Difference and non-difference, both belonging to the thing's own nature — neither produced by a limiting condition, neither derived from the other, and neither destined to be removed. The most economical statement of the bhedābheda thesis, and the one that survived as a living tradition.
Nimbārka states it in ten verses, and later commentators spend centuries on them.
The independent reality, with infinite auspicious attributes, the material and efficient cause of the world, and free from every defect. Not attributeless in any respect, and not remote: he is sarvāntaryāmin, the inner controller of all.
Atomic in size, many, eternal, conscious, knowers and agents and enjoyers. Different from brahman by nature and non-different from him by nature, both without qualification. Each is a knower and is knowledge — a substance that is also its own attribute.
Three kinds: prākṛta, derived from primordial nature; aprākṛta, the non-material stuff of the Lord's own realm and form; and kāla, time. Real, and really transformed. There is no māyā doing the work of explaining it away.
The inventory is identical to Viśiṣṭādvaita's, which is one reason the two schools are often confused. The relation is not. For Rāmānuja, cit and acit are modes of brahman, related to him as a body to its self — an asymmetric relation in which non-difference is the fundamental fact and difference holds of the modes. For Nimbārka they are powers of brahman, and the two relations are symmetric: neither identity nor difference is the deeper one. Nimbārka also does not build his system on the body–soul model, using it as one image among several rather than as the defining category.
| Nimbārka | Rāmānuja | Bhāskara | Śaṅkara | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Is difference natural? | Yes, and so is non-difference. Both equally | Difference holds of modes; non-difference is the fundamental fact | No — difference is due to an adjunct | No — difference is not ultimately true at all |
| Is the relation symmetric? | Yes. Neither term is prior | No. Modes depend on the substrate, never the reverse | No. Non-difference is the substance's own | Not applicable; there is one term |
| Does the self survive liberation as distinct? | Yes, permanently | Yes, permanently | No — the adjunct goes, and with it the distinctness | There was never a distinct self to survive |
| Is there māyā? | No. The world is a real transformation of a real power | No. The world is the Lord's real body | No, and he attacks the doctrine as an importation | Yes, and the system requires it |
| Means to liberation | Five, including surrender and devotion to the teacher | Devotion, or surrender | Knowledge and works together | Knowledge alone |
Symmetry is the whole disagreement with Rāmānuja, and it is easy to miss because the two schools' inventories match. Rāmānuja's apṛthak-siddhi is deliberately one-directional: the substrate can be thought without this mode, the mode cannot be thought at all without a substrate. That asymmetry is what lets him say the whole is one thing rather than several. Nimbārka gives it up, and pays for the loss of that unifying move with a relation that is harder to state — but he gains a difference that needs no explaining away and a self whose distinctness is not on loan.
The Daśa-ślokī is the school's creed, and short enough to be memorised in an afternoon. Its content, verse by verse:
| Verse | What it establishes |
|---|---|
| 1 | The self is by nature a knower, an agent, an enjoyer, atomic, and eternally distinct from and non-distinct from brahman. |
| 2 | The self is of two kinds — bound and released — and the bondage is beginningless. |
| 3 | Matter is threefold: derived from nature, non-material, and time. |
| 4 | Brahman is the ruler of both selves and matter, free of all defect, the abode of all auspicious qualities. |
| 5 | He is to be worshipped as Kṛṣṇa, with Rādhā at his left, attended and adorned. |
| 6–7 | The mode of meditation, and the vision of the divine realm. |
| 8 | The means: surrender to the Lord, with the teacher's grace. |
| 9 | What the released soul attains — the Lord's nature, and eternal service. |
| 10 | The lineage: the teaching received from Sanaka and the sages, and transmitted. |
Nimbārka's Brahma-sūtra commentary is the shortest of the major bhāṣyas by a wide margin — it glosses rather than argues, and it engages almost no opponents by name. That makes the school's dating unusually hard: there is little internal evidence of whom he had read. The philosophical work of the school is largely Śrīnivāsa's and Puruṣottama Prasāda's, several generations later, and readers should be aware that a “Nimbārka position” on a technical question is often a position the commentators supplied.
In Nimbārka's fifth verse, Rādhā is at Kṛṣṇa's left, surrounded by attendants, and is worshipped with him as a single object. This is early — earlier than the Caitanya movement's elaboration, and earlier than most of the Rādhā theology that later becomes standard in north Indian Vaiṣṇavism.
