Tradition names Badarayana as the author and sometimes identifies him with Vyasa, the arranger of the Vedas; modern scholarship places the sutras' final redaction in the early centuries CE, compiling debates that are older still, since the text cites earlier teachers such as Ashmarathya, Audulomi and Kashakritsna whose works are lost. Its history thereafter is the history of Vedanta itself. Shankara's commentary, composed around the eighth century, reads the sutras as teaching Advaita, strict non-duality: Brahman alone is real, the world of multiplicity is a superimposition born of ignorance, and liberation is knowledge that the self was never other than Brahman.
Ramanuja's Sri Bhashya, in the eleventh to twelfth century, reads the same sutras as qualified non-duality, with souls and world real as the body of a personal God, and devotion as the path; Madhva in the thirteenth century read them dualistically, holding God and souls eternally distinct. Nimbarka, Bhaskara, Vallabha and, in the sixteenth century, the Gaudiya commentator Baladeva added further readings, each school certifying itself by returning to the same 555 aphorisms. That one compressed text could ground mutually exclusive theologies is not a failure of the work but its function: it fixed the questions and the canon of evidence, and left the living tradition to argue the answers.