- Lived:
- trad. 1017–1137, a 120-year life still printed everywhere; modern scholarship prefers c. 1077–1157 · born Śrīperumbūdūr near Madras (Chennai) → Kāñcīpuram → Śrīraṅgam, with twelve-odd years of exile in Melkote, Karnataka
- Field:
- philosophy and theology — Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, the "qualified non-dualism" of the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition — and religious institution-building on a continental scale
- The Big Idea:
- God is not an impersonal abstraction you dissolve into but a person you can love — the whole universe, you included, is God's living body — and because the door to God is surrender, not scholarship, it stands open to every caste, both sexes, anyone.
- In their words:
- "Steady remembrance of this kind is designated by the word 'devotion' (bhakti); for this term has the same meaning as upāsanā (meditation)." (the Śrī-bhāṣya, in George Thibaut's 1904 translation — love, defined as a way of knowing)
- If you remember one thing:
- Sworn to secrecy on pain of hell, he climbed the temple tower and shouted the saving mantra to the crowd below — saying that if hell was the price of everyone else's rescue, he would pay it gladly.