shrii Madhusudhana Sarasvati

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

I will be updating my advaita page to include post-Sankaran advaitins.
Madhusudana Sarasvati is a significant figure in the history of advaita
vedAnta, because he was a great kr.shNa bhakta (kr.shNAt param na jAne -
I know nothing greater than kr.shNa), and at the same time a great
dialectician who refuted dvaita doctrines.

By all available indications, he was born in Bengal, and lived in Puri
for a while. He met Visvesvara Sarasvati there and became a sannyasi in
the advaita order. Another guru of his was named Madhava Sarasvati. A
large part of his life was spent in Varanasi. He is supposed to have been
a contemporary of Akbar, the Mughal emperor. Those who have read about the
fighting nAgas (the militant monks) in the north of India, would know that
among the advaita sannyasis, there is a group called nAga sannyasis, who
go naked, but carry arms and don't hesitate to fight. Many Hindu kings
had whole regiments of these sAdhus in their armies. The origin of such
nAga sAdhus is traced to Madhusudana Sarasvati. The story is probably
apocryphal, but he is supposed to have been concerned that ascetics of all
denominations were being persecuted by the regional Muslim governors and
their armies. So he went to the Mughal court and discussed this with Akbar
and his minister, Birbal. Birbal suggested that if the sannyasis armed
themselves and defended themselves, they would not be troubled too much.
Akbar agreed to the proposal, and Madhusudana Sarasvati decided to have
some of his disciples trained to fight. He is supposed to have made large
numbers of Kshatriya and Vaisya sannyasis take to arms.

>From the point of view of advaita philosophy, Madhusudana's contribution
is large. He does not hesitate to disagree with some of Sankara's
 interpretations of BrahmasUtras. His "advaita-siddhi" is a masterpiece of
 dvaita-advaita
debate. He wrote a commentary called "siddhAntabindu" on Sankara's daSaSlokI.
vedAntakalpalatikA is an independent composition, while the samkshepa-
SArIraka-sAra samgraha is a commentary on sarvajnAtman's samkshepa-SArIraka.
A commentary on a portion of the bhAgavata-purANa is also attributed to him.
By far the most famous among his compositions is the gUDArtha-dIpikA on the
bhagavad-gItA. By his time, there were two sub-schools of advaita, called
vivaraNa and bhAmatI schools, who disagreed between themselves on some points.
Madhusudana Sarasvati cannot be classified under either school, because he
is more faithful to Sankara's upanishad-bhAshyas and sureSvara's naishkarmya-
siddhi. On the other hand, he interprets some of the brahmasUtras differently
from Sankara. It is to be noted that both vivaraNa and bhAmatI schools are
based on differing interpretations of Sankara's BrahmasUtra-bhAshya.

S. Vidyasankar