CHAPTER VIII IDEAL SEER

The dictum of the Lord that even a knower should punctiliously engage himself in action if only to guide others properly (Gita III-26) was so faithfully observed by His Holiness whenever the phenomenal world received His attention that He might well be characterised as an uncompromising ritualist or bigotted idolater.

A gentleman from Bengal who had heard of His greatness and self-realisation came to Sringeri and was astonished, and perhaps disappointed, at seeing His Holiness rigidly engaged in His ablutions in the morning and in the worship of the Divine Mother in Sri Chakra Yantra later in the day. He evidently expected His Holiness to be ever in deep Samadhi and oblivious of the world. He did not want to doubt His greatness, but found it difficult to reconcile his own conception of a seer as revelling in the contemplation of the Formless Absolute of the Upanishads with what he actually saw before him, namely, ritualistic exactitude and devoted worship of images. He wanted to have a solution and found occasion to mention his difficulty to His Holiness Himself. He asked in a general way “If a person has Atmic realisation as propounded in the Vedanta, can he properly engage himself in rituals or in image worship?” His Holiness asked in answer. “What else do you expect him to do?” If the gentleman had answered this question by suggesting any other alternative, even that alternative would have been equally inconsistent with the state of self-realisation. He perceived therefore that by this simple question of His Holiness he himself was placed in a dilemma and he sought to get over it by saying “I do not mean to say that he should do anything else. My difficulty arises this way. Doing anything, be it rituals, or image worship, or even study of the scriptures, implies the sense of doership. Self-realisation implies a sense of non-doership. Are not these two attitudes inconsistent with each other and, if so, how can they exist at the same time in the same individual?”

His Holiness: “Quite true. Two things which are mutually contradictory cannot exist at the same time in the same entity. Now will you tell me, who the non-doer is?”

G: “Of course the self.”

H. H: “Quite right. You have studied our system well. Will you tell me who the doer is?”

G: “Certainly it is the body, the senses, the mind and the intellect.”

H H: “Quite right again. The self is the non-doer and the doer is the non-self. Is it not so?”

G: “Yes ”

H. H: “Where is the inconsistency now? The doership and the non-doership do not inhere in the same entity”.

The gentleman felt this solution to be so-telling and at the same time so simple that he realised the absurdity of his doubts and parted from His Holiness more devoted than before.

When His Holiness was in the habit of expounding Sri Sankaracharya’s Bhashyas, He was one morning deeply engaged in Sri Chakra Pooja oblivious of the disciples who were waiting for the Vedanta class and they had to go away disappointed. I was there at the time watching the pooja, noticed their departure and happened to think within myself; “How can His Holiness find pleasure in mechanically throwing flowers on an image and how can that pleasure, if any, be even a fraction of the ineffable joy and exaltation which one can have in expounding the beautiful passages in the Bhashyas?” After the Pooja was over, His Holiness came out, gave prasadam to me and said “मिथ्याजगदधिष्ठाना (The substratum on which the illusive universe seems) is one of the names of the Divine Mother. Do the Bhashyas contain anything more than this?” and smilingly passed on.

His Holiness evidently pointed out that the intellectual reasoning in the Bhashyas was really only theoretical and must lead to the realisation of the self only through the practical course of devotion and contemplation. If every word in the Lalita Sahasranama, nay, any name of God, is given its fullest significance at the time of worship, is any other course of training towards self-realisation necessary at all? To His Holiness, the Pooja was not mechanical but was itself a divine experience yielding bliss beyond compare.

When His Holiness started one forenoon for worship in the Sri Sarada Temple at Sringeri and went near the southern entrance, a cow was found squatting just below the lowest step leading to the doorway. As the temple could not be entered that way without disturbing the cow, the servants went near it to drive it away. His Holiness however signed to them to keep quiet and Himself went in front of the cow and sat down on the ground and signalled to the servants to place near Him all the Pooja materials which they had brought for the worship of Sri Sarada. He began Go-Pooja in right earnest and used up all the materials in the worship of that cow. After Deeparadhana, the cow stood upon its legs of its own accord; His Holiness went round it in pradakshina and stood before it with folded hands: the cow looked up at Him; and slowly passed on as if giving Him leave to enter the temple. His Holiness must have felt that He had no justification for passing by a living representative of the Divine Mother in the cow, while seeking to enter the Divine Presence in the temple.

On another occasion when His Holiness was performing Abhisheka to Sri Chandramouliswara Linga in the Mutt, some other disciples and myself were seated at a distance and looking on. Suddenly a big King Cobra began to crawl in and we stood up in consternation. His Holiness observed the commotion and its cause and signalled us to sit down. Strange to say, we did so immediately without the slightest sense of fear. The Cobra came on and on and finally reared its head into the room in which His Holiness was seated and moved into it. We again got afraid but His Holiness coolly took a small cup, filled it with milk and extended his hand with the cup of milk in it so as to bring it just beneath its shining tongues. This increased our apprehension but we were too dumbfounded to do or say anything. The serpent leisurely licked up the milk in the cup held by His Holiness, raised its head high, had a good look at Sri Chandramouliswara, turned towards His Holiness as if to take leave of Him and then went away as it came. Well does the Lord characterise the Seer as one who has no fear of anything in the world and of whom none in the world is afraid (Gita XII, 15).

When thus even animals behaved towards Him, it is certainly no matter for surprise that all men equally loved and revered Him, the most orthodox and the most apostate, the prince and the peasant, the learned and the ignorant, the young and the old, for from the height of His realisation all these distinctions ceased to have any value for Him and His vision peered into and grasped the Divine Essence in all. The reader will have seen from the incidents recorded heretobefore that His Holiness’ vision covered also the past, the present and the future as well as things beyond the flesh. His greatness was such that it was transcendental and impersonal. After His return to Sringeri from Kaladi in 1940, His moods of abnormality increased both in frequency and in duration and it was only very rarely that the disciples had the opportunity of seeing Him and paying their respects to Him in person. It may have seemed a misfortune to the ordinary people that the Head of such a great Mutt as Sringeri was not accessible to them for advising them or guiding them in matters worldly and spiritual but, if the object of the great Master Sri Sankaracharya in founding this seat was to show to the world that the Advaita ideal was not beyond possibility of realisation even in this age, that object was more than fulfilled by this occupant of the seat being what He was. The ordinary world failing to understand the great cannot in any way detract from their greatness.

His Holiness at times was quite normal and moved in the world as did His illustrious predecessors without detriment to His self-realisation. At other times He retired into Himself but continued to radiate spirituality throughout the world by His very silence as did many an ancient Sage in this land of Saints ? Fortunate and happy are those who have benefited by His silent but very potent influence. God grant us the faith necessary to enable us to profit by the existence of such souls in this world ! It is well for us that in this age of restless activity we had amidst us one who stood out as a striking example of the ideal Advaiti described in the Sastras and served as a beacon-light to guide the steps of earnest aspirants for the bliss of the self.

If anybody in the modern world could be called a seer, that is, one who had realised in actual experience the Vedantic truth of the basic identity of the Individual Soul with the Universal Self, it was certainly His Holiness Sri Chandrasekhara Bharati Swaminah and it was only in the fitness of things that He occupied the spiritual throne founded by the Great Master Sri Sankaracharya, the Apostle of Advaita.

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