At  nearly  the  same  period  as  Eamanuja,  another  man
of  the  South,  Anandatirtha,  born  at  Kalyana,  on  the
Malabar  coast,  pushed  still  farther  than  he  did  the  reac-
tion against  the  idealism  of  the  school  of  ^aiikara.  He
taught  that  matter,  the  souls  of  individuals  and  God,  that
is  to  say  Krishna- Vishnu,  are  so  many  irreducible  and
eternally  distinct  essences.  This  was  to  make  a  step
nearer  the  fundamental  principle  of  the  Sankhya  deism
(and  yet  Anandatirtha  was  a  Vedantin,  and  commented  on
the  Brahma  Sutras  !),  that  is  to  say,  to  a  system  which  had
not  in  the  main  the  predilections  of  Vishnuism.  But
even  within  the  circle  of  the  Vaishnava  theology  that
was  not  a  novel  doctrine.  In  fact,  if  the  dualistic  con-
ception is  not  a  dominant  one  in  any  of  •  the  important
Vishnuite  works  which  have  reached  us,  they  are  never-
theless all,  from  the  Bhagavad-Gita  onwards,  so  profoundly
penetrated  with  ideas  that  depend  on  it,  that,  in  spite  of
the  close  affinity  of  the  theory  of  the  Avataras  with
A^edantic  ideas,  we  cannot  doubt  that  there  existed  early
a  Vishnuism  with  a  Sankhya  metaphysics.  The  followers
of  Anandatirtha  belong  almost  exclusively  to  the  extreme
South,  where  they  are  very  numerous.  The  members  of
the  congregation  strictly  speaking,  the  Madhvas,  so  called
from  a  surname  of  their  master,  are  all  Brahmans.  for,  in


196  THE  RELIGIONS  OF  INDIA.
