The Vaishnavite Reformers of India

He was probably a descendant of early Vaishnava immigrants from the banks of the Jaumna and other parts of the north who carried the Bhagavata or the Pancharatra cult to the south and laid the foundation for the spread of Vaishnavaism during the second to the seventh centuries of the Christian era which were the palmy days of the Pallava rule. [...] The literature of the Alwars presupposes a thorough knowledge of the Krishna stories and the stories of the earlier avatars of Vishnu and the frequent impassioned references to such stories even in the songs of the earliest of the Alwars show that the South must have been flooded with these6 Nathamuni marvellous legends at a very early period. [...] The truth is that both the Adwaita and the Visistadwaita Schools were the simultaneously expressions of a natural rection from the sacrifice-ridden Purva Mimama schools of Guru and Kumarila which held the field in philosophical speculation during the centuries immediately preceding the times of Sankara and werein their turn the outcome of the disgust at the devolopment of philosophical Buddhis [...] The study has been a matter of mere academic interest and the maxims evolved from the various sections of the old Sutras were applied to the intepretation of the Upanishads and of the Smritis sometimes relevantly sometimes as the fancy gf the author suggested.18 Pundarikaksha The latest and the best exposition of the subject in the Bhatta Dipika of Khandadeva of about the eighteenth century [...] That is the use of the partical 4in the middel of the Sutra 3 of the set is most usually indicative of a change of side in the argument both in the Purvamimamsa and in the Vedanta.