A Luminous Life

Kapali Sastry's vision of The Mother

Kapali Sastri used to walk on the terrace of his house because from there he could see the Mother walking on the terrace of hers — before the new rooms were built — and what he saw was not simply a woman walking, but a pillar of white light moving up and down. He once took Madhav up to see it too, and Madhav saw the very same thing: the Mother's form, entirely made of light.

It was this kind of direct, personal vision — not blind devotion — that had convinced men like Kapali Sastri and Ganapati Muni, both orthodox and exacting Vedic scholars, of the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's divinity; each had, in his own way, been shown forms of the Divine Mother before he would accept her. They were not merely adoring disciples; they were themselves realised men, already recognised as gurus in their own right, who had chosen to lay that position down. Even in his letters, Kapali Sastri had once asked the Mother directly who she was; her answer came in the form of the chapters she had written — not as a single planned book, but as separate pieces given out to different disciples as each one needed them — called the Four Aspects of the Mother. To Kapali Sastri, reading them was simply a confirmation of what he had already seen with his own inner eye. He never wavered afterwards in his faith, taking every word Sri Aurobindo wrote as literally true.

Kapali Sastri also translated Sri Aurobindo's Secret of the Veda into Sanskrit, following the tradition of the three great Acharyas — Shankaracharya's Advaita, Madhvacharya's Dvaita, and Ramanujacharya's Vishishtadvaita, the last of which comes closest, philosophically, to Sri Aurobindo's own vision. He had been astonished, in fact, to find on his own inner wall — quite literally, in vision — the Vedic deities appearing and confirming to him the very things Sri Aurobindo was writing in his commentaries on the Veda: confirmation that Sri Aurobindo had received his knowledge directly, from the source itself, with no human teacher in that field.

It was of Sri Aurobindo that one of our own Ashram poets, Pujalal, wrote in a Sanskrit hymn calling him Gurur-guroh — Guru of Gurus. That, in truth, is what he had become: men like Kapali Sastri, who had already been recognised as gurus in their own right outside, gave up that standing entirely to become disciples here. It is an extraordinary thing, when you think of it.