In plain words
That Kuppuswamy died. The garb itself changed. At that very point he took the name Śivānanda. This is the twenty-sixth year since he took the name ‘Śivānanda’. So he is not seventy,’ I said. Kuppuswamy is seventy. Śivānanda is twenty-six. Then Śivānanda spoke. ‘This body has turned seventy. Till now no one has struck me with a hammer,’ he said. They make only the physical their support, but no one recognises the foundation of the physical.
Youth comes in the middle and goes in the middle!
This is possible for no others: only for God and for the divine Avatāras. From birth until the body perishes, one form, one name. In this way, within Advaita, many go wrong: they rest on their former āśrama and go on enjoying their former āśrama. In that village there was no one to help Śaṅkara. He had to take that body away and perform the rites of cremation. No one came. The Nambūdri brahmins said they could not touch it. For Śaṅkarācārya was entering into what was against Dharma. Left with no choice, he lifted the body onto his own shoulder, dug a pit inside his own backyard, and buried it right there. There was no help to carry it to the cremation ground. This rite which Śaṅkara began that day is, to this day, burial inside the backyard of the house, whenever the elders of any home pass away. There is no cremation ground. If you go to Kerala and look, houses stand all along the road. There is nothing behind. Behind, it stays empty. When someone of that house passes away, there has to be empty ground there. Śaṅkara fulfilled the promise he had made to his mother and went back to Kāśī. He went along the road on foot. In those days you had to walk wherever you went. There were no torches then. People would set fire to a stick, pour oil on it, and travel. Śaṅkara looked at his disciples: ‘The young women and young men of today are drawn to the body made of filth, urine, stench, flesh and blood, but no one inquires into the divine Ātmatattva.