The Happiness that Qualifies Nonduality: Jñāna, Bhakti, and Sukha in Rāmānuja’s Vedārthasaṃgraha

The great eleventh-century figure, Rāmānuja, belonged to the Śrīvaiṣṇava community that worshiped the divine as Viṣṇu-with-Śrī, the Lord-and-Consort. But he also embarked on a project to develop an interpretation of the first-century Vedāntasūtra, which presented the supposedly core teachings of the major Upaniṣads, traditionally the last segment of the sacred corpus of the Vedas. Rāmānuja sought to reconcile the devotional commitments of Śrīvaiṣṇavism—which was built on the human yearning for the divine that was incomprehensibly Other while graciously accessible—with the conceptual demands of the Vedānta in which a profound identity between the individual self (ātman) and the impersonal, ultimate explanatory principle (brahman) was taught. This reconciliation of difference and identity came to be called “Qualified Nondualism.” In his earliest work, the Vedārthasaṃgraha, one of the ways Rāmānuja points to reconciliation is through identifying a single state of consciousness as both cognition of nonduality (the Vedāntic project) and the emotionally valent experience of happiness (the supreme expression of the human encounter with the divine). It does not seem that he systematically pursues this conception of how a state can be both cognitive and affective, and such an analysis will require independent philosophical analysis. Thus, this article argues that if a state of consciousness were indeed both cognitive and affective in this way, we would have a full explanation for how the devotional approach of a human being to Viṣṇu-with-Śrī can also be the self’s realization of identity with brahman.

A fair amount is known about the great Hindu figure, Rāmānuja (although there are competing theories about how and why he is traditionally assigned the extraordinarily long life span of one hundred and twenty years  and what a more realistic dating might be). This is because Rāmānuja was born in the Tamil land among those who had already coalesced in the previous three hundred years into a mainly Brāhmaṅa community devoted to the worship of Viṡṅu and his consort Ś rī (and therefore called Śrīvaiṡṅavas). The community also ensured that his works were carefully noted, and there is only some controversy about Rāmānuja's oeuvre. His critical works are his first composition, an independent summary of his views, the Vedārthasaṃgraha: his commentary on the Vedānta Brahmasūtra, the Śrībhāṣya; and the commentary on the Bhagavadgītā, the Gītābhāṣya. He is generally supposed to have written two shorter commentaries on the Brahmasūtra, the Vedāntadīpa, and the Vedāntasāra. There is controversy over whether he wrote the rather different prose hymns, the Gadyatraya, introducing ideas not found in the acknowledged works (Lester 1966). Unlike Ś aṅkara (who history sees as his great rival in competing visions of the Vedānta), whose teachings appear not to have had an immediate effect on the community that he left behind on becoming a renunciate, Rāmānuja continued to work among his community even after renunciation and strengthened their theological identity immeasurably. Although competing interpretations of his views fed into the formation of two subgroups within the community, there continues to be a close association between the philosophical theology he developed called Viśiṡt˙ādvaita-Qualified Nonduality-and the Ś rīvaiṡṅava community.
It is a matter of interpretation whether Rāmānuja was primarily a Vedāntin who assimilated popular Vaiṡṅava devotionalism into the Brāhmaṅa community (van Buitenen 1966) or whether he was a Vaiṡṅava who took the Vedānta as "the general framework" to present his sectarian religion (Kumarappa 1934: 185). The community finds these mono-directional aetiologies baffling, taking him to synthesize the philosophical and devotional aspects of his tradition within his theology (Narasimhachary 2004) harmoniously. The Western scholarly understanding of this integrated view is first and best articulated in a classic work by John Braisted Carman (1974).
As Swāmī Ā didevānanda says about the Vedārthasaṃgraha, it "occupies a unique place inasmuch as this work takes the place of a commentary on the Upaniṡads, though not in a conventional sense or form. The work mirrors a total vision of the Upaniṡads, discussing all the controversial texts in a relevant, coherent manner. It is in fact an independent exposition of the philosophy of the Upaniṡads" (1956: i). Drawing not only on the Upaniṡads themselves, but many previous teachers (many whose work are not extant) as well as the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa, and the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, Rāmānuja seeks to contextualize the various lines of thought in the Upaniṡads in such a manner as to present them as being reconciled within his system. In brief, he argues that passages which affirm the complete difference between the grounding principle brahman, world, and self, and those that speak of the complete subsumption of the latter two within the first, are reconcilable with the teachings where brahman is presented as the essential self of selves and the world (Ā didevānanda 1956: ii). Brahman, so understood, is God Viṡṅu. As such, the text lays out a comprehensive, theistic rendering of Rāmānuja's original reading of the doctrines of the Upaniṡads.
