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The other great Vedanta thinker, Ramanuja agreed that there could not be two realities, but was not willing to deny the physical universe its reality.
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Sankara insisted that Brahman alone was ultimately real, and the fleeting, ever-changing nature of the universe was evidence that it could not be real. Sankara, the primary voice of Vedanta tradition, developed his thought based heavily on the principal Upanishads, although he also sought to incorporate the Bhagavad-gita. Its central position is “non-duality,” the idea that there cannot be two realities, physical and spiritual. Vedanta, the sixth philosophical school, is the most influential in modern Hinduism. Samkhya continues to influence Hindus in large measure because Pajantali absorbed its ideas into the Yoga Sutra, the basis of much of the Yoga school already mentioned. As the material world changes and evolves, the Self can simply watch silently. Neither is the product of a Creator, and indeed, the spiritual Self cannot influence nor is it influenced by the material world. It offers a philosophy of dualism that is, it assumes that one’s liberation comes through the proper distinction between the two eternal orders: physical and spiritual. The fifth is the oldest of the six schools, known as Samkhya. Another focuses exclusively on yoga, and will be considered later in that context. Of the six, three are essentially footnotes to Hinduism’s history. The dividing lines between the six systems are 1) the texts that they deemed central to the quest for knowledge 2) their emphasis on the spectrum from the individual’s practice of yoga to the priestly rituals and 3) their assumption about the relationship between the material world and the immaterial “self”. Textbooks list six traditionally recognized Hindu philosophical schools, six approaches to the path of knowledge that claim the Vedas as their basis. The path of knowledge is considered the most difficult of the paths, as it is not simple knowledge alone, but a deeper discrimination of oneness that is required and sought. In tandem with the study of the Vedas, the pursuer of insight must come to know the world the sciences, history, psychology and more must be studied in order to grasp fully the knowledge contained in the scriptures. It is the intellectual pursuit, but as such it is not limited to the writings. The path of study is traditionally centered on the Vedic traditions of Hinduism (the Scriptures).