Person · Vaishnava Vedanta philosopher
Nimbarka
Also known as Nimbārka, Nimbarkacharya, Nimbārkācārya, Nimbaditya, Niyamananda
Nimbarka was a Telugu-born Vedanta philosopher who taught Dvaitadvaita, or svabhavika bhedabheda: that the soul and the world are both different and not different from Brahman, identified with Krishna, and that this relation is natural rather than imposed. He is said to have lived mostly at Mathura and founded the Nimbarka or Sanakadi Sampradaya, one of the four Vaishnava orders. Yet his own Brahma Sutra commentary names Rama, identified with Lakshmi, as Krishna's consort and never mentions Radha.
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Confidence
- Qualified / contested — Dates proposed range over half a millennium; biography is traditional.
Worth knowing
Tradition explains his name, 'neem-sun', with a story that he set Vishnu's discus on a neem tree so that it shone like the sun after dusk, letting a guest who would not eat after sunset take his meal.
His date is among the most disputed in Vedanta: his followers place him in 3096 BCE; R. G. Bhandarkar put his death about 1162, Roma Bose the 13th century and S. N. Dasgupta the 14th, while Satyanand and Ramnarace argue for the 7th century, before Shankara. Radha-Krishna devotion may be a later development of his order, though the Dashashloki attributed to him does praise Radha.
Connections (5)
- Traditional linkMathura
Born into a Telugu Brahmin family in the south, Nimbarka is said to have spent most of his life in Mathura, and his order's tradition has his parents migrate to the Mathura country. Little of his life is historically recorded, so the tie rests on the sampradaya's memory. Gerard Colas names Keshava Kashmiri as the first Nimbarka teacher whose association with Braj is certain, and the order's present leaders are based in Vrindavan and Mathura.
- Traditional linkGovardhan
According to the Nimbarka Sampradaya's own account, Nimbarka's parents Aruna Rishi and Jayanti Devi migrated to the Mathura country and settled at the place now called Nimbagrama or Neemgaon, between Barsana and Govardhan, the hill Krishna is said to have lifted. The village's name, 'neem village', echoes the founder's own. The account is traditional and carries no citation, and it sits beside the same tradition's claim that Nimbarka appeared in 3096 BCE.
- Traditional linkPratishthana / Paithan
One account gives Nimbarka's parents as the Bhagavata saint Jagannath and his wife Sarasvati of Pratishthana, present-day Paithan in Maharashtra; his order places his birth at Vaiduryapattanam, identified with Mungi village near Paithan, where the 48th head of the Nimbarka Sampradaya built a temple in 2005. Other versions name the parents Aruna Rishi and Jayanti Devi, living somewhere near the Godavari, so the place is traditional rather than established.
- InfluencedChaitanya Mahaprabhu
Gerard Colas notes that the Kramadipika, a ritual treatise by the Nimbarka teacher Keshava Kashmiri, influenced Chaitanyaite authors, and the Gaudiya tradition, following Krishnadas Kaviraja's Chaitanya Charitamrita, says Keshava Kashmiri met the young Chaitanya in a contest of Sanskrit learning. Keshava's disciple Shribhatta is held to have influenced the Vrindavan theologians, Chaitanya among them. Doctrinally the schools are cousins: Nimbarka calls the difference and non-difference of soul and God natural, Chaitanya inconceivable.
- AnalogueRamanujacharya
Nimbarka and Ramanuja both teach that the soul is at once different and not different from Brahman, but explain it differently: Ramanuja through the analogy of soul and body, where non-difference is principal, Nimbarka by calling the relation svabhavika, natural and needing no reconciling. The two are also tied by the dating dispute: R. G. Bhandarkar placed Nimbarka after Ramanuja, dying about 1162, while Satyanand and Malkovsky argue that Nimbarka and his disciple Srinivasa lived well before him.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Nimbarka" and "Nimbarka Sampradaya". Roma Bose, Vedānta-pārijāta-saurabha of Nimbārka (2004); Joseph Satyanand, Nimbārka: A Pre-Śaṁkara Vedāntin and His Philosophy (1997); Vijay Ramnarace, Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa's Vedāntic Debut (PhD thesis, Edinburgh, 2015).
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