The inquiry into Dayananda's teaching is conducted against the background of his reformist activities in the time of a nascent conflict between medieval consciousness and India's new social realities in the 19th century. The examination of Dayananda's ontological position leads the author to the conclusion that in postulating the existence of the three independent and coexisting entities or essences (Brahman, Jiva and Prakriti), he above all sought to find a theoretical explanation for his repudiation of Advaita whereby Brahman is the sole reality, the material and efficient cause of the world. Traitavada absorbed the rationalistic elements of realistic systems (Sankhya and Vaisheshika), and the world is regarded by it as existing objectively. By repudiating the supertheism of Advaita and embracing the theism of Vaisheshika, the reformer thus also "invalidated" the basing of Mayavada, the Advaita teaching about the three levels of being, and did away with the opposition of the spiritual world to the temporal world of multiplicity of things and phenomena. Swami Dayananda was dissatisfied with the meaning emerging from the interpretation of the man-God relationship made by both trends of the Vedanta. In his Traitavada, this relationship is different: the soul and God are eternal, distinct and independent essences or entities possessing a number of common characteristics (purity, eternity), but they are not identical (as in Advaita), the soul is not part of God (as in Vishishta-Advaita). An important result of this interpretation of the man-God relationship in Traitavada is the evolvement of world-outlook and theoretical foundations for understanding the place of man in the world. It was through new solutions to general ontological questions that the reformer's guidelines constituting his approach to the problems of man's being, markedly different from the classical Vedanta approach, were eventually realized. Solutions to problems of ethical and social order, in many respects new, follow from his view of the world.
Aсcording to Traitavada man is endowed with free will, he is absolutely free in his actions and deeds but he bears responsibility for whatever he has done. The reformer is convinced that God created the world exclusively for man. In answering the questions as to whether the destiny of an individual endowed with free will is determined by his own deeds and whether the assumption of God, the supreme ruler of the world, is necessary in principle, Dayananda furnishes solutions deriving from a merger of Mimansa, Sankhya and Vaisheshika. From the first two darshanas he derives the tenet whereby one takes the consequences or rather fruits of his deeds, and this is an unalterable process which it is beyond the power of anything or anyone to violate or change; simultaneously, the reformer invokes a postulate, drawn from the Nyaya-Vaisheshika, whereby God, as the world's supreme ruler, "supervises" the law of retribution and reward.