Bhagavad Rāmānuja

The hymns had been lost once already.

Twelve poets had made them, over some three hundred years in the Tamil country, and the tradition calls those poets the Āzhvārs, the ones who went in deep. They sang in Tamil. That mattered more than it sounds: it meant a potter and a king heard the same words with the same ease, and nobody stood between a man and what he was hearing. When all the songs were finally gathered and counted there were four thousand of them. Then the last of the poets died, and the men who had learned the songs from them died, and the men who had learned from those men grew old, and somewhere in there a generation failed to hand on what it had been given. After that nobody in the country could recite more than a handful.

Nāthamuni heard a handful. He was at Kuḍandai, in the temple where the Lord lies along his serpent and is called Ārāvamudan, the nectar a man never has enough of, and some pilgrims stood in front of that image and sang eleven verses in Tamil, and the last verse said, as it closed, that these were ten out of a thousand. Nāthamuni asked them where the other nine hundred and ninety were. They did not know. They had been given these, they said. These were what they sang.

So he went south to Kurugūr, where the poet who had made the thousand had lived and died. He found there the descendants of a second poet, Madhurakavi, who had followed the first one about and had sung eleven verses on no subject but his teacher. They told Nāthamuni what their family had always said: that whoever recited those eleven verses with his whole mind and nothing held back would be given the sight of Nammāzhvār himself. Nāthamuni sat down under the tamarind tree that Nammāzhvār had sat under, and recited the eleven verses twelve thousand times.

Nammāzhvār came, and gave him not the thousand but the four thousand, every verse of all twelve poets. He gave him something else as well, a discipline of inward practice that the accounts call the secret of yoga and never write out, which after that passed from mouth to ear and no other way.

That is how the songs came back.

After Nāthamuni the line ran through Uyyakkoṇḍār, and then through Maṇakkāl Nambi, and then it reached Yāmunācārya, whom the whole Tamil country called Āḷavandār. Four men in four generations. By the time Āḷavandār was old and living at Śrīraṅgam the thing those four had carried between them had hardened into a school, with a doctrine, and disciples, and land, and a considerable reputation. It also had a hole in it.

The hole was this. Everything the school taught rested finally on the Brahma Sūtras, five hundred and fifty short lines in which Bādarāyaṇa had compressed the whole argument of the Upaniṣads, compressed it so far that a line of four words could be read three ways and each reading would hold. A text like that cannot be used at all without a commentary, a bhāṣya. There was a great commentary in the field, and it read those lines as saying that the difference between the self and God is in the end unreal. Āḷavandār's school held the opposite. It held it as the plain sense of the Upaniṣads and the plain sense of everything the Āzhvārs had sung, and it had no commentary of its own to set beside the other one. There had been one once, by an ancient teacher named Bodhāyana. Nobody in the south had seen a copy in living memory.

Āḷavandār knew exactly what was missing and knew he was not the man who would supply it. He had written sixty-five verses to Raṅganātha that people were already learning by heart. He had written a short book on the Gītā that says more in its thirty-two verses than most books say in three hundred. He had written a defence of the Vaiṣṇava scriptures against the learned men who held that they were not scripture at all. And he had begun a book of demonstrations and left it lying. That book breaks off partway through a sentence. Anyone who reads it comes to the place where the sentence stops and understands what the stopping means.

What the line needed was somebody who could finish it.

Śrīperumbudūr sits on the road running east out of Kāñcī, flat country, tanks and paddy and palmyra, the kind of town a traveller passes without slowing down. It had a temple to Ādikeśava. It had a settled community of learned brahmins who took their learning seriously and their procedure more seriously still, and one of them was called Keśava Somayāji.

The second half of that name was not a family name. It was an account of something he had done. He had performed the soma sacrifice, the long one, the expensive one, the one that takes days and a great many exactly qualified men and cannot be repaired if it goes wrong; and a man who had performed it carried the fact in front of his name for the rest of his life, the way a man carries a scar he is not sorry about.

His wife was Kāntimatī. She had a brother up on the hill at Tirumalai who had given his life to the service of the Lord there and was known as Śrīśailapūrṇa, and he is going to matter a great deal further on. Kāntimatī also had a sister, married into a family at Madhuramaṅgalam, and that sister had a son, and the two boys were born close enough together to be brought up half in each other's houses. The cousin's name was Govinda. Hold on to him.

For a long time Keśava Somayāji and Kāntimatī had no child at all. They asked for one the way people in that country asked, at the shrine and then at another shrine, in one season and then in the next, until asking had become simply a thing the household did.

What finally moved, in the account the Tamil side of the tradition keeps, moved because of a man in Kāñcī who had no learning and no standing and was not a brahmin. His name was Kāñcipūrṇa. He spent his days fanning the Lord at Varadarāja's temple and he was in the habit of being answered when he spoke, and it was Kāñcipūrṇa who told Keśava Somayāji where to go and what to perform: the sacrifice for a son, at Tiruvallikkēṇi, before Pārthasārathi. The father performed it. He was, after all, a man who knew how. The answer he was given was that the Lord would come himself.

Hold on to Kāñcipūrṇa too. He is in this story before Rāmānuja is, and he is the reason there is a story.

The child came in Cittirai, in the flat heat before the rains break, under the star Tiruvādirai. There is a quantity of material in the accounts about that night and about what the learned men of the town said when they worked out the hour, and all of it says one thing in a number of different ways, which is that the hour was extraordinary and that every qualified man in Śrīperumbudūr knew it within a day. Let that stand as it is. The ordinary details keep better. The house filled with women from the neighbouring houses and stayed full. Kāntimatī's brother came down off the hill for it and stayed a month. The father, who had spent a whole life on exact procedure, performed every rite of the first year on its exact day and did not let one of them be shortened for convenience.

On the twelfth day the uncle named him, and gave his reason for the name in one line: call him Lakṣmaṇa, because he will be to God what Lakṣmaṇa was to Rāma. In Tamil that came out as Iḷaiyāzhvār, the young Āzhvār, and as Iḷaiya Perumāḷ, the younger lord, which is what the Tamil country calls Lakṣmaṇa. It is all one naming in three languages.

Consider what the uncle had actually said. Of all the men around Rāma he picked the one who is not remembered for a single thing done on his own account. Lakṣmaṇa went into the forest not because he was told to but because he could not be anywhere his brother was not. He slept outside the door. He is the one who wanted nothing.

And the Sanskrit name the world eventually settled on says it over again, because Rāmānuja means born after Rāma: the one who came second, and stood behind.

Nobody chose any of it for the meaning. That is usually how it goes.

He was a quick child and a beautiful one, and the town said so, and he grew up hearing it said. He learned to read early. He had the kind of memory that makes teaching pleasant and makes a teacher careless, because nothing has to be repeated. By the time he was seven he was working through the recitation with boys four years older and keeping up, and by the time he was eleven he had finished with what Śrīperumbudūr could give him.

Two things happened in the same year, when he was about sixteen.

He was married. Her name was Rakṣakāmbāḷ. She was a beautiful woman and a scrupulous one, exact about purity in the way her upbringing had made her exact, and everything about the match was correct.

Four months later his father died.

The accounts do not linger on it and there is no reason to. Keśava Somayāji performed his last rite and then there was no more of him, and the household at Śrīperumbudūr was a young widow, a young married son, and a great deal of respect that does not feed anybody. Kāntimatī did what a woman in that position did. She took her son west to Kāñcī, where her family had connections, where the temple of Varadarāja stood on its hill and drew learned men the way a tank draws cattle, and where a boy of sixteen who could already recite anything put in front of him might be placed with a teacher worth the name.

There was such a teacher just outside Kāñcī, at Tiruppuṭkuzhi. His school was the best in that country and his name was Yādava Prakāśa. He was a sannyāsin, and he carried the single staff, which told anyone who saw him coming exactly what he held about the soul and God and the difference between them, and how little of that difference he thought was real.

Kāñcī was not a town anybody passed without slowing down.

It sat on flat red ground between two rivers that were sand for most of the year and then were not. It had been the seat of kings for four hundred years and it kept the habits of one: broad straight streets laid out on a plan, walls, tanks cut square and stepped on all four sides, and a settled municipal conviction that whatever was being done anywhere else was being done less well. The kings had moved their capital south long before, and the town had not noticed, because the thing Kāñcī actually was could not be moved. It was where men went to argue.

The god of the western half of the town was Śiva, who stood under a mango tree there and was worshipped by the people of eight or ten streets who had done nothing else for generations. The Lord had the east: his own quarter, his own tanks, his own weavers, his own street of houses where the men who could recite the four thousand Tamil songs lived close enough together to hear each other doing it in the morning. Across the river to the south-west there was a settlement of Jains with their own teachers and their own school, and they had been in that place longer than anybody, and they were good at logic and everyone conceded it. The Buddhists had gone, or nearly. Their great houses of study had stood in that town and had emptied inside two generations, and what they left behind was a habit: the habit of public disputation, on fixed days, in a hall, with judges, in front of anyone who wanted to come and listen.

The learned men were sorted by street and every one of them knew exactly what the men in the next street held and what was wrong with it. In one street the grammarians, who were the most feared, because a grammarian could destroy an argument without ever going near its subject. In another the men of ritual, who held that the Veda is a set of instructions and that asking what it means beyond the instructions is a category error. There were men who taught that there is no self at all, only a sequence of events that a bad habit of speech gathers under a name; and men who taught that there is nothing but the self, and that the town, the river and the mango tree are a misapprehension that will clear. There were men who held that the world is real and God is not, and men who held the reverse, and men who held both to be real and separate for ever, and men who held them to be real and not separate at all. On the appointed days, in the pillared hall by the tank, two of them would sit down opposite each other with judges between them and go at it from the morning until the light went, and boys climbed on the parapet to watch, and the losing side went home and were fed by their wives in silence.

The flower market opened at four. It had to, because the first offering is made before the sun is up and a garland has to be strung after the flowers are picked and not before. The women came in from the gardens along the channel with jasmine in wet cloths, and tulasi, and the small orange sēṅkāntaḷ, and oleander for the shrines that took oleander, and they sat in rows on the stone with their knees up and their fingers going, and the smell of that street at four in the morning was thick enough to walk through. By noon the same street smelt of the flowers they had not sold.

Water was the sound underneath everything else. Pots going down wells and coming up, pots set on stone, the tank slopping over when the buffaloes went in, the wooden gates of the channels being lifted and dropped, the temple water poured from a height into a vessel because pouring it from a height is part of the rite. A man born in that town could tell the hour by which of the waters he was hearing. The dyers worked at the tank edges and the water went the colour of whatever they were dyeing that week, and the weavers wove the silk that the town had been famous for since before anybody's grandfather, and the looms started at first light in about a thousand houses and did not stop until it was too dark to see the thread.

Varadarāja stood on a low hill in the middle of his own enclosure. It was a hill so small that a stranger could fail to notice it was a hill until he had climbed it, which took a moment. Hastigiri, they called it, the elephant's hill, because an elephant had worshipped there, and the Lord's attendants were still called after that elephant by anybody who wanted to say something exact about service. He stood. He did not lie down like the Lord at Śrīraṅgam; he stood upright with one hand raised, which is the posture of a god about to give something away, and the name he is called by means the one who gives. His consort Perundevi had her shrine apart, a little to the north, and a man coming with a request went to her first if he had been brought up properly. Below the hill lay the tank, Ananta Saras, wide and stepped, with a channel feeding it; and in the tank, under the water, in a chamber, lay a second image of the same Lord cut from fig wood, which was raised and shown and put back on a reckoning of decades, so that most men in that town saw it twice in a life and some saw it once.

The gopuras went up over the walls on all four sides and could be seen from an hour's walk out in any direction, which is what they are for. The walls made a town inside the town, with streets in it, and gardens, and store-rooms, and a kitchen that could feed several hundred, and men sleeping in the corridors who had nowhere else.

The day inside those walls began at four with the doors. The conch first, then the doors, and then the waking of the Lord, which is done with singing and not with noise. Then the bathing, and the dressing, and the lamps, and the first food offered and taken away and given out; and in the middle of that, the recitation, Sanskrit on one side and the Tamil of the poets on the other, by men whose fathers had done it. Then the town came in. From about six until the middle of the morning there was a continuous slow river of people through that enclosure, women with children on their hips, men on the way to work who came in for four minutes, the old who came in for two hours and sat against the pillars where the stone was cool. The second offering at noon. Then the doors shut and the whole place slept, and the only sounds were the crows and somebody sweeping. The doors opened again in the middle of the afternoon, and the evening was the best of it: the lamps lit in their hundreds along the walls and in the niches, the procession when there was a procession, the god carried out on a platform on the shoulders of eight men with the drum in front of him and the flute beside him, once round inside the walls or out into the streets on the big days. Then the last offering, and the putting to bed, and the doors, and the lamps left burning.

Pilgrims came all year and in floods at the festivals. They came from the Telugu country and from down south past Madurai, and from the hill at Tirumalai on their way home, and from Śrīraṅgam. They walked. They came in family parties of eleven and fourteen with the grandmother on a bullock cart and everybody else on their feet, and they carried their own vessels and their own rice and slept in the mandapas and the corridors and under the trees in the outer court, and cooked on three stones. There was a place where they were fed and there was a great deal of quarrelling about the arrangements for it, as there is everywhere.

The heat came up in Cittirai and did not let go until the rain came in Aippaci or Kārttikai, and in Āṉi and Āḍi the stone of the temple steps was too hot for a bare foot by eight in the morning. Work happened before nine and after four. In between, the town lay down. The wind, when there was wind, came off the dry riverbed and carried the dust with it, and the dust got into the food and the eyes and the folds of cloth and the ink.

A poor student in Kāñcī lodged wherever a household could be persuaded to let him. A corner of a courtyard behind somebody's kitchen; a share of a roofed veranda with three other boys; a mandapa in a small temple where the priest did not object as long as the boys swept it. He had a mat and a water pot and a lamp shared four ways and one change of cloth, which he washed himself and stood beside while it dried on the wall, because he did not have a second one to wear while it was drying. He ate by going round. Certain houses fed students on certain days, and a boy's week was a route: this house on Monday, that house on Thursday, and on the days when nothing came in, nothing came in. A meal was rice, and buttermilk, and a tamarind broth, and a boiled green, and salt, and a piece of something fried if the house was doing well; served on a leaf, eaten with the right hand, once in the day, with a handful of parched grain at night for those who could get it. Boys grew tall in that town and not wide. They recited on their way to their meals and on the way back, because the walk was long enough to get through a good deal of it.

Into this, in the year after her husband died, came Kāntimatī of Śrīperumbudūr, a widow in white with her head shaved and her bangles gone, walking, with a bundle on her head.

Behind her came her son, who was sixteen, and his wife, who was younger. They had with them the vessels out of the kitchen at Śrīperumbudūr, two mats, a box, the deer-skin and the books, and the great deal of respect that a Somayāji leaves behind him and which does not feed anybody. They did not have land in Kāñcī and they did not have a house in Kāñcī. What they had was her family, who had connections in the Lord's own street, and who put them in two rooms off a courtyard with a well in it and a lime tree, and were kind about it, and knew to the day how long they had been there.

The school was not in Kāñcī. It was at Tiruppuṭkuzhi, a long morning's walk out past the last of the gardens, where the road stopped being a street and became a path between fields with a tank at the end of it.

The village had a grove and a temple. The Lord of that temple is called Vijayarāghava, and the stone shows him seated with a bird across his knees. The bird is Jaṭāyu, who saw Rāvaṇa going south through the air with Sītā in his arms and went up after him although he was old, and was cut out of the sky for it, and lived long enough to say which way she had gone. What the stone shows is Rāma performing the funeral rites of that bird, which is why the place is called what it is, the pit of the bird. Standing behind his brother in the same stone, waiting, holding nothing, is Lakṣmaṇa.

So the boy who had been given the name Lakṣmaṇa before he could hold up his own head walked out to that village six days a week for four years. None of the accounts remarks on it.

His teacher was Yādava Prakāśa, and the first thing anybody knew about him was in his hand.

He was a sannyāsin, and he carried one staff. In that country a man's doctrine was legible at fifty paces. The renunciates of the school that holds the soul and the Lord to be two things standing in a relation carry three staves bound together, the tridaṇḍa, and the three are the three the man has taken charge of: what he thinks, what he says, what he does. The renunciates of the school that holds the difference between the soul and the Lord to be finally an error in the seeing carry one staff, because in the end there is one of everything. Yādava Prakāśa carried one. He had thought about it for forty years. He had earned it in the ordinary way, by giving away a house and a wife and a name and an income, and anybody who met him on the road knew, before he opened his mouth, that the road and the meeting and the two of them standing on it were in his settled opinion less real than they looked.

He was the first man in the Vedānta between the two great rivers, and he knew it, and was not vulgar about it. Students came to him from the Telugu country and from down past Madurai and one year from the Kannada country. The king's officers consulted him, not about policy but about the matters kings consult learned men over: omens, expiations, the interpretation of a dream, the handling of spirits, in which he was held to be expert. When there was a public disputation at Kāñcī on a serious question, he was one of the four or five men who might be asked to sit as judge, and he never took the fee.

What he was like: a tall thin old man with a long back, very clean, with one cloth and one staff and a water pot and no other possession in the world, who ate once a day and ate almost nothing. He had a dry voice that carried further than it seemed to. He remembered every student's name and his father's name and his village, and asked after all three, and meant it. He was funny in a way that took people a moment, and pleased with himself when it did. He could not bear to be interrupted, and would bring an interruption up three days later in front of everybody as a joke that was not entirely a joke. He had never taken money for saying a thing he did not hold. He was vain about exactly one item, which was his standing in the country's opinion, and he would have said that it was not vanity but stewardship, because the doctrine goes where the reputation goes.

He kept about forty students. He taught the Upaniṣads and the Brahma Sūtras, in the order everybody used. First the text, until it sat in the boy like his own name, and only then the meaning. Then the meaning sentence by sentence, with the older commentary given as the older commentary and not as his own. Then the objections, put at their strongest, because a man who has only heard the weak form of his opponent's case has not been taught. Then the answers. On the appointed days the senior students argued in front of him, one holding the position and one attacking it, and he said very little and missed nothing, and at the end he would name the two or three places where the thing had actually turned, and everybody would see that he was right.

A student's day had a shape that has not changed much anywhere. Up in the dark. Down to the tank, the cold water, the wet cloth, the recitation on the way back because the walk was long enough for it. Then the teacher's body.

A sannyāsin's body belongs to his students in the way a field belongs to the men who work it. He has given up the right to look after himself and somebody has to. So: water drawn and heated in the big vessel, and carried, and the bath, with one boy pouring and another holding the cloth. Then the oil. It went into the scalp first, worked in with the pads of the fingers in small circles from the crown outwards, and then the back of the neck, and then the shoulders and the length of the back with the heel of the hand, and then both legs down to the ankles and the soles of the feet, which take longer than people expect. Sesame oil, warmed in a shallow brass dish set in the sun or over a few coals, because cold oil on an old man is a cruelty. Then the cloth washed and spread on the wall. Then the alms brought in and looked over and sorted. Then the bed. The staff was carried when he walked out and set down where his hand would find it without his looking.

Then the class, in the hall or under the tamarind, until the heat. Then food. Then the afternoon, which was for repetition: one student saying back what had been given the day before while the others listened for the place where he would go wrong, which was generally the place where the teacher had gone fast. Then the temple, because the temple was there. Then a lamp, and a small oil-smelling circle of light with four or five heads in it, and the going over of it again.

Govinda was in that school, and was the other one people watched. He and Rāmānuja were first cousins on their mothers' side: Kāntimatī, who is also called Bhūdevī, and Śrīdevī, who is also called Dīptimatī, were sisters, and both of them were sisters of the man who had given up everything to serve the Lord on the hill at Tirumalai and who had named both boys. Govinda's father was Kamalanayana Bhaṭṭa of Madhuramaṅgalam. The two of them had been brought up half in each other's houses and walked out to the village together in the dark and back in the dark. Govinda was quick in a different way. He was not a rememberer; he was a plunger. He would get to the answer by a route nobody could follow and then be unable to say how he had got there, which drove the teacher to distraction and did not stop him being right. He had no fear anywhere in him. He was the boy who would put his hand down where the snake was because he had stopped noticing the snake, and who once walked back alone at night through country where a leopard had taken two calves that week, and was surprised to be asked about it.

Rāmānuja's speed was the other kind. Nothing had to be said to him twice. He took the text at first hearing and gave it back intact the next day with the commentary attached and the objections in their order, and after the first month Yādava Prakāśa stopped checking whether he had it. That is the thing that happens with a student like that, and it is worth saying plainly: a teacher grows careless. He goes faster. He stops putting in the joins. He leaves out the step he would have put in for anybody else, because this one does not need it, and he begins to enjoy not putting it in, and after a year or two he is no longer teaching the boy the subject but performing the subject in front of him. Neither of them notices for a long time. Both of them are enjoying it.

And the affection was real. This has to be understood or nothing that happened afterwards is worth telling.

Yādava Prakāśa was proud of him the way a man is proud of something he did not make and cannot account for. He put him at the front, on his right. He used him to show the slower boys what the thing sounded like when it was done properly, and then made a point of going back and doing it slowly for them himself, because he was not unkind. When men of standing came out from Kāñcī to sit with him for an afternoon, he would break off and say, give them the fifth chapter, and sit back with his eyes half shut while the boy gave it, and enjoy their faces more than he enjoyed his own work. He said, to more than one person and on more than one occasion, that whatever he himself had received he had received whole, and that this one had it too. He kept a place for him at his own meal on the days when there was enough, which is not nothing from a man who ate once. He liked having him in the room.

The disagreements started in the first year and were not spoken.

There was an afternoon when the teacher, going through the Chāndogya, said that the manyness of things is a defect in the looking and not a feature of the things; and Rāmānuja, who was working oil into the man's left calf at the time, said nothing, and finished the calf, and washed his hands at the well, and gave the whole passage back the next afternoon word-perfect with the commentary attached and not one syllable of his own in it.

There was a morning on how much of the difference between the soul and the Lord survives release, and the answer given was: none of it, in the end, the way a dream does not survive waking. Rāmānuja looked at the floor.

There was the question of whether the Lord can be said to want anything. Nothing was said about that one either.

He was sixteen and then seventeen. His mother was living in two rooms that were not hers, on other people's goodwill, and was careful about it the way a woman in that position is careful. He had no father, no land, no income, and the best teacher in the country was fond of him. He was not a coward and he was not calculating. He had the sense, which very young men occasionally have and almost never keep, that a thing does not have to be said on the day you first think it.

In the evenings, before they turned back for Kāñcī, he would go into the small temple at the end of the village, which was almost never busy, and stand in front of the stone where the Lord does what has to be done for a dead bird, and where the younger brother stands behind him with his hands empty.

At the top of the hill, behind the god, where no air moves at all, an old man stood and moved a fan.

The fan was the broad kind on a long handle, the ālavaṭṭam, a flat oval of stitched palm leaf as wide as a man's chest, or of peacock feathers on the great days, with a shaft of about four feet. It is heavier than it looks and the weight is all at the end of it. A man doing it properly does not wave it. He makes a long slow stroke from one side to the other and back, with his wrist quiet and the work coming out of the shoulder, and he changes hands at intervals without breaking the rhythm, and after the first hour the shoulder he is not using aches more than the one he is.

