itative work, not to be neglected by
any who wished to affiliate their own doctrines to the Veda. At present,
at any rate, there are very few Hindu sects not interested in showing
that their distinctive tenets are countenanced by Badaraya/n/a's
teaching. Owing to this the commentaries on the Sutras have in the
course of time become very numerous, and it is at present impossible to
give a full and accurate enumeration even of those actually existing,
much less of those referred to and quoted. Mr. Fitz-Edward Hall, in his
Bibliographical Index, mentions fourteen commentaries, copies of which
had been inspected by himself. Some among these (as, for instance,
Ramanuja's Vedanta-sara, No. XXXV) are indeed not commentaries in the
strict sense of the word, but rather systematic expositions of the
doctrine supposed to be propounded in the Sutras; but, on the other
hand, there are in existence several true commentaries which had not
been accessible to Fitz-Edward Hall. It would hardly be practical--and
certainly not feasible in this place--to submit all the existing
bhashyas to a critical enquiry at once. All we can do here is to single
out one or a few of the more important ones, and to compare their
interpretations with those given by /S/a@nkara, and with the text of the
Sutras themselves.

The bhashya, which in this connexion is the first to press itself upon
our attention, is the one composed by the famous Vaish@nava theologian
and philosopher Ramanuja, who is supposed to have lived in the twelfth
century. The Ramanuja or, as it is often called, the /S/ri-bhashya
appears to be the oldest commentary extant next to /S/a@nkara's. It is
further to be noted that the sect of the Ramanujas occupies a
pre-eminent position among the Vaishnava, sects which themselves, in
their totality, may claim to be considered the most important among all
Hindu sects. The intrinsic value of the /S/ri-bhashya moreover is--as
every student acquainted with it will be ready to acknowledge--a very
high one; it strikes one throughout as a very solid performance due to a
writer of extensive learning and great power of argumentation, and in
its polemic parts, directed chiefly against the school of /S/a@nkara, it
not unfrequently deserves to be called brilliant even. And in addition
to all this it shows evident traces of being not the mere outcome of
Ramanuja's individual views, but of resting on an old and weighty
tradition.

This latter point is clearly