Dvaita's most distinctive teaching is the doctrine of five eternal differences, pancha-bheda: the difference between God and the individual soul, between God and matter, between one soul and another, between soul and matter, and between one portion of matter and another. All five differences are real and permanent, in this life and after liberation alike, which is what separates Dvaita most sharply from both Advaita, which treats such distinctions as ultimately dissolving into undifferentiated Brahman, and from Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita, which holds souls and matter to be real but organically united with God as a body is united with its self rather than eternally separate from it. For Madhva, liberation does not mean union or even organic unity with God; it means the soul's full and permanent realization of its own eternal, dependent nature in blissful nearness to a God who remains, forever, other.
The school also developed a distinctive and debated doctrine of graded souls, holding that individual souls differ eternally in their inherent capacity and destiny, some fit for liberation, others bound permanently to transmigration or even eternal darkness, a position that set Dvaita apart from the more common Vedanta assumption that liberation is, in principle, open to every soul. Madhva's commentaries on the Brahma Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagavata Purana read all three of Vedanta's foundational textual sources through this dualist and strongly Vaishnava lens, producing a complete alternative system to Shankara's non-dualism within the same shared canon.