Madhusūdana was born in Bengal, and originally called Kamalanayana. He was educated in the Navya-Nyāya tradition, but became an Advaita sannyāsin, and moved to Varanasi in order to study Advaita. He gained as a patron the Emperor Akbar, and was a friend of the poet Tulsīdās. He led many symposia attended by both Hindu sādhus and Muslim mullāhs.
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 Nyāyāmŗta. Madhusūdana also wrote at least nine other works, of which five were commentaries (on the Bhagavadgīta, part of the Bhāgavatapurāņa, and others).
Sources and further reading
Primary texts
- Advaitasiddhi
- Siddhāntabindu
- ''Vedāntakalpalatikā
Secondary texts
- Karl H. Potter, "Madhusūdana Sarasvatī" (in Robert L. Arrington [ed.]. A Companion to the Philosophers. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. ISBN 0-631-22967-1)
- Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, et al. [edd], History of Philosophy Eastern and Western: Volume One (George Allen & Unwin, 1952)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Sunday March 09, 2008 at 20:59:42 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
Copyright © 2008, Dictionary.com, LLC. All rights reserved.