśēṣa with His consort Raṅganāyakī, on an island between the Kāvērī and the Kollidam, beside the city of Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu. The Śrīvaiṣṇavas call it simply the Kōvil, the temple, or the Periya Kōvil, the great temple, and Bhūlōka Vaikuṇṭha, the Vaikuṇṭha on earth. It is the first of the 108 divya dēśams, the holy places that the Āḻvārs sang, and its hymns are a part of the daily service.

The tradition tells that the shrine came to the island by way of Vibhīṣaṇa, to whom the image was given after Rāma's victory over Rāvaṇa; when Vibhīṣaṇa set it down by the Kāvērī it would not move, and the Lord there lies facing south. The life of Rāmānuja as a teacher centred on Śrīraṅgam, by the tradition's account, and Parāśara Bhaṭṭar was born there and grew up in the Lord's temple. The tradition also tells that consecrated food sent from the Lord's own table to a poor household on a rainy evening led to the birth of the twin brothers Parāśara Bhaṭṭar and Vyāsa Bhaṭṭar.

A Śrīvaiṣṇava is one who worships Nārāyaṇa together with Śrī. Vaiṣṇava is the wider word, for any devotee of Viṣṇu; the Śrī before it is the Goddess, who is never apart from the Lord and who speaks for the soul to Him. The name belongs to the tradition of Rāmānuja, in the line of the Āḻvārs before him and the ācāryas after, found chiefly in South India and having its heart at Śrīraṅgam.

It holds that the Lord, Nārāyaṇa with Śrī, is the one supreme Person; that souls and the world are real and are His body, which is the sense of Viśiṣṭādvaita; and that the soul comes to Him by devotion and, above all, by surrender to His grace in refuge. It rests on two bodies of scripture together, the Sanskrit Vēdānta of the Upaniṣads, the Brahma Sūtras and the Gītā, and the Tamil hymns of the Āḻvārs. A Śrīvaiṣṇava is received into it by an ācārya, in a rite that includes the marks of the conch and the discus on the shoulders, the sign that the person belongs to the Lord.

In later centuries the tradition has come to have two branches. The Vaḍakalai leans more on the Sanskrit Vēdānta and honours Vēdānta Dēśika as its chief teacher; the Teṅkalai leans more on the Tamil hymns and honours Maṇavāḷa Māmuni. Both hold Rāmānuja and the Āḻvārs dear, and they differ in some points of emphasis and in how they speak of the working of grace. The reading of the thousand names on these pages is Parāśara Bhaṭṭar's, whom both branches honour.

The Nālāyira Divya Prabandham, 'the four thousand divine compositions', is the collection of the hymns of the twelve Āḻvārs: about four thousand Tamil verses in praise of the Lord, in four parts. Its best-loved pieces are Nammāḻvār's Tiruvāymoḻi, of 1,102 verses, Āṇḍāḷ's Tiruppāvai, of thirty verses, one for each day of the month of Mārkaḻi, and Periyāḻvār's Tiruppallāṇḍu, a blessing for the Lord's long life.

The tradition tells that Nāthamuni gathered the hymns, set them in order and gave them their place in the worship of the temples, where they are still recited, at Śrīraṅgam among others. The Śrīvaiṣṇavas call the collection the Dravida Vēda, the Tamil Vēda, and hold it with the Sanskrit Vēdānta as the second ground of their understanding; Rāmānuja is credited with giving it a standing beside the Vēdas.

These pages meet the hymns in small places: the Tiruppāvai is recalled for Kaṃsa's fear of the Lord and for Kēśin's death, and a commentator quotes it on the bow Śārṅga. The tradition tells that Āḷavandār wished for a commentary on the Tiruvāymoḻi, and that Bhaṭṭar charged Nañjīyar to write it.

When these pages say 'the tradition holds' or 'it is told', they mean the sampradāya: the teaching that a line of teachers hands to their pupils, one to the next, together with the way of reading the sacred texts that goes with it. The word comes from sam-pra-dā, to hand over fully. Here it is the Śrīvaiṣṇava sampradāya, which reads the sacred texts as Rāmānuja and Vēdānta Dēśika and the ācāryas before and after them taught them to be read, and reads the thousand names as Parāśara Bhaṭṭar does in the Bhagavad Guṇa Darpaṇam.

The word does not mean history proved. An account that the tradition tells, of a teacher's birth or of a deed of the Lord, is given as told, with 'it is said' or 'the tradition holds' at the word that cannot be tested; and the years of the old teachers are given as the tradition counts them beside the years that historians place them. Nor does it mean the only reading. Where the commentary attributed to Ādi Śaṅkara, or another understanding, hears a name differently, the difference is named fairly and without quarrel.