Ramanuja's move is the most quietly influential in Indian theology: he accepted the Upanishadic statements of identity and then argued about their grammar. When a text says the self is Brahman, he reads it the way you read a sentence saying a person is their body — one entity, two aspects, the soul the inner ruler and the world its body. This preserves non-duality on paper while leaving the devotee someone to love, which is exactly the point. He is also said to have climbed a temple tower at Tirukoshtiyur and shouted a mantra he had been sworn to keep secret to whoever was in the street, accepting damnation as the price of everyone else's salvation. The story is the tradition explaining its own character to itself. Srivaishnavism went on to split over how much the devotee contributes, and the two halves still mark their foreheads differently.