In this article, I focus on a specific concept in his masterful début, the Vedārthasaṃgraha. Towards its peroration, 1 Rāmānuja says: We have already said that the means of attaining brahman is supreme devotion in the form of intense meditation that enters into perception of utmost pellucidity, immeasurably and preeminently dear to the devotee; it is attained by steadfast devotion that is preceded by awareness of the real as learned from sacred teachings and furthered by the performance of one's apt actions. The term "devotion" has the sense of a distinguishing love. And so, too, "love" of a distinguishing awareness. "However, love is commonly related to a worthless happiness, and the happiness that is to be won by a distinguishing awareness is something else altogether." Not so. For whatever distinguishing awareness it is that is said to win it [that is, happiness], that distinguishing awareness itself is happiness (141). 2 The identification made here between awareness-specifically, the gnosis of nondifference-and devotion through the twinned notion of love (prīti) and happiness (sukha) is critical to Rāmānuja. While it would be a far larger undertaking to demonstrate that this identification is central to his lifelong project, for this article I suggest that it is helpful to have a general idea of this project, at least to see how he lays out the connection between this particular construal of cognition and this particular emotional nexus of love and happiness.
What is this project? I propose to look at it as the ultimate harmonization of ontic nonduality and devotional relationality. For Rāmānuja, there are two different aspects of belonging to his tradition. The first is the commitment to an account of reality founded on his reading of the Brahmasūtras as the essence of the teachings of the Upaniṡads. The other is the call to love of God as Viṡnu-with-Śrī. He is therefore left with these two contrary considerations. Let me try and explain what I mean.

Unicity and Otherness: The Project of Reconciling Vedānta and Bhakti
One side of Rāmānuja's project is driven by what might be called the "Vedāntic imperative." He has to offer an account of how our being is encompassed by the ground of all being that is brahman. This is laid out, deriving from Rāmānuja's reading of the Upaniṡadic terms of the Brahmasūtras, as a metaphysics of consciousness. Drawing on my previous work (Ram-Prasad 2013), we can see this Vedāntic work as gnoseology combined with ontotheology. I take the term "ontotheology" described by Martin Heidegger, as the subsumption of all being in the Being of God. In other words, this is the taking of God as the supreme Being who encompasses all other beings and modes of being, a reflex that is widely shared across theistic traditions; so much so that to this day, people in different religions take this to be the most basic definition of God. (Heidegger subjects this understanding to probing criticism that has influenced many subsequent Christian theologians. In my examination of Rāmānuja's commentary on the Bhagavadgītā (Ram-Prasad 2013: Chapter 2), I showed that Rāmānuja was unique in inaugurating a theology that simultaneously granted a role for this ontotheology-because of his theistic reading of the Vedāntic identification of ātman as individual self and brahman as Lord Nārāyaṅa/Viṡṅu-while also limiting it by saying [as some Christian theologians only in the past few decades have done] that the God of love is beyond being, beyond metaphysical understanding.) Rāmānuja locates this ontotheology within a gnoseology, that is to say, a system of gaining insightful awareness (the Greek "gnosis" here functioning exactly like its cognate "jñāna"). Since the Vedānta has the authority of sacred text, its teachings make it function as the prompt to the revelation of an account of reality for the one who seeks to know brahman. Upon approaching the texts with proper preparation and investigation with the appropriate virtues of conduct, the authorized individual comes to the point of having self-consciousness of the self's non-separateness from the consciousness of brahman (Ram-Prasad 2013: 41-47). As is well known in the tradition, Rāmānuja makes several pedagogic moves to convey the nature of this relationship of non-separateness. (This is, of course, quite distinct from-and explicitly opposed to-Ś aṅkara's denial of any internal relationship in the nonduality of self and brahman.) The most celebrated such move in itself also provides a multilevel ontology: This is Rāmānuja's mapping of the individual self's relationship to its material body onto brahman's relationship with all being. That is to say, just as ātman is to body, so supreme brahman is to all reality (which encompasses all selves and the whole world). 3 So we have this Vedāntic side of Rāmānuja. In it, he does two things: firstly, he develops an ontotheology of how all being is contained in God's Being, thereby uniting individual selves within divine brahman while also distinguishing us from brahman. Also, he locates this within the ancient Upaniṡadic practice of selfrealizing inquiry-that is, gnoseology-about the self-as-brahman.
