of those
who have not reached the knowledge of the highest Brahman.--And under I,
3, 19 /S/a@nkara, after having explained at length that the individual
soul as such cannot claim any reality, but is real only in so far as it
is identical with Brahman, adds the following words, 'apare tu vadina/h/
paramarthikam eva jaiva/m/ rupam iti manyante asmadiya/s/ /k/a ke/k/it,'
i.e. other theorisers again, and among them some of ours, are of opinion
that the individual soul as such is real.' The term 'ours,' here made
use of, can denote only the Aupanishadas or Vedantins, and it thus
appears that /S/a@nkara himself was willing to class under the same
category himself and philosophers who--as in later times the Ramanujas
and others--looked upon the individual soul as not due to the fictitious
limitations of Maya, but as real in itself; whatever may be the relation
in which they considered it to stand to the highest Self.

From what precedes it follows that the Vedantins of the school to which
/S/a@nkara himself belonged acknowledged the existence of Vedantic
teaching of a type essentially different from their own. We must now
proceed to enquire whether the Ramanuja system, which likewise claims to
be Vedanta, and to be founded on the Vedanta-sutras, has any title to be
considered an ancient system and the heir of a respectable tradition.

It appears that Ramanuja claims--and by Hindu writers is generally
admitted--to follow in his bhashya the authority of Bodhayana, who had
composed a v/ri/tti on the Sutras. Thus we read in the beginning of the
/S/ri-bhashya (Pandit, New Series, VII, p. 163),
'Bhagavad-bodhayanak/ri/ta/m/ vistirna/m/ brahmasutra-v/ri/tti/m/
purva/k/arya/h/ sa/m/kikshipus tanmatanusare/n/a sutrakshara/n/i
vyakhyasyante.' Whether the Bodhayana to whom that v/ri/tti is ascribed
is to be identified with the author of the Kalpa-sutra, and other works,
cannot at present be decided. But that an ancient v/ri/tti on the Sutras
connected with Bodhayana's name actually existed, there is not any
reason to doubt. Short quotations from it are met with in a few places
of the /S/ri-bhashya, and, as we have seen above, /S/a@nkara's
commentators state that their author's polemical remarks are directed
against the V/ri/ttikara. In addition to Bodhayana, Ramanuja appeals to
quite a series of ancient teachers--purva/k/aryas--who carried on the
true tradition as to the teaching of the Vedanta and the meaning of the
Sutras. In the Veda