Materialien zur Geschichte der Rāmānuja-Schule IX

The ninth volume of the "Materialien zur Geschichte der Rāmānuja-Schule" tries for the first time to systematically investigate Rāmānuja's philosophical-theological teaching on the Ātmā as a sentient subject, which in his work is dealt with in various places and in the context of various issues. The investigation has revealed that Rāmānuja adopts the reflections on the Ātmā as are taught by Yāmunamuni in his Ātmasiddhiḥ, although these teachings have not been fully worked out. However, in integrating the Ātmā into his theological view of the Brahma, Rāmānuja considers the Ātmā mainly as a relational prinicple in human beings that, in the end, becomes the "place" of possible revelation and thus the "place" of human "religion". It is noteworthy that the Ātmā thus becomes ontologicallyy a relational unit with the divine Ātmā, in which monism is avoided due to an "ontological difference" between the divine and human beings. The second section of the volume is devoted to the reception of Rāmānuja's philosophical-theological reflections on the human subject. This section offers a translation of and commentary on the chapter about the Ātmā in Nārāyaṇārya's Nītimālā (12th cent.) as well as portions of Meghanādārisūri's portrayal of the Ātmā in his Nayadyumaṇiḥ. A paradigm shift can be seen thereby, due to their falling back on Yāmunamuni's Ātmasiddhiḥ: a scholastic "treatise on the soul" was developed out of Rāmānuja's philosophical-theological reflections on this subject.