Reflections on the King of Ascetics (Yatirāja): Rāmānuja in the Devotional Poetry of Vedānta Deśika

The ocean of Śrīvaiṣṇava literature is vast and it is a humbling scholarly endeavor to realize that the more one works on it, the more there is to discover; thus, any conclusions that one reaches on the intellectual history of the tradition can only be tentative postulations which can and must be superseded by further research.1 This being said, it has become increasingly clear that we are seeing a particularly fertile period between Rāmānuja (traditional dates: CE1017– 1137CE) andVedānta Deśika (traditional dates: CE1268–1369CE): a period when doctrinal ideas are emerging from a wide spectrum of genres—fromdevotional poetry and hagiographies to commentaries and kāvya literature. We see also that, for instance, when it comes to the issue of the salvational means—the upāya for mokṣa —and their definitions, there was in fact much variation and a spectrum of views, without one single overarching version. Thus, to take one example, even within what emerged as a consensus on the significance of pra-patti as the more appropriate upāya for the Kali Yuga, as opposed to bhakti , matters were by no means settled in the immediate post-Rāmānuja period as to how to understand the qualifications ( aṅga s) for prapatti , or who was qualified for it.2