Bahutattvavada is a doctrine which maintains the plurality of objects as real as against the monistic view that reality is one. Such a pluralistic realism is held by many schools of thought in Hinduism. In fact, except Advaita which maintains absolute monism, all other schools of philosophy adopt pluralistic realism in one form or the other.
Madhva holds an uncompromising pluralism (dvaita) declaring
that all differences are real. For example
- Physical objects are different from one another
- Physical objects are different from the selves
- Selves are different from one another
- The soul is different from God
- God is different from everything else
Madhavacharya goes to the extreme and declares that even the
released selves differ in their experience as the delights of deliverance.
Ramanujacharya does loosen this rigorous pluralism of
Madhavacharya by holding that reality exhibits not only differences but also an
identity running in and through them. For example, Brahman in his system is not
a bare non-dual identity as in Advaita of Adi Shankaracharya. He is qualified
(visishta) inseparably and organically by the twin attirbutes (visheshana) of selves
ont eh one hand, and matter on the other. Hence his system is called Visishta-Advaita,
or qualified non-dualism.
Yet Ramanuja asserts that each self and every material
object is real. In other words, the self, either in bondage or in release, does
not lose its individual identity. The plurality of selves and matter is real
though they are the inseparable aspects of God. Nevertheless, God permeates
everyone of them and lends them an identity in, and through, their differences.
Thus, Ramanujacharya prefers an identity-difference rather than a bare monism
or a bare pluralism.
Many other Vedantic philosophers like Nimbarka, Vallabha,
Bhaskara, Srikantha, and Chaitanya follow, in one form or another, the pattern
of Sri Ramanujacharya. Even Kashmir Shaivism or Shaivasiddhanta are plainly pluralistic.
The other philosophies not based on the Vedic text but on reasoning
like Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Samkhya and Yoga, believe the reality of the plurality
of categories. For example, the Nyaya School accepts seven categories such as
substance, quality, action, inherent relation, generality, particularity and
non-existence as fundamental and real.
The Vaiseshika admits atoms as ultimate particles. To both
Nyaya and Vaiseshika, each and every self is independently real. Samkhya and
Yoga say that each and every self is real, though the physical objects owe
their being to homogeneous matter. The Vedic school of Mimamsa, too, adopts
this pluralistic realism both as regards material objects and the selves.
Among the heterodox systems, all the school of Buddhism and
Jainism admit plurality of selves and objects. Thus Hindu thought falls
basically into two types of doctrines – monism or non-dualism and pluralism, qualified
or unqualified.
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