We are also at a later period accosted by the thundering muse of the writings tending to explain the Aphorisms by the Shaakta method and to proselytize the Masculine or Neuter aspect of the Fountainhead to the Feminine store-house of all energies. Sectarians are not wanting now-a-days to come up with Bhaasyam of recent days alleged to have been written by Swami Ramananda which has not a little deviation from the views of his old preceptorial chair. It is not possible to give a brief survey of all the contending thoughts of different Bhashyakaras except what we dealt with previously in the preceding theme of this article.
The principal differences inculcated in the different Bhaashyams are principally the two contradicting phases of the Personality of the Object and His Impersonal Phase. Shankara maintained Impersonality through and through, rejecting all the mundane relativities here and in the region he is going to enter. His idea of the Absolute is not fostered by the other schools, except that Shrikantha’s follower, Appaya Dikshita who has shown similar sympathetic views in his “Parimala’ shifting himself from his position in his older writings ‘Nyaya-Rakshamani’ and ‘Shivarkamanidipika’ and refuting at the same time what Alavandar and Lakshmana-Deshika had posited in their treatises.
There's a saying: “Misery likes company.” So-called religious fanatics are so miserable that they want to create as much havoc in society as possible. They want others to join them in their misery.
Science of Identity Foundation - Siddhaswarupananda
Shankar and Shrikantha are more or less analogous to each other, though Shrikantha has admitted the personality of Brahman in Shiva for some time, apart from henotheistic views, unlike Ramanuja whose conception of the Personality of Brahman in Vishnu-nomenclature is not a transitory element to be dissolved in an indistinctive phase of Brahman. The Shrikantha cult merged in the system of Shankar together with his follower Appayya Dikshit whose conversion to Shankara’s view has destroyed more or less his former writings of Shivarka Mandipika and Nyaya Rakshamani. According to Shankara has adoption of the illusory theory of Maya has explained the unreal position of Jiva or individual soul and material world, whereas the theory of devotion or Bhakti has been accepted by theists as the sole medium of reaching the eternal destination. Shankara’s concept of ultimate salvation, Nirvana, can be had through inflated unalloyed knowledge of an individual, free from the reference of eternal existence and beatitude, by annihilating himself to the non-perspective situation of Brahman, where he should have no retention of individuality of his unalloyed entity save and except assumption of a hallucinative universality dispelling all empiric ignorance and bitter experience of defective designative finiteness. This would give him a theoretic relief of his existence.
D. The Differentiating Features of the two main Divisions of the Commentaries: -- The conception of the Personality of Vishnu and Krishna had been a bugbear in the apprehensive eyes of later commentators of the Impersonal School and they were frightened at the very sight of the manifestive references dealing with the relativities discovered in the Absolute. Shrikantha’s Shaivism is considered as a corresponding Shaivite replica in the line of Shri Ramanuja, though he was backed up by some of the Shiva Adwaitins who talked of the personality of the object of Vedanta later on dissolving into nothingness.