The Vedāntic imperative for Rāmānuja leads to the unicity of self and brahman (even if this is qualified by a distinguishability that does not collapse all differences). But on the other hand, we have what we could call the Ś rīvaiṡṅava imperative. This is to explain the profound, existential orientation of the person in a loving relationship with God-Nārāyaṅa-with-Ś rī. Here, Rāmānuja presents not primarily the Vedāntic exposition of a gnostic ontotheology but the lyrical adoration of a God available to the devotee in an intricate, richly detailed personal presence. Within his community, this is elaborated through ritualized devotional practices that express an intense connection with God. What is critical here is that such a connection, by the very structure of love and grace, is not one of nonduality (howsoever qualified). The divine person is the focus of the highly charged emotional attention of the individual who possesses the entire panoply of bodily means of expression-a sight to see the deity's concretized icon, tongue to give word to the devotional song, the senses all to be saturated in worship, and the cognitive capacities to receive the divine presence. 4 Here, otherness is integral to Rāmānuja's worldview: one does not love oneself but the Other in all its mysterious disclosure to oneself.
I have previously argued that the culmination of Rāmānuja's vision is not his Viśiṡt˙ādvaitic ontotheology but the loving relationship with a God who is beyond Being, a conception amply testified in Rāmānuja's commentary on the Gītā (Ram-Prasad 2013: 71-75). There, Rāmānuja's main line of thought is that the attainment of qualified nondual consciousness between the being of the individual self and the being of brahman-as-God is a preparation for the proper expression of loving devotion by the individual towards God. In the passages from the Vedārthasaṃgraha that we will now consider, it seems as if this construal is already present. But I also think that it is possible to see a more radical identity between Vedāntic cognition and devotional love: that is to say, Rāmānuja could be saying that the gnostic, or self-realizing awareness of qualified nondifference, is also-properly speaking-the love of God. To my knowledge, no attempt has been made to look closely at this conceptual move, largely implicit in Rāmānuja.
This article will explore the relevant passages in more detail and conclude by laying out these alternative readings of Rāmānuja's view of the relationship between Vedāntic awareness of unicity and loving bhakti towards the divine Other.

The General Theory: Happiness as Awareness
To recapitulate, Rāmānuja claims that "whatever distinguishing awareness it is that is said to win it [that is, happiness], that distinguishing awareness itself is happiness" (141). He places this claim within a very general theory regarding the nature of awareness.
That is to say, awareness of objectual content comes under happiness, sorrow, and intermediate categories. They become individuated according to their objectual content. If awareness is individuated by particular objectual content that generates happiness, it is accordingly held dear; awareness that has that objectual content is itself happiness, for we observe no other corresponding thing. This is because what occurs is just the practical behavior of being happy (142). 5 "Objectual content" (viṣaya) is a compendious term for what makes a state of awareness that individuated state by virtue, in some way, of being of a particular object and not another. Such a catch-all definition does not tell us specifically how a state of a subject is "of" that subject (for example, later Viśiṡṫādvaita sharply distinguishes itself from Advaita on the relationship between particular states of awareness and the subject who is aware, as well as whether the subject is simply awareness or possesses awareness as a quality). Nor does it tell us the exact way in which an object becomes content (for example, whether it is by being an external cause, whether it is by a representation, or whether this implies a realist ontology of objects independent from cognitions of them, and so on). Since Rāmānuja does not specify further, we can see here that there is some systematic correlation between the things there is awareness of and the awareness being of that thing and not another: the awareness of an object individualizes that (state of) awareness.
Rāmānuja uses this formal understanding of objectual content to make two bold moves. The first move is to assert that a tripartite division can thematize awareness according to the emotional character (the nature of emotion) and valence (the value of emotion to the subject). All awareness is either happy, sorrowful, or something in-between. It must be acknowledged that one might want to stop and protest that this is inadequate when thinking of emotional character as a whole (especially given the rich understanding of rasas and bhavas available in the surrounding culture). There are at least two kinds of objections along these lines: (i) it is unclear what the emotion or emotions might be that could be identifiable with cognitions with "intermediate" objectual content; and (ii) it seems a highly schematic view of emotions to think of them as entirely lying on a continuum between happiness and sorrow. Nevertheless, let us grant that the notion of the "intermediate" is sufficiently flexible to allow abstract space for a richer depiction of emotions; there is perhaps nothing conceptually incoherent in such a claim.
The second move is ingenious. If we grant that objectual content is saturated with emotional character-because objects are bearers of emotional valence-then the awareness of an object is also in some way an emotional orientation towards that object. This, in turn, can only mean that the awareness of the object also carries emotion concerning that object. Emotion is the awareness commensurate with the object, and we should not distinguish between awareness of objects and emotions regarding them as two separate subjective states. This is because there is no second or separate subjective state found; Rāmānuja argues that one cannot identify an emotional orientation towards an object over and above the awareness of it. We find a situation where just how a person is aware of what makes her happy manifests that happiness. Becoming aware of the happy-making thing is nothing more than being happy, and being happy is showing happiness. And so, Rāmānuja argues, showing happiness is nothing other than showing awareness of the happy-making thing.

