One God, One System

One God, One System charts a history of Sanskrit philosophy in the absence of an agreed-upon canon, timeline, principal thinkers, or core philosophical questions. Contrary to previous ahistorical approaches centered on unchanging 'schools', Elisa Freschi focuses on and reconstructs the intellectual figure of Venkatanatha and his philosophical and theological contribution to what we now call Visistadvaita Vedanta.

This volume explores how Visistadvaita Vedanta as we know it now is largely a product of Venkatanatha's unique philosophical and theological contributions. He connected various texts and theories so that readers and practitioners looking at the time before Venkatanatha now recognize them as parts of a unitary whole. Once Venkatanatha's contribution is in place it is in fact easy to look back at authors before him and recognize them as pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle. Freschi presents a novel reading of Venkatanatha through focused chapters on his epistemology, ontology, soteriology, and theology, examining both the range and theoretical basis of his synthesis and methodology.