  The Shri Vaishnava picture of reality is thus clearly monotheistic. Problems are created, however, by the fact that the scriptures on which the Shri Vaishnavas draw closely associate Vishnu with his consort Lakshmi. In the Pancaratras, for example, “the five functions associated with God’s oversight of the world,” namely, creation, preservation, destruction, and “obscuration” and “favoring” (roughly, withholding and bestowing grace) are sometimes ascribed to Vishnu and sometimes to Lakshmi (Kumar, 23f). Again, while Ramanuja and his great predecessor, Yamuna, have little or nothing to say about Lakshmi in their philosophical writings, she plays a significant role in their devotional works, where she is described as Mediatrix between Vishnu and his devotees. Yamuna describes her as inseparable from the Lord, for example, and insists that while non-intelligent and intelligent beings (including the gods such as Brahma and Shiva) are “only a small part of God’s reality, … the divine consort” is “the equal match of the Lord, … sharing the same auspicious qualities” (Kumar, 61). Ramanuja, too, claims that Vishnu and Lakshmi are “eternally associated,” and asserts that both possess “‘the multitude … of unlimited, unsurpassed, and innumerable auspicious qualities’” (Kumar 66–7). All of this is regarded as compatible with the oneness or nonduality of “the ultimate reality,” however. Thus, Yamuna insists that Brahman (Vishnu) is the one without a second who “‘neither has, nor had, nor will have an equal or superior capable of being counted as a second’” (Kumar, 61). Nevertheless, the precise relationship between Vishnu and Lakshmi was left undefined, and it remained for later generations to work out fuller accounts which both respected Lakshmi’s importance to ritual and devotion and at the same time protected monotheism. There were two major resolutions.