Ramanuja and Nimbarka

 The primary question for any Vedanta philosophy is what is the relation between Brahman and the world and Brahman and the individual souls. Nimbarka takes this relation to be one of identity and difference. He gives the analogy of a coiled snake and of sun and its rays. Brahman is both immanent and transcendent; the souls and matter are really just the different manifest states of the one Brahman. The concern with such a philosophy is to show that the immanence of Brahman does not compromise its unity and the impurities that accrue to the soul and matter do not thereby affect Brahman.

Ramanuja believes that this is not possible in the Bheda-Abheda system (his criticisms of Bhaskara would with certain modifications apply also to Nimbarka). The reason is identity and difference cannot be affirmed simultaneously of the same object. Identity is an absolute relation or in the logical terminology of Nyaya it is a locus pervading relation. In terms of Modern Logic identity is a reflexive relation. Anything that is; is identical with itself. Not in one part identical with itself and not in another - for identity belongs to a thing fully and completely. So there can be no such thing as a partial identity. And difference is only possible if there is identity for difference exists between two terms and to be a term or a thing is to have an identity. Hence the principle of non-contradiction implies that nothing can be both identical with itself and different from itself. Arguably this is not the way Nimbarka conceived the issue but the burden of proof is on him - he has to make clear in what intelligible sense identity and difference can co-exist and why that would not compromise the unity of Brahman. Instead it seems Nimbarka has merely asserted that this is the case without explaining the grounds for that assertion. He has simply assumed the datum or that which requires explanation or explication.

Secondly, since the identity of Brahman and the the world on one hand and soul on other is asserted there is no reason why the impurities that accrue to the latter shouldn’t accrue to the former too. And since identity is a transitive relation i.e. if A = B, B = C then A = C. Thus since soul and matter are identical with Brahman they should also be identical with each other. How then to account for their difference?

Unlike Nimbarka, Ramanuja does not want to reduce the relation between Brahman and Jiva and Matter to be an a-logical one. To circumvent the second problem he asserts the difference of Jiva and Matter from Brahman. And in order to account for the unity of Brahman he takes both to be inseparable from Brahman in a way that they qualify it or in a way qualities are related to a substance. Think of the body of Brahman as a substance which is subject to modifications that accrue to soul and matter. The body is however inseparably connected with the soul - so that there cannot be one without the other. This is called the concept of Aprithaksiddhi. The difference of the qualification from the qualified does not compromise the unity of the underlying substance because the qualifiers are inseparable from the qualified. The body of Brahman suffers modifications but as its essence or soul Brahman is not subject to those modifications.