The Equation of Brahman and Happiness
The equation of awareness and happiness is not a theory for its own sake but a step in Rāmānuja's larger argument. He indicates that by now drawing attention to the familiar Vedāntic identification of brahman and ultimate happiness.
The individuation of awareness as intrinsically happy in the case of anything other than brahman is inferior and unfixed, but with brahman itself, it is preeminent and fixed. It is said, "brahman is bliss" (Taittirīya Upaniṣad 3.6). Since awareness is really happiness if its objectual content is intrinsically of happiness, brahman itself is happiness (142 continued). 6 We now see the beginning of what will become the crucial problem Rāmānuja realizes he faces once he equates awareness with happiness: If the general theory is accepted, and the valency of objects determines their emotional awareness of them, where does that leave the gnoseological path to brahman? To preserve the general theory while also carving out the special nature of the awareness of brahman, Rāmānuja needs to point out that all objects, in general, produce emotional awareness, including happiness. However, such happiness is fundamentally different from the happiness of brahman-awareness.
He returns to this issue later. But first, he must also clearly signal yet again that brahman, as presented here, is Lord Nārāyaṅa: indeed, he certainly identifies a series of sacred terms (Vedārthasaṃgraha 6) with one another: the self of all (sarvātmā), supreme brahman (paraṃ brahma), supreme self (paramātmā), Being (sat), and First Person (puruṣottama). Once more, it would be a different task to explore in detail the theological potency of the semantics involved; 7 here, we only need to remember that the ontotheology of brahman and the devotional theology of Nārāyaṅa are two aspects of the approach to the one God who is Being, yet also the Person beyond Being.
Thus it is said, "It is the essence, for only when one has got that essence will one become blissful" (Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.7); the meaning of this is that brahman alone is happiness, and getting brahman one becomes happy. The Supreme Person, being by himself and on his own, boundless and preeminent happiness, becomes the happiness of another too, being of intrinsic happiness quite generally (not in any particular manner). This means that one for whom brahman becomes the objectual content of awareness becomes happy (142 continued). 8 This is the crux upon which the ontotheology of nondifference between selfawareness and awareness of brahman turns into the qualified relationship of the self's happiness in awareness of brahman's intrinsic happiness. The crux is the obtainment, the "getting," of brahman. Obtaining brahman for Rāmānuja is not the switch in consciousness whereby awareness realizes its nonduality, as Ś aṅkara would have it; it is entering into a certain relationship with brahman in which ultimate happiness occurs in and as self-awareness. That relationship, of course, is Rāmānuja's celebrated concept that I translate as "supplementarity" (śeṣatva) but can also be taken as "being an accessory."

Happiness and the Question of Independence
We need not here delve into the details of supplementarity, where the self is a supplement/accessory and the Lord is the principle (the technical definition-based on a theological rereading of the relationship between the purposes of sacrificial ritual-is introduced by Rāmānuja at Vedārthasaṃgraha 121). What is important here is that such a relationship means that the self is entirely dependent upon the Lord. The supplement or accessory is the locus of pervasion (vyāpya) by the principal, which is to say, the occurrence of the former is invariably simultaneous with that of the latter. (Hence my choice of "supplement"-think of the supplement of a book: there can be a book without a supplement, but a supplement is a supplement only under the book.) When it is realized that the brahman of maximal divine qualities is the principal (śeṣin) of all, of which selves are supplementary (śeṣa), and is the object of preeminent love (atiśayaprītiviṣayaṃ), then that supreme brahman makes itself attainable to the self (sat paraṃ brahmaivainam ātmānaṃ prāpayatīti) (142 continued).
Rāmānuja now steps back and imagines that an opponent might find happiness and dependence incompatible. In response, he postulates that the objection summarizes that "we see that all conscious beings only wish for independence" (sarveṣām eva cetanānāṃ svātantryam eva iṣṭatamaṃ dṛśyate), for other-dependence (pāratantryaṃ) is sorrow (duḥkam) (143).