The air in there is hot in a particular way. The sanctum is stone on six sides with one door, and it holds whatever heat gets into it. There are lamps, and each lamp is a small fire. There is camphor burning, and sandal paste on the god, and the flowers of the morning going over by the middle of the day, and the smell of all of it together sits in the room and does not leave, and the one thing that moves it is the fan. That is the office. It is not decorative and it was not thought of as decorative. Somebody has to keep the air going in front of him, through the heat of the day, every day, for ever.

His name was Kāñcipūrṇa. He had been born at Pūvirundavalli, out north and east on the Poonamallee road, and he was not a brahmin.

He wore no thread. In the technical language of that community he was one of the threadless, and the word was used of him to his face, without malice, as a statement about the seating. It settled a great many things in advance and everybody on both sides of it knew what they were. He could not eat in the house of any of the men who stood beside him in that temple, and they could not eat in his, and if he was fed at a brahmin house he was fed outside on the ground and the ground was washed afterwards, and he did not regard this as an injury any more than he regarded the rain as an injury. There were parts of the enclosure he did not go into. There were rooms at the back where the accounts were kept and he had never been in one. The Veda was not recited where he could hear it, which meant that at certain hours he stayed outside the wall, and he knew the hours and went out before he was asked.

And he had no letters. He could not read anything at all. He had no Sanskrit past the words that any devout man in that country picks up the way he picks up the names of the months, and he could not have followed one page of what the forty students at Tiruppuṭkuzhi argued about all morning. He knew a great deal of Tamil verse by ear, the way a man who cannot read knows things, exactly and without knowing where the joins are.

The word in that country for what he did is kaiṅkarya. It is not the same as work, because work is done for a wage, and it is not the same as merit, because merit is done for a result. It is what a man does because he belongs to somebody. There is no smallest unit of it. A man who has swept one corridor has done the whole of it and a man who has endowed a temple has done the whole of it, and the two are not ranked, and everybody in that enclosure knew the theory and about half of them lived as though it were true.

What Kāñcipūrṇa had was the fan, and he had it for something over fifty years. He came up the steps before the doors opened. He took the fan off its hook. He fanned through the morning while the town came in, and through the noon offering, and stopped when the doors shut, and went home and ate, and came back in the afternoon, and was there at the lighting of the lamps. On procession days he walked beside the platform in the street with the fan going and the drum in front of him and the crowd pressing in on both sides. On the days he was ill his son or one of the others took it and he came anyway and sat against the wall and watched them do it wrong.

And the Lord spoke with him.

Nothing in the accounts decorates this. During the fanning, in the heat, with nobody else in the room, Varadarāja would say something to him, and he would answer, and the conversation went on as long as it went on. Then he put the fan back on its hook and went home and ate.

If a man asked him whether the Lord had spoken to him that day, he said yes. If the man asked what about, he told him, in the voice he used for the price of oil. It was generally about somebody's trouble. It was sometimes about somebody's service and whether it was being done properly, and when it was that, he passed it on, and the man who was doing it wrong was told he was doing it wrong, by a fan-bearer, in the corridor, in six words, and generally took it. Once he came down and told a garland-maker's family to take the boy off the medicine he was on, and they did, and the boy lived. Once he told a woman that what she was asking for was not coming and that she should stop asking for it, and she did not speak to him for two years, and then she did. He was asked more than once what it was like at the time, and the answer he gave has not been kept, which is a pity and is also the most likely thing to have happened, because nobody in Kāñcī thought of him as a man who gave interesting answers. In fifty years he never carried home a single message that made him look important.

Kāñcī held three opinions about all this and held them comfortably at once.

The people of the Lord's own street believed it flatly and without excitement, the way they believed that the river came in Āvaṇi. It was a fact about their temple, like the fig-wood image under the water in the tank. It did not require them to do anything.

The learned street had a settled and courteous explanation, which was that a man of that community was no doubt sincere, and was no doubt also mistaken, and that the sincerity was the part that counted and should not be enquired into too closely. They were polite to him. They were polite to him in the particular way that is worse than rudeness and that everybody involved can hear.

And a certain number of people in that town thought he was a simple old man with a fan, and said so, and went on sending for him when their children were ill, on the grounds that whatever he was he had not yet been wrong about anything that mattered.

None of the three opinions made the slightest difference to the fanning, which began when the doors opened and stopped when they shut.

He spoke in short sentences and he called people by their trade. He did not use honorifics on anybody and nobody had ever been able to make him. He was old by the time this story reaches him, sixty or more, with a heavy chest and grey in his arms, and he walked slowly up the hill and had to stop once on the way, and he had an ācārya of his own at Śrīraṅgam whom he saw perhaps twice in ten years and spoke of constantly.

He lived at the bottom of the town on the Pūvirundavalli side, in a house with a mud wall round a yard and a lime tree in the yard, and his sons were grown and doing other things.

The temple's own men handled him in a way that took years to work out and was perfectly consistent once you had. Officially he was an attendant of no rank whatever. In practice, when the establishment had a question it could not settle in the ordinary manner, and had argued about it for a week, somebody would find a reason to walk past him in the corridor at the end of the afternoon and mention it, not asking, simply mentioning; and the next day he would say what he said; and the thing would be done that way. And then it would be minuted, when it was minuted at all, as having been decided in the ordinary manner. He knew that, and it did not trouble him, and he never once referred to it. He was invited to nothing. He had no seat at anything. On the day of the great festival, when the gods of nine surrounding shrines came in and the whole town stood in the outer court, he was on the platform beside the Lord with the fan going, above every man in Kāñcī, and at the end of it he walked home by himself and ate.

Between the shut of noon and the opening in the afternoon he sat in the shade at the back of his yard with his feet in a basin of water. People came to him there. They came about illnesses, and about debts, and about daughters, and about quarrels between brothers over land, and they sat on the ground because there was nowhere else, and he heard them out and said something short, and what he said was usually about what they were to do next and not about what it all meant.

When the doors shut at noon he hung the fan on its hook, and put his hand on the doorpost on the way out, which he did every time, and went down the steps into the light.

Rāmānuja had known about the old man since before he could remember knowing.

It was Kāñcipūrṇa who had sent his father down the coast road to Tiruvallikkēṇi to perform the sacrifice for a son, and his mother had told him so, and in the house at Śrīperumbudūr the name had been said the way a family says the name of the physician who was there on the night. It had been said at meals. It had been said at the naming and at the thread ceremony. It came into the house attached to the only sentence that mattered, which was that this particular boy existed because a man in Kāñcī had been told something and had walked out of his temple and gone and said it to a stranger.

So within a month of coming to Kāñcī he had found him, and after that he did not stop.

He waited at the bottom of the steps in the morning until the fanning finished. He took the sandals off the stone and had them in his hands when the old man came out. He walked behind and not beside. When Kāñcipūrṇa came down the street he stood up, and went on standing until the old man had gone past, and if the street was crowded he went in front and made a way through it with his shoulder, and people got out of the way because he was young and large and they assumed he was somebody's servant.

And then one morning in the main street, at the hour when the main street is at its fullest, with the silk shops open on both sides and the flower women sitting in their rows, he went down full length in the dust in front of him.

A prostration is not a bow. It is the whole body on the ground, face down, with the eight parts touching, and it takes a moment to get down and a moment to get up, and during the time it takes, everything in that street stopped.

The men from the school saw it, because two of them were coming out of the cloth merchant's. One of them said, at a carrying volume, that some people would lie down for anything. It went out to Tiruppuṭkuzhi by the afternoon. Within three days a senior student had made a joke about it in the hall and Yādava Prakāśa had let the joke stand, which is a thing a teacher does when he wants a point made without making it.

His mother's relatives heard within the week. One of them, a careful man with a position in the Lord's street to protect, came round to the two rooms in the evening and sat a long time and said very little of what he had come to say, and left, and went home and told his wife that the boy was young and it would settle.

Kāñcipūrṇa asked him twice to stop, and told him plainly what he was doing to himself, and was not obeyed. He took his own sandals back out of Rāmānuja's hands and carried them himself, and Rāmānuja was there again the next morning and took them again.

In the rains he stood at the bottom of the steps with the water coming off the end of his nose for the better part of an hour, because the old man went on fanning whatever the weather did and a man who is waiting cannot sit down under somebody's eaves and call it waiting. A cloth merchant offered him the shelter of his veranda across the street and he took it twice and then stopped taking it, because from the veranda he could not see the side door.

He did it again the next morning, and the morning after that, for four years.

And he asked him things. That is the part that is easy to pass over. Out at Tiruppuṭkuzhi he was being given the Upaniṣads by the first man in the country, with the objections and the answers to the objections and the answers to those, and he was taking it in faster than it could be handed to him. Then he walked back into Kāñcī and stood at the foot of a hill and asked an unlettered fan-bearer whether a man ought to be frightened of dying, and got an answer of about nine words with nothing in it he could argue with and nothing in it he could have arrived at himself. He asked him what the Lord was like, and was told: like somebody you know. He asked whether he ever said no, and was told yes, often, and was not told what about. He asked, once, in the third year, whether a man could be certain of anything at all, and the old man looked at him for a while and said that he was asking as a man asks who already knows the answer and wants it said by somebody else, and that he should go home; and he went home.

Two educations ran side by side for four years, and only one of them was being paid for, and the other one was going faster.

What he wanted at the end of it was simple and enormous, and he went about it directly, which was his way in everything.

He asked Kāñcipūrṇa to come to his house and eat. And he told him what he intended to do afterwards, because he was not going to get it by concealment: when the old man had eaten and gone, Rāmānuja meant to sit down at the same leaf and finish what was left on it.

That is what a disciple does with the leavings of his ācārya. It is not a courtesy and it is not affection. It is the act by which a man puts himself under another man for good. It cannot be done partly, and it cannot be done as a private gesture, because the whole of its force is that it is public and that everybody can see what has been done and cannot be undone. And in the ordering of that town it could not be done at all in the direction Rāmānuja was proposing to do it.

Kāñcipūrṇa said no.

He said it kindly. He also said it immediately, before Rāmānuja had finished putting it, which suggests that he had seen it coming up the street some time before it arrived.

His reasons were not about himself.

He said that he was of no community that could stand as teacher to a brahmin, and that this was not his opinion about himself but the state of the world he had to live in.

He said that he had no letters, and nothing to teach, and that a man cannot hand over what he does not hold in a form that can be handed.

He said that Rāmānuja's father had been a man who performed the soma sacrifice, the long one, the one that cannot be repaired if it goes wrong, and that what was being proposed would be said about that man's son in that town for the rest of that son's life, in the street, at weddings, when his own children were being married. He said: you will not be able to take it back and I will not be able to take it back for you.

'You have not thought about your mother,' he said.

Rāmānuja said that he had thought about very little else for a month, and that he was asking anyway.

'Then you have not thought about it usefully. Go out to your school in the morning.'

He asked again at the end of that month, in a different form. He offered to do it at night, with the door shut and nobody present.

He was told that a thing done at night with nobody present is a thing being hidden, and that the old man was too old to begin hiding, and that in any case it would be known by the second day, because these things are always known by the second day.

He asked a third time before the rains, and he asked it differently again: not the meal, nothing to do with food, simply to be taken as a disciple in the ordinary way, with the ordinary words. That was refused too, on the same ground and in the same tone, with one thing added. There is a right man for you, said Kāñcipūrṇa. He is somewhere. I am not him.

Then Rāmānuja stopped asking.

He went home after the first refusal and did not eat that night. He sat in the doorway where the air was, with his back against the frame and his legs out into the yard, and the lime tree over him, and the household went to sleep behind him. His mother, who had buried a husband and knew the difference between a boy who is sulking and a boy who has been hurt in the place where he actually lives, put the food where he would find it and left him alone. His wife asked him what the matter was, twice, and got nothing, and went in. It was a clear night with the year turning, and somebody two houses along was grinding something on a stone for much longer than it could have needed, and he listened to that until it stopped.

In the morning the old man came up the hill as usual, with the sun not yet over the east wall, and stopped once on the way, and went in through the side door, and took the fan off its hook, and began.

The Taittirīya came up in Vaikāsi, in the fortnight when the class had given up on the hall and moved out to the east side of the building where there was shade until about ten.

There were eleven of them that morning sitting in a half circle on the ground. The two brothers from Kūram who finished each other's sentences and were both slow. The big one from the Telugu country who had been there six years and had the whole of the Brahma Sūtras and would never understand a line of it. The boy who wrote everything down on a palm leaf with a stylus and could not follow anything he had not written. Govinda, at the end, sitting on his heels. Rāmānuja on the teacher's right.

Satyaṃ jñānam anantaṃ brahma. Four words. Brahman is the truth, is knowing, is without limit.

Yādava Prakāśa began where he always began, which was with what the sentence is for. The Upaniṣad has set out to say what Brahman is. That is the most difficult undertaking in any language, because every sentence any man has ever spoken has been about something inside the world, and this one is not. So look at what it does. It does not point. It does not compare. It gives three words and then stops, and any reader who is paying attention can feel the stopping.

Then he put his case, and he put it as a man puts a thing he has thought about for forty years and is not going to be talked out of by the middle of the morning.

Consider a cow, he said. A cow may have a broken horn. A cow may have no horns. A cow may have both horns entire. Those three states cannot be in one cow at one time, and nobody would take all three, string them together and call the result a description. Now: an attribute is a limit. That is what an attribute is, and it is not a complaint about attributes, it is what the word means. To say that a thing is blue is to say that it is not the other colours; to say that it is here is to say that it is not there; to say that it is knowing is to mark it off from everything that does not know. Every attribute you hang on a thing is a wall you have built round it. Hang enough of them and you have not described the thing, you have fenced it. And what is being spoken of in this sentence is precisely that which has no fence anywhere.

Therefore, he said, these three words are not three attributes. If they were, they would exclude one another as the cow's horns do, and the sentence would come apart in your hands. What they are is three sweepings. Truth sweeps away the thought that it might be an appearance. Knowing sweeps away the thought that it might be dead matter. Without limit sweeps away the last of it. Each word takes something off and none of them puts anything on, and when the three have done their work there is nothing left to say, and the not-having-anything-left-to-say is the whole teaching. Brahman with attributes is a contradiction, the way a square circle is a contradiction, and the man who goes on wanting a God with qualities in him wants that God for his own comfort and not because the text will bear it.

And he had the rest of the scripture behind him and he brought it up. There is a place in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, he said, where a teacher who has been asked to describe him answers twice over: not this, not this. That is not evasion and it is not modesty. It is the method. Every description offered is taken up and put down again, and what remains at the end of the taking up and putting down is not a better description; it is the man who has stopped trying to make one, and he is the one who has arrived.

It was well done. He had done it well for thirty years, and the two brothers from Kūram were nodding, and the boy with the stylus was two sentences behind and catching up.

Rāmānuja asked whether he might say something.

He had never asked that before, and the half circle heard him ask it.

He said: may I begin with the cow. I do not think the cow's horns are the place to look. Broken, absent and entire are three states of one thing in one respect, and of course they exclude each other; a thing cannot be in two conditions of the same kind at once. But that is not what is in front of us. Take the flower in the teacher's hand. It is red. It is soft. It has a smell. Not one of those three crowds out either of the others, and none of them is made smaller by the company. Nobody has ever had to decide whether the flower is really red or really fragrant. Or take the sun, which we are sitting in the shade of. It gives light and it gives heat. That is not two suns, and it is not a sun divided against itself, and no one has yet been obliged to choose.

Attributes exclude one another, he said, when they are the same kind of thing competing for the same room. These three are not doing that at all. They are doing three separate pieces of work, and he could say what the three pieces were.

Satyam. It says that he is not a thing that begins and stops. There is no hour at which he is and another at which he is not, and nothing that he is made out of which could come apart. Take that word away and everything else in the sentence is being said about a thing that might one day not be there.

Jñānam. It says that he is one who knows. This is the word that decides the whole matter, because it puts him on the side of the knower and not on the side of the known. He is not a quantity. He is not a substance, however fine. He is not a spread of anything. He is someone, and the moment the word has done its work a man may address him, and before it has done its work a man may not.

Anantam. It says that there is no edge to him. Not in place, and not in time, and not in kind either. There is no direction in which you travel and come to the end of him and find something else beginning.

And then he asked them to look at the sentence again, at its grammar, which he said was the part nobody looked at because it was in plain sight.

It says Brahman is truth. It does not say Brahman is not-untruth and leave it at that, and it does not say that truth is a word we are obliged to use and must afterwards withdraw. The verb is there and it is doing what verbs do. Whatever else a man does with the Upaniṣad, he has to keep the verb.

Then he said the last of it, quietly, and it was the only part of the morning that was not argument.

If you take away from him everything that could be said of him, he said, in order to keep him safe from limitation, the thing you are left holding is not an exalted Brahman. It is nothing. It is not even nothing that a man could be reverent towards, because reverence is also a relation and you have removed the other end of it. The Upaniṣad is not defending him from description. It is describing him. A wall round a field is a limit. A wall round the sky is not a wall.

The half circle had stopped moving. The two brothers from Kūram were looking at the ground with great attention. The boy with the stylus had stopped writing, which is the only reliable evidence of anything in a class. Somebody's slate slid off somebody's knee and nobody picked it up.

Yādava Prakāśa sat for a while.

Then he said, 'Thou, to argue with me.'

That was all of it. He did not answer the argument that morning. He did not answer it the next morning either, or in that season, or ever. He dismissed the class an hour early and went and sat in the inner room, and the students went out into the sun and stood about in the yard in twos not knowing what to do with the rest of the morning.

Govinda caught his cousin up on the road back and walked beside him for a mile without saying anything. Then he said, 'You could have let it go.'

'I have been letting it go since I came.'

'Then four years was the habit and you have broken it, and he will notice which of the two of you broke it.' He walked on a bit. 'He was not wrong about the cow, you know. He was only wrong about what the cow was for.'

They came down through the gardens with the light going flat and the smoke starting in the village behind them, and the next morning the teacher began where he had left off, and went on, and the passage was not opened again in that school for as long as Rāmānuja sat in it.

She was thirteen, and she was the youngest of the four daughters of the king who held Kāñcī and the country round it, and she had been betrothed in Tai and was to be married after the next harvest.

In the middle of the hot weather she stopped eating.

Then she stopped sleeping, and then she began to talk at night, and what came out of her was not hers. It was a man's voice, dropped low in the chest, and it used Sanskrit, which she had never learned, and it used it correctly and with a good deal of contempt. It knew things. It told the second of her sisters something about a servant in that house that the second sister had told nobody, and the girl went out of the room and was sick. It told the chief of the household guard the name of his first wife's child, who had died at Kumbakōṇam before he came into that service, and after that the chief of the guard would not go into the room.

The household did what any household does. They sent for the men from the great Śiva temple in the east of the town, who came in a body and did the things they knew: the smoke, the ash, the mantras of that school, a lime cut and a lime cut again. They sent down the coast for a man who was said to be able to handle this kind of thing and had handled it at Mayilāppūr, and he came, and was in the room for two days, and went away without taking anything. They gave grain away at three temples. They had the astrologers in, and the astrologers disagreed with each other in the courtyard at some length and were paid. A woman was brought from a village out towards Uttaramērūr who was said to have done this before, and she was in the room for one afternoon and came out and said that she would not touch it and asked to be taken home, and would not take anything for the journey.

Her mother stayed in the room the whole time and slept on the floor beside the bed and would not be moved out of it by anybody, including her husband. Her father came in twice a day and stood in the doorway and did not come further in, and he was forty-one years old and looked a good deal more than that by the end of the month.

Then somebody at the court said that this was probably a brahma-rākṣasa, one of the kind that has been a learned man, and that if it was, there was one person in the country to send for, and he was at Tiruppuṭkuzhi.

The messengers went out and found Yādava Prakāśa and told him the whole state of affairs and asked him to come.

He did not go. He told them: go back and say to the spirit, Yādava Prakāśa commands you to leave the princess.

They went back and said it into the room. The thing in the girl answered them. It said: go and tell Yādava Prakāśa, from me, to get out of this country.

They ran the whole way out to the village a second time with that, and this time he came. He came with a troop of his students behind him, into the palace, through the courts, into the room with the lamp in it and the mother against the wall, and he stood in front of the girl and began.

He was on the formulas for a long time. He knew a great many of them and he went through them in their proper order and he did it faultlessly, and the room got hotter, and when he had come to the end of what he knew he raised his fist at her and ordered the thing out.

The girl stretched out her legs on the bed and pointed her feet at him, which is the worst thing one person can do to another in that country, and which a thirteen-year-old daughter of that house could not have done if she had been in there at all.

'Do you imagine,' it said, 'that I do not know your mantras and your magic? I am a brahma-rākṣasa. Neither your formula nor your person has any force against me. You have no knowledge of me and you have no knowledge of yourself. Get out.'

'And you have knowledge of yourself, as you boast,' said Yādava Prakāśa.

'Learn it from me, then. In your last birth you were an iguana. You lived in the holes in the bank of the tank at Madhurāntakam. A party of Śrīvaiṣṇavas going up to Tirumalai on pilgrimage stopped at that tank and cooked and ate and went on their way. You came out afterwards and ate what they had left on the ground, and drank the water they had spilt. That is the merit that got you this birth, as a brahmin, with learning in it. As for me, I was a brahmin in my last birth. I began a sacrifice, and there were omissions in the chanting and in the acts that go with it, and this is what came of that. Now see which of us has knowledge.'

Nobody in the room moved. The students were behind their teacher in the doorway and in the passage outside, and the ones at the back were being told by the ones in front what had just been said.

Yādava Prakāśa said, 'Very good. Then tell me who will make you come out of her.'

The thing put its hands together, and it was afraid.

'There,' it said, and pointed past him into the troop of students, 'in your own ranks. Him, whom you have the glory of counting as your pupil. His name is Rāmānuja. At his word I must go.'

Yādava Prakāśa turned round.

Rāmānuja was near the back with his teacher's staff in his hand, because he had been carrying it. He came forward when he was told to, and put the staff against the wall, and asked the thing to come out of the girl.

It said it would not, unless he would put his foot on its head.

He put his foot on its head.

Then it said, in a voice that everybody in the passage heard, that it saluted him and was leaving the princess. Rāmānuja asked how they were to know it had gone. It said that it would go into the aśvattha tree in the outer yard, and that they should watch for a branch to break.

The branch broke. They heard it from inside.

The girl was asleep.

She woke in the middle of the afternoon and was herself. She asked for water. She asked how long it had been, and was told, and did not believe it, and was told again. She remembered nothing of any of it except one afternoon early on when she had been frightened in the doorway and had not been able to say so. Then she cried for a long time with her mother holding her, and slept again, and ate in the evening, and was thin until the rains and married in the following year to the man she had been promised to.

The king could not be got to stop. He loaded them with presents and honours and had them fed and would not let them leave until the next morning, and he told everybody at his court, for years afterwards, that he had been in the room.

Yādava Prakāśa praised Rāmānuja in front of the king's men, warmly, at length and in public, and meant a good part of it.

They walked home the next day, a troop of men in the dust with the king's cloth and the king's vessels carried in front, and the young ones talked the whole way and the senior ones let them. They went over it endlessly: what the thing had said about the iguana and the tank, and whether a brahma-rākṣasa is bound to tell the truth about a man's last birth or is merely likely to, and what had been in it that had made it so frightened of a boy of seventeen who had not yet finished the Brahma Sūtras. Two of them laughed about the iguana. They did not laugh loudly, and they did not look round to see where the teacher was, which meant that they knew exactly where he was.

