This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Madhva's philosophical system begins from a wager about the reliability of ordinary experience that most of Vedanta had already made in the opposite direction. Where Advaita treats the plurality perceived by the senses as a construction to be dissolved by higher knowledge, Madhva argues that perception and inference must be innately valid, and that the reality they present must be actually and ultimately real. His reasoning is partly defensive, if the pramanas, the instruments of valid knowledge, cannot be trusted to disclose truth in ordinary life, then there is no non-circular way to trust them when they are turned toward scripture, since the authority of the Veda is itself established through inference and testimony that rest on the same faculties. Deny the everyday reliability of perception and inference and the ground for taking any sacred text seriously collapses with it. So Madhva builds his metaphysics on the same footing as his epistemology. If the senses report difference wherever they look, then difference is not a veil thrown over a hidden oneness but the basic furniture of the world.
That furniture, on Madhva's account, sorts into three kinds of thing, God, addressed as Vishnu or Brahman, individual souls or jivas, and insentient matter, jada. He organizes these further into two orders of being, svatantra, the independent reality that belongs to Brahman alone, and paratantra, the dependent reality of everything else, souls and matter both, which exist and act only through Brahman's sustaining power without ever being identical to it. The five-fold difference this produces, between God and soul, God and matter, soul and soul, matter and matter, and soul and matter, is the doctrine most associated with Madhva's name, but it is not merely a polemical device aimed at Shankara and Ramanuja. It is also, in Madhva's hands, a soteriology, because if souls differ genuinely from one another and not just in circumstance, then they differ in kind, and that difference has consequences that outlast any single life.
Madhva held that souls carry innate configurations of virtue and fault, gunas and dosas, that are not fully explained by accumulated karma, and that these innate configurations mean souls are predestined to certain ends rather than converging, given enough lifetimes, on the same liberation. Karma, on this account, is not the whole explanation for why souls differ, it is instead the mechanism that carries a given soul toward the destiny its own nature already inclines it toward. This graded ranking of souls by their innate fitness for release is a doctrine of predestination unusual enough among Vedanta's schools that later commentators, both Indian and Western, have found it startling, and it sits uneasily against the more common Hindu assumption that every soul reaches liberation eventually, if only after countless rebirths. Some Dvaita theologians defend it as an expression of a deeper kindness, arguing that a soul whose nature is fixed toward hatred of God would only suffer further inside a state it cannot inhabit, much as a tree suited to bitter soil is not wronged by being planted in it. Whether that reasoning satisfies is a live question in Dvaita scholarship, but the doctrine's coherence with the rest of Madhva's system, epistemology grounding a metaphysics of real difference, real difference grounding a soteriology of real and permanent rank, is not in dispute. Madhva, who held that he was himself an avatara of the wind god Vayu, built a cosmos with no ultimate undoing of hierarchy in it, only its confirmation.