But he is quick to respond that this anxiety for independence is due to an existential misreading: But this is from someone who has the appropriative conceit that knits together the flesh and the self, not having learned that the intrinsic nature of the self is distinct from the body. It is thus: the body, which is just a lump upon which qualities such as generic humanness, etc., dwell, is considered independent. Those who are in the bonds of rebirth take it to be the "I" (143). 9 Ordinary existence is marked by "appropriative conceit" (abhimāna)-the particular implication of the more general translation of abhimāna as "conception"-wherein self-awareness is vitiated by conflation with awareness of the body. Egoity-selfcentredness-arises when what the self is centered on is not-self; for if the self is centered on what it is, that would be nothing other than to be centered on its relationship with God, and then there would be no misleading conceit. Egoity generates a misplaced sense of independence, and it is only then that the anxious question put by the opponent arises.
Whatever conceit one has of the self, one holds the ends of life that are congenial to it. 10 This conceit about the self settles what happiness is, according to whether it is a lion, tiger, boar, man, semi-divine attendant, demon, fiend, god, antigod, male, female, and so on. But these [ends] are mutually incompatible (143 continued). 11 With a flourish, Rāmānuja points out the explanatory power of the concept of appropriative conceit. The diversity of life forms is due to that primal tendency of the self to seek an independent existence as one or another creature. The diversity, however, is united by the same cosmic error, which takes self-awareness to be aware of the bodily form in life.
Therefore all is put together by whatever aim of life is peculiar to the appropriative conceit of the self (143 continued). 12

Awareness of Supplementarity: The Path of Happiness
Rāmānuja then explains why this longing for independence within a life-form's aims of life-which arises from the appropriative conceit of taking the self to be one or another bodily being-is wrong. As we would expect, this explanation takes us back to supplementarity, which is the very opposite of mistaken independence. The intrinsic form of the self is solely of the aspect of awareness, characteristically other than the body of deities, etc. Its intrinsic form is only of supplementarity to the Other (143 continued). 13 Self-awareness, properly speaking, is awareness of self, not bodily being; this proper self-awareness is constitutively and veridically awareness of self as a supplement to the divine, the supreme self, the Supreme Person. In answer to the implied question on the persistence of the existential error, Rāmānuja cannot do more than say that the prideful conceit of independence (svātantryābhimāna) should be understood as erroneous cognition (viparītajñāna) due to the operation of consequentiality (karmakṛtva). In other words, we can point to the process by which the error persists, which is the tie between how individuals act and the existential consequences that are visited upon them across different bodily lives. But we cannot find the originary point of disclosure. 10 ātmābhimāno yādṛśas tadanuguṇaiva puruṣārthapratītiḥ / 11 siṃhavyāghravarāhamanuṣyayakṣarakṣaḥpiśācadevadānavastrīpuṃsavyavasthitātmābhimānānāṃ sukhāni vyavasthitāni / tāni ca parasparaviruddhāni / 12 tasmād ātmābhimānānuguṇapuruṣārthavyavasthayā sarvaṃ samāhitam /

Consequentiality as an Explanation of Variable Happiness
The resort to karman loops back to the earlier point that there are two classes of happiness-the intrinsic, eternal happiness of the (self-)awareness of God, and the contingent, transient happiness from objects of bodily awareness. Now, why would we ever choose the latter?
Thus, it is also due to consequentiality that objects other than the Supreme Person induce happiness (143 continued). 14 This entanglement of happiness in karman causes persistent orientation to objects, even though the happiness they yield is as nothing to the happiness due to God.
All things other than brahman lack intrinsic happiness and produce it only due to consequentiality (143 continued). 15 He goes on to say the very structure of objectuality is given by the operation of consequentiality: the identity of objects is determined through how they affect and are affected by the self-awareness that is misplaced in bodily being.
What makes an entity-that is exactly of the form of happiness or sufferingthat very entity? Its singularity is due to the operation of good or evil [consequentuality]. 16 This is what generates the diversity of experience. The happiness of one is the sorrow of another, and the happiness of one at one time is her sorrow at another time. All the variation between and within people of happiness and suffering concerning the same entities can be explained through the working out of karman, not due to the intrinsic nature of those entities. They might remain stable in their other qualities, but the removal of karman removes the happiness or suffering due to them. This is because happiness-the quality of producing happiness-as-awareness -is not the intrinsic form (svarūpa) of these objects. When consequentiality ends through self-awareness (that is, the gnoseological attainment discussed at the beginning of this article), then the happiness yielded by objects goes away, too (143 continued).