Yādava Prakāśa did not say anything for the last two hours of that road. One of the seniors, walking beside him, noticed it, and put it down to tiredness and an old man's knees, and said something kind about the knees, and got no answer to that either.

The next morning at the recitation he did not call on Rāmānuja.

He had called on him first, every day, for four years. That morning he looked along the half circle, and passed over the place on his right where Rāmānuja was sitting, and called on the big one from the Telugu country, who had the whole of the text and not one line of the sense of it, and who got up and started and lost his place in the fourth sentence and started again.

Every single person in that half circle understood what had happened, including the big one from the Telugu country, who had to stand there in front of them and go on.

Rāmānuja sat where he was, with his hands on his knees, and looked at the ground and let him finish.

The oil was warmed in a shallow brass dish set out on the step where the sun came round at about two, and by three it was the temperature of blood.

The courtyard on the west side of the building had shade in it from three onward, and that is where it was done. A low wooden stool. The teacher sitting on it with his upper cloth off and his back straight and his eyes shut. Rāmānuja standing behind him with the dish on the ground beside his right foot.

It was not his turn every day. There were four or five of the older students who did it in rotation, and it was the most sought-after work in that school for the same reason that carrying the staff was: it was an hour close to him with nobody else talking. But Rāmānuja did more of it than his share, because the others let him, because he was better at it. He had good hands and he did not hurry, and he had worked out on his own, without being told, that an old man's scalp wants the pads of the fingers and not the nails, and that the place that actually hurts is the ridge at the base of the skull, and that you finish the feet last and slowly because a man who has walked on stone all his life will let you do anything to him if you do the feet properly.

Yādava Prakāśa's habit was to carry on with the day's text while it was being done. Partly this was an old man's dislike of a wasted hour, and partly it was that he liked the sound of himself working a thing out, and there was no better audience in the world than one student, directly behind him, unable to interrupt.

They had been getting on well that season. Whatever had come into the room after the business at the palace had been in it for a few weeks and had then been put away, in the manner of that school, by the simple method of nobody mentioning it. He had gone back to calling on Rāmānuja first. He had asked after his mother twice. On the previous afternoon, in the same courtyard, on the same stool, he had told him a long story about a disputation at Kāñcī thirty years before in which he had been badly beaten by a Jain logician over a matter of two words, and had told it against himself, and had laughed, and had said that he had learned more in that hour than in the three years on either side of it.

They were in the Chāndogya that afternoon, at the description of the person in the sun, the golden one, and they had come to the line about his eyes.

Tasya yathā kapyāsaṃ puṇḍarīkam evam akṣiṇī.

His eyes are like a kapyāsa lotus.

Yādava Prakāśa gave the word. Kapi, he said, is a monkey. Āsa is the seat, the hinder parts. So: the eyes of the person in the sun are like a lotus, and the lotus in question is like the hinder parts of a monkey, which is to say, red in that way, that exact red. That is the comparison the Veda is making. It is not the reading of one man; it is the received reading, and it comes down from the greatest of the commentators, and the wise have not been ashamed of it.

The hands on his head did not stop.

But a tear came out of Rāmānuja's eye and fell on the old man's thigh, and it was hot, and it scorched him.

He started, and put his hand flat on the place, and twisted round on the stool and looked up.

He asked what the matter was.

Rāmānuja said that the word would bear a different division, and then, when he was told to go on, he gave it.

Ka, he said, is water. Pibati is drinks. The water-drinker is therefore kapi. And kapi in that sense is the sun, which draws the water of the world up into itself; and kapi is also the stalk of the lotus, which drinks water in the plainer way, standing in it. As for āsa, it comes from the root that means to open out, to expand, vikāsane; and it comes as well from the root that means to be seated, to rest, upaviśane. So the phrase says: eyes like the lotus that the sun opens. Or, taking the second root and the other sense of kapi: eyes like the lotus that rests upon its stalk. And this is not a derivation he had put together in a courtyard for the purpose, because the śruti itself glosses kapi as the beams of the sun.

Yādava Prakāśa heard him out. Then he said that the received reading was not meant in derision, and that this had been said in as many words by the commentator who gave it, who had put in a clause to that effect precisely so that nobody would take it for mockery; that the comparison was to a colour and to nothing else; and that the boy was manufacturing an offence in order to have something to be offended by.

Rāmānuja said that he did not doubt it for a moment, and that it made no difference at all. The clause is in the commentary. The words are in the Veda. A man reciting that line in a temple does not recite the clause after it.

Then he said the rest of it, and the rest of it was not grammar.

He said that there are two ways of repudiating the Lord, and that the first is to deny that he is anybody, to hold that person and face and eyes are a concession made to weak minds and are to be taken away again from strong ones. That is done honestly and in the open and a man can argue with it.

The second way, he said, is done inside the text. When the Veda has taken the trouble to give a person, and has given him with gravity and with grandeur, and a man comes to those words and reads a joke into them, he has repudiated him twice: once by the reading, and once by putting the reading in the Veda's own mouth. He said that constructions of that kind are not learning and are not even error. He said that he could not sit in a room and hear it and go on rubbing oil into somebody's head as though nothing had been said, and that he had tried, and that this was what the teacher had felt on his leg.

Yādava Prakāśa got up off the stool.

He was oiled and half dressed and his cloth was in his hand and he was shaking, and he was an old man of great learning who had just been corrected in his own courtyard, on a point of Sanskrit, by a boy of eighteen, correctly.

'Haughty youth,' he said. 'If thou canst not abide by my instruction, thou must leave me.'

Rāmānuja did not say one syllable in reply.

He wiped his hands on the cloth that was kept there for it. He set the brass dish down beside the stool where the man's hand would find it. He made his prostration, which took the usual time and which nobody stopped him doing, and then he walked out through the gate and turned on to the path between the fields and went towards Kāñcī.

It was the hottest part of the afternoon and there was nobody on the road. He walked the whole of the way without meeting anybody except a boy with three goats, who greeted him, and was greeted back.

At Tiruppuṭkuzhi the courtyard stayed empty for a while. Then one of the other senior students came out to see why the class had not been called, and found the teacher still standing beside the stool with his cloth in his hand and the oil drying on him, and was sent away without being told anything.

By the evening the whole school had it, in four or five versions. In one of them Rāmānuja had shouted. In one of them he had thrown the oil. The version that was true, which was that he had said nothing whatever and had prostrated on his way out, went round as well and was considered the least interesting of the four.

Govinda walked in to Kāñcī that night after dark, which was the better part of three hours each way, and found his cousin, and they sat in the yard under the lime tree, and Govinda said that if he went back in the morning and said one sentence of regret the whole thing would be over inside a week. Rāmānuja asked him which sentence. Govinda thought about it for a while and then said that he would go home.

Rāmānuja did not tell his mother that night. He told her two days later, and by then she had heard it from a woman at the well, and had been waiting for him to bring it to her, and let him.

He went up the hill both of those evenings and stood at the back of the enclosure for the lamps with two hundred other people, and did not go anywhere near the old man with the fan, and left before the doors shut.

He washed his hands three times that night at the well in the yard and they still smelt of sesame oil two days later.

For the next seven weeks he had nothing to do, and he did it thoroughly.

He was up in the dark as before, because the body does not stop, and down to the tank, and then he sat on the step of the courtyard with the lime tree over him and recited to himself: the whole of what he had been given, in order, from the beginning, out loud, at the speed at which it had been given to him. It took most of the morning. The household got used to it. The woman in the next house across the yard, whose husband was a copyist, told her husband that the boy had gone on with his studies at home and did not appear to need anybody, and the husband, who copied for a living and knew exactly how much a man can hold, said that was not possible and went and stood in the yard one morning and listened, and then came away and did not say anything further about it.

In the afternoons he went out and found work. He carried grain from a merchant's store for eleven days for a rate that was an insult and did not argue about the rate. He read out letters in the street for people who could not read them and wrote the answers on the backs, for nothing, because he could not bring himself to charge for it, which meant that after the first week there were four or five of them waiting for him at the corner every afternoon. He carried his mother's water. He avoided the streets where the school's men bought their cloth.

Out at Tiruppuṭkuzhi it was not going well either.

It is difficult to say in what way, because nothing was wrong. The class met. The text was given. The recitation was heard. Yādava Prakāśa was, if anything, more exact than usual, and went slower, and put in the joins he had not been putting in for four years, and the two brothers from Kūram had the best season of their lives and said so to each other. And the whole thing had gone flat, in the way that a room with one person missing from it is flat, and the flatness was not about affection; it was about resistance. He had nothing to push against. He would put a position, and the eleven of them would take it down, and nobody would ask him the second question, and at the end of an hour he would find that he had been agreeing with himself since the beginning of it.

He was also an old man who had heard himself say a sentence he did not like remembering.

In the seventh week he sent one of the seniors into Kāñcī with a message. The senior was the one who had made the joke in the hall, and knew it, and was uncomfortable, and delivered the message standing in the yard with his hands behind his back. It said: an old man's temper in the heat is not a judgement. It said that the Chāndogya was waiting where they had left it. It said that the class was not the same, and that he was to come out in the morning.

Rāmānuja said he would come.

He did not go back because he had been flattered, and he was clear-headed about it afterwards and named the reasons himself.

There was no second school of that standing between the two rivers. He had no money to take himself anywhere else, and no relative who would pay for it, and the nearest teachers of any weight at all were at Śrīraṅgam, two hundred miles south, and he had no introduction to any of them and nothing to say for himself if he arrived. His mother was living on other people's goodwill, and a young man who has been thrown out of a school is a heavier guest in that house than a young man who is in one; the arithmetic of it was done at the well by other women within a day and he knew that too. And under all of it there was the plain fact that Yādava Prakāśa still had in his head a great deal of what Rāmānuja wanted and had not yet got. He wanted the text. He was prepared to pay for the text with a considerable quantity of silence.

His mother said one thing about it, which was that he was to be careful of the man, and did not say careful of what. Govinda said one thing about it, which was: good, come back, and do not do it again in the courtyard.

He went out in the morning and was received well. Yādava Prakāśa came to the gate himself, which he did not do for anybody, and put a hand on his shoulder, and said nothing about anything, and walked him in. His place on the right was as he had left it. The big one from the Telugu country was visibly relieved. The boy with the stylus had kept a set of leaves for him of the eight weeks he had missed, in his own appalling hand, and had done it without being asked and without mentioning it, and handed them over in a bundle at the end of the morning and went away before he could be thanked.

For some weeks it was better than it had ever been.

Then the pilgrimage was proposed.

It came from one of the senior men, in the hall, in front of everybody, in the ordinary way such things come up: that the teacher was old and had never seen the Gaṅgā, that there was a duty in it, and that if it was to be done at all it had better be done while his knees would still carry him. Yādava Prakāśa said that he had thought about it for twenty years and had always found a reason not to. They talked about it for a fortnight and then it was settled.

It is not a small undertaking. Kāśī is somewhere over a thousand miles from Kāñcī on foot, and a party of that size does eight or ten miles in the cool of the morning and no more; so the journey is three months out if nothing goes wrong, and the return is another three, and the rains stop everything for six weeks in the middle wherever they catch you. They fixed to leave after the harvest and to travel through the cold weather, which is the only sensible way to go north. Money had to be found, and it was found the way it always was, from the houses in Kāñcī that supported the school, who were told that the teacher was going to the Gaṅgā at his age and gave more than they had intended to.

Thirty-one men went, in the end.

Eleven of them were the senior students, the men of twenty-five and thirty who had been with him ten years and would be teaching in their own villages within five. Fourteen were younger, Rāmānuja and Govinda among them. There were four servants of the school who did the cooking and the carrying, all of whom had done the road to Tirumalai and none of whom had been further. There were two bullocks for the bedding and the vessels and the grain, with a man for the bullocks.

They took brass pots, and two large vessels, and a stone for grinding, and rice and dāl and tamarind and salt and oil and chilli and asafoetida in cloth bags inside a wooden box; blankets, which most of them had never owned before and which had to be bought, because none of them had any idea what the cold is like on the Gangetic plain in Mārgazhi; a bundle of medicines, which was a piece of foresight that three of them owed their lives to before the end of it; a coil of rope; and the teacher's staff.

Rāmānuja was to carry the staff. He had carried it for four years and the matter was not discussed and there was nobody else it would have occurred to anybody to give it to.

They went out of Kāñcī in the second week of Mārgazhi, before light, from the temple, with the whole of the Lord's street standing in it to see them off and a good part of the Śiva quarter as well, because a party going to the Gaṅgā is a public event and the town liked to have a hand in it. They were given garlands and had them off again by the first milestone. The senior men were given cloth by the houses that had paid for the journey. The teacher was put through a considerable ceremony at the gate and was gracious about it for longer than he wanted to be.

Kāntimatī came to the corner of the street with her son's rice tied in a cloth, and gave it to him there rather than at the temple because she did not want to be looked at, and held the back of his head with one hand for a moment, and told him to eat at the halts and not walk through the middle of the day. His wife did not come out. He had said goodbye to her in the yard before it was light and she had asked him twice how long and had been told the same answer both times.

They walked north out of the town on the Tirupati road with the light coming up behind the gopuras, thirty-one men and two bullocks, and the boy at the teacher's right hand was carrying the staff.

A fortnight before they left, Yādava Prakāśa called seven men into the inner room in the evening.

He chose them carefully. They were seniors, all of them men of his own mind about everything, three of them men who owed him their entire standing in the world and knew it.

The one who had made the joke in the hall was there, and was the youngest in the room by eight years. The one who had come out into the courtyard and found the teacher standing with the oil on him was there. So was a thin, very able man of thirty-four with a wife and three children at Kāñcī, who taught the beginners and was better at it than anybody and who had been passed over twice for a place he wanted; and so was a heavy silent man from the Telugu country who had been in that school for nineteen years and had never once been first at anything and never would be. They were not, on the whole, wicked men. Every one of them would have got up in the night to fetch water for a sick child in that building, and two of them had.

Govinda was not in the room. Rāmānuja was not in the room. The door was shut, which in that building meant something, because it was never shut.

He began with the doctrine, because that is where it began for him and it would be a falsification to put it anywhere else.

He said that he had been teaching for forty years and had one student he could not answer. Not one he could not out-argue in front of a class, because he could still do that most days with the advantage of the chair. One he could not answer. He said the boy had taken the central passages of the Upaniṣads and had turned them the other way up, using nothing but the words that were in them, and that he had been through it since and could not find the flaw; and that a man of his age who cannot find the flaw in an eighteen-year-old's reading of his own texts is in a position he did not expect to be in.

Then he said the rest of it, which was not doctrine.

Inside five years, he said, this one will be the first man in the country and I will be an old teacher he studied with. That is bearable. What is not bearable is what he will be teaching. He will not be teaching it against us from outside, where an opponent belongs and can be answered; he will be teaching it out of our own texts, in our own words, to our own students, and the men in this room will spend the rest of their lives explaining to people why their teacher's teacher was wrong. And he is not going to stop at the school. He said this last part slowly, because it was the part he was most sure of: that boy will overturn a great deal more than a commentary. Men like that do not stay a private nuisance. Whatever he touches will be different afterwards and none of us will be consulted about it.

And so, he said, it is expedient to put an end to him.

They discussed methods for a long time.

One man said the road itself would do it. There are six hundred miles of country where nobody knows anybody; a man leaves a camp at night for the ordinary reason and does not come back, and there is an end of it. It was objected that thirty-one men had left Kāñcī and thirty would come back, and that the boy's mother had relatives in the Lord's street, and that the first question anybody in Kāñcī would ask was who had been standing nearest him.

One man said there were parts of the Deccan where a party could be set on by men who make their living that way, and that a thing of that kind could be arranged in advance in a town for a sum of money. It was objected that this meant putting the whole matter into the hands of strangers who would afterwards be alive and would know, and that men of that trade talk, and talk most freely to whoever asks them last.

One man said the river crossings. There are a dozen of them and every one is dangerous in the wrong month, and men are lost at them every year, and nobody investigates.

One man said food, and named a thing that could be got in any bazaar and would look like the flux, which half of them would have anyway by the time they reached the Narmadā.

At that point the first of the two objections came up, and it was raised by the man who had proposed the food, against himself.

He said that this was sin. He said it plainly and nobody in that room laughed at him. The śāstras are not ambiguous on the killing of a brahmin, and they are not ambiguous about what follows: that the sin is real, that it attaches to the man who commits it, that it must be expiated, and that the expiation is not a formality but a punishment, to be borne in this body if a man is fortunate and over several bodies if he is not. They knew the penances. They had taught them. Twelve years, the skull, the begging, the declaration of the offence at every door.

He said, and nobody contradicted him, that he was not prepared to do it. He said that he had given up his house and his wife and his name in order to be done with that kind of account, and that he was not going to open a new one at his age for the sake of a boy from Śrīperumbudūr.

The heavy man from the Telugu country asked, in the only sentence he spoke all evening, whether it would be a smaller sin if a man of another community were paid to do it, and was told by two of them at once that it would be a larger one and would also be his, and he said that he had thought so and had wanted it said.

So the thing had to be done in a way that did not incur it.

And the second objection was put by Yādava Prakāśa himself, and it was shorter. However it is done, he said, it must be above suspicion. Not merely unproved. Above suspicion. No man in Kāñcī must be able to form the thought.

They sat with those two conditions for a while, and then somebody found the answer, and the room saw at once that it was the answer, and it is not recorded which of them found it.

They would take him back into the fold.

They would make much of him. They would treat him for the whole of the journey as the one man they could not do without, put him at the teacher's right hand, give him the staff to carry, ask his opinion in front of the others. Then they would go north together, on foot, on pilgrimage, which was already arranged and already known about in Kāñcī and already paid for by the best houses in the town. And at Vārāṇasī, at Maṇikarṇikā, where the steps go down into the Gaṅgā and the burning grounds are, in the water, in the crowd, in the morning, they would drown him.

And here is the whole of their reasoning, and it has to be set down exactly as they had it.

A man who dies in that water, at that ghāṭ, does not merely die. It is counted to him. It is the death that every man in the country would choose if he could choose, and men are carried a thousand miles to get it, and families ruin themselves to bring their fathers there in time. Therefore, in drowning him there, they would not be taking anything from him. They would be giving him the best thing he would ever be given. Therefore no sin could attach to the act, because the act was a benefit. Therefore there was nothing to expiate. And therefore nobody would suspect anything either, because who suspects a pilgrimage.

They went over it twice more and could not find anything wrong with it.

The thin able man of thirty-four raised one difficulty, which was practical. He said that it would have to be in the water and in the crowd and it would have to be quick, and that the boy was eighteen and strong and could swim, and that it would want three men and not one. That was accepted and the three were settled there in the room, and which of them would be on which side, and what would be said afterwards, and by whom, and to the teacher first so that the teacher's grief should be the thing everybody remembered.

Then they agreed to it, and the lamp was put out, and the door was opened, and the seven of them went out through the courtyard to their mats. It was a clear night at the end of the hot weather with the first of the cloud coming up from the south-east.

In the morning the eleven students sat in the half circle on the east side, and Yādava Prakāśa asked Rāmānuja to give the fifth chapter, and Rāmānuja gave it, and the teacher sat with his eyes half shut and enjoyed it, as he always had.

They were eleven weeks on the road before anything happened, and the eleven weeks were the best time of Rāmānuja's life so far.

He had never been out of his own country. Everything was new and he wanted all of it. The land went up off the coastal plain into the dry hills past Tirumalai, and the rock changed colour, and the trees changed, and then the language changed and the rice got worse and the millet began, and the women wore their cloth differently and the roofs went from palmyra thatch to flat mud and then to tile. They forded the Penna and were ferried over the Kṛṣṇā in two loads with the bullocks swimming. They went through towns where nobody had heard of Kāñcī and one where a man took them into his house because his father had been to Kāñcī once. They walked from four in the morning until about ten, lay up through the heat, cooked once, walked again from four until dark. Rāmānuja carried the staff and carried water for the older men at the halts and slept better than he had slept in years, and at every shrine along the road he went in and came out and said nothing about it.

They were made much of the whole way. He was put at the teacher's right hand. His opinion was asked in front of the others, twice on points where his opinion was worth having and once on a point where it was not, and he noticed the third one and put it down to kindness.

Then the ground began to lift and go dark, and they came up into the Vindhyas: teak and bamboo and sāl, dry leaves a foot deep, ridge after ridge of the same height and the same colour, villages a day apart, and a road that was in places an opinion rather than a road.

Govinda came and sat down next to him at the fire on the fourth night of that country.

He had known for eight weeks. He had heard two of them talking at a river crossing in Telugu, which they did not know he had, and he had spent the eight weeks being certain and then being uncertain and then being certain again, and walking every day between men he had lived among since he was eleven.

He said it in as few words as it can be said in.

'Go tonight. Not in the morning. Get up when the second watch changes and go, and go north-west and not north, and do not come back to this fire, and do not walk with these men again as long as you live.'

'Who?'

'Don't.'

'Govinda. Who?'

'If I tell you, you will go and stand in front of him and ask him about it, because that is what you do, and then we will both be in the river. It is more than three of them and it is not only the students.' He put a piece of wood on the fire and watched it catch. 'Take the small pot. There is rice in the bag under the box and I have put some in a cloth for you, it is behind you now, don't pick it up while anybody is looking at it.'

'What will you say?'

'That I walked my own road and don't know what became of you. I am going to say it fourteen times over the next three months and I am going to say it to the teacher first, in the morning, with my face arranged, and then I am going to walk back to Kāñcī with them and eat out of the same vessels.' He got up. 'Give me the staff. You cannot walk out of this camp carrying that.'

Rāmānuja gave him the staff.

When the second watch changed he went out of the firelight in the cloth he had on, with a small brass pot and a cloth of rice, and by the end of the second day he had no idea where he was.

The forest up there does not deal in directions. Everything is the same height and the same colour, the leaves take the sound out of a man's own footsteps, and water is not where a man from the Tamil country expects water to be. He went down every slope he came to, on the principle that water goes downhill, and found dry beds with sand in them, and dug in two of them and got nothing, and in the third got enough to wet his mouth. He ate the rice on the second day and after that he ate what was on the ground and in one place a quantity of small sour fruit that he was ill from. He slept sitting up with his back against something, because things moved at night, large ones; and once something coughed a long way off and then coughed again much closer, and he stood up and stayed standing until it was light. The flies came in the afternoons and would not be got rid of. By the fourth day the soles of his feet had gone and he was walking on the sides of them, and he had stopped being able to tell whether he was going forward or in a circle, and it had stopped mattering, because there was nothing to go forward to.

In the evening of the fourth day a hunter came out of the trees, with his wife behind him.

The man was short and wide and grey in the beard, in a cloth to the knee, with a bamboo bow unstrung across his back and a coil of gut over one shoulder and two small birds on a string. His wife was taller than he was by a hand. She had a brass pot on her hip and a great many thin bangles and her cloth over her head against the flies, and she was the one who spoke.

She asked him who he was and whose son he was. He told her. She asked his mother's name, and he told her that too, and she said it back to him.

'And where is she?'

'At Kāñcī.'

'Then what is her son doing in this place?'

He said he did not know where he was.

'No,' she said. 'Nobody does, here.' She looked at her husband. 'He has been four days without water.'

'Three,' said Rāmānuja.

'Four,' she said.

