The Maharshi

I. THE MAHARSHI AND HIS CENTRAL TEACHING

THE Bible teaches the Ten Commandments, the bible of every great Faith teaches the same essentials; but men go on sinning merrily not that there is dearth of teachings of ethical and religious value, not that all the so-called sinning men have no sense of sin or no fear of hell and fire and no attraction for heaven and joy, not that they are all (even when they do not believe in Life beyond) absolutely unaware of the social convenience and ethical necessity of a well-behaved and orderly life. Fraud, falsehood, violence, murder and the rest of the multitude of ills have not been the monopoly of any individual or group, primitive and unlettered or learned and civilised. If men err, it is because they cannot help being what they are.

All the same, high ideals and teachings have not been altogether lost upon mankind, for they have been found to be a great incentive and strength and signposts to those who have had a natural bent for them, whose natures have already taken the inevitable turn towards high ideals of ethical and religious import for their actual expression in life. Even then, the ideals which in themselves are mental representations of truths in abstract terms, have a forceful attraction only when they find living vehicles for personal manifestation influencing the environment. If this is true of principles of common virtues necessary for ordinary life in the world, much more true is it in the realm of spiritual ideals, in the sphere of mystic life.

Who has not heard of the ages-old mystic teaching ’Know thyself’ that has come down to mankind from immemorial time? Seers and sages of different countries and ages have lived and taught this truth of self-knowledge and left their impress in varying degrees upon their contemporaries, passing on their life-messages as heritage to posterity. Still if the common run of mankind is proof against the light they brought to the world and gets on well quite unconcerned, treating such things as irrelevent to its life’s purpose, certainly it is not because there is want of stimulating thought and information on these profound subjects or of living exponents of the ancient teachings, but obviously because there in the bulk of mankind’ no need felt, no necessity arisen, no inward turn warranted; in other words, Nature is not yet ready to turn round to the Mechanic of whom she is the mechanism. It is this last fact that one has to bear in mind when one finds that a few alone receive tangible benefit, out of a thousand that come in contact with a great soul.

Ever since Sri Ramana Maharshi — the sage of Arunachala stepped into Tiruvannamalai forty years ago,⁶³ he has not moved out of it, living there these years the life of enlightenment that sprang upon him while at home and still in his teens. Of late there has been a growing literature available to English-reading public, giving accounts of his life, of his teachings and their philosophic implications, of his devotional poems, crisp philosophical verses and other compositions, of the experiences of some of those who have come under his influence, of his conversations, and of his views by way of answers to questions put to him on several subjects connected with spiritual life. Surely, by such help as books can give, one can, if so minded, get an intelligent grasp of the central principles of spiritual life as lived and expounded by the great sage. But an intellectual belief, a reasoned conviction, can go only some way, and not all the way if it does not undergo the drive of a deeper urge, of a spiritual or divine necessity, if it does not submit itself to the momentum of a dynamic faith. Herein precisely lies the need and value of the guide, of the Guru, of one who has in himself realised the Truth of which his life is at once a commentary to the initiate and a message to him who has ears to hear.

But how are we to recognise that here is the Guru, the Siddha, the perfected soul that can transmit the truth to others? Well, how do we recognise a leader who is singled out from thousands of men that he leads? Or again, as Douglas Ainslie would put it straightly — “How do I see the Sun on looking out of the window? By the use of my eyes and incidentally of all my other senses collaborating." This is indeed the root of the matter. The fact is this: that the self-evident Truth makes itself clear to the vision of the inner man that presents itself as an unflinching faith throwing with certitude, as it grows, the whole being of the earnest seeker into a consuming zeal for the discovery and consummation of the supreme aim. Thus it is faith and not reason that opens the doors of the soul’s chamber to the Truth, God or Guru, the faith that determines the trend of reasoning, getting itself verified and strengthened by experience, while reason simply collaborates.

The Guru then is the living fire that warms the logs of wood around in general while the dry ones catch the fire. And as I have elsewhere stated, no method suggested by the Shastra alone, no book however sacred it be, can give the initiating touch that opens the third eye in us. The Guru gives the method, not the written instruction, not necessarily the spoken word even. The word, the real initiation, upadesha or diksha, is a silent one, a power, an influence issuing from the being and consciousness of the Guru, the Jnanin, who has realised the Lord, the Self of all existences, in his own being and so knows him in other beings, in the All. And in the language of the Bhagavad Gita, the Jnanin knows that all is in Vasudeva and all is Vasudeva. Therefore Sri Krishna says ’The Jnanin is myself’. ’The Jnanins are there to initiate’, upadekshyanti te jnanam jnaninas-tattvadarshinah. The Jnanin alone is the real Guru, for none else but God is the Teacher, and He revealing Himself in the Jnanin initiates the soul, faithful, chosen, fit and devoted.

That the grace of the Guru, the Divine representative and his personal touch occupy a central place in the scheme of spiritual life is the general rule, exception being found occasionally and once in an age when a rare soul — here the Maharshi is an instance requiring no help from a human source is directly receptive to the Divine Grace and gets into immediate touch with the Sole Initiator, the Supreme Self.

As one who has come under his influence and known him for well-nigh a quarter of a century, I may here refer to the central teaching of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi that can always bear repetition and may act as a stimulant for those who are interested in the life of the spirit and who have the faith to follow up the Truth that the Maharshi’s life unfolds.

He had completed his sixteenth year and a few months had passed when one afternoon fear of death took possession of him driving him to seek refuge somewhere. He was soon convinced, not by mental reasoning, but by an inner movement, we can call it Grace now, but he did not know it to be such then that when the body perishes, with it the ’l’ does not perish. This ‘I’ this ego-self of Venkataraman⁶⁴ went deeper and deeper to discover its source, to know where it was rooted, to realise whence it came to the surface. As he went still further in, it was no longer his effort, he found that the ’I’ which, struck with fear of death, started the quest, was being forcibly dragged and drawn in by Something tremendous, like a mountain of magnet attracting to itself a piece of steel. The ’I’ was drowned, fell into an abyss, lost itself as it were; but there arose another ’I’, the Parent Self, the Original Being, the source and support of the surface man.

Since then it is this Supreme and Real Self within, that has taken charge of the personal self and outer being, of the mental activities, of his very bodily movements. “My Sadhana! The whole work was finished in twenty minutes, in less than half an hour,” said the Maharshi.

Hence he lays stress upon this Sadhana of searching for the Self within one’s own being, in the heart and often mentions this as the direct method and as superior to other Vedantic Sadhanas such as ’I am He’, ’I am Brahman’, ’All is Brahman’, ‘All this is not self’ neti neti, etc., etc.. “Go deep to find Thy Self that is the real ’I’, everything else can wait. Other problems can be solved afterwards if they arise,” is often his exhortation.

"Liberation, mukti, lies in the loss of ego’. An egoless Selfconscious life is the life of the Jivanmukta, the liberated soul, who lives and acts from the depths of the Truth, the Heart, unaffected by the shocks of the world in ignorance. He, the Jivanmukta, has been the ideal of mankind as conceived by the ancient Indian spirit, and is the fruit of the human race, the highest result of all true human culture that has so far been possible for the Spirit in man. Therefore he is the Godman who, while he is well aware of the divergent ways taken by the intelligence of others in ignorance of the One Supreme Truth, has his own life on earth guided by the Lord of All, by the Self behind all selves, by the One Allcontrolling and Independent, Eternal and Supreme Being. He, the liberated man, in short, is an effulgent manifestation of the Atman, and here or in the next, regardless of embodiment, is firmly settled in the ineffable Permanence, ever radiating his uplifting influence upon those around. Long live the Maharshi!