Serving, Knowing, and Loving God
All this is really about the fundamental distinction between the happiness of God and that of the objects of the world, for Rāmānuja has already said earlier in 143: 14 ataḥ karmakṛtam eva paramapuruṣavyatiriktaviṣayāṇāṃ sukhatvam / 15 brahmavyatiriktasya kṛtsnasya vastunaḥ svarūpeṇa sukhatvābhāvaḥ karmakṛtatvena ca / 16 sukhaduḥkhādyekāntarūpiṇo vastuno vastutvaṃ kutaḥ / tadekāntatā puṇyapāpakṛtetyarthaḥ / Then, it is also due to the operation of consequentiality that objects other than the Supreme Person bring happiness. They are thus mean and unfixed, while the Supreme Person alone is happiness in himself. 17 All entities other than brahman are intrinsically lacking in happiness due to the operation of consequentiality and unfixed.… 18 He then grants that dependence as such is not a desirable condition. The opponent's earlier quotation of Manusmṛti 6.160 that "all subservience is sorrow" (sarvaṃ paravaśam duḥkhaṃ) (at 143), does hold, for the mutuality of supplement and principal (parasparaśeṣaśeṣibhāva) does not hold for the self with anything other than the Supreme Person (144). In all other cases, supplementarity does produce sorrow because it lacks mutuality with God. Rāmānuja has already said that, in the case of God, dependence does not produce sorrow.
Let us sum up the sequence of ideas so far. Intentional awareness takes on the content of its object. Objects have emotional valency, resulting in happiness, sorrow, or something intermediate. But emotion is no different from awareness since no extra subjective state is detected; the manifestation of awareness is nothing other than the expression of the relevant emotion. The Vedānta says (on Rāmānuja's reading) that self-awareness is awareness of brahman.
Given that (for Rāmānuja) brahman is the Supreme Person, Nārāyaṅa, the assertion of sacred text that brahman is intrinsic happiness amounts to saying that God is happiness. Consequently, self-awareness is awareness of God. If awareness of happiness is identical to happiness, the awareness of God just is the ultimate happiness. Our tendency to look for happiness in other things is because we lack true self-awareness and instead take awareness to be bodily happiness given by objects. But objects do not generate happiness, for brahman alone is intrinsically happy; instead, beginningless consequentially traps us in our misconstrued state. In this trapped state, we are dependent upon objects, and our sense of independence is wrong because the happiness of objects is transient, irrelevant to them, and variable, according to karman. By contrast, dependence on God is not harmful but, rather, is a fulfilling mutuality in which awareness is equivalent to eternal happiness.
Finally, Rāmānuja turns to the question of how we may cultivate this fulfilling mutuality in which we gladly acknowledge our supplementarity to God. And in these concluding passages, we see the resolution of that tension between nondualistic ontotheology and the qualified otherness in loving devotion with which I began this article: it is clear that the resolution's core is the identification of awareness and the emotion of happiness.
All those who know the true nature of the self serve the Foremost Person alone. As the Lord has said, "When one serves me unerringly through the discipline of devotion, he will pass beyond the [existential] qualities and become brahman" (Bhagavadgītā 14.26). This service in the form of devotion is denoted in the word "knowing" when it is said in the sacred text that "One 17 ataḥ karmakṛtam eva paramapuruṣavyatiriktaviṣayāṇāṃ sukhatvam / ata eva teṣām alpatvam asthiratvaṃ ca paramapuruṣasyaiva svata eva sukhatvam / 18 brahmavyatiriktasya kṛtsnasya vastunaḥ svarūpeṇa sukhatvābhāvaḥ karmakṛtatvena cāsthiratvaṃ… who knows brahman obtains the ultimate," "The knower of this becomes immortal," "Knowing brahman he becomes brahman," and so on. In the specific text, "One whom he chooses may attain him," we understand from "whom he chooses" that one must be chosen. And the one chosen is the beloved (144). 19 In this dense passage, Rāmānuja assembles sacred texts around the suggestive but elusive description of the ultimate relationship between self and brahman/Lord: it is one of "becoming" (bhūya), "obtaining" (āpana), "attaining" (lābha) brahman/the Lord. Here is a creative lacuna that is at the heart of Viśiṡṫādvaita. The relationship can be seen exegetically as the realization of the ontological closure of nondifference, but it can also be seen as the achievement of supplemental intimacy with the Other. Indeed, the qualification of nonduality that gives the system its name is the qualification due to that intimacy. (To reiterate that simplistic analogy: a book supplement has an identity-but only by virtue of being a supplement of that book.) Rāmānuja points out that the sacred texts stipulate the approach to the mystery of our relationship with God through the cognitive register of knowledge of self and the emotional register of devotion. The final sacred passage he quotes indicates that they are not two different existential modes of being a self. The cognitive attainment of "becoming" aware of brahman is precisely also the sign of the emotional attainment of being chosen out of God's love. And this is not surprising-we have been told of the general argument that awareness and emotion are not two different existential modes.