The hunter said they were going that way themselves and that he had better come with them, and then set off without waiting, and they went.

They walked until it was properly dark and then for a good while longer. The man went in front and did not use a light and did not appear to be looking for the path. Rāmānuja asked him twice whether he was sure of the way and got an answer the first time.

His wife talked the whole way. She asked whether he was married and how long, and whether his father was living, and when he said no she said the name of his town again, and asked whether the tank there was the big one on the west side, which it was. She scolded her husband twice about the pace. She said that the birds were for somebody at the other end and not for eating. She took a cloth out of her waist at one point and put a handful of something into Rāmānuja's hand in the dark, and he ate it, and did not ask what it was, and it was sweet and had grain in it.

Then she said she was thirsty.

The hunter said there was a well he knew of, further on, and that they would come to it in the morning, and could drink there and bathe.

So they went on for a while more, and then stopped and lay down where they were, in the leaves, without a fire. Rāmānuja said he would keep awake because of the animals, and was asleep in the middle of the sentence.

When he woke it was grey and cool and the ground under him was not leaves but grass. The air smelt of woodsmoke and cow dung and wet stone. There was no forest. There was flat red country with palmyras standing in it and a channel running along the edge of a field, and a long way off, coming up out of the mist with the first of the light just touching the tops of them, four gopuras of a town he had walked past every day of the last four years.

The hunter said that the well was there, below the road, and that the pot was empty.

Rāmānuja took the pot and went down the steps of the Śalai well and filled it. It took a little time, because the well is deep and the steps are worn and there was no light in it yet.

When he came up with it on his hip they were not there.

He stood on the road with the full pot and looked along it both ways. He went back down and up again in case they had gone round to the water on the far side. There was a woman coming out for water with two vessels, and a boy with goats, and after that nobody on that road at all.

He carried the pot up the hill instead and gave the water to Varadarāja, because it was there and so was he.

Then he walked to his mother's house, and she fed him, and asked him when he had last eaten a proper meal and did not get a satisfactory answer, and made him eat again in the middle of the day and again in the evening. He slept most of two days. On the third morning he found that both heels had split across and that there was a thorn broken off deep in the left one, and he sat in the doorway with a needle for the better part of an hour and got it out.

The party came back at the end of the following hot weather, thinner and much browner, with the stories men bring back from Vārāṇasī, and Yādava Prakāśa walked up the main street of Kāñcī on the second morning and found Rāmānuja standing in it.

He did it well.

He came forward with both hands out. He said that their grief at losing him in the Vindhyan forest had been very great, that they had gone back over three days of country looking, that he had given him up and had performed what a man performs for a student presumed dead, and that seeing him standing here had put the grief out and filled him with joy that had no bounds. The men behind him said the same things in their own words, some of them more warmly than others. Somebody wanted to know where he had come out of the forest.

Rāmānuja told them.

He told it the way he told everything, flatly and in order, without pausing anywhere for effect, from the fourth evening to the well. There was a silence in that street when he had finished. A cart had to go round them.

Yādava Prakāśa stood and looked at him, and what was in his face was fear and wonder in about equal parts, and then something that was harder to look at, which was shame. Whatever else the man was, he was not able to hear that account standing in a public street and go on with what he had intended. He said, in front of everybody, that the school would be honoured if Rāmānuja came back and finished what he had begun, if he was willing.

Govinda was not with them. He had left the party on the way home, before they came down into the Tamil country, and had gone to his own birthplace at Madhuramaṅgalam. At Kāśī, in Māgha, bathing in the Gaṅgā, a small stone liṅga had come down the current into his open hand, and Yādava Prakāśa had said that Gaṅgādhara himself had appeared to him, and had given him a name on the spot which means the one who brought it in his palm. So Govinda had carried the thing home, and set it up, and gone into its service, and was out of this story for a long time. He had said his sentence about walking his own road fourteen times, as he had promised to, and had said it first to the teacher, in the morning, with his face arranged.

Rāmānuja went back to the school for the second time.

It was not like the first time. He took his place on the right and the half circle was careful of him. Nobody asked him again about the forest, in the school, ever. The younger boys, who had been told something by somebody, watched him the way boys watch a man who has come back from the dead, and the seniors, several of whom had sat in the inner room with the door shut, were elaborately ordinary with him and asked after his mother.

He served the body as before. The water heated and carried, the bath, the oil warmed on the step, the scalp and the neck and the back and both legs and the feet last and slowly. He did not know which of them had been in that room. He may have known.

Because he had a thing in his head now that he had not had the first time, and there was no putting it down. He had been told, in a wood, at night, in about forty words, that the men he had lived among since he was sixteen had sat in a room and worked out how to kill him. He had not been told which of them. He knew Yādava Prakāśa had been in it, because Govinda's forty words had not left that out. And Yādava Prakāśa's remorse in the street had been real, and his welcome had been real, and the teaching he was now giving was the best teaching available in the country and he gave it generously and withheld nothing; and every third afternoon Rāmānuja stood behind him with his hands in the man's hair and his thumbs on either side of the back of the man's neck.

Neither of them ever said one word about the Vindhyas. For a year and more the two of them went on together in perfect courtesy over the top of it, and of the two, it was the old man who was frightened.

And the teaching went on, and the teaching was the problem, because nothing in it had changed at all.

They came to the Chāndogya again, to the place where it says that all this is Brahman: sarvaṃ khalv idaṃ brahma tajjalān iti. Yādava Prakāśa set it beside the line out of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka which says that there is not the least diversity here, and drew from the two of them together the conclusion he had drawn all his life. The world is Brahman. The manyness of it is therefore an appearance and not a fact. The soul that takes itself for a separate thing standing outside him is under a misunderstanding, and the misunderstanding will end, and when it ends there will not be a soul left over that has understood something.

Rāmānuja said that the sentence had a second half, and that he wanted to read the second half. Tajjalān is three words folded into one for the metre: born from that, dissolving into that, breathing in that. A thing that is born from something, and goes back into it, and lives in it in the interval, is not that thing. Each of the three is a relation, and every relation wants two terms at the ends of it.

Then he gave them the image they remembered, and it is the part of that season worth keeping. Pearls on a thread are not one pearl. The thread goes through all of them and holds them and they are held by nothing else at all, and a man who says there is one thing here and not many has told the truth about the thread and has said nothing whatever about the pearls. The Upaniṣad is not abolishing the world. It is telling a man where the world is, and whose it is, and by what it is held up.

Yādava Prakāśa said that this was the error at its root and that he would not have it in his school. Rāmānuja said that it was the text. They went at it the next day and the day after that and on and off for a season, and as obstinately as the one preached it, so obstinately did the other put it back, and there was no heat in Rāmānuja anywhere, which made it worse, and the class sat through it with their eyes down and learned nothing for two months.

It ended in the middle of a morning. Yādava Prakāśa put down what he was holding and said:

'No more can you read with me, sir. You must henceforth find your own congenial teacher.'

Rāmānuja got up, and made his prostration, which took the usual time, and walked out of the school at Tiruppuṭkuzhi and did not go back to it.

He was about twenty. He had no father. He had a mother living in two rooms that were not hers, a wife whose family were entitled to their opinions and had them, and no land, no income and no employment. He had been turned out of the first school in that country twice, and the second time was final and was known about in Kāñcī by the evening, and a man turned out twice is not placed anywhere, because the men who would place him have to live in the same town as Yādava Prakāśa and eat in the same houses and marry their daughters to the same families. There was no other teacher within two hundred miles who held the whole of the Vedānta in his head and would hand it over. And the one man in Kāñcī he would have crossed the country on his knees for had refused him three times and meant it.

His wife's people came to the house about it and were perfectly reasonable. A man of his attainments, they said, should be attached to a temple establishment or to a household of standing, and there were both to be had, and the way to get either was to go and be pleasant to two or three people whom they were prepared to name. He said he would think about it. His wife asked him, that night, what was to become of them, which was a fair question and had no answer.

He went home and told his mother.

She heard the whole of it standing up with a vessel in her hands. She did not once ask him whether he might have handled it differently and she said nothing at all against the school. What she said was this.

'Enough of your studies, son. There is Kāñcipūrṇa, who stands well with Varadarāja. Go to him. Serve him, take his advice, and do what he tells you. That will do you good.'

So she sent him back to the man who had refused him.

He went up the hill that evening at the hour when the lamps were being lit along the wall in ones and twos, and stood at the top of the steps a little way off, out of the light, and waited for the fanning to finish.

What he asked for was work. He put it in the words Lakṣmaṇa used when Rāma was going out into the forest, which were the words nearest to hand for a man with his name: only say to me, do this, and it is done.

Kāñcipūrṇa thought for a moment and said that the Lord was fond of the water from the Śalai well, the water he used to be brought from there, and that Rāmānuja should fetch it every day and serve him with it.

He did not explain the sentence and Rāmānuja did not ask him to.

So that was the employment, and it lasted for years.

The well is outside the town, a good walk out and a longer walk back with the pot full. Water for an offering cannot be drawn by a man who has not bathed and must not be set down on the ground between the well and the god, so the man carrying it does not stop, and the street knew at fifty paces what he had and let him through. Twice a day. In Āṉi the stone was too hot for a bare foot by eight; in the rains the path ran like a channel and the pot was the driest thing about him. The first year changed the shape of his shoulders and he kept that shape for the rest of a hundred and twenty years.

No payment was attached to the work, so the household lived on whatever else came in, and it was small. He taught. Four or five boys at first and then eight or nine, in the front room or under the tree in the yard: a goldsmith's two sons, a temple cook's son, a flower-seller's boy whose father wanted him to read. They brought what their mothers sent, he never named a fee, and he taught them as he had been taught at Tiruppuṭkuzhi, the text first.

It was a thin life and he was not unhappy in it. What he was, was stuck.

In the fourth year of the water he asked Kāñcipūrṇa to come and eat at his house.

He asked for nothing else this time, and did not say what he meant to do afterwards, because he had learned what came of saying it. Kāñcipūrṇa said yes to a meal; he had eaten at brahmin houses before, in the yard, on the ground, and thought nothing of it.

It was fixed for the following week. That morning Rāmānuja went up the hill to walk down with him and missed him, and went to the hut and did not find him, and by the time he got home it was done.

His wife had fed him in the yard, correctly and with no discourtesy of any kind, which is what her mother would have done and her mother's mother. Then she had told him he was wanted at the temple, which he was not, and he had got up and gone. Then she had taken a stick and pushed the leaf he had eaten from across the yard without touching it, and washed the ground with water and cow dung, and, considering herself made impure by the doing of it, had bathed.

She told him all of it herself when he came in, because there was nothing in it she saw any reason to conceal.

'Your Sāttāda guest came and has eaten and is gone. He is a low-caste man, so I have purified the place where he ate, and I have bathed.'

'Ignorant woman,' he said. 'What have you done. How you have ruined what I wanted.'

She did not know what he had wanted, because he had never told her, and said so.

He went out and stood where the leaf had been. The ground there was still wet.

Then he said this. Nobody was in the yard to hear it and it has come down anyway.

What I wished for has failed. Perhaps it is his will that I should not break the restrictions of caste, even in a case like this one. Be it so.

He did not raise it again, with his wife or Kāñcipūrṇa or anybody.

A man cannot carry water twice a day for four years without thinking, and the thinking had brought him up against six things he could not settle.

The first came from the boys. The goldsmith's elder son asked him one afternoon which of the great gods a man should go to when the thing he wanted was large. His father went to one and his mother's people to another, and the boy had noticed that his teacher only ever went up one hill. Rāmānuja could answer it out of what he felt and out of no text he could put in front of a child as settling it, and he would not teach a boy something he only felt.

The second was the old one. He had spent four years saying that the difference between the soul and the Lord is real and will not be dissolved, against a man who had spent forty saying the opposite, and had won every exchange they ever had. Then he went home and lay awake. Winning an argument in front of a class is not the same as knowing, and he was honest enough to tell the difference in the dark.

The third came out of the street and was the worst of them. A man who carried water for hire, of a community not permitted inside the wall at the top of the hill, stopped him one morning and asked, with no bitterness in it, what a man in his position was supposed to do. The Veda was shut to him. The sacrifices were shut to him. Every road the learned men described began behind a door he could not go through. He was not asking to be let in anywhere. He was asking what there was for him to do. Rāmānuja had an answer in his mouth and did not say it, because he could not have supported it.

The fourth came out of a death. A man four doors along went with a fever in Aippaci and took three days about it, raving on the last day, not knowing his sons. When it was over the family asked Rāmānuja, because he was the one in the street who had studied, whether their father had lost everything at the end for want of a thought he was not able to hold. The Gītā says to remember him at that hour, and somebody had read it to them. He sat in that house with the mat rolled against the wall and had nothing to give them.

The fifth was the next question along from the fourth. When a man who is the Lord's dies, is that the end of it, or is there a term to be served first, an ascent by stages with the thing always further on.

The sixth was the shortest. Who is going to teach me.

He went up the hill with all six and asked Kāñcipūrṇa to put them to the Lord. And then he did not tell him what they were. Nobody has ever explained that, and Kāñcipūrṇa did not ask. He said he would put them, and went up at the usual hour and took the fan off its hook.

Varadarāja spoke first. 'I think you have something to ask me.'

'Yes, most high. Rāmānuja has some doubts. He asked me to put them to you and bring him back the answers, and he has not told me what they are.'

'I know them,' said Varadarāja. 'He has six in his mind. Here are the six answers to them.'

I myself am the supreme reality.

Between me and the souls there is difference, and the difference is what is true.

The means is surrender.

One who is mine does not need to remember me at the end.

Release comes when the body falls, and not after it.

Go to Mahāpūrṇa, and take hold of his feet.

In the morning Kāñcipūrṇa found him on the road with the pot on his shoulder and gave him the six, in order, plainly, the way he gave everything, while Rāmānuja stood holding the water and unable to put it down. Then he said, 'Were these your doubts, sir?'

'They were. I prostrate to you for it, with my whole heart.'

Kāñcipūrṇa stood working it out, and from that morning treated Rāmānuja differently, in a way that did not please Rāmānuja at all.

It took the rest of that year to get through the six.

The first went in whole and at once, and closed the goldsmith's son's question and every question of that kind in that street for good.

The second closed the other thing, as a distinction and not a victory. Not two. And not one either. The name the doctrine goes by, afterwards and out of other men's mouths, is viśiṣṭādvaita: non-duality with a qualification inside it. The soul is not a second thing standing over against the Lord and arguing with him from ground of its own. It is his. It is held by him, supported by him, moved by his will, belonging to him the way a body belongs to the one whose body it is. And that is why it is real and not an error, because what is not there cannot be owned, and what is not there cannot love anybody.

The third took him longest, because of what it did to the road he had been walking on.

The means is surrender. Prapatti is the word for it, and the act of it is śaraṇāgati: a man taking himself up in both hands and putting himself down in the hands of the one who will carry him. It is not a thing a man qualifies for and not a thing he brings. It is handed over, and the one who receives it does the rest. And it is not offered in the place of loving him. Nobody was ever told to surrender instead of loving him. It is what gets a man who cannot begin as far as the beginning, and everything a man is for starts on the other side of it.

Which meant that the door was not where he had been taught the door was.

He went and found the water carrier at the corner where he worked and told him, and it took a minute. The man listened to all of it and asked him to say the second half again, and he said it again, and the man stood in the road with his yoke on his shoulders and said, 'And me.'

'And you.'

The fourth he took to the house four doors along. He told the family that their father had lost nothing, that a man who belongs to him is not put out of his hands by a fever, and that the hour of a man's death is not an examination.

The fifth he did not need for himself for another hundred years, and gave away many times in the interval.

The sixth he could do nothing about. Mahāpūrṇa was at Śrīraṅgam, two hundred miles south on the island between the two arms of the river, the first of the men of that school and not a man who could be sent for. Rāmānuja had no money for the road, no introduction, and nothing to say for himself at the other end except that he had been told to come, by somebody whose authority could not be set out in a letter.

So he went on carrying water twice a day, and the well was still cold to the hand in the early part of the morning, and he went down the worn steps into the dark of it and came up with the pot on his hip into the light.

The line came down to a boy who was not being brought up to carry it.

He was born at Vīranārāyaṇapuram, Nāthamuni's own town, the son of Īśvaramuni and the grandson of Nāthamuni, and by the time he was old enough to be taught, the four thousand songs and the discipline of practice that went with them had passed out of his family altogether and into other men's hands. That is how those things are handed on. Not down a bloodline, which any fool can be born into, but across, by choice, from a man who has satisfied himself to a man who has satisfied him. Nāthamuni had given them to Uyyakkoṇḍār, who kept a field and threshed his own grain, and Uyyakkoṇḍār had given them to Maṇakkāl Nambi, who had nothing at all. Neither of them was a relation. The boy in the family house was taught his letters, and his grammar, and his logic, in the ordinary way, by a teacher who lived in the same street, and nobody thought it necessary to tell him what his grandfather had been given under a tamarind tree.

His name was Yāmunācārya. Hardly anybody would use it after he was twelve.

He had the memory. It ran in that house the way a shape of the jaw runs in some houses, and by nine he could take a page at one hearing and hold it, and by eleven he was being brought out and shown to visitors, which his teacher permitted because a teacher's reputation is made of his students and of nothing else.

That teacher had a standing arrangement with the court, and the arrangement was a humiliation.

The king's city lay some days off, and the king kept at his court a pandit called Ākki who had beaten every man who had ever stood up to him. He had beaten them in public, in the hall, with judges, and he had gone on beating them long past the age when most men stop wanting to. Out of that record he had established a custom, and the king had let him establish it. Once a year every man who taught anything in that country sent Ākki a token of gold and a line in writing acknowledging that he was undefeated. It was not a tax. Nothing compelled it but the certainty of what would happen to a man who declined. The boy's teacher had sent it every year for as long as the boy had been alive, and made no secret of it, and did not enjoy it.

The year the boy was twelve, the demand came in and the teacher was away in the south at a funeral.

The boy read it. It was a short document and a courteous one and he understood exactly what it was. He turned it over and wrote on the back of it, in Sanskrit, in about three lines, that the man it was addressed to was from home; that the gold was not enclosed and would not be; and that if the court required the acknowledgement, a student of that house would come and see about it.

Then he sent it with the same runner who had brought it.

His teacher came back from the south nine days later and was told about it at his own gate by a neighbour who had been waiting most of the afternoon for the pleasure of telling him. He went in and sat down without washing and sent for the boy. The old man said one thing and then said nothing else for the rest of that evening. He said that he had sent that gold for eleven years in order to keep a school open, and that a school is not kept open by a child who has not yet had his first shaving. The boy said that he was sorry. He did not say that he would not do it again, and his teacher noticed that he did not, and went inside.

What came back was a summons, and it was not addressed to his teacher. It named him. The road took four days on foot and he did not go on foot; a palanquin was sent for him, which was the court's way of saying that it intended to enjoy itself. His mother put a clean cloth in the bundle and did not ask him what he had done.

He had never been carried anywhere in his life. There were four men under the poles and they changed at every stage, and they went at a trot for the first hour of each morning and then settled into the pace they meant to keep, and the boy sat in it with his knees up going through his declensions and looked out at the road when he remembered that he could. They put him up in choultries. At the third stage one of the bearers asked him, without any particular respect, what the court wanted with a child, and the boy told him the whole of it, and the man carried it a mile and then said that he would not be doing what that pandit did, for any gold.

The hall was long and dark and cool after the street, with two rows of stone pillars and a floor polished by four hundred years of feet. The king sat on a raised seat with his back to the light, so that everybody who came in was looking into it. The queen sat to his left and a little behind, behind a screen that did not conceal much, which is how it was done. There were perhaps sixty men in that hall who could follow an argument and another hundred who had come to watch faces. Ākki came in with two men carrying his books behind him in cloth bundles, sat down on a mat, arranged himself, and looked at what had been brought for him.

They had kept the hall waiting an hour, which is a courtesy to the senior man. In that hour the boy sat on the floor at the side with the court going on around him: petitions being heard, a dispute about a grant of land to a temple in the south, two brothers who wanted a ruling about a well. He listened to all of it. He was asked long afterwards whether he had been frightened, and he said that he had been very frightened until the land case, and that after the land case he was not, because the men arguing it were not as good as his teacher.

He saw a boy in a washed cotton cloth, with no books at all, and he laughed, and so did a good part of the hall.

The queen leaned forward and said something to her husband. No account preserves what it was, only what he said back, which was that the child would be flat on the floor inside a quarter of an hour and that she should not distress herself.

She said that he would not.

The king was amused and asked her what she would care to stake on it, and she said the thing that turned the day: she said, stake half your kingdom. If the boy wins, give it to him. The king was a man who kept a wager in public because keeping it in public was the whole point of making it, and he thought the risk was nothing, and he said before the hall that it was agreed.

Ākki offered the boy the choice of side, which is the courtesy the stronger man extends. He could take up a position and let it be attacked, or he could attack.

The boy said that if he took up a position the pandit would pull it apart, because the pandit had been pulling positions apart since before his mother was born; and if the pandit took one up, he himself would need three days with a text he had not read to get at it properly, and there were not three days. So he proposed something else. He would state three things. He would prove none of them. He undertook only that Ākki would not be able to refute any of the three, and that if Ākki refuted so much as one of them, the boy lost, the gold went, and the acknowledgement went with it.

Ākki said that this was not a debate. The boy said it was a debate with the middle taken out of it, and that he had no objection to the pandit taking a whole day over any one of the three.

The judges conferred and allowed it. The hall settled.

The boy stated the first. Your mother is not a barren woman.

He stated the second. This king is a righteous king.

He stated the third. The queen is a chaste woman.

Then he sat down on the floor with his hands in his lap and waited.

It took the hall about the length of a breath to get the first one, and the sound it made getting it was not a laugh. To refute the statement Ākki would have to establish that his mother was barren; and a barren woman is a woman who has borne no child; and the man arguing it was standing in the hall as her son. There was no way in. He could not even begin without unmaking himself.

The second went into the room more slowly and then all at once. To refute it he would have to stand in the king's own hall, in front of the king, and demonstrate that the king was not righteous, and the demonstration would have to be thorough, and it would have to be public, and he would have to live in that city afterwards.

The third nobody needed explained.

Ākki sat for a long time. He was an old man and he had a great deal of dignity and he used all of it. He did not bluster and he did not appeal to the judges. He turned the three over in front of everybody, once, and then said what there was to say, which was that he had been beaten by a boy who had not opened a book to do it, and that he did not propose to insult his mother, his king or his queen in order to go on being called undefeated.

Then he got up and had his books carried out.

Nobody wrote down what became of him. He walked out of that hall and out of the account, and the boy he had lost to was thirteen in the spring.

The queen laughed out loud behind her screen, which a queen may do when she has just won half a kingdom off her husband, and what she called out was not a title and not a formula. It was the ordinary Tamil of a woman delighted with someone: he has come to rule us. Āḷavandār. It went round the hall that afternoon and it went out of the hall and up the roads with the men who had been in it, and within a year there was nobody in the Tamil country who called him anything else. The Sanskrit name survived in documents. His own tradition has used the Tamil for a thousand years.

The king paid. He did it properly, in the hall, on a fixed day, with the officers of the districts standing by and the boundaries read out: land, and the revenue off it, and the men who collected the revenue, and a seat, and the right to sit on it.

Before he was thirteen he had a seal cut with his own name on it, and it was very nearly the last document of his life that used the name at all.

