MADHAVACHARYA (i.e., Mddhava, the Acharya, or spiritual teacher) is one of the greatest Hindu scholars and divines that graced the medimval literature of India. He is -famed for his numerous and important works relating to the Vedic, philosophical, legal, :and grammatical writings of the ancient Hindus, and also for his political connection with the history of some renowned kings of the Deccan. His learning and wisdom were so eminent, that he was supposed to have received them from the goddess Bhuvaneswarl, the consort of Siva, who, gratited by his incessant devotions, became manifest to him .in a human shape, conferred on him the gift of extraordinary knowledge, and changed his name to Vidyaranya (the forest of learning), a title by which he is sometimes desig nated in Hindu writings. All the traditions about Maclhavacharya, however differing 'from one another, agree in ascribing the origin of Vijayanagam to Madhava. His birthplace is said to have been Pampa, a village situated on the bank of the river Tunga ibliadra; and as all the accounts of his life admit his having been the prime minister of Sangama, the son of Kampa, whose reign at Vijayanagara commenced about 1336, and to have filled the same post under king Bukka I., who succeeded Harihara I. about 1361, 'and as he died at the age of ninety, the date of his birth coincides probably with the beginning of the 14th century. Among his works, the principal are his great commen taries on the Rig-, Yajur-, and Sama-veda (see VEDA); an exposition of the Mtmansa -philosophy; a summary account of fifteen religious and philosophical systems of Indian speculation; BOIDC treatises on the Vedanta philosophy; another on salvation; a history -of Sankara's (q.v.) polemics against multifarious misbelievers and heretics; a commen
tary on Paras'ara's code of law; a work on determining time, especially in reference to the observation of religious acts; and a grammatical commentary on Sanskrit radicals and their derivatives. The chief performance of Madhava is doubtless the series of his great cominentaries on the Vedas, for without them no conscientious scholar could attempt to penetrate the sense of those ancient Hindu works. In these commentaries, Madhava labors to account. for the grammatical properties of Vedic words and forms, Tecords their traditional sense, and explains the drift 9f the Vedic hymns, legends, and mites. That in an undertaking almost unparalleled, in the literary history of any nation, . , for its mag,nitude and difficulty, Madhava should have committed sundry inaccuracies :--the remedy against which, however, is really always afforded by- himeelf—ean sur prise no one; but when modern Sanskrit philology affords the spectacle of writers haughtily exaggerating these shortcomings, and combining with their would-be criti cisms the pretense of establishing the true sense of the Vedas without the assistance of MAdhava, a mere comparison of the commentary of the latter with what the European public is called 'upon to accept as its substitute, adds a new testimony to the vast supe riority of the Hindu scholar over his European antagonists. See VEDA. Some of Mild hava's works seem to have been lost.