Person · Vedanta philosopher & sect founder
Vallabhāchārya
Also known as Vallabha, Vallabhacharya, Mahaprabhu Vallabhacharya
Telugu-origin philosopher who founded the Pushti Mārga, the way of grace, and argued Shuddhādvaita — that the world is real and is Brahman, against Shankara's reading of it as appearance. Worship in his order is sevā, the household service of a child Krishna: waking, dressing, feeding and putting him to bed eight times a day.
- Date
- 1479 – 1531
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Tradition
- Anubhāshya; Shodasha Granthas; Pushti Mārga
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
He is said to have held eighty-four discourses on the Bhāgavata at eighty-four places between Gujarat and Braj; each is a baithak and is still visited. His son Vitthalnāth organised the seven principal images among the family's houses, which is the reason those images later scattered across Rajasthan and Gujarat.
Connections (5)
- Monastic foundationNāthdvāra
Nāthdvāra is the principal seat of the order Vallabha founded, though he never saw the town: the Shrīnāthjī image was still at Govardhan in his lifetime and only came west in 1672, a century and a half after his death. His grandson's line has served it ever since as the Tilkāyat.
- Life routeGovardhan
Govardhan is where Vallabha is said to have found the Shrīnāthjī image emerging from the hill and to have established its worship. The hill Krishna lifted in the Bhāgavata is therefore also the origin point of the Pushti Mārga's image geography, which later ran west into Rajasthan under Mughal pressure.
- Teaching lineagePandharpūr
Pandharpūr is one of Vallabha's eighty-four baithaks, the seats where tradition has him expound the Bhāgavata. The Pushti Mārga and Varkarī geographies therefore overlap at Vitthal's town, two Krishna devotions of different languages and different centuries claiming the same riverbank. Vallabha's own descendants still hold the seats at several of the eighty-four baithaks, which makes the network a family property as well as a pilgrimage, and the two claims have been litigated more than once.
- Teaching lineageAhmedabad Pushti havelis
Vallabha is held to have expounded the Bhāgavata at eighty-four places between Gujarat and Braj, and each is a baithak still visited. The Ahmedabad havelis are the western end of that network — house-temples rather than shrines, because in the Pushti Mārga the deity is a child kept at home rather than a god visited.
- Teaching lineageSwami Haridas tradition, Vrindavan
Haridās belongs to the same Braj devotional world that produced Sūrdās and the Pushti Mārga's eight poets, where music was liturgy rather than performance and the singer faced an image rather than an audience. The Haridāsi sampradāya he founded still sings at Nidhivan. The question the tradition puts through him — whether courtly and devotional music are the same art — is one the Braj sects answered firmly in one direction and Gwalior in the other.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Vallabha”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
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