The prasthanatrayi — the three points of departure — explains the shape of Indian intellectual life better than any other single fact. To be taken seriously as a Vedanta theologian you did not write a treatise; you wrote a commentary on the Upanishads, the Gita and the Brahma Sutras, and demonstrated that the texts had always meant what you were saying. The Brahma Sutras are so compressed that some run to two or three words, which makes them almost infinitely interpretable, and the great commentaries disagree about the referent of individual pronouns in ways that carry entire theologies. Shankara around 700 CE, Ramanuja in the eleventh century, Madhva in the thirteenth, then Nimbarka, Vallabha, and the Gaudiya school — six mutually incompatible readings of the same aphorisms, each claiming to be the plain sense. It is a tradition where innovation must be disguised as conservatism, and the disguise is thin enough that everyone can see through it and nobody objects.