A kingdom is not a state of mind. It is a great deal of work, and most of the work is water.

Half a kingdom meant tanks, and the tanks meant sluices and silt and men to open the sluices in the right order in the right week, and quarrels between two villages about which of them the water reached first, and a third village that had been quietly cutting a channel for two generations. It meant the assessment, which was argued about every year. It meant an establishment: accountants, a captain with a body of men, horses, a stable, elephants because the seat came with elephants, a household, and the hundred and fifty people who lived off a household of that size. He learned it. He was good at it in the way that a very quick mind is good at anything you set in front of it, and he was fair, and the districts under him did well, and he married, and his sons were born, and the years went by like that.

It took about twenty of them for him to stop remembering what he had been born into.

Nothing dramatic happened. He did not renounce the songs or argue against them. He simply had a day that began before light with the accounts and ended after dark with a dispute about a boundary stone, and in the middle of it the hour when a man might sit down with a text kept being needed for something else, and the something else was always legitimate. Then one year there was no such hour in the day at all, and he did not notice the year it went.

Maṇakkāl Nambi noticed. He was at Śrīraṅgam, and he was old, and he had been carrying Nāthamuni's charge for a long time with nobody to put it into. What Uyyakkoṇḍār had told him was exact: the grandson is the one, go and get the grandson. So he walked south to the district where the grandson now sat and presented himself at the gate.

He was a small elderly man in one cloth with nothing in his hands. The men at the gate were courteous and did not let him in. There was a procedure, and the procedure involved a written application through a clerk, and the clerk's day was full for a fortnight, and the old man had no letter, no introduction and no business that could be stated in a form the clerk recognised. He came back the next day and the day after that. He never raised his voice at any of them, and none of them ever remembered his face.

So he stopped going to the gate and went round to the kitchen.

He found the cook, who was a Vaiṣṇava, and asked him one question, which was what the master of the house liked to eat. Not what he ate. What he liked. The cook thought about it and said that there was a green his master was fond of, the bitter climber they call tuduvalai, which grows wild in the hedges and in the thorn along the field bunds; that it took a long time to gather any quantity of it because you get a handful from each plant; that the kitchen sent for it when somebody remembered; and that when it came, cooked with pulse and pepper the way his master's mother had made it, he would eat two helpings and say nothing, which from him was a good deal.

The cook was a heavy, slow man of sixty who had come with the seat and had fed the man who held it before. He did not ask the old man at his door who he was, or where he slept, or what he wanted, then or at any time in the six months that followed. He said long afterwards that he had taken it for a vow of some kind, and that men who are doing a vow do not care to be questioned about it, and that in any case the greens came in clean and came in early, which was more than he could say of anything else that reached that kitchen.

Maṇakkāl Nambi went out into the thorn and gathered greens.

He did it every day for six months. He was up before the light because the leaves are better before the sun is on them, and he worked the hedges along three or four miles of bunds, and his hands and forearms were cut to pieces for the first fortnight and then hardened, and he brought the bundle to the kitchen door at the same hour every morning and put it into the cook's hands and went away again without giving his name. The cook cooked it. Āḷavandār ate it. Twice a day for half a year a dish of the green he liked best came to him, in the middle of the accounts and the boundary stones, and he ate it and did not ask about it, because a man with a hundred and fifty people in his establishment does not ask where the greens come from.

Then, one day, the old man did not come.

The kitchen served what it had. The second day was the same, and the third. On the third day Āḷavandār put his hand out over the leaf and stopped, and asked where the tuduvalai was.

The cook said that he did not know; that an old man had been bringing it in every morning since the cold weather; that he had not come for three days; that he had never said who he was or where he came from, and had refused food every time it was offered.

Āḷavandār put his hand down and said, find him.

They found him on the fourth day in a mandapa at the edge of the town, and he came in without any reluctance, and they took him up through the rooms, and he stood in front of the man he had come all that way to get.

Āḷavandār asked him why he had been doing it.

The old man said that he had been sent, a long time ago, by a man who was sent by another man; that there was something in his keeping which belonged to this house and had been held in trust for its grandson; and that he had been trying to hand it over since Kārttikai but could not get past the clerk. He said the greens were not a gift. They were the only door he could find.

Then he said one more thing and it was the thing that did it. He said that he was old and that he could not hold what he was holding much longer, and that if Āḷavandār did not take it now there would shortly be nobody in the world who had it.

The teaching began the next morning in a side room of that house with the door shut, and the first thing the old man put into his hands was the Gītā. It went on for a long while. It went on in the middle of the district's work and then, gradually, the district's work was moved to make room for it, and then the district's work was being done by other men, and then Āḷavandār was not doing it at all.

He gave the land back. Not in one gesture, which would have been a scene, but over a season, correctly, with the accounts closed and the officers paid and the land settled where it would do least harm, which is the only honourable way to put down something that other people are eating from.

The one thing he could not hand over was the seal, because a seal with a man's own name cut into it is no use to anybody else. He used it a last time, on the document that gave the rest away, and after that nobody ever saw it again. Then he took the ochre cloth and went north to Śrīraṅgam and did not own anything again.

He was at Śrīraṅgam the rest of his life, which was long.

What he became there is not easy to name in one word, because he held no office in the temple. He taught. Men came from the Telugu country and from the far south and from Kāñcī and sat in front of him, and what they got from him was the four thousand songs with their meanings, and the discipline of practice, and a way of arguing that had not existed before him. He put the school on its feet. Before him it was a treasure passed hand to hand by four men; after him it was a body of doctrine with a defence, and it had positions on the questions the other schools were actually asking, and men trained to hold them.

He wrote, and the writing tells you what he thought was short.

He wrote for Raṅganātha, and that poem went out into the country and men learned it who would never read anything else of his. He wrote four verses to Śrī, only four, and put into them the thing his whole school turns on, which is that the way to the Lord runs through her and not around her. He wrote a small book on the Gītā that takes a text of seven hundred verses and gets it into thirty-two, and nobody who has worked through both thinks the small one is a summary. He wrote a defence, a hard, cold, formal defence, of the authority of the Pāñcarātra scriptures, because there were learned men in that century who held that the books the Vaiṣṇavas worshipped by were not scripture at all and therefore that the worship was not worship. That book is a lawyer's book. It won.

And he began a book of demonstrations, three of them, on the self, and on God, and on knowing, which was to be the foundation under everything else. He worked at it for years. He did not finish it.

His own disciples were the whole of what he had instead of a kingdom, and he knew their names and their weaknesses and their handwriting. Mahāpūrṇa, who was born on the island and had never wanted to leave it. Goṣṭhīpūrṇa, down in the dry country to the south, who held the mantra and its meaning and would not give it away. Mālādhara, who had the Tamil songs by heart with their commentary and taught them slowly and got angry if a man went fast. Tiruvaraṅgapperumāḷ Araiyar, who sang them in the temple in the evening and acted them with his hands and his feet. Śrīśailapūrṇa, away north on the hill at Tirumalai, carrying water and telling the Rāmāyaṇa to whoever would sit down. And out at Kāñcī, in the Lord's own shrine, an unlettered man of no standing at all who stood at the god's shoulder with a fan and was answered when he spoke.

Any one of them could have taken the school on. Not one of them could write the book that was missing.

The leaves of the unfinished one were tied in a bundle and kept on a shelf in the room where he taught, and they were still on that shelf, still tied, when they carried him out of it.

Two men out of Kāñcī came to Śrīraṅgam on pilgrimage in the hot weather, and after they had done what they came for, somebody brought them to the room where the old man taught, because he always wanted news.

One of them was in the flower trade and kept the accounts for two of the gardens along the channel, a talkative man of forty with a bad leg. The other was older and quieter, of the Lord's street, and could recite the whole four thousand, and had come south because his son had promised for years to bring him and had died before he could do it.

He asked them for news of Kāñcī. He meant the town, the shrine, the water in the tanks, who had died. What he got was an hour and a half on a single subject, because the two of them had been sitting in that town for four years with their mouths open.

There was a school out at Tiruppuṭkuzhi, they said, kept by Yādava Prakāśa, who was the best teacher in that country and carried the single staff and taught that the difference between a soul and God is finally not there. And in that school there was a student. They gave his name. They said the disputes between the two of them had been going on for years and had gone into the streets of Kāñcī, and that the whole quarrel came down to one thing: the teacher held out for a God with no qualities in him at all, and the student held out for a God full of them. They told him about the morning the student was oiling his teacher's head and a hot tear fell on the man's thigh and scorched it, and why. They told him what the student had made of the lotus in that passage, and they said it well enough that the old man made them say it twice. They told him about the possessed girl. They told him about the pilgrimage to the Ganges and what had been arranged for the student at Maṇikarṇikā, and about the forest, and the hunter, and the well, and the morning he walked back into Kāñcī alive.

'And then he went back to him,' the flower man said. 'That is the part nobody in our street can get past. The man arranges to have him held under the water at Maṇikarṇikā, and the boy walks home across three countries, and inside a season he is sitting in that school again with his slate on his knees.'

'He had nowhere else to sit,' said the older one.

'He had nowhere else to sit,' the flower man agreed, 'and he went back, and he is out there still, six days a week, and carries the man's staff for him on the road. Our street gives it a year. He has nothing of his own. He reads with two or three boys in a yard in the evenings and takes no fee from them, and nobody has given him anything.'

Āḷavandār heard all of it without interrupting, which was not his habit. Then he made them go through the lotus dispute twice, and a third time, until he had the grammar of it in the order the young man had put it.

What he said at the end of it was about the world and not about the boy. He said that bad men are as common as the sparks that come off a furnace, and that when you find a good one standing in the middle of the fire he is a lotus growing in it.

Then he said he was going to Kāñcī.

He was very old by then and had not travelled for years, and the people around him put up all the arguments that people put up. He went. They went with him, because the alternative was letting him go alone. He went by way of Tirukkōvilūr, and stopped there, and took two days over it, and then went on east and north into the flat country.

The shrine at Tirukkōvilūr is small and stands where two rivers come together, and the reason a Vaiṣṇava stops there is a black night three hundred years before, when the first three of the poets, who had never met each other, came separately out of the rain into one narrow doorway; and the space was room for one man standing, and then for two standing, and then for three pressed against each other in the dark, and then a fourth came in and pressed against them and they could not see who it was. What the three of them said about that night afterwards is the beginning of the whole Tamil canon. Āḷavandār had the verses of the oldest of the three by heart, and he said them out loud sitting on the step of that doorway with the water going by outside.

Kāñcipūrṇa met them a mile short of the town.

He had heard, and had done what he always did, which was to tell everybody. There were three or four hundred people on that road: the Lord's street entire, the weavers, the flower women who had shut their baskets to come, boys up on the bunds. Kāñcipūrṇa had brought out the Śaṭhakōpa from the shrine, and the water, and the god's food in a covered vessel, and he put them into the old man's hands in the road with the dust going up around both of them.

Āḷavandār held on to his wrist and looked at him and said, 'Gajendradāsa. Are you steady at the fan?'

'By your grace, sir. He is accepting what little I do.'

They took him up the hill in the middle of the afternoon when the stone was still too hot to stand on barefoot for long, and he went in to Varadarāja, and stayed a long time, and came out, and was put in a room in the outer court to lie down. He was there four days. Men came to him all four days, because word had gone out that he was on the hill, and by the second day there were learned men from streets that had no business with Vaiṣṇavas at all standing in the court to see what he would say.

A logician came over from the Jain settlement across the river to the south-west on the second afternoon with two of his students, asked him three questions, got three answers, and went away without saying whether he was satisfied, which in that town was a compliment. A grammarian came and tried him on a passage and was answered inside a minute and stayed the rest of the day. The room they had put him in was in the outer court with a window on the tank side, and the heat came out of the stone all night, and men sat in the doorway of it until very late because they could hear him breathing in there and did not want to go home.

On the third morning Yādava Prakāśa came up the hill.

He had not come to see Āḷavandār. He came on the day he always came, in the way he always came, with about twenty of his students behind him in two lines, the single staff going down on the stone at every second step. Āḷavandār was sitting in the pillared hall by the tank when they came through, and he watched them cross the court, and he turned to the men beside him and asked which of those was Rāmānuja.

He had a good view of it. That hall stands up two steps and looks down the length of the court, and a party coming in at the west gate has forty yards of open stone to cross in the light before it reaches any shade. He heard the staff before he saw them. It went down at every second step and the sound came back off the wall.

They pointed him out. He was not at the front, because a student does not walk at the front. They said, that one in the middle, the tall one, the one with the shoulders. They said the shoulders were like Rāma's own.

Āḷavandār looked at him for as long as it took the line to cross the court, and drank him in with his eyes the way a thirsty man takes water, and sent his prayers after him as the last of them went out of sight round the corner of the wall.

He did not speak to him. He did not send anybody after him. He did not ask Kāñcipūrṇa to bring him.

When they asked him about it afterwards, he said that the young man was in the middle of a course of reading with a teacher, and that you do not put your hand between a teacher and his student, whatever you think of the teacher. He said that the reading would end. He said he would wait until it did.

Then he had himself taken up to the shrine, and he stood in front of Varadarāja and asked for one thing, and he asked for it as a lawyer asks, out of the god's own name. Your name means the one who gives, he said. It is said of you that by your favour the deaf man hears and the lame man runs and the dumb man speaks and the blind man sees and the barren woman bears a child. I have come to you. Give me this. Let that Rāmānuja be the man who carries the lamp of our faith.

That night a runner came up from the south with a letter, and whatever was in it could not wait; there was something at Śrīraṅgam that needed him and needed him at once. They were on the road before the middle of the next morning. He had no time to go back down into the town, no time to send for the young man, and no time even to sit with Kāñcipūrṇa and tell him what he had decided and what he wanted done about it.

He never got another chance.

They carried him the last part of the way because the heat had gone into him on that road and he could not walk it. At the ferry below the temple they lifted him out and set him down on the sand while the boat came across, and he sat there in the middle of the afternoon with the water going past, looking at the towers on the island, which he had been looking at for sixty years.

The old man came back off that journey with the heat in him and did not get up again properly.

He had been strong for a very long time and he went down the way strong old men go down, which is all at once and then slowly. He could teach sitting up in the morning. By the third month he was being carried the fifty yards to the river. His disciples took it in turns and did not discuss it, and the room where he taught stayed full because he wanted it full, and men who had walked in from three hundred miles away sat in that room and got their lesson from a man propped against a bolster with his knees drawn up.

Somewhere in there he sent for Mahāpūrṇa and told him to go north and fetch the young man at Kāñcī.

The instruction, as it has come down, was four sentences long and had no explanation attached to it. The reading is over, he said. Yādava Prakāśa has put him out for the second time and will not take him back. Go up and get him and bring him to me, and take the poem with you, because he will not listen to a stranger in a street but he will listen to that. And do not come back without him.

Mahāpūrṇa had been born on the island, inside the walls, in a house four streets from the sanctum. His father had served in the temple and his father's father had served in the temple. He was a big man, heavy through the shoulders and heavier as he aged, with hands that had done work; he walked everywhere and would not be carried; and he had a way of speaking that annoyed quick men, because he took his time and never took it back. He had come to Āḷavandār young and had never gone anywhere else. Whatever he had been before that, he had put down.

His house was four streets from the sanctum, two rooms and a yard with a well in it and a tulasī in a raised pot, and he had lived in it all his life and died out of it. He had a wife, who was a temple family's daughter like himself, and a daughter, and no sons that the accounts mention. He ate once in the middle of the day and took milk at night and did not eat at all on the days a Vaiṣṇava does not. He got up at three. He did the round of the temple every morning before it was light, the whole circuit, at the same pace, and there were men in that town who set their households by the sound of him going past.

The word the tradition uses about him is dependence, and it does not mean weakness. It means that he had stopped having a position of his own. A man who is dependent in that way does not give his own opinion of a question; he gives what his teacher held about it, and then, if pressed, what he himself has understood of what his teacher held, and marks the difference between the two clearly so that you cannot mistake one for the other. It went a long way in him. Years afterwards, when his own daughter came to him about a difficulty in her husband's house, he heard her out and then told her to take it to Rāmānuja, because he considered that he and everything he had belonged to his own disciple by then and that it was not his to settle.

There is one story about him that tells you the whole of him, and it happened long after this, when Rāmānuja was at Śrīraṅgam and running it.

A man named Māraṇēri Nambi died. He was a Śrīvaiṣṇava of long standing, one of Āḷavandār's own, and he was of the fourth community, a Śūdra. When he died, Mahāpūrṇa performed his funeral rites. Not attended them. Performed them: carried, washed, laid out, lit the fire, did the whole office with his own hands as a son does for a father or a disciple for a teacher.

Some of the Śrīvaiṣṇavas of that quarter would not have it, and they went to Rāmānuja with it, and Rāmānuja called for his teacher and asked him what he had done and why.

There were three of them who came and they were not disreputable men. One of them had given land to the temple. They did not say that Māraṇēri Nambi had been a bad Vaiṣṇava; they said the opposite, and one of them had sat beside him at recitation for years and said so. What they said was that the man had had relations of his own community who were the proper people to do what had to be done, and that the rites Mahāpūrṇa had performed were not the rites of that community but the rites of his own, said over a body that had no title to them; and that if this was now to be allowed, they would like to be told what else was going to be allowed, and by whom, and on what authority, because they had children.

Rāmānuja had read for four years out at Tiruppuṭkuzhi. The stone in the temple there shows Rāma performing the funeral rites of a bird, with Lakṣmaṇa standing behind him holding nothing.

Mahāpūrṇa did not argue about qualification and did not plead an exception. He answered out of the Tamil. He named two of the decades of Nammāzhvār's thousand, two runs of ten verses that belong together, the one that begins with the light that never goes out and the one about service to the tall Lord, in which the poet says over and over, and says it as the ground of everything else he says, that he is the servant of the Lord's servants, and that he does not enquire what they were born. Those are the verses, Mahāpūrṇa said. That man was a servant of the Lord's servants and I am another, and I did for him what one does.

Rāmānuja said that there were rules about who may touch a body and who may light the fire.

Mahāpūrṇa said that the rules were the roar of the ocean. A man who lives by the sea, he said, hears it the first week and after that he does not hear it at all, and he goes on with his work inside the sound of it; and the sound has nothing to say to him.

That is what he said and he did not enlarge on it, and the tradition wrote it down and kept it, including the part where its founder was the one who had to be told.

He came north in the hot weather with a bundle, a stick, and a set of palm leaves wrapped in cloth against his chest.

The road runs north out of the river country through tank and scrub and black cotton soil, and at that season it is white with dust and the tanks are down to cracked mud with the cattle standing in what is left. He did it in stages, village to village, the way a Vaiṣṇava did it: into the temple at each place, stay in the mandapa, take what was given, out before the sun. He was not young. It took him a fortnight and some days.

At the fourth or fifth village a boy of about eleven attached himself to the party of one and carried the bundle for two days without being asked and without being paid, and turned back when the country stopped being country he knew. At one place there was nothing at all, because the village had had a death and no house was cooking, and he sat that day out under a tamarind and drank water and went on in the evening. He was three days crossing a stretch where the tanks had gone and the wells were being drawn by a rope with twelve men on it, and he took his turn on the rope both mornings he was there, which is the kind of thing that got told about him afterwards.

What he carried in the cloth was his teacher's poem to Raṅganātha, the one that had gone all over the country by then, and his instructions were to use it.

He came up the hill at Kāñcī on an evening in the month when the first rain is expected and does not come. The lamps had been lit along the walls. The evening service was going, Sanskrit on one side and Tamil on the other, and there was the usual crowd in the court, two hundred people sitting on the stone with the day's heat still coming out of it.

Mahāpūrṇa went in, and stood in front of Varadarāja, who is not his Lord and not the one the poem was written for, and recited it aloud from the beginning.

It takes a while. He had a voice that carried without effort and he did not perform it; he said it the way his teacher had said it to him, which was plainly. The court went quiet in sections as people worked out that what they were hearing was not from the four thousand and not from anything they knew. The Tamil singers stopped and let him finish.

Rāmānuja was at the back of that court with an empty water pot under his arm.

He had come up with the evening water and stayed, which he did most days. He heard the whole of it from the third or fourth verse onward, standing, and then he pushed through the crowd to the front, which he did not normally do, and waited until the old man had come down off the step, and asked him whose that was.

'Yāmunācārya's,' said Mahāpūrṇa. 'Āḷavandār. He made it at Śrīraṅgam.'

'I want to see him.'

'That is what I have walked from Śrīraṅgam to say to you.'

They sat down against the wall of the outer court with the lamps going and the crowd emptying past them, and they were still there when the doors were shut for the night and had to be let out by the man with the keys. Mahāpūrṇa told him who he was and who had sent him and what for. Rāmānuja told him about the six questions and the six answers and the sixth one in particular, which he had been carrying about for years with nothing to do about it, and Mahāpūrṇa heard the sixth answer out with no expression on his face at all and then said that they would deal with that later and that the immediate thing was the road.

'How long will it take us?'

'A fortnight, at my pace. Less at yours.'

'Then we should go in the morning.'

'We should go in the morning,' said Mahāpūrṇa.

They went in the morning, and there were five or six of them on the road, and it took thirteen days.

Rāmānuja walked badly on that journey in the way a man walks badly when he is pulling at the front of a group that is going as fast as it can. He had been in Kāñcī for the whole of his adult life. Everything he had was there: his mother, his wife, his students, his well, his hill and his one friend. He had never been south. What he knew about the man at the other end he knew from two conversations with a fan-bearer and from whatever Mahāpūrṇa told him between one village and the next, and it had become, in the space of a fortnight, the only thing he wanted.

They did the thirteen days on foot with a start before light and a long stop through the middle of the day, and the two of them talked the whole of both ends of it. Mahāpūrṇa gave him the four thousand in pieces, out loud, walking, ten verses at a time, and answered what he was asked and did not mind being asked the same thing twice. Rāmānuja gave him the four years at Tiruppuṭkuzhi, the whole of it, the disputes in order, which he had never told to anybody from beginning to end before, and Mahāpūrṇa heard it out over about four days without once saying that the other man had been a fool. They ate what the temples gave them and twice slept in a field because they had misjudged the distance between villages, and at the crossings the students went into the water first and came back for the old man.

They came down out of the dry country on the thirteenth day and the land changed under them, the way it does: red and thorn, and then paddy, and then the smell of the river before they could see it.

Four miles short of the ferry they met men coming north who had the news.

Mahāpūrṇa asked them twice to be sure of it, and they were sure of it, and they had been at the burning. Then he turned round to the young man behind him.

Rāmānuja did not say anything for a while. The account of what Mahāpūrṇa said to him there on the road is one sentence, and it is a hard sentence, and he offered nothing softer with it. Obstacles fasten themselves on to good men, he said. When a man turns bad, the obstacles run off somewhere and leave him alone.

They went on and crossed and came into Śrīraṅgam in the afternoon.

The body had not been taken out yet. It was in the room where he had taught, laid on the ground on a plantain leaf with the head to the south, washed, marked in the twelve places with the white clay, garlanded, and the room was full. It had been full since the night before. Men had come in from the villages along both rivers and were standing in the street outside in the sun waiting for their turn to come in, and the place had the particular silence of a house with a great many people in it and nobody talking.

