active 17th century Gaudapurnanandacakravarti

Very little is firmly known about this author beyond the name Gauda Purnananda Chakravartin and the work traditionally linked to him. Modern library and ebook records list him simply as active in the 17th century, while an older scholarly notice says his exact date is uncertain and suggests only that he was likely later than the 14th century.

His reputation rests on The Tattva-Muktavali, a short Sanskrit philosophical text. A nineteenth-century English publication in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society presents it as a critique of Vedanta in its non-dualist form, and later catalog records continue to identify it as his best-known, and apparently only widely circulated, work.

For listeners coming to him today, the interest is not in a detailed life story but in the text itself: a concise example of classical Indian philosophical argument, where major ideas about the soul, Brahman, and the nature of difference are pressed into a tightly argued poem.