She is not a devotee who happens to be exalted. She is the Lord's own power personified — his hlādinī aspect, the capacity for delight — so that the couple is one reality in two persons, and the both-relation of §1 is exhibited at the level of the deity himself.
A system whose central claim is that difference and non-difference are equally natural has an obvious theological expression: a deity who is one and is two, whose distinction from his power is real and whose unity with it is equally real, and neither reducible.
Whether the metaphysics generated the theology or the devotional tradition supplied a picture the metaphysics then formalised is a genuine question, and the sources do not settle it. What can be said is that the two fit unusually well, and that in this school the doctrine of Rādhā is a philosophical position and not only a devotional one.
Sādharmya — likeness of nature. The released soul becomes like brahman in respect of freedom from defect, unbroken bliss and unobstructed knowledge, and it dwells in the Lord's non-material realm.
It does not acquire the four powers reserved to the Lord: creating, sustaining, dissolving, and ruling from within. Nor does it merge. The natural difference of §1 is natural, and so it holds in liberation exactly as it held before — which is the doctrine's chief practical payoff.
Not the removal of an adjunct, as in Bhāskara — there is no adjunct. Not the correction of an error, as in Advaita — nothing was mistaken about the world. Not the acquisition of something the soul lacked in its nature — the soul was always non-different from the Lord, and always different.
What changes is that the obstruction — the material power's entanglement, and the beginningless ignorance of one's true relation — ceases. The relation itself is unchanged, and always was. Liberation is a change in condition, not in constitution.
1 · What does svābhāvika add to the bhedābheda thesis?
The last is close to Rāmānuja's position and is precisely what Nimbārka declines to say.
2 · How does Nimbārka differ from Rāmānuja, given the same three reals?
And he treats cit and acit as powers rather than as a body, so the body–soul model is one image among several rather than the defining category.
3 · What do the two powers do?
The first is Advaita's pair of powers of ignorance, which this school has no need of.
4 · What is unusual about the fifth means?
Coordinate with the other four, and consistent with a theology in which the guru stands to the disciple somewhat as the Lord stands to the guru.
Rāmānuja's asymmetry does real work: it explains why the whole counts as one thing rather than several, since the dependent term has no standing of its own. Nimbārka gives that up and owes an account of what makes the Lord and the selves one reality rather than two. His answer is the power-relation — a power is not a second thing beside its possessor — but a power that is naturally different from its possessor looks harder to keep on the near side of that line. The school's reply is that the demand for one relation to be prior is itself the assumption under dispute, and that a philosophy is allowed to take two relations as basic. See the parallel discussion on the Bhedābheda page, §10.
Less than the name suggests, and this is not a criticism peculiar to him. His own writings amount to a short commentary and ten verses; the technical positions — on the two powers, the analysis of the relation, the responses to Advaita — are largely Śrīnivāsa's and later. The same is true in some degree of every sampradāya, but the ratio here is unusual, and it matters for the dating question: arguments that place Nimbārka late often rest on doctrines that may belong to his commentators rather than to him.
On doctrine, the case is thin: svābhāvika bhedābheda is a recognised variety of bhedābheda, and Yādavaprakāśa held something close to it a century or more earlier. On everything else, the case is strong. Nimbārka founded a sampradāya that still exists, with a lineage, an institution, a settled canon of commentaries and a distinctive theology of the divine couple; Bhāskara founded nothing. Whether that warrants a separate chapter in a history of philosophy or a separate section in a history of religion is a fair question — this series gives it its own page because the theology of §6 and the fivefold path of §7 are not found in the older bhedābheda at all.
| IAST | Devanāgarī | Sense |
|---|---|---|
| aprākṛta | अप्राकृत | Non-material; the stuff of the Lord's realm and form, not derived from primordial nature. |
| gurūpasatti | गुरूपसत्ति | Devotion to the teacher, counted as a fifth means to liberation. |
| hlādinī | ह्लादिनी | The delighting power; Rādhā as the Lord's own capacity for joy, personified. |
| parā / aparā śakti | परा / अपरा शक्ति | The higher and lower powers, producing the conscious and material orders respectively. |
| sādharmya | साधर्म्य | Likeness of nature; what the released soul attains, short of the Lord's four powers. |
| svābhāvika-bhedābheda | स्वाभाविकभेदाभेद | Natural difference-and-non-difference; the school's full name for its thesis. |