They had been arguing all morning about the hour and had settled it. The wood had been brought and stacked outside at the end of the lane and there was a man sitting with it. Somebody had thought to send for curds and there was a pot of it by the door that nobody had touched. In the corner behind the head a lamp had been put on the floor and it was the only light in the room besides the doorway, because the shutters had been closed against the afternoon.

They made a way for Mahāpūrṇa. He went in and knelt down and put his head on the floor beside his teacher's feet and stayed there.

Rāmānuja stood in the doorway.

Nobody in that room knew who he was. There were sixty or seventy men in it and the only one who had ever seen his face was the one on the floor by the feet. Two of them asked him, quietly, as he came through, and he told them his name and where he was from, and it meant nothing to either of them and they let him past because of the way he was walking.

What he said, when he came forward, was not addressed to anybody. He said that he had at least been allowed to see this much. Then he went down on the floor and looked at the face for a long time, drinking it with his eyes the way a man drinks who has walked a long way, and then he looked at the rest of him, up and down, the hands, the feet, the way you look at a thing you are going to have to remember without help for the rest of your life.

Which is how he came to see the hand.

The right hand lay open on the chest with the palm up, and three of its five fingers were folded in.

He looked at it. Then he turned round on his knees to the room behind him and asked them about it.

They came and bent over and looked, and they looked at each other, and one of them said it for all of them. 'We never marked that before, sir. None of us.'

Rāmānuja asked them whether their teacher had ever told them of anything in particular that he wanted done. Anything he had left unfinished. Anything he had said he wished for.

They said no. Not directly, not to any one of them, not as an instruction.

Then an older man said that indirectly they all knew it, because he had said it often, in the room, in the years when he still walked, the way a man says a thing that is always in him. There were three things he used to say he wished to see done before the world was finished with him.

And they gave him the three.

The first was that the debt to the two sages should be paid. Parāśara and Vyāsa; the one who had given the school its whole account of what the world is and where it comes from and what a soul is doing in it, and the one who had put the argument of the Upaniṣads into the five hundred and fifty lines. He used to say that the men who lived off those two had never properly thanked them, and that gratitude which is only felt is not gratitude.

The second was that a tribute of love should be paid to Nammāzhvār. The thousand verses were sung in every Vaiṣṇava street in the country and had been for two hundred years, and there was no book that went through them and said what they meant, line by line, the way a scripture is gone through. He wanted one.

The third was the one they had all been waiting for. The Brahma Sūtras must be commented on, all of them, from the first line to the last, so that the sense actually in them comes out: that the world is real, and that souls are real, and that the difference between a soul and the Lord is not a mistake that clears up. The great commentary in the field said otherwise. There had been an old commentary on the other side once, by Bodhāyana, and nobody had seen it.

Rāmānuja got up off the floor and stood at the head of the body with his hands joined and said the three back, out loud, one at a time, so that the room heard each of them separately.

Then he made the promise, and he made it three times conditional, which nobody who was there ever forgot, because a man of twenty-four in a room of his elders could have been forgiven for making it plain.

He said: holy sage, if this is your mind, I will carry it out. Provided I have the health for it. Provided your grace is on me. Provided he grants what I ask him.

The three bent fingers opened.

The room made the sound a room makes. Mahāpūrṇa, who was still on the floor on the other side of the body, got up onto his knees to see. Goṣṭhīpūrṇa had come in from the dry country the previous evening and was standing against the wall by the door; he did not move at all. Mālādhara was near the window with the Tamil verses he had been reciting still in his hand. Tiruvaraṅgapperumāḷ Araiyar was in the doorway behind Rāmānuja, having come straight from the temple, still in the cloth he sang in.

It was the older man who had given him the three wishes who spoke first, and he spoke for the room, and what he said was not a compliment but an act.

'Do not doubt that his grace is on you, sir. The power and the force of him will come into you. You are the one fit to come after him in this work, and we anoint you for it here, all of us, in front of him.'

Nobody argued with him. There were men in that room with thirty years of service behind them and sons of their own in the school, and any one of them might have said that a young brahmin off the northern road who had been in the building for an hour was a strange choice; and not one voice is recorded as having been raised against it, then or in the days after. They report that the whole assembly said it together, and that Goṣṭhīpūrṇa, who said nothing at all, put his hand out and touched him on the shoulder as he went past to the door.

Rāmānuja bent down and took the feet of the dead man in both hands and pressed them to his eyes and then to his chest.

He would not stay for the burial. He went down to the river at first light the next morning and bathed, which is the last service anybody can do for the dead, and came up the bank, and went and found Mahāpūrṇa and took his leave of him, and started north before the middle of the morning.

He did not go into the temple.

He had come two hundred miles in thirteen days to an island whose whole reason for existing is that the Lord lies down on it in a dark room under a gold roof, and he had been on that island for a day and a night and had not once walked the four hundred yards up the street to look at him.

Nobody asked him about it at the time. He never explained it afterwards, then or at any point in the next hundred years, and the accounts that record it record it exactly like that, without a word of gloss, which is itself the mark of men who knew him.

The road north took longer going back.

He had come down it in thirteen days in a hurry with five men and an old man setting the pace. He went up it alone, or as near alone as made no difference, and it took him the better part of three weeks, and he did not walk it fast and he did not walk it slowly, and the men who fed him at the temples along the way afterwards remembered a tall young brahmin who ate what he was given and said the right things and was not there at all.

At one of those places the priest was an old man who had heard the news off the road two days before him and worked out on the third evening who his guest must be, and sat down opposite him after the meal and asked him whether it was true about the fingers. Rāmānuja said that it was true. The old priest asked him what he had promised, and Rāmānuja told him the three, in order, and the old man heard them out and then said that the third one was a book and that books take twenty years. Rāmānuja said that he knew that. The priest said that he had not meant it as an objection.

Twice he turned round. Both times he stood in the road for a while and then went on north.

What he had in his head, all the way up that road, was a hand.

At Kāñcī the town told him nothing had happened, because nothing had. The lime tree had come down in a wind. His senior student had gone off to a place near Tirukkōvilūr to be a temple accountant. His wife had been ill in Āvaṇi and was better. His mother had a cough that came in the cold weather and went in Māci.

He went up the hill the day he got in, at the hour he had always gone, and Kāñcipūrṇa saw him come across the court and stopped what he was doing and came down to him.

Kāñcipūrṇa had known for nine days. News goes up a road faster than a man does.

He did not say that he was sorry, which would have been a thing to say. He looked at him and said, 'You got there.'

'I do not know what I got to.'

'I got there a day late.'

'You got there,' said Kāñcipūrṇa again, and left it, and then asked him what the hand had looked like, because that part had come up the road too and he wanted it from somebody who had been in the room.

So he was told. They sat down on the step below the shrine with the afternoon going on around them and Rāmānuja went through the whole of it: the men on the road with the news, and the room, and the lamp behind the head, and the palm turned up, and the three fingers, and which three. Kāñcipūrṇa listened to all of it the way he listened to everything, with his head slightly down and no expression of surprise anywhere about him, and at the end of it he asked one question, which was whether the hand had been warm.

'No.'

'No,' said Kāñcipūrṇa. 'Well.' And he got up and went in, because it was the hour.

The water started again the next morning.

The well was where it had always been, out past the last houses, with the worn steps going down into the dark of it and the cold coming up off the water, and the pot was the same pot. He bathed at the tank, put on the wet cloth, walked out, filled it, brought it up, and took it up the hill without setting it down, and did it again in the afternoon.

Then he did that for seven years.

The sources do not skip those years and there is no reason to skip them, but there is also not very much in them, which is the point. A promise had been made over a dead man in front of forty witnesses, and then the man who made it went home and carried water.

Nobody sent for him. That is the plain fact and no source gives a reason for it. At Śrīraṅgam they had a school that had just lost its head and had to be got back on its feet, and a temple, and quarrels about who now decided things; Mahāpūrṇa had a house and a wife and a daughter and a dead teacher's papers to put in order, and he was not a man who moved quickly. Up at Kāñcī there was a household to feed. Those are reasons of the kind that fill a year, and then another, and they are not reasons at all when you set them beside what had been promised. He did not go south and nobody came north, and it went on being that way while the students he had taught grew up and were married and brought their own sons round to him.

He was not idle. He read everything he could put his hand on, which in Kāñcī was a great deal. He went on teaching, and the class got bigger and then smaller and then bigger. He argued, in the hall by the tank on the appointed days, with men who came up from the south to argue, and he beat most of them, and his name began to be a thing said in other towns: there is a young man at Kāñcī. Twice a year the men of the Lord's street put on a festival and he did the work of it, the lists and the stores and the lamps, because he was the one who did not mind doing it.

The rains failed in the second of those years and the tanks went empty in Paṅkuni and the Śalai well dropped so far that a man had to go down onto the fourth step from the bottom and lie on his front to reach the water, and the cattle came in off the dry fields into the streets, and the price of rice doubled and stayed doubled, and the temple fed six hundred people a day out of its stores until the stores were gone. He carried the water through all of it. In the fourth year his mother stopped going up the hill because of her knees and he carried her account of the day up for her instead.

In the fifth year a man came up from a town below Madurai specifically to take him on, in the hall, on a fixed day, in front of judges, on the question of whether a quality can be said to exist in the way the thing it belongs to exists. It went from the morning until they had to send for lamps. The judges gave it to Rāmānuja on the second of the three heads and would not give him the other two, which was correct, and he said so afterwards to his own students in a way they remembered, because he took the loss apart for them line by line and would not let them console him about it. The man from below Madurai stayed four days and they parted well and wrote to each other for years.

In the sixth year the eldest of the boys he had been teaching since the beginning, the goldsmith's first son, died of a fever in nine days at the age of twenty-two, and Rāmānuja was in that house every one of the nine and did the recitation at the end of it, and the goldsmith would not be comforted and said in front of everybody that he had given his son to a teacher who had taught him to want things there was no way of getting. Rāmānuja did not answer him. He went back the next day and the day after that, and went on going back for a year, and the goldsmith's second son was brought to him in the following Cittirai by the goldsmith himself, who said nothing about it.

There was a wedding in the seventh year in a house of that street, and he was asked to conduct the recitation because the family wanted the best man they could get and could not pay the best man they could get. He did it, all of it, three days, and was given a cloth and refused the money; and an uncle of the bride, who had come from Śrīperumbudūr and had known his father, stood in the yard afterwards and looked at him and said, to nobody in particular, that Keśava Somayāji had performed the soma sacrifice and that his son was carrying water for a living, and went away without waiting for anyone to reply to it.

He did not go south, and he did not write.

He was thirty-one before anything moved at all, and what moved it was Kāñcipūrṇa, who had been watching him for seven years.

Kāñcipūrṇa put it to him at the top of the hill on an ordinary morning, in two sentences.

He said that the sixth answer had been an instruction and not a suggestion, and that a man who had been carrying it about for seven years had had long enough.

Rāmānuja said that he had not been sent for.

Kāñcipūrṇa said that he had been sent for on a road outside Śrīraṅgam by a man who walked a fortnight to do it, and that being sent for twice was not a thing anybody was owed. Then he took the fan off its hook and went in, which was his way of ending a conversation.

Rāmānuja went south within the week, with two of the students and a letter he did not need.

At the other end of the same road, in the same week, the Vaiṣṇavas of Śrīraṅgam had come to a decision they had been circling for seven years. They went in a body to Mahāpūrṇa and asked him to find them a head.

What he said back is preserved and it is short. Have you forgotten the signs that were given us, he said. Did Āḷavandār not point that man out to us himself when he was at Kāñcī? Do you not remember the fingers of a dead hand opening when he spoke? Rāmānuja is the one who comes after him. Our ācārya was not mistaken in what he chose.

They said, well said, and then they said the rest of it: go yourself, sir, and get him, and prepare him for the office, and bring him here.

Mahāpūrṇa agreed to it in one sentence. He took leave of Raṅganātha, and he took his wife, because a man of his age going north for an indefinite stay does not leave his household behind him, and he took his daughter, who was still a girl and was called Attuzhāy, which means the one who belongs to the tulasī.

So the two of them came up and down the same road towards each other and neither had any way of knowing it.

They met at Madhurāntakam.

It is a small town on the road, a long day's walk south of Kāñcī, and it is famous for one thing, which is the tank. It is an enormous tank. The bund runs for miles and is wide enough at the top for two carts to pass, and the water behind it in a good year goes out flat to the horizon with the palmyras standing in it at the far edge, and the villages under the bund live entirely off what comes through the sluices. At the head of it there is a temple, and the Lord of that temple is Rāma, standing, facing east, eight feet of him in black stone, with Sītā on one side and Lakṣmaṇa on the other; and because the people under the bund have always believed that it is he who holds the water back for them, they do not call him Rāma. They call him the one who guards the tank.

Mahāpūrṇa had stopped there for the day. He was sitting in the mandapa with his wife and his daughter and his bundle when a party came in off the north road, and the tall one at the front of it stopped dead in the doorway.

Neither of them had known. They both said so afterwards and both said it as a plain fact and not as anything else.

Years before, in a street in Kāñcī, Rāmānuja had been told that there was a right man for him somewhere and that the man telling him was not the one. He had not been told anything further about it, because the old man had not known anything further.

Rāmānuja went down on the stone floor of that mandapa and took hold of the old man's feet and said what he had come to say, which was that he wanted the five sacraments, the pañca-saṃskāra, and wanted them from him.

Mahāpūrṇa said that it was a very good thing and that there was no need to do it in a wayside temple by a tank. Kāñcī was one day north. Hastigiri was there, and the Lord stood on it, and there were proper arrangements and an assembly of people who ought to be present. Let us go up together, he said, and do it there, where it can be done as it should be done.

'No, sir. Not a moment.'

He gave his reason and it was the same reason both times. Is the example of Yāmunācārya not still fresh, he said. He breathed his last just as I was coming to see him. That is a warning about wasting time and I have had it once. Our lives here are of the length of lightning.

Mahāpūrṇa looked at him for a while.

'What a hurry you are in,' he said. 'Very well. It shall be as you want it.'

There is a tree of the sort they call magizham a little outside the temple wall, which has a small hard flower that keeps its smell for days after it has dried, and they went and stood under it, and the old man put the young one on his right hand and did the whole of it there, in the middle of the afternoon, with a tank on one side and a road on the other, and five people watching.

There are five marks and every one of them is a thing done to a man's body or put into his mouth.

The first is the stamping. The discus on the right shoulder and the conch on the left, pressed on hot, with the words that go with each of them; and they are put on for the same reason that a married woman puts on her bangles, which is not decoration and is not private. It says whose he is, to anybody who looks.

The second is the clay. The two white lines up the forehead with the red between them, and the same in eleven other places on the body, and it is not a caste mark and never was: the two white lines are the feet of the Lord set on a man's head, and the red line down the middle of them is the lady who stands between and speaks for him.

The third is the name. A man gets a new one when he is made over, and it is a servant's name, and he answers to it afterwards in the house of his teacher. Mahāpūrṇa thought for a moment and gave him the name Rāmānuja.

Rāmānuja told him, because it seemed right to tell him, what his mother's brother had given him in his first fortnight and why: call him Lakṣmaṇa, because he will be to God what Lakṣmaṇa was to Rāma. The Sanskrit the old man had just handed him means the one born after Rāma, the one who came second, the younger brother, and it is the same naming in another language.

Mahāpūrṇa heard that out and said, 'Then you have been called it twice,' and went on with the rite.

The fourth is the mantra, and the one he was given is the Dvaya, the pair, which the tradition calls the jewel among mantras. He put him on his right, called his own teacher's feet to mind, leaned over and spoke it into his right ear.

It is two lines and it is not long. I take refuge at the two feet of Nārāyaṇa, who is with Śrī. To Nārāyaṇa, who is with Śrī, my homage, and nothing of this is mine.

The first line is the act and the second is what the act leaves behind it. She is in both lines, and in the Sanskrit she is the first word of each of them, and that is not an ornament of the phrasing: a man does not go to him around her. He goes by way of her, because she is the one who turns his face, and what a man is doing when he says that first line is putting himself into a pair of hands and taking his own hands off. It does not make him good and it does not finish anything. It gets him to the start of a road he was not standing at the beginning of, and everything he exists for is on the other side of that.

What he was not given, and did not ask for, was the other one, the eight syllables and what they mean. That was not Mahāpūrṇa's to give. It was in the dry country to the south, in the keeping of a man named Goṣṭhīpūrṇa.

The fifth mark is the plainest and it is the one that takes the rest of a life. It is the daily worship: the form of it, the order of it, what is said and in what sequence and with what in the hands, so that a man who has been made over has something to do at four in the morning for the next ninety years.

When it was finished the old man laid the charge on him.

Take yourself, he said, from this day, as the man appointed to come after Yāmunācārya. He did not simply die. He died putting his own feet on your head, the way Rāma put his sandals on Bharata's head before he went into the forest, and everything that was his is on you now. As for me, understand what I am in this. He is your ācārya and I am not. I am the hand that passed it over.

They walked back round the tank in the late afternoon with the light coming off the water, and Rāmānuja asked the question he had been holding since the mandapa.

He said that this had not been done as it is done. No assembly. No shrine. No preparation of any kind, in a field, under a tree, because he had refused to wait a day. Was what he had just been given the same thing he would have been given on the hill at Kāñcī, or was it a lesser article.

Mahāpūrṇa said that a thing is a lesser article when a lesser thing has been put into it. He said that what had been put into it was the whole of what he had, and that he had nothing left over to give anybody on any hill; and that as to the assembly, there had been the tank, and the road, and the tree, and the man who guards the tank standing eight feet high thirty yards off, facing east, and he had been facing them.

Then he told him to ask about something worth asking about.

So Rāmānuja asked him to explain the three: the measure, the thing measured, and the one who measures.

The measure, said Mahāpūrṇa, is the revelation, and the whole of the revelation is concentrated in the two lines you were given an hour ago. The thing measured is the Lord himself, who is mother and father both. And the one who measures is the man who knows him and, knowing him, makes other men know him.

'And who is that,' said Rāmānuja.

'That is you,' said Mahāpūrṇa.

They went up to Kāñcī the next day and Kāñcipūrṇa met them on the road as he had met Āḷavandār, with the town behind him.

He took them straight up the hill without letting them go home first, and stood them in front of Varadarāja and asked him to show himself to the visitors, which was the kind of request Kāñcipūrṇa made in an ordinary voice and expected to be granted; and the two of them came down off that hill an hour later not saying much to each other.

Then Rāmānuja took his teacher home and put him upstairs.

The house was in a lane off the Lord's street, small, with a yard at the back and a room above reached by an outside stair, and he had taken it four years earlier when the class outgrew the two rooms his mother's people had given them. He had the upper room swept and whitewashed and the good mats brought up and a lamp put in the niche, and he moved his teacher and his teacher's wife and his teacher's daughter into it and took the lower rooms for his own household, which was his mother, his wife and himself.

For six months that was the arrangement, and for most of six months it worked.

The work of those months was Tamil.

It surprised everyone, including him. He was a man who could take a page of Sanskrit at one hearing, who had sat four years in the best school in that country and taken it apart, and what his teacher put in front of him was the songs: the four thousand, the ones the flower women sang, the ones a boy learns without being taught. Mahāpūrṇa took them slowly. He would give four lines in a morning and spend the morning on them, and where Rāmānuja went fast he stopped him, and where Rāmānuja said he had understood he asked him to say it back and then showed him what he had not understood. The two of them sat in the yard under the awning from six until the middle of the morning, and again after the afternoon sleep, and the neighbours got used to the sound of an old man's voice going on one note and stopping, and a younger voice repeating, and stopping.

Early on, the old man gave him a decade in which somebody stops a heron on the bank and asks it to carry a message, and asked him who was speaking. Rāmānuja said that the poet was speaking. Mahāpūrṇa said that the poet was a man of the Tamil country with a wife and a house, and that the voice in that verse was a girl's, and that he should go back to the head of the decade and count how many people were in it and which of them said what. It took the rest of the morning and he did not get all of it. When he had most of it, Mahāpūrṇa told him why the songs are taught out of a man's mouth slowly instead of handed over in a bundle of leaves: there is nothing in the grammar to mark who is talking, and a man who does not know who is talking does not know what is being said, and the knowledge of who is talking is carried in men and nowhere else, and dies with the last man who has it.

Underneath the songs he was given the other thing, the part that is not written down and is handed over by mouth: what the words of the mantra do when they are set against each other, which of them is the ground and which is the act, and what a man is committing when he says them. That went into him in pieces over months, in the yard, in the dark before the lamps were lit, with nobody else in the house awake.

The house had ten people's work in it and two women to do it.

Mahāpūrṇa's wife was a Śrīraṅgam woman of a temple family, the daughter and the wife and the mother of men who served, and she had kept house inside the walls of the greatest temple in the south, where the rules are not opinions but the conditions of the work. Rāmānuja's wife had been brought up in a strict Kāñcī house and had married into a stricter one, the house of a man who had performed the soma sacrifice, and she was exact by nature as well as by training and had never in her life been found wanting in it.

Neither of them was careless and neither of them was lax and that was the trouble.

Two houses of that kind, each impeccable by its own reckoning, have different reckonings. Where a vessel may be set down. Whether a vessel set down there may be picked up again or must be washed. Which water is drawing water and which water is used water. How long after a meal a floor is a floor again. How far a cloth that has been worn to the well is from a cloth that has been worn to the temple. None of it is written anywhere in a form that settles it. All of it is absolutely settled in the house you were raised in, and a woman who has done it one way for twenty-five years does not experience the other way as an alternative. She experiences it as a mess being made in her kitchen.

They were correct with each other for about four months. Attuzhāy, who was eleven, went up and down the outside stair all day and belonged to both kitchens and noticed nothing.

She was a thin, forward, sure-footed child who had been raised inside temple walls and had never in her life been more than a street from a sanctum, and she took to Kāñcī immediately and was up the hill three times in the first week with whoever would take her. She learned the lane. She knew which house had the good tamarind tree and which had the dog. She sat at the top of the outside stair in the evenings with her chin on her knees listening to the class in the yard below, and when Rāmānuja got something wrong she could be heard from above going tch, which he permitted, and which his students did not.

The well was at the end of the lane and nine houses used it. It had a low parapet and a groove worn in the coping where the rope came over, and the women went there twice a day and it was where the business of that lane was done.

The morning it happened, Rāmānuja was down at the tank at his ablutions.

The two of them came to the well at the same time and there was the usual small business about who was drawing, and one of them said something about the other's pot, and the other one answered, and inside a minute they were standing on either side of the parapet with a rope between them arguing about which of the two vessels was fit to go into that water. Each of them knew the answer. The answers were different. Every woman at that well stopped what she was doing. They did not shriek at each other and neither of them said anything that could be repeated afterwards as a disgrace, which is partly why the accounts have kept the episode: it was a quarrel about purity between two exact women, in a lane, in front of the neighbours, and it was unanswerable.

There were five other women at that well and one of them was the wife of a man who taught in the Lord's street, and every one of the five went home and told the story before she had put her pot down, and each of them told it in the shape her own house held. By the middle of the morning there were two accounts of it in that lane and they did not agree about who had spoken first, and the flower women coming back at noon had a third. That is the last thing the accounts say about either woman together and it is enough to be going on with: two households of blameless people found out in one minute that they could not both be right, in public, over a rope.

Mahāpūrṇa was at the upper window with the leaves in his hand and he watched the whole of it.

