In the years after his debate with Vidyaranya, tradition holds that Akshobhya Tirtha moved north from the Kolar region to Pandharpur, on the bank of the Bhima river. There, in his later years, he met the young man who would become his most celebrated disciple and eventual successor: Jayatirtha.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Meeting place | The bank of the Bhima river, near Pandharpur |
| Disciple | Jayatirtha |
| Later residence | Malkhed (ancient Manyakheta), Karnataka |
| Jayatirtha's succession | 1365 CE, on Akshobhya Tirtha's disappearance |
| Akshobhya Tirtha's samadhi | Malkhed, on the bank of the river Kagini |
| Later institutions descending from this line | Uttaradi Matha, Vyasaraja Matha, Raghavendra Swami Matha (the Matha-traya) |
A Meeting at Pandharpur #
Jayatirtha's own remarkable early life, his birth name Dhondopant, his family background, and the well-known story of how he came to seek initiation, is told in full on Life and Renunciation Under Akshobhya Tirtha. What belongs here is Akshobhya Tirtha's own side of the encounter. By tradition, he was the ascetic the young Dhondopant met on the bank of the Bhima river near Pandharpur. It was Akshobhya Tirtha who accepted him as a disciple, ordained him into sannyasa, and gave him the name by which history remembers him: Jayatirtha.
Final Years at Malkhed #
After Jayatirtha's initiation, tradition holds that the two of them moved further north to Malkhed, ancient Manyakheta, on the bank of the river Kagini, the historic former capital of the Rashtrakuta dynasty. It was here that Akshobhya Tirtha spent his closing years. In the words of Dvaita tradition, he devoted himself to training his gifted disciple in the fine points of Madhva's own Dvaita philosophy, the specific interpretive skills that later let Jayatirtha uncover meanings in Madhvacharya's writing that earlier scholars had missed. Jayatirtha's own later writings are said to carry warm, direct tribute to the guru who had given him this training. When Akshobhya Tirtha's own life came to a close in 1365, Jayatirtha succeeded him as the sixth pontiff of the line running back through Madhvacharya. In a tenure of just twenty-three years, he went on to become the single most important commentator Dvaita Vedanta produced after its own founder.
A Samadhi Shared With His Disciple #
Akshobhya Tirtha's own samadhi (brindavana) stands at Malkhed on the bank of the Kagini. Jayatirtha's own tomb, by tradition, came to rest nearby in the same town. Guru and disciple, in a sense, are still close to one another in the place both called home in their final years. The line that continued after Jayatirtha split, over the following two centuries, into what Dvaita tradition calls the Matha-traya, the three mathas: the Uttaradi Matha, the Vyasaraja Matha, and the Raghavendra Swami Matha at Mantralayam. All three trace their institutional descent back through Jayatirtha to Akshobhya Tirtha himself. Whatever theological or institutional differences have grown up between these three mathas over the centuries since, all three still honor Akshobhya Tirtha as the guru of the disciple at their own shared root.