It is on account of such an identity of the cognitive and the emotional that the path is clear for the Viśiṡt˙ādvaitin. From the general theory of their identity, Rāmānuja has argued that self-awareness is the same as happiness. However, mistaken (bodily) self-awareness is the same as karman-variegated and transient happiness, while true (brahman-becoming) self-awareness is the same as eternal happiness. Now there is a switch of perspective from the theologian's argument to God's sacred assurance: The beloved of the Lord is the one in whom boundless and preeminent love of God has been bred. Thus has the Lord said, "For I am the dearly beloved of one who is wise, and he is beloved by me (Bhagavadgītā 7.17)." Therefore, it is knowledge that has reached the form of ultimate devotion that is truly the means of attaining the Lord (144). 20 The Lord himself says that being wise and aware of him is identical to loving and being loved by him, which is to be in a relationship of eternal mutual happiness with 19 sarvair ātmayāthātmyavedibhiḥ sevyaḥ puruṣottama eka eva / yathoktaṃ bhagavatā māṃ ca yo 'vyabhicāreṇa bhaktiyogena sevate / sa guṇān samatītyaitān brahmabhūyāya kalpate // itīyam eva bhaktirūpā sevā brahmavid āpnoti param tam evaṃ vidvān amṛta iha bhavati brahma veda brahmaiva bhavatītyādiṣu vedanaśabdenābhidhīyata ityuktam / yam evaiṣa vṛṇute tena labhya iti viśeṣaṇād yam evaiṣa vṛṇuta iti bhavagatā varaṇīyatvaṃ pratīyate / varaṇīyaś ca priyatamaḥ / 20 yasya bhagavaty anavadhikātiśayā prītir jāyate sa eva bhagavataḥ priyatamaḥ / tad uktaṃ bhagavatā priyo hi jñānino 'tyartham ahaṃ sa ca mama priyaḥ / iti / tasmāt parabhaktirūpāpannam eva vedanaṃ tattvato bhagavatprāptisādhanam / him. So the reception of the self by the divine also equates to the cognitive and emotional states of the self.
Rāmānuja then quotes from the Mokṣadharma of the Mahābhārata: 21 "His form is not beheld; no one sees him with the eye; only one who has concentrated, with discrimination and devotion on the self, sees steadily the intrinsic form of awareness." 22 This does not quite say the same thing as the previous statement that Rāmānuja quoted since awareness is not equated with the emotional quality of devotion but is given as a requisite quality. But perhaps we should permit some slippage in the rhetoric, for Rāmānuja's primary concern is to show the fundamental concomitance of the cognitive and the emotional, even when the exact nature of their co-occurrence is underdetermined between identity and qualification. That is what we have seen throughout: Viśiṡt˙ādvaita leaves what I have called a creative lacuna at the heart of the matter. There is some profound but mysterious truth where the unicity of self and brahman is qualified by the nonidentity implied by intimate relationship; there is an equation of awareness and happiness that is also rephrased as a qualification of the former with the latter.
The meaning is that having concentrated on the self with discrimination, one sees the Supreme Person-makes him immediate-through devotion, attains him…Everything follows from devotion taken as a distinguishing awareness (144 continued). 23 While acknowledging that there is this lacuna, perhaps deliberately left at the center of this account of truth and love, I would like to conclude my exposition with some tentative remarks on two possible readings of what Rāmānuja might mean by saying that "everything follows from devotion taken as a distinguishing awareness."

Two Readings of the Central Claim
The first reading may be called one of "causal succession." According to it, first, there is the attainment of true awareness. (Later, the commentator Sudarśanasūri [1924] glosses jñāna at 144 in terms of the effective function of the system of epistemic validation [pramāṇatantra]. This strict epistemological definition is absent in Rāmānuja, who generally takes the truth theologically as apt in relation to God.) Then there is the generation of emotion: the happiness intrinsic to brahman is expressed as mutual love with God. 21 van Buitenen (Rāmānuja 1956) helpfully points out that dhṛti-should be "discrimination" because in the Gītābhāṣya at 6.25, Rāmānuja "glosses buddhyā dhṛtigṛhītayā by vivekaviṣayayā": footnote 814, page 299. 22 na saṃdṛśo tiṣṭhati rūpam asya na cakṣuṣā paśyati kaścanainam / bhaktyā ca dhṛtyā ca samāhitātmā jñānasvarūpaṃ paripaśyatītīha // 23 dhṛtyā samāhitātmā bhaktyā puruṣottamaṃ paśyati sākṣātkaroti prāpnotītyarthaḥ / …bhaktiś ca jñānaviśeṣa eveti sarvam upapannam / This is the straight reversal of the Ś aṅkarite sequence in the Gītābhāṣya. 24 Ś aṅkara can afford to found devotion on gnosis because, for him, the world order of devotion is less than ultimately real, and therefore falls away with ultimate true cognition. In Rāmānuja's system, however, there is a problem: if self-awareness as awareness of the unicity of self and brahman is merely a preparation for divine love -where devotion structurally implies a difference between a human person and the Supreme Person-that might make sense as a devotional process, but it does not prima facie map on to the formal theory of the identity of awareness and emotion that he offered in the first place.
