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Difference and Non-Difference Together: The Bhedabheda Schools

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Difference and Non-Difference Together: The Bhedabheda Schools

The main entry's brief mention of Bhedabheda, "difference and non-difference," as a further position in the argument over the relation between jivatman and Paramatman covers a family of schools distinctive enough to warrant closer attention.

Bhaskara, an early Vedanta commentator writing before Ramanuja, held that the individual self is both identical with and different from Brahman depending on perspective: identical in essential nature, since the self's true being is Brahman itself, but different insofar as conditioned by association with a body and mind, much as space enclosed within a jar is both identical with unenclosed space and different from it by virtue of the jar's boundary. Nimbarka, founder of a later Vaishnava school centered on Radha and Krishna, taught a related dvaitadvaita, holding that selves are simultaneously and permanently both different from and non-different from Brahman, as waves are both different from and identical with the ocean.

The most influential later development is Chaitanya's Gaudiya Vaishnava doctrine of acintya-bhedabheda, inconceivable difference and non-difference, holding that the relation between jiva and Krishna is genuinely both different and non-different at once, but declining to resolve the tension through the mediating analogies Bhaskara or Nimbarka offered, insisting the relation is acintya, beyond ordinary logical categories, because Krishna's own inconceivable power holds difference and identity together in a manner reason cannot model. Where Advaita denies real difference and Dvaita denies real identity, the Bhedabheda schools refuse the demand for resolution itself, treating the coexistence of difference and non-difference as a datum to be accommodated rather than a problem to be dissolved.

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