He came down before his wife got back and started putting things into the bundle. He did not send anybody to the tank. When she came up the stair with the pot on her hip he told her, in a voice that carried further than he intended, exactly what he thought of what he had just watched and exactly whose fault he held it to be, and it was hers. Then he had her pack, and he called the girl in off the stair, and the three of them went out of that lane before noon with the bundles on their heads and took the south road.

They left no message. There was nobody in the house to leave it with.

Rāmānuja came back up from the tank in the middle of the day with his cloth still wet, and went round to the outside stair as he did every day at that hour, and went up, and the room was empty.

The mats were rolled against the wall. The lamp in the niche had been put out and the wick trimmed and the oil poured back into the jar, which is what a careful man does to a lamp he does not expect to light again. He stood there for a while. Then he came down and went out into the lane and asked, and the lane told him, because the lane had been at the well.

The account says that he went white.

He did not go back into the house. He did not speak to his wife that day at all. He went and stood in the yard where the awning was and where the two of them had been sitting at six that morning, and the mat was still there with the dent in it, and he stayed standing in the yard until it got dark.

He had married her when he was sixteen and had lived in the same house as her ever since, which was fifteen years, and what he did for the next two days was go back through them.

She came from a family much like his own. Learned, exact, not rich, with the particular hardness that people have when their standing rests on observance rather than on money, because observance is the one kind of standing that can be lost in an afternoon by a single mistake in front of the right witness. She had been brought up by a mother who had been brought up the same way. She had been taught to cook, to keep, to clean, to know the calendar, to know what was done on which day and which pot was used for what, and she had been taught it the way a boy is taught recitation, by correction, until it was not knowledge any more but the shape of her hands.

Her father's house was in a street of houses like it, where the men recited in the morning and the women fed them and the standing of the whole street depended on nobody's slipping. She had grown up watching what happened to a family that slipped. There had been one, two doors along, where a thing was done wrongly at a funeral and half the street stopped eating in that house, and it took eleven years and a good marriage to mend it, and she had been nine when it started and twenty when it finished, and it was the most instructive thing that happened in her childhood.

She had been handed into a house at fourteen. Four months later her father-in-law was dead and the house was gone, and she walked to Kāñcī behind her mother-in-law and lived in two rooms off somebody else's courtyard for years.

She walked the twenty miles in a day with a bundle on her head, at fifteen, in Vaikāsi, behind a widow in white who had been shaved three weeks before, and she went into a courtyard she had never seen belonging to people who were kind and who counted the days. Nobody asked her what she thought about any of it. Nobody would have, and it would not have occurred to her to expect it.

Whatever else she was, she was not idle and she was not a fool. She ran that household through the seven-year stretch when there was no money at all, on what the students' mothers sent and what came in at festivals, and there was never a day when the three of them did not eat. The floor of that house was swept twice a day for fifteen years. The vessels were scoured with ash and river sand and set upside down on the shelf in the order they were used in. She was up before her husband and she was the last one lying down.

And she was married to a man who gave things away.

That is the plain shape of it and it does not require anybody to be a villain. He carried water twice a day and was paid nothing for it. He taught eight boys and named no fee and took what their mothers sent. He brought people into the house. He brought in travellers, and men of no standing at all, and once a man of a community that could not be let past the doorway without the doorway having to be dealt with afterwards, and he did not warn her, and he did not think to. He was becoming known. Men came from other towns to argue with him and went away impressed, and being impressed put nothing in the pot; and she stood in the cook-room at the end of the month and did the arithmetic that he never once in his life did, and the arithmetic came out the way it always came out.

The arithmetic was not complicated. What came in was what the students' mothers sent, which was rice and oil and greens and, at the three seasons, a coin; what the temple gave out on the days it gave out; and what her own people sent twice a year, which they sent to her and not to him and which she was careful he did not see arriving. Out of that: three people, and his mother's medicines in the cold weather, and the lamp oil, and the rent, and the cloth, and whatever came through the door on his shoulder. She kept a fortnight ahead. A woman in that street who did not keep a fortnight ahead was a woman whose husband was going to be told something at the well.

None of that is written down anywhere. What is written down is one morning.

Two Śrīvaiṣṇavas came to the house, travellers, on the road somewhere, and they were brought in and made welcome, and they did him the service that is done for a man whom you honour, which is that they sat him down and oiled his head and his shoulders and his arms for him with their own hands.

They had come up from the south, from a town on the river below Śrīraṅgam, and they had heard about him on the road at two places and had turned aside to see him. They had been walking eleven days. They were not beggars and they did not present themselves as beggars; they were men of some standing at home who happened to be four hundred miles from it and had run out of everything two days before. It takes a while. It is not a small courtesy; it is a service a disciple does. When it was finished they asked whether there was any food in the house, because there had been none on the road.

She said there was not so much as a grain.

He heard her say it and he did not believe her, and he did not hide that he did not believe her. He got up with the oil still on him and went into the cook-room and took the lids off the vessels one after another, and it was there. Not a great deal. It was there.

He came out holding it.

Not the vessel. He had the food itself in his hand, in his fingers, having lifted the lid and put his hand in, which is not a thing a man of that house did to a vessel in his own cook-room. He stood in the doorway between the two rooms with the oil still on his forehead and his shoulders and the two travellers behind him in the yard with the oil on their hands.

'Are you capable of this? Hungry men are standing at your door and you tell them a lie. Is there a meaner thing in the world than turning away food from people who have come in need of it, and then putting a lie on top of the meanness? Oh, the sin of it.'

Then she cooked it, and they were fed, in the yard, off leaves, sitting down, with water brought to them first for their hands; and it was done properly, because she did not know how to do it any other way. The two of them ate what was put in front of them and got up and washed and took their leave and were on the road again before the worst of the heat. One of them was still alive a very long time afterwards, at Śrīraṅgam, an old man by then in a community that had grown up around the man he had gone four hundred miles to look at, and he was asked about that morning more than once, and what he would say about it was that the rice had been good and that he wished they had gone on past the town.

Nothing records that she answered.

They do not record what the food was for, either. There is nothing in any of them about the next day, or the day after that, or the festival at the end of the week, or the guest she may have been expecting, or the boy who came for the rent. They do not say that she was hoarding and they do not say that she was providing. They say that there was food in the house, that she said there was none, and that he found it, and what he said when he found it, and then they go on to something else.

It is worth being exact about what they do give her, because it is very little. They give her three faults, and one of those is a quarrel at a well that another woman was equally party to, and the man who saw it blamed the other woman and took her home and told her so. They give her one sentence of direct speech in her whole life, and it is an accurate statement of what every house in her street would have done in her position. They do not give her father a name. They do not give her a face, an age, an illness, a friend, or a single word about what she wanted.

They do not say whether she was ill that season, or whether her mother was. They do not say how old she was when she came to Kāñcī, or what she was called at home, or whether there was anyone in that street she could sit with. They give fifteen years of a woman's life in three incidents, and two of those incidents took place in a doorway and at a well.

And the men who wrote her down like that were writing to explain why a great man left his wife.

On the third day he sent for one of his students and asked him how far it was to her father's town, and whether there was a cart going that way.

The arrangements took two days and he made them himself, which was unlike him, because he was a man who was bad at arrangements and knew it.

There was a cart going up that road at the end of the week with a load of oil jars and the carter was a man the household had used before.

The carter wanted three days' notice and got two, and put up the usual objection about the load and the road and then agreed to it for what he was offered, which was less than he asked and more than he expected. He was told only that a woman of the house was going to her father's and would be got down at the far end. He did not ask and was not told anything else, and the story he had by the time he came back a fortnight later he had picked up on the road like everybody else. There was a cousin of his mother's, an elderly and unhurried man with no opinions, who was willing to go the whole way and hand her over at the door and come back, and to be away eight days doing it.

That man was the only person outside the house who was told anything before it happened. He heard it sitting on the step with his stick between his knees, and he did not say that it was a pity, and he did not say that it was right. He asked two questions. He asked whether her father was alive, and was told yes. He asked whether her father had been written to, and was told no, and then he said that a letter had better go a day ahead of the cart, because a house that is given no warning behaves badly for the first hour and then cannot take it back. The letter went the next morning. There was the question of what she took with her, which was settled by giving her everything she had brought and a good deal that she had not: the vessels she had been using, her own box, the cloths, and the grain in the house except for what would see the others to the end of the month.

She packed it herself and it took her a day and a half, and she did it the way she did everything, which was thoroughly. The vessels went in scoured. The grain went into two of the sacks she had been keeping empty on the shelf against the next harvest. She washed and dried and folded what was hers and left on the line what was his mother's, and she went round the cook-room and put every lid back on the vessel it belonged to and set them in the order they were used in, which was of no use to anybody after that morning, because nobody left in that house knew the order.

And there was money.

He counted it out on the floor in front of her, and it was all of it. Whatever had come in over those years and been put away in the small brass box, whatever was owed to him and had been paid, whatever he had. He did not keep back a share for himself or for his mother, and he did not leave himself the price of the road south, which he would need within the month and which he had to be given afterwards by somebody else.

His mother watched him do it and said nothing while he was doing it. She had been in that house through the whole of the last fifteen years, in the same two rooms and then the same four, and there is no record of one word of hers about her daughter-in-law in all that time, for or against, at any point, which in a household of that kind is itself a fact and is probably the largest one there is about her.

Then he told her.

He named the three things. He named the leaf and what she had done to the ground after Kāñcipūrṇa ate off it. He named the two men at the door and the food in the vessel and the lie. He named the well, and the woman she had quarrelled with at it, and whose wife that woman was. He put them in that order, first to last, and he said after them that she was not fit to go on living with him; that she was a woman of the world with her eyes shut to anything else; that she should take the money, which was her share and was owed to her; and that it was right that she should go back to the place she had come from.

That is all he is recorded as saying to her, and it is his own account of his reasons, given by him, out loud, in his own house.

She had two days after that in which to be in the house with it. What happened in those two days is not recorded either. The lane knew by the evening of the first one, because the lane always knew, and the lane's verdict divided the way lanes divide: the older women held that a woman who quarrels with her husband's teacher's wife at a public well has gone past what a house can carry, and the younger ones held that it was very hard, and both parties went on sending across what they always sent across, and two of them came in on the last evening and sat with her for an hour and then went home and said nothing about it to anybody.

She went on the Thursday morning.

The cart came up the lane at the hour carts come, before it was properly light, and the carter put the jars forward to make a place behind them, and the box went up, and the bundles. Kāntimatī came out and stood at the door in her white and said something to her that is not recorded, and put her hand on her head. The women of the lane were at their own doors with their lamps still going and watched the whole thing and did not come out, because there is no form for coming out.

He stood in the doorway of his own house while it was loaded and did not help and was not asked to. There is no record that the two of them said anything to each other at the cart. There is no record that they did not.

She got up into the cart and sat with her back to the jars.

The old cousin walked at the bullock's head to the end of the lane and then got up himself, and the cart turned out of the lane on to the main road.

The cousin came back on the ninth day, walking, with the empty cloth and the stick. He reported to Kāntimatī and not to her son, and what he reported was that the cart had got in on the fourth evening, that she had been handed over at the door as arranged, and that her father had come out into the road to the cart himself and had been civil to everybody. That was the whole of his report and he never added to it. He was asked about it in that lane for years, by people who had a right to ask and by people who had none, and he had a way of looking at the questioner and going on with what he had been doing, and he took whatever else he had seen at that door out of the world with him.

After that there is nothing. Not where she went after her father's house, not whether she married again, which a woman in her position might, not whether there were children of that marriage at any point and what became of them, not when she died or where. Not one account in the whole tradition, in any language, in nine hundred years, follows the cart to the end of that road.

And on the other side of it there is a silence of exactly the same size.

He lived another eighty-nine years. He talked to thousands of people and a very great deal of what he said to them was written down, including a fair amount that a man would rather not have had recorded. He spoke about his father and about his mother. He spoke about his uncle constantly. He spoke about Kāñcipūrṇa, who was not a brahmin, in terms that scandalised people who heard him do it, and about Mahāpūrṇa, and about the teacher who had tried to have him drowned, and about a wrestler, and about a washerman. There is no record anywhere of his ever mentioning his wife again.

Not to complain of her. Not to excuse her. Not to ask after her. Nothing.

The accounts do not record what he felt about it, then or later, because nobody knew and he did not say. What they record is what he did on the Thursday, which was that when the cart had gone up the lane and turned, he went back into the house and found his mother sitting on the floor of the cook-room among the vessels that were left, and he stood there a moment, and then he went out to the tank and bathed and put on the wet cloth and walked out past the last houses to the Śalai well, at the usual hour, and filled the pot, and took it up the hill.

For about a fortnight after the cart went he did nothing anybody could see.

He carried the water. He took the class. He sat in the yard in the evening with the students and answered what they asked him. His mother fed him and he ate. The lane, which had watched the whole business from its own doorways and had opinions, waited to see whether he would be sent another wife, since a man of thirty-one with a name and no household is a problem that families in a street like that consider it their business to solve, and two of them had already begun considering it.

One of the two sent a man round on the ninth or tenth evening. He was a careful, decent, elderly person of that street who had done this office before and did it well, and he sat in the yard and talked about the weather and the tanks and a dispute over a boundary, and worked his way round, and put it. There was a girl in a good family at Tiruvallikkēṇi. Nothing needed to be settled now. A year was a reasonable interval and nobody would think anything of it, and a man who was going to be somebody could not run a house on his mother's knees.

Rāmānuja heard him out to the end without interrupting and thanked him properly and said that he would think about it, and then sat in the yard after he had gone until the lamp went out.

What he was doing inside that fortnight comes out in one sentence, and it is the only sentence of it that is recorded, and he seems to have said it to himself.

This world is a hateful thing. I must be finished with having anything to do with it.

There is a verse about the tank on that hill that men of that town knew. It says: bathe in the pool they call Ananta Saras, that lies in the shadow of the temple's own dome, having settled it with yourself that there is nothing in this world that gives a man real happiness; and your sins will go off you; and take Varada for your refuge; and you will come to the country where he is.

It is a set of instructions and he followed them in order, the way his father would have followed a set of instructions.

He went up in the dark, before the doors, when the only people about were the flower women coming in with the wet baskets and the men going up to the kitchen. The tank sits below the hill, wide and stepped on all four sides, with a channel feeding it at one corner, and when the light comes the shadow of the dome over the sanctum falls across the water and lies on it until the sun is well up. He went down the steps on the west side into water that had the night's cold still in it, and stood in it with the dome's shadow across his chest, and settled with himself, in words, that there was nothing in the world that would ever give him anything.

Then he did, in that water, before anyone was up, the thing a man does before he puts on the cloth, which is his own funeral. The offerings for it are made to himself by himself, as for a man who has died. Afterwards he has no fire, no household, no property, no debts, no rites to keep for his ancestors and no ancestors, and no name.

The hair goes first and it goes at the water. There was a man of the barber community who sat at the northern steps of that tank from before light every day of his working life and shaved pilgrims for whatever they put in his hand, and he shaved him there in the dark with the water at his ankles, the whole head and the face, leaving the tuft, and was paid the last small coin in the house. He had done sannyāsins before, four or five in thirty years, and he knew what he was shaving and he did it slowly and said nothing while he was doing it, and afterwards he gathered the hair into a leaf and carried it down the steps and put it into the water himself.

He came up the steps and put on a wet cloth and went up the hill and sat down outside the door of the sanctum to wait for it to be opened.

There was a difficulty, and it was not small, and the tradition has never made any attempt to smooth it over.

A man does not give himself the order. Sannyāsa is received. The rule in that matter is exact and it has two halves: a man takes it either from a wandering ascetic who holds it already, or he takes it from the Lord directly. That is the whole of the permitted list. And the ascetic who holds it already must be present, and must be willing, and must know the man.

There was nobody. Mahāpūrṇa had gone south a month before and was three weeks' walking away and was not an ascetic in any case but a householder with a wife and a daughter and a house on the island. Kāñcipūrṇa had refused for years to stand as his teacher in anything, on a ground he never varied and never argued about, which was his own birth. There was no third man he would have accepted.

So he used the other half of the list.

The doors were opened at four with the conch, and the lamps were brought, and the waking was sung, and the god was bathed and dressed and the first food offered and taken away; and when the crowd had thinned in the middle of the morning Rāmānuja went in and stood in front of Varadarāja and asked him out loud, in front of whoever was in there, to make him a sannyāsin.

The prayer is preserved and it is worth having in his own order, because he does not begin with himself.

Giver of boons, he said. Keeper-off of death. Giver of the country of the gods. I have seen as much as I need to see of the kinds of delusion there are in this world: fathers and mothers, wives and sons, property and goods and the rest of it. I am certain now that those things stand in a man's way, in the way of you, and of yours, and of the teachers who bring a man to you. I do not value them. I value you, and your feet, and nothing else at all. Take the one away from me and give me the other. Put on me the whole of the ascetic's insignia.

Then he named the things he was asking for, item by item, the way a man asks for a set of tools.

The triple staff. The thread. The under-cloth, and the loin-cloth, and the upper cloth. And the hoop, the ring of rope with the cloth in it that hangs from the shoulder, which is what a man who is not allowed to own a vessel or store a grain of rice carries his one meal home in.

They were given to him, and they were given to him by hand, because in a temple everything is given by hand. The man whose office it is to hand things over is the archaka, and it was his hands the articles came out of; and the words that came with them came through Kāñcipūrṇa, who was standing where he always stood, at the god's shoulder, with the fan.

What he said, and he said it plainly and in Tamil and did not embroider it in the telling afterwards, was this.

'My own Rāmānuja. You shall put on the ascetic's cloth and serve me.'

The cloth is called kāṣāya, and it is the commonest thing in the whole account and the one people see first at fifty yards. It is ordinary cotton that has been boiled in water with red earth in it and dried in the sun, and when it is new it is stiff and the colour is uneven and it comes off on everything it touches, on the hands, on the stone, on the rim of a vessel, for about a month. After that it fades to the colour it keeps, which is nearer to the dust of that country than to anything else.

The staves were bamboo, three of them, cut to the height of his eyebrows and bound together at the top and at the middle with cloth so that they carried as one stick and struck the ground as one stick. The article is called the tridaṇḍa, and it is not a convenience.

They had been cut and dried and trimmed and bound by a man attached to the temple whose work that was, out of a clump behind the garden wall on the north side, and he had made them a fortnight earlier, before anybody had asked him for them, because word runs round a temple faster than it runs round a street and the men who work in one are seldom surprised by anything. He put them into the archaka's hands himself and then stood at the back with his arms folded and watched them given away.

He was given a place to live, as well: a small maṭha in the town, near the hill, with a room and a yard, which the temple had in its gift.

And he was given the name they gave a man with that cloth on: Rāmānuja Muni, Rāmānuja the silent one. He had been called Rāmānuja by his teacher under a tree by a tank seven months before, and Iḷaiyāzhvār by his uncle before he had teeth, and Lakṣmaṇa in the same breath, and it had all along been the same name in three languages; and now the Lord of that hill had given it to him a fourth time, in his own voice, out of an archaka's hands, with a word added on the end that meant he was to stop talking about himself.

He put the things on in the side room where such things are put on, and came out into the court with the staff in his right hand and the hoop on his shoulder and his head bare and cold. The first time he set the staff down on the stone of that court it made a sound he had never made before, three lengths of bamboo coming down together, and he stopped and stood still and looked at the floor, and then went on towards the gate.

He came out of the enclosure at about eleven in the morning and there were four of them waiting for him in the street.

Word had gone round the hill inside the hour and down into the Lord's street inside two, and somebody had run to the lane, and somebody had run further than that. The goldsmith's younger son was there, who was twenty by then and married. A man from the class was there. Kūreśa had come in from Kūram, three miles west, as soon as the news reached him, and was standing against the wall of the mandapa with his arms folded, having come too fast to bring anything with him. And sitting on the step of that mandapa, with his feet in the dust and a bundle beside him, was his sister's son.

His name was Daśarathi, and the Tamil country would call him Mudaliāṇḍān before he was done. He was a compact, square, practical young man with no nerves, from a village outside Kāñcī, and he had been in and out of that house since he could walk, and he had heard about the cart, and about the fortnight, and had guessed the rest, and had walked in that morning and sat down to wait because he could not think of anything more useful to do.

He got up when he saw the staves and went down on the stones of the street in front of his uncle.

He had a reason of his own and he gave it later, more than once, to people who asked. He said that he had been coming to that house since he was four years old and had never once been sent away from it, and that he had worked out on the road that morning that if his uncle now belonged to the Lord and to nobody else, then the way to go on being let into the house was to belong to him. He said he had not thought it out any further than that and had not needed to.

What he asked for was the five marks, and the other three asked for them with him, and they did not ask for them quietly or in a corner. That is how it happened, in the street outside the west gate, in front of the flower sellers, and it is the reason the tradition dates his teaching from the day he put on the cloth and not from any later day: he had disciples before he had had his midday meal.

He gave them to them within the week. He did it properly and in a shrine and with an assembly, because he had found out what it was like to be given them in a field.

The four of them were not the last. By the end of the cold weather there were nine, and one of them was a man of fifty who had been arguing against him in the hall by the tank for three years and had lost the last four times running and had finally come round the back way one evening and asked to be taken.

Then he learned how to live on nothing.

A man in that cloth does not cook, does not keep, does not carry money, and does not eat twice. He goes out once in the day with the hoop over his shoulder into a fixed number of houses, in order, and stands at each door and says nothing except the formula, and takes what is put in, and when he has enough he stops and comes back, and what he has is what there is. Seven houses was the usual count. He did the round himself, in the streets where he had been a boy and where every one of those doors knew him, and the first week of it was very hard and not for the reason he expected. It was not the hunger. It was the faces of women who had fed him as a student at their own tables and who now had to put a handful into a cloth at the doorstep of their own house and not ask him in.

The fifth house on his round was the goldsmith's. The first morning he stood at that door the goldsmith's wife put in what she had ready and then stood there holding the empty ladle and could not make herself go back inside, and he said the formula and turned and went on to the sixth house, and neither of them ever mentioned it, and she was at that door with it ready every morning he was in Kāñcī after that.

He went on carrying the water. Nothing in the rule of that cloth forbade it and he had not asked anybody's opinion.

Word came from the south in the cold weather.

It came twice. Kāñcipūrṇa had it first, off a party of pilgrims from the island, and he brought it down the hill himself in the middle of the day, which he never did: they had held a meeting at Śrīraṅgam, they had settled it, and they wanted him. Not for a visit. To come and take the place at the head of them, which had been standing empty for eight years.

The formal embassy came up the road eleven days later and it was one man, and he was a considerable one.

Tiruvaraṅgapperumāḷ Araiyar held the office of singer at the Śrīraṅgam temple, and he was Āḷavandār's own son. What he did, and what his son would do after him, was to stand in front of Raṅganātha at the evening service and sing the Tamil of the poets and act it as he sang: the meaning carried in the hands and the turn of the head and the feet, so that a man who could not follow the words could follow what was happening. He had been one of Āḷavandār's five. He had been standing in the doorway when the fingers opened.

He was a small, dark, light-footed man in his fifties with a voice that was nothing much in a room and enormous in a temple, and he had the rolling walk of a man who has spent his life on stone floors. He arrived in the middle of the day, went up the hill without washing off the road, went straight in and looked at Varadarāja for about a minute, and then came out and found Rāmānuja and looked at him for rather longer.

