Bādarāyaṇa

Bādarāyaṇa is credited with composing the Brahma-sūtra (also Vedānta-sūtra or Śārīraka-sūtra), the terse aphoristic text that organizes the diverse teachings of the Upaniṣads into a system. Because the sūtras are so compressed, every Vedānta school — Advaita (Śaṅkara), Viśiṣṭādvaita (Rāmānuja), Dvaita (Madhva) and others — produced a rival bhāṣya 'reading back' its own doctrine, making the work the single most contested text in Vedānta. Early Vedāntins (e.g. Upavarṣa, and Śaṅkara) treated Bādarāyaṇa as distinct from Veda Vyāsa; the identification of the two arose only around the 8th–9th centuries among Advaitins and is, as scholars note, an anachronism. The text in its surviving form is usually dated to roughly 400–450 CE and likely incorporates incremental additions by multiple hands; Bādarāyaṇa's own biography is unrecoverable.