Madhvacharya’s engagement with Advaita and Vishishtadvaita was not merely oppositional; it was a deliberate attempt to reassert what he saw as the plain sense of scripture through a robust dualist vision. He read the Upanishads, the Brahma-sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, and other texts as consistently affirming a real and eternal distinction between Vishnu, the individual souls, and the world. Against the Advaitin claim that Brahman is nirguna in the sense of being without attributes, he insisted that Brahman is a personal, qualified reality endowed with infinite auspicious qualities, and that “nirguna” can only mean “free from material or defective qualities.” In this way, he sought to preserve a living, relational theism rather than an impersonal absolute.

His critique of Advaita’s non-dualism centered on the doctrines of maya and avidya. Madhvacharya argued that treating the world as illusory or “neither real nor unreal” undermines both logic and experience, since direct perception testifies to a real, ordered world. The idea of a pervasive ignorance obscuring a non-dual Brahman appeared to him self-contradictory: if there is only one undifferentiated reality, the very notions of ignorance, knower, and known lose coherence. Scriptural statements such as “tat tvam asi” were therefore read not as declarations of absolute identity, but in ways that preserve the difference and dependence of the soul upon Brahman, for example as indicating belonging or similarity rather than oneness.

In response to Vishishtadvaita, Madhvacharya took issue with the body–soul analogy in which souls and matter are treated as the body of Brahman. For him, this model failed to safeguard the full transcendence and independence of Vishnu and did not do justice to the genuine distinctness of jivas and prakriti. Where Ramanuja affirmed a single Brahman qualified by many modes, Madhvacharya insisted on a stronger doctrine of real plurality, formulating the five eternal differences (pancha-bheda) and holding that these distinctions are never dissolved, even in liberation. Liberation, on this view, is eternal service to Vishnu by souls that remain ontologically distinct.

Madhvacharya also emphasized that souls themselves are not all of one grade or capacity, introducing the notion of inherent gradation (taratamya) among them. This stood against any tendency, in either Advaita or Vishishtadvaita, to flatten all souls into an ultimate sameness, whether through identity with Brahman or through an undifferentiated equality in liberation. A realist epistemology undergirded these positions: perception, inference, and scripture were all taken to converge on a pluralistic, hierarchically ordered reality. From this standpoint, genuine devotion (bhakti) requires a real distinction between devotee and deity, and a system that erases or softens that distinction was, for Madhvacharya, both scripturally and philosophically inadequate.