Bhedābheda
Bhāskara · 8th to 10th century (dating contested) · No surviving sampradāya of its own; the elder Vedānta line of Bhartṛprapañca
This school takes the scriptures whole. Some texts say the soul is Brahman; others say the soul is small, bound, one among many. Bhedābheda refuses to demote either set to figure of speech. Both are literally true, because reality itself holds difference and unity together: the sea really rises as waves, and the waves are really nothing but sea. Brahman genuinely becomes this world through its own powers, and the soul is Brahman under a limiting condition, distinct while the condition lasts, never other in essence. The seeker is asked not to unmask the world but to keep working within it while the conditions that make separateness wear away.
Before Śaṅkara, something like Bhedābheda may have been the default reading of the Upaniṣads. Bhartṛprapañca, an early Vedāntin known now only through the citations of opponents who argued with him, held that Brahman's creation is real and that the texts of unity and the texts of plurality must both be honored. Bhedābheda was never a single fixed system but a family of positions sharing that refusal, and Śaṅkara's doctrine of an illusory world was, in part, an argument against this elder house.
Bhāskara is its great surviving voice. He wrote his Brahma-sūtra commentary in open opposition to Śaṅkara, announcing that he meant to block commentators who had concealed the sūtras' original sense. His own version is called aupādhika bhedābheda: difference is conditioned by upādhis, limiting adjuncts, and is fully real while they stand, though Brahman in its natural state is without difference. Against the doctrine of knowledge alone he defended jñāna-karma-samuccaya, the path in which knowledge and prescribed works combine. Most of his writings are lost; besides the sūtra commentary, his Bhagavad Gītā commentary survives only in part.
No school endured under Bhāskara's name, but the family lived on in other hands. Yādavaprakāśa, the teacher Rāmānuja broke with, held a bhedābheda position; Nimbārka built his svābhāvika dvaitādvaita on difference and non-difference as equally natural to Brahman; Caitanya's followers framed acintya-bhedābheda, the relation beyond thought; and in the sixteenth century Vijñānabhikṣu argued the position reconciled the scriptures better than Advaita. For the Gītā, Bhāskara remains the voice through which this oldest strand of Vedānta still speaks.
Bhāskara's dates range in modern scholarship from roughly 800 CE, a near contemporary of Śaṅkara, to the later ninth or even tenth century.
Scholars disagree over whether Bādarāyaṇa's Brahma-sūtra itself teaches a bhedābheda position, which would make this the oldest Vedānta rather than one school among several.
Bhartṛprapañca's doctrine survives only in his opponents' citations, so how directly Bhāskara continues his line is a scholarly reconstruction, not a documented succession.
Brahman is one, real, and really creative. It stands in two forms: as cause, the undivided ground; as effect, this articulated world of souls and things. Both forms are Brahman's own; neither is mere appearance. In its natural state Brahman is without difference, yet its becoming many is a genuine transformation worked through its own powers.
The soul is Brahman under a limiting condition, as the space in a jar is the one space enclosed. While the upādhi stands, the difference is real, not imagined: this soul acts, enjoys, suffers, is bound. When the condition falls away, nothing new is acquired; the soul stands as the Brahman it never ceased to be.
The world is Brahman's real transformation, not a misperception waiting to be cancelled. As waves rise from the sea, different from it yet nothing but it, so things rise from Brahman; effect and cause are one substance in two states. To call creation an illusion would slight the very power by which the Lord becomes all this.
Liberation comes through knowledge and works together, jñāna-karma-samuccaya. Prescribed action is not scaffolding to be discarded once knowledge dawns; it purifies, and it joins with knowledge as a single discipline. When the limiting conditions dissolve at the end of that path, the soul attains the nature of Brahman, its separateness gone the way a jar's space rejoins space.
Heard here, the Gītā refuses to choose between work and knowledge because reality itself holds difference and unity together. Kṛṣṇa teaches that beings rest in Him and that He also stands apart from them; both halves are kept. The soul is His part, really distinct as an agent in this world, really one with Him in essence. So the counsel runs: keep acting, with ordained action joined to knowledge as one discipline, while the conditions that make us separate are worn thin. The book's whole arc is the combined path, walked to its end in Him.