Sri Madhava Tirtha

Introduction

Madhava Tirtha held the Uttaradi Matha's pitha (seat). According to Srila Prabhupada's purport to Chaitanya-charitamrita, Madhya 9.245, he was born in Shaka 1136, about 1214 CE. He was the third pontiff after Madhvacharya himself, following Narahari Tirtha. Before he took sannyasa, his name was Vishnu Shastri. The matha's own tradition and independent Dvaita scholarship agree that Narahari Tirtha was his guru and gave him the name Madhava Tirtha. Apart from these facts, very little about his life can be confirmed from independent sources. This gap in the record is real, and we state it plainly instead of hiding it.

Chapter 1

The Vamsha Rama Deity and a Vision of Madhvacharya

A story kept by Uttaradi Matha's own tradition, of the founder of the sampradaya appearing at his third successor's worship.

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Uttaradi Matha's own historical materials remember Madhava Tirtha's time as pontiff as the period when the matha obtained one of its most treasured deities: Sri Vamsha Rama. This deity is still worshipped today alongside the matha's other sacred images, Sri Digvijaya Rama, Sri Moola Rama and Sri Moola Sita. The story below is told exactly as that living tradition holds it. It is a devotional account, not an independently verified historical record.

According to the account, Madhava Tirtha was one day engaged in the daily worship of the matha's deities when those present saw something unusual. In the middle of the puja he rose from his seat and bowed down with deep reverence before what looked, to everyone else, like empty space. When the worship was finished, he received teertha (water made sacred through worship) with visible humility from that same unseen presence. The assembled devotees, astonished, asked him what they had just seen.

Madhava Tirtha's answer, as the tradition keeps it, was that Madhvacharya himself had come. He said the founder of the sampradaya had appeared, worshipped the newly obtained Vamsha Rama deity himself, taken the sanctified water offered in worship, and then given that same teertha back to him as a blessing. This tradition already holds that Madhvacharya remains spiritually present in the line of pontiffs he established. For that reason, the tradition sees the story as showing two things: the holiness of the Vamsha Rama deity, and Madhava Tirtha's own place in that line.

No independent source outside the devotional tradition confirms this specific incident. That is true of most such stories about pontiffs from this period, and it does not by itself make the account false. In fairness, it is like much of what survives about Madhava Tirtha's inner life. His own tradition has preserved it, and his own institution treasures it. But it cannot be checked by outside historical methods, the way his dates or the founding of his matha can.

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Closing

An Obscure Figure By His Own Tradition's Account #

B. N. K. Sharma's *History of the Dvaita School of Vedanta and Its Literature* is the standard scholarly reference for this period. Sharma is unusually direct about Madhava Tirtha. He calls him "a comparatively obscure figure in the history of his school." He notes that no genuine work of his has survived. He also points out that Jayatirtha, who wrote only a generation or two later and is the most thorough commentator the Madhva sampradaya ever produced, never once mentions him in his own writings.

A later traditional compilation does credit Madhava Tirtha with commentaries on the Rig, Yajur and Sama Vedas. Uttaradi Matha's own historical materials add one more: a commentary on the Parasara Smriti called the Parasara Madhva-vijaya. Sharma doubts these claims openly. No manuscript of any of these works has ever been found, in India or abroad, even though people specifically checked reports that copies existed in foreign libraries. Whatever his personal qualities, Madhava Tirtha does not seem to have left the kind of literary legacy that Padmanabha Tirtha or his own successors did.

Founding A Matha And Passing At Mannur #

Madhava Tirtha's clearest and best-recorded legacy is the matha he founded and the succession he continued, not any written work. He founded a matha of his own, which still exists today under the name Majjigenahalli Matha (also called Tambehalli Matha), near Mulbagal in present-day Karnataka. He put his disciple Madhuhari Tirtha in charge of it. He also gave diksha to Akshobhya Tirtha and installed him as the next pontiff of the Uttaradi Matha. In this way he continued the same line that would soon produce Jayatirtha, the tradition's greatest commentator.

Tradition holds that after Madhava Tirtha passed away, his remains were first laid to rest at Hampi and later moved to Mannur, on the river Bhima, where his brindavana stands to this day. His aradhana (disappearance anniversary) is kept there on Mahalaya Amavasya.

A Contested Rung In The Gaudiya List #

Within the Gaudiya Vaishnava guru-parampara list, Madhava Tirtha holds the same place that independent Dvaita-tradition sources give him: guru to Akshobhya Tirtha, disciple of Narahari Tirtha. For his dates, this page follows Srila Prabhupada's list.

Srila Prabhupada's purport to Chaitanya-charitamrita, Madhya 9.245, gives a numbered list of the succession, with each teacher's year of birth in the Shaka era:

Padmanabha, 1120; Narahari, 1127; Madhava, 1136; and Aksobhya, 1159.

Shaka 1136 works out to about 1214 CE. This is the date this page follows for Madhava Tirtha's birth.

The page on Madhvacharya already shows that this Gaudiya guru-parampara list does not match the Madhva sampradaya's own succession lists, which were recorded separately. It shows this from the same purport and from historian Friedhelm Hardy's scholarship. The fuller discussion of this question, across the whole chain from Madhvacharya to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, is on Madhavendra Puri: Life in the Madhva Sampradaya.