The Impact of Ramanuja’s Teaching on Life and Conditions in Society

This work entitled The Impact of Ramanuja’s teaching of life and conditions in society is an attempt to study Sri Ramanuja’s teachings and their impact on various aspects of social life in India not only during his life time but also on the present life. Many works have been written on Sri Ramanuja with a view to analyse his philosophy. But the application of philosophy. But the application of philosophy. To social life and the measure of success achieved by Ramanuja have not received sufficient attention from the scholars. The present work tries to fill that gap in the social history of south India. The emphasis is an Ramanuja as a social reformer and socialist philospher. This work claims to be an historical work and as such has tried to analyse the relevancy of Sri Ramanuja’s teachings to Socio-Economic, Cultural and administrative fields. Sri Ramanuja was not a revolutionary. He was no doubt revolutionary in the context of the times he lived and without rejecting the tradition, he tried to accommodate suitable changes wherever necessary for the integrated growth of the society. He made a sincere attempt to conserve the long established tradition and made it meaningful to our existence. Sri Ramanuja in one sense he termed as a ‘Socialist-philosopher’ who based his concept of the distribution of material things in socio-economic life on the firm faith in God. It is not a Godless Socialism of the present day society but a God based socialism appealing to each and every one. Integration of society was his concern, rather than disrupting the existing system and replacing it by a new one. In this sense he advocated evolutionary development of man and society. This is the thrust of the present work.