One could perhaps defend this reading by adding a step to Rāmānuja's formal theory of awareness and emotion: while in general, they are the same, and perfect self-awareness is also the happiness of brahman, ordinary awareness must be perfected first, stripped of its bodily identification and its subjection to karman. There is then a long period of preparatory awareness, which will manifest emotions too. Still, the emotion of mutual love with God is generated only by the occurrence of realized self-awareness. We could therefore try and defend Rāmānuja by saying that awareness is indeed the cause of emotion when we look solely at the process by which awareness gains the discrimination required to achieve the ultimate emotion of mutual love with God. Still, throughout the process, any awareness is also an emotion (just not the ultimate emotion of mutual love of God).
This, however, does strike me as special pleading, for it is difficult to get around the explicit claim Rāmānuja makes that it is not just preparatory awareness but perfect-discriminating-awareness that still precedes the emotion of devotional love of God. And that does run counter to even the tweaked theory of causal sequence that I have suggested.
The second reading may be termed that of supplemental identity. The attainment of perfect awareness is the expression of the emotion of love: to know that I love is for me to love, and to know that I have become brahman is to love the Supreme Person who is brahman. In this reading, supplementarity is crucial. As I have indicated, it does the crucial job of providing the qualificatory restriction of nonduality that Rāmānuja requires. Indeed, the Vedāntic notion of an "attainment" or "becoming" of brahman makes ontotheological sense only because the being of the self is nothing other than the being of brahman. 25 However, since the self "becoming (or 'attaining') brahman" for Rāmānuja is the awareness of being supplementary to brahman (in contrast to being indistinguishably [that is, Advaitically] identical with brahman), an intimate space opens up between self and God, which is articulated by the emotion of loving devotion (and reciprocal divine love). The identity of awareness and emotion (specifically, of true selfawareness of brahman and mutual love of God) is consistent from the espousal of the general theory at the end of 141 right through to the assertion of love arising from discriminating awareness at the end of 144.
In short, just as there is an asymmetry in the unicity of self and brahman when the former is supplemental to the latter, there is also an asymmetry between emotion and awareness. Emotion-the mutual love of the God who is intrinsic happiness-is supplementary to awareness (that is, true self-awareness as a nondifference from brahman). That is why Rāmānuja can talk about awareness without happiness/love when mentioning the path of discrimination while also asserting that love is not different from awareness.

Concluding Remarks
The challenge for Rāmānuja, therefore, is how to reconcile ontotheological unicity with the differentiating relationship of love between humans and the divine. This has been recognized in the tradition from the beginning, so I am not making an original point. But all too often, we have tended to hold them together by fiat, as if declaring that the mere identification of the brahman of Vedānta and the Ś rīman Nārāyaṅa of Śrīvaiṡṅavism suffices to explain how Rāmānuja's vision holds them together. I have previously argued that the culmination of Rāmānuja's vision is not that ontotheology but the loving relationship with a God who is beyond Being, a conception only recently emerging in Christian theology but that is amply testified in Rāmānuja's commentary on the Bhagavadgītā. But I had not understood then that he does not provide in that commentary an indication of how jñāna is intrinsic to bhakti, only that the attainment of the former is preparatory to the proper expression of the latter. But it seems as if the explanatory move is evident here in his first work. We have now glimpsed how key constituents of his hermeneutic are brought together.
In sum, Rāmānuja takes the gnostic awareness that is the culmination of nondualism and equates it with the participation in the emotional essence-rasaof the divine (through the evocation of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.7, raso vai saḥ / raso hyevāyaṃ labdhvānandī bhavati). He thereby not only reconfigures our understanding of the nature of happiness but also of the ontological state. This understanding of self and divinity is exactly what "distinguishes" his vision of nonduality, for the self's participation in divine essence is both a matter of copresence and difference. Here is a powerful articulation of why his vision is called "viśiṣṭādvaita." But we must acknowledge that this requires developing, on its own terms, a detailed and nuanced theory of the equation of cognition and emotion that nevertheless preserves a distinction between them. It is unclear what salience the tradition has accorded this issue, but it would be a philosophical program worth undertaking.
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