He came into Kāñcī, went up the hill, and found out what everybody in that town already knew, which was that Varadarāja was not going to let Rāmānuja go.

The tradition is quite matter-of-fact about this. The man had been given to that hill by name, out loud, through an archaka, and told to serve there, and the water came up from the Śalai well twice a day and had done for years, and the god of that place was not disposed to hand him over to another temple because another temple had held a meeting. Kāñcipūrṇa put the request and got no answer. The men of the Lord's street put the request, and they put it badly, because in their hearts they did not want it granted either.

So the Araiyar did the only thing he was any good at.

He went up at the evening service and stood in front of Varadarāja, who is not his Lord, on a hill he had never sung on, in front of a crowd of two or three hundred people who had never seen anything of the kind, and he sang. He sang for a long time. He took the Tamil of the poets and went through it the way he went through it at home, with his hands and his feet, and the men who ought to have been doing the recitation stopped and let him, and the people in the court came in off the steps and sat down on the stone and stayed sitting on it after the lamps had been lit.

When he had finished he asked for what he had come for.

He was given it. No account says how, and none reports it as an argument won. They report the singing at length and the granting in half a line, and then they move on to the arrangements for the journey, which took nine days.

There was a good deal to arrange, because he was not going alone and he was not coming back. The class had to be handed over, and it was, to the man of fifty who had come round the back way. The maṭha had to be given up, and the temple took it back and put another man in it. There was the question of who would carry what, and who would come as far as the first stage and who all the way, and the question of the road itself, which at that season was safe as far as the river and then was a matter of going in company. And there was money, and he had none, and it was found by the Lord's street in an evening without anybody being asked twice.

Rāmānuja went round and took his leave of the town. He went to the house in the lane, where his mother was, and she was going to her own people, and it had been settled between them and there was nothing left in it to settle. He went to the hall by the tank where he had argued on the appointed days and said what men say there. He went out past the last houses to the Śalai well in the dark of the last morning, and drew the water, and carried it up, and gave it to Kāñcipūrṇa at the top of the hill, and told him who was to do it from the following day, and had already arranged it with the man.

Kāñcipūrṇa took the pot and said, 'He will want it the same way.'

'He will get it the same way.'

'Then go on, sir,' said Kāñcipūrṇa, and went in with the water.

They left by the south gate a little after first light on a day in Mārgazhi with the cold still on the ground. There were seven of them. The Araiyar went in front because he knew the road. Mudaliāṇḍān carried the bundles and would not let anybody else carry them. The other three of the first four were coming as far as Madhurāntakam and then going back.

Rāmānuja walked in the middle with the three staves going down as one stick, and the cloth on him was three weeks old and had not yet given up its colour, and by the time the sun was properly up his hands were the colour of it, and so was the shoulder the hoop hung on, and so was the dust of the road behind him for a while where it had rubbed off.

A man of the eastern half of the town, coming in with a load on his head, stood aside in the road to let the party by, and looked at the staff, and counted.

The Kāverī comes down out of the hills in the west and runs east across the whole width of the Tamil country, and about two thirds of the way along it splits in two. The northern branch is called the Kollidam. The two channels run apart for something like nineteen miles and then close again, and the ground they enclose is an island, flat, sandy under a foot of silt, planted with paddy and sugarcane and plantain, with palmyra along the bunds.

In Āḍi the water comes up brown and fast and full of what it has taken off the fields upstream, and the ferrymen raise their price, and the low fields go under, and everybody who lives there expects it and has expected it since before anybody can remember. Twice or three times in a century it comes up further than that and takes the bunds and a quarter of the houses with them. The river made the island and the river is the standing threat to it, and every generation of men living on it has spent part of its labour on sand and stone and basketwork against the day the water decides.

On that island, near the southern channel, stands the temple.

It is not a building. It is a system of walls, seven of them, each one enclosing the last, and if a man walked the whole length of all seven he would walk something over six miles. The innermost five hold the shrines, the halls, the kitchens, the store-rooms, the wells and the flower yards. The outermost two are streets. People live in them. There are houses in the fourth street and the sixth with children and cooking fires and a cow tied in the yard, and there are shops, oil and rice and brass vessels and cloth, and there are weavers and garland-makers and a man who repairs cart wheels, all of them inside the temple wall. A householder in the sixth street who wants to see his Lord in the morning passes through gate after gate and never at any point leaves the temple, because he never was outside it.

That single fact governs everything that happened there afterwards. To run the temple at Śrīraṅgam is to run a town: its grain, its water, its money, its quarrels, its cows, its widows and its drains. Nobody who took charge of it was taking charge of a liturgy alone.

At the centre of it the Lord lies down.

He does not stand, as he stands at Kāñcī on his hill, and he does not sit. He is stretched full length along the coils of the serpent with his head to the west and his face turned south, one arm bent under his head, the other laid along his thigh, in the posture of a man asleep who is not asleep. The tradition's reason for the direction he faces is that he was carried south long ago as a gift to a king of Laṅkā, and was set down on the sand of this island on the way, and would not be lifted again; and he looks south still, towards the country he was going to and never reached. He is called Raṅganātha. His consort is Raṅganāyakī and her shrine is her own, in its own enclosure, and she is not brought to him; he is taken to her.

The day begins before it is light.

The first sound is not a bell. It is the well ropes, because the water for the morning has to be drawn and carried in before anything else can be done, and after the ropes it is the cows, and then the crows, and only then a drum. At the Viśvarūpa the doors of the sanctum are opened while the sky outside is still grey, and what is done there first is the waking: the recitation begins, the conches go, the lamps are carried in, and the Lord is shown to the men who have stood outside in the cold waiting for the doors. Then the bath, then the sandal paste, then the fresh garlands that were strung that night in the flower yard by women who work by lamplight because the flowers have to be picked in the dark to be fit. Then the first food. Then the accounts of what was used.

There are offerings at set hours through the whole of the day, and between them the doors are shut and the place is quiet and hot and smells of wet stone and jasmine going over. The last of them is at night and is called the great turn, the periya avasaram, and it is announced with drums that carry right out through the seven walls into the streets, so that everyone in every house on the island knows the hour at which the Lord is fed for the last time that day and goes to his bed. After that the doors are barred, and a man with a lamp walks the inner prākāra, and the temple is as quiet as six miles of wall can make anything.

The work of it was done by bodies of men, ten of them, each with its own name and its own hereditary right. There were the ones who officiated. There were the bearers of the holy feet, who carried the processional image on their shoulders through the streets at festivals and whose sons carried it after them. There were those whose office was to make the petition, to stand before the Lord and put to him what a man or a village had come to ask. There were the reciters, Sanskrit on one side and Tamil on the other. There were the singers of the Araiyar line, who do not merely recite the hymns but sing them to fixed tunes and act them out with their hands and their faces, an office set up two hundred years before by Nāthamuni, who had recovered the hymns and who had also, for a time, run this temple. There were the gardeners, the garland-makers, the store-keepers, the cooks, the carpenters, the men who kept the elephants and the ones who kept the parrots and the deer.

The money came from land. Kings and their officers and merchants and ordinary men had given villages to the temple over three hundred years, and the grain from those villages came in as rent, and the temple ate some of it and sold some and gave some away. Gifts were cut into the walls where they could be read: so many cows for a perpetual lamp, so much land for so many measures of rice daily, this hall by this man in this year. Oil, ghee, pepper, camphor, sandal, cloth, all of it came in against an entry, and all of it went out against a service that somebody had the right to perform.

That last word is the one to hold on to. The rights were property. The right to cook a particular offering, to carry a particular image, to recite a particular portion on a particular day, belonged to a family the way a field belongs to a family. It was inherited. It was divided among sons and subdivided among grandsons until a man might own a ninth part of a right to light one lamp. It was pledged, and let, and quarrelled over, and the quarrels went on for generations. A man's honour and his income were the same object.

Eight or nine times a year the whole of it turned inside out and became a festival. The Lord came out. He was brought down from the sanctum and set on the shoulders of the men whose right it was to carry him, and taken through the streets, all the way round the outer walls if it was a great occasion, with the elephants in front and the fire-pots and the Tamil recitation going the whole way; and the villages for twenty miles round emptied into the island and slept in the streets and on the river sand. The greatest of them runs for twenty-one days in Mārgazhi, in the cold weather, and the whole business of it is recitation. That is the festival at which the four thousand hymns are sung through from the first to the last in the presence of the Lord, and the town does very little else for three weeks, and a man who has a hereditary part in it holds a thing more valuable to him than land.

By the time of which this is being told, the thing had been running for a very long time and it had silted up in the way such things do. Nobody could say with certainty who was responsible for what. Some offerings were made late and some were not made at all, and the difference between what came into the stores and what was cooked was not a figure anybody had. There were men drawing the income of offices they no longer performed and men performing offices for which nothing was paid. There were two and three claimants to a single right, and each of them had a document and a grandfather.

The Vaiṣṇavas of the place had had a head, and he had been a considerable man, and he was dead. Yāmunācārya, whom the whole country called Āḷavandār, had lived in the fourth street, and had taught, and had written, and had held the community together by being what he was; and when he died there was nobody of his size. What he left was a school with a doctrine and no commentary, a body of disciples scattered over five or six places, and a temple no one man was running.

His people were still there. Mahāpūrṇa was there, older now, who had gone north on the old man's errand and come back too late; he lived in the town with his wife and his daughter Attuzhāy, and he recited in the temple, and nobody would have guessed from the way he kept himself that he had the standing he had. The Araiyar was there, in his family's house, with the manuscript of the Iyaṟpā in it. The priests were there, and the ten bodies of servants, and the eleven thousand daily things that had to be done whether there was anyone at the head of it or not.

It was into this that a man was coming down from Kāñcī with new ochre on him, who had never in his life administered anything larger than a household of eight or nine boys.

They crossed at the ferry below the town in the middle of the morning, and the men who had come out from Śrīraṅgam to meet him on the road had swelled on the way, so that by the time the boat touched sand on the island side there were perhaps eighty people standing on the bank, and most of them had never seen him.

What they had was report. The learned men had the report of a young man at Kāñcī who had silenced Yādava Prakāśa twice in his own room and been thrown out for it. The Vaiṣṇavas had the report of the three fingers, which by then every house in the fourth street had heard and half of them claimed to have witnessed. And there was the thing Āḷavandār had said about him in the crowd at Kāñcī years before, which had been repeated so often since that nobody could any longer say who had heard it first.

He came up the bank with his three staves in his hand and went past all of them and into the temple, and they followed, and he did not stop until he was in front of Raṅganātha.

What he said there has not come down. The accounts, which are talkative about far smaller matters, say only that he stood a long time and that the priests waited, and that when he came out he was given the town's business inside the week.

Nobody elected him. There was no office to appoint him to and no one with the standing to appoint him. What happened was that a body of men who had been carrying a dead master's work for years, badly and in fragments, each of them holding a piece of it and none of them able to make the others move, found that there was somebody there who could be given a thing and would return with it done, and they gave him one thing and then another and then the whole of it. Within a few months the priests brought him their disputes instead of taking them to the assembly. Within a year the stores were his.

Raṅganātha gave him his title for it and it is the title Śrīraṅgam still uses. Udayavar. The one who owns the place; and it was not a compliment about his soul, it was an account of what he now had on his hands.

What he had on his hands, first, was rice.

The temple bought nothing. It received, from something over a hundred villages, an income in grain, and that grain went in three directions: to the Lord's kitchen, to the servants as their maintenance, and out again in sale to raise the cash for oil and camphor and cloth. Nobody had reconciled the three in a long while. He began with the measures, because a measure is where the theft is. There were four different vessels in use in the stores at Śrīraṅgam called by the same name and holding four different quantities, and grain that came in by the largest went out by the smallest, and the difference had been a man's living for two generations. He had all four brought out into the yard and stood there with the store-keepers while they were filled with water against a fifth, and then he broke three of them.

Then the cooking. The kitchen at Śrīraṅgam is not a kitchen, it is several, and the offerings are made at set hours and the hours are not negotiable, and the reason they had been slipping was not laziness but the sequence of the work: the firewood came late because the man who carried it also carried water, and the water was wanted first. He walked it through, from the wood to the pot, twice, once before dawn and once at midday, and then separated the two offices and found a second man. This is the level at which most of his first two years went.

The quarrels took longer than the grain.

A right at that temple, as anywhere, was inherited, and the families had been dividing them for three hundred years, so that a single office might be split eleven ways and eight of the eleven parts might be in the hands of men who lived elsewhere and drew the income and sent nobody. He would not break a right. He said more than once, and the point was practical as well as pious, that a man's right in the Lord's service was the Lord's gift to that man's grandfather and was not a thing an administrator took away in the afternoon. What he did instead was require the performance. If the right was a man's, the work was his; and if he was living at Kumbakōṇam he could come and do it, or send a son, and the son would be trained and named and entered in the register; and if he did neither, the maintenance stopped, and stopped from that month, and the office was performed by whoever was there, and the record said by whom.

There was a great deal of noise about that. Some of it went on for fifty years.

A specimen of the kind of thing, out of hundreds. Two men claimed the right to carry a particular lamp in a particular procession, and had claimed it for eleven years, and each had a document, and each had a grandfather in it, and the documents did not agree, because one of them recorded a gift and the other recorded a sale of the same office nine years later by a man who may or may not have owned it. Rāmānuja heard them both out, twice, on separate days so that neither had to argue in front of the other. Then he ruled that the elder man's document was the better one and the office was his, and that the younger man's grandfather had bought in good faith and had been cheated by a third family now extinct, and that the temple had taken the money and would therefore make it good; and he found him another office, and had both entries written into the register in the same hour with both men standing there. It took the best part of a fortnight. He did not consider it a distraction from his work. It was his work.

He kept the building in repair, which nobody had troubled about in a generation, and the reason he could is that he asked where the money was instead of asking for more. He put his nephew over the daily administration and left him there until he died. That was Mudaliāṇḍān, his sister's son, a small man with a completely level temper who had come to him at Kāñcī on the day he took the ochre and never afterwards went anywhere else; and the arrangement they settled that first year at Śrīraṅgam held until both of them were old, Rāmānuja deciding and Mudaliāṇḍān executing, and the men under Mudaliāṇḍān saying nothing about the arrangement because it worked.

And he had to manage the fact that his own teacher was one of the temple's servants.

Mahāpūrṇa was living in the town, old, reciting in the daily service like any other reciter, on the maintenance any other reciter drew. He had initiated Rāmānuja on the road at Madhurāntakam before either of them reached anywhere, and he had given him the five marks and the name, and there is no relation in that tradition higher than the one between those two men. Now the younger of them held the stores and the elder of them came for his measure of rice. Not one awkward moment is reported, which may mean there were none, and it may mean that the men who wrote them would not have written it down. What they do report is that Rāmānuja would not walk in front of him, would not sit while he stood, and would not be the one to end a conversation; and that he twice sent an instruction to the whole body of servants and then went himself to his teacher's house to ask whether it was right.

Attuzhāy was there in that house, Mahāpūrṇa's daughter, a girl then. She is in this story again later and it is not a comfortable occasion.

One man in the town would have nothing to do with him.

His name was Periya Kōil Nambi and he was a considerable figure, a poet, a Sanskritist of real quality, court pandit to more than one crowned head, and the holder by inheritance of the sole right to expound the Purāṇas in the temple and to conduct a number of ceremonies nobody else could conduct. He did not fight the new head of the community in the open. He obstructed him, which is slower and works better. He made himself hard to reach, he attended nothing, he came to nothing, he sent no message, and when the two of them met in the street, which in a town of seven walls they did, he was civil in the way that cannot be complained of.

Rāmānuja minded it more than he minded the men who fought him openly, and he minded it for years, and what he eventually did about it is a story for much further on.

The days settled into their shape. He was up before the drums. He went to the temple at the opening of the doors and again in the evening and did not miss either in forty years except when he was out of the town. Between the two he sat in the maṭha and taught, because that was the actual work and the rest was housekeeping; and between the teaching and the temple he heard the housekeeping, standing up, in the corridor, in the flower yard, wherever the man with the question caught him.

He ate once. He was given the offered food from the temple like everybody else and it was brought to him by hand. He slept a little under five hours and he slept on the floor of the room he taught in.

And on the days when the accounts came in he sat with them until they came out even, and if they would not come out even he sent for the man whose column it was, and the man came, and the two of them went through it line by line by lamp, and at the end of it, more often than not, Rāmānuja would find that the fault was in the way he had ordered the thing to be recorded, and would say so out loud in front of the clerk, and change it.

The poem he now went to be taught had eleven hundred and two verses in it and he already knew every one of them by heart.

That is the thing to understand about what happened next. He had been hearing the Tiruvāymozhi since he could hear anything. It was sung in the temple at Kāñcī in the morning and in the evening, and it had been sung at Śrīperumbudūr, and his mother had it, and the boys in the street had decades of it; and a man with his memory who has heard a thing five thousand times has it whether he wanted it or not. He could have recited the whole poem standing in the yard, in order, from the first word to the last. He went to Mālādhara because he could not read a line of it.

Nammāzhvār made it at Kurugūr in the far south, three hundred years before, and what he made is not a book. It is a thousand and a hundred verses in a hundred decades, and the decades are grouped in ten hundreds, and each verse takes up the last word of the verse before it and carries it forward, and the last word of the last verse is the first word of the first, so that the whole thing is a closed chain and cannot be entered anywhere but where it starts and cannot be broken off anywhere at all. It is in Tamil. It is in the Tamil of a man who lived when Tamil was doing things it has not done since, packing four senses into a compound and leaving the grammar to be decided by the listener, using the word for a bee and the word for a woman's eye and the word for the Lord's dark colour in one line and making all three of them do work.

The man who made it never went anywhere. He was born at Kurugūr on the Tāmraparṇi, into a family of landholders who were not brahmins and never pretended to be, and what his parents got was a child who did not cry, did not feed in the ordinary way and did not speak. They carried him to the temple and set him down under a tamarind tree, and he climbed into the hollow at the base of it and sat there with his eyes shut, and went on sitting. He said nothing for sixteen years. Then a man came from the north who had heard about him, and stood in front of the tree, and asked him a question, and got an answer; and after that he sang, and what he sang is this poem and three others. He died at thirty-five without having travelled more than a few miles in any direction. Half of everything the Tamil country has sung since comes out of that tree.

It is also, in the school Rāmānuja had come into, not poetry. It is scripture. They call it the Tamil Veda, and they do not mean that as a compliment; they mean that it stands where the Veda stands, that it can be argued from, that a conclusion drawn from it is a conclusion, and that a man who has the Upaniṣads and not this has half of what there is. A potter's son who cannot go near the Veda can sing this in the street. That is not a concession, in that school. That is the point of the thing.

There is a further difficulty and it is the one that defeats a Sanskritist. The poem has speakers in it. Nammāzhvār does not only speak as himself; he speaks as a girl who has fallen in love with somebody she has seen once and will not eat, and then as that girl's mother watching her not eat and not knowing what is wrong, and then as the friend who knows exactly what is wrong and will not say, and then as a messenger bird, and then as himself again three decades later. Nothing in the text announces the change. The verses do not say, here the mother is speaking. A reader who does not know which mouth a verse is coming out of will construe every word correctly and understand nothing whatever, because the words mean one thing in the mother's mouth and the reverse of it in the girl's; and which mouth it is, is not in the grammar. It is in the tradition, and the tradition is a man in a room who was told.

A man who can take a Sanskrit sūtra apart in four ways before breakfast is no better placed in front of that than a boy, and may be worse, because his equipment keeps producing answers.

And because it is scripture, it has meanings, and the meanings do not travel in writing. They travel from an old man's mouth to a younger man's ear, one decade at a time, with the older man deciding when the younger one has had enough for the day.

Mālādhara held them. He was one of the five into whose separate hands Āḷavandār had put the separate parts of what he knew, and the Tiruvāymozhi was his portion. He was older than Rāmānuja by a good deal, and not a large man in the way Mahāpūrṇa was large; he had not been sent anywhere on anybody's errand and had not done anything the accounts record apart from this, which was to sit for a great many years in a room at Śrīraṅgam with the poem in front of him and to give it to men who came. He knew what he had. He knew it was the only copy of itself in the world, in the sense that mattered: there were manuscripts of the verses everywhere and there was one man alive who had been told by Āḷavandār himself what the third verse of the third decade of the second hundred was doing, and it was him.

The sessions ran in the morning after the first offering, in the room off the second street where he lived, and the arrangement was the ordinary one and Rāmānuja did not get anything better than the ordinary one. A man came before he did. A man sat on the floor. He brought no palm leaf and wrote nothing down, then or afterwards, because a thing written down can be read by somebody who has not been prepared for it. He recited the decade. Then he said what it was doing, word by word and then as a whole, and then he recited it again; and then, if he chose, he asked a question, and if the answer was wrong he did not correct it, he simply recited the verse once more and waited.

They went at a speed that would have driven any other student in the country out of his mind. A decade could take four days. It could take nine. There were mornings when the whole session was one word.

Rāmānuja, who had gone through the whole of the Brahma Sūtras with Yādava Prakāśa at a rate that made the older boys give up, sat in that room for a long time and did not once ask to go faster. What the accounts say about him in this period is that he was a good pupil, which is a strange thing to have thought worth recording about a man of his reputation, and is recorded because it was not expected.

Take the fifth decade of the first hundred to see what the trouble was.

The poet in it is doing something that looks at first like ordinary self-abasement and is not. He has been singing the Lord's qualities, and he stops, and says that he will not sing any more, because he is not fit to; that a man like him praising a Lord like that does the Lord damage, the way a low man's praise damages any great man's name; and that he is going to withdraw. And then he does not withdraw. He goes on for nine more verses, and each of the nine is an argument put to him against withdrawing, and the arguments are the Lord's, and they consist of the Lord naming the people he has already made his own: a monkey, a cowherd's household, a pot of butter, a hunchbacked girl, a man who was a bird.

Now a man can recite that and understand every word of it and have missed the whole of it. What Mālādhara gave him in that room was what it is for. It is not a poet being humble. It is the exact question the school exists to answer, which is whether a thing as small and as spoiled as a particular man has any standing at all in relation to something that size; and the answer the decade gives is not that the man is bigger than he thought, it is that the Lord has a taste for exactly that smallness and has demonstrated the taste repeatedly and on record. Nine verses of evidence.

He was two or three mornings on it. Then they went on to the sixth.

The arrangement lasted a long time and neither man has left any account of what he made of the other. Mālādhara had been giving the poem to whoever came, for years, and had been giving it to men who received it, thanked him, and went off and used it in their household worship and never opened their mouths again. This one received it, thanked him, and then it came back at him. Not in the session. Afterwards, in the street or at the tank or in the temple corridor, somebody would repeat to Mālādhara something the new head of the community had said about a decade they had done three months before, and it would be a thing Mālādhara had not said, and had not thought, and could not immediately fault.

Mālādhara would take it home with him and sit with it after the lamp was out, and find the fault in it by the morning about half the time.

They came to it in the second hundred, in the third decade, in the hot part of the year.

The decade is a decade of joy, and what the poet says in it is not complicated on the surface. The Lord has come into him and mixed with him, and he cannot find the edges of himself, and he says so verse after verse in the voice of a man who has been given more than he can hold. And then, in the third verse, he says a thing that can be heard two ways. In the time when I did not know, he says, you made me love your service; and you have kept me, your servant, in this great bewilderment that knows nothing.

Mālādhara recited it. Then he gave the meaