Madhva, the thirteenth century Kannada philosopher who founded the Dvaita school, built his Vedanta on a direct and sustained rejection of Shankara's Advaita. Where Shankara had read the Upanishads as teaching that Brahman alone is ultimately real and that the world's and the soul's apparent separateness from Brahman is Maya, an ignorance-born appearance dispelled by liberating knowledge, Madhva read the same texts as teaching the opposite: that God, individual souls and the material world are all equally real and eternally distinct, and that no degree of knowledge or liberation ever collapses one into another. He wrote at length specifically to refute Advaita's illusionism, arguing that a doctrine holding the entire world of ordinary experience to be, in the end, unreal could not be squared with the Upanishads' own plain sense, nor with the moral seriousness of a universe in which individual souls genuinely act, suffer and are judged.
Madhva's dualism, dvaita, gave Vedanta its most thoroughly theistic reading. God, whom Madhva identifies with Vishnu, is not an impersonal absolute that devotion merely approaches as a concession to human limitation, but the fully personal, supreme, independent reality on whom every soul and every particle of matter eternally and completely depends, a dependence that liberation makes more perfect rather than dissolving. The school takes its place in the classical threefold division of Vedanta commentary on the Brahma Sutras, standing opposite Shankara's non-dualism and offering, alongside Ramanuja's qualified non-dualism, one of Indian philosophy's two great theistic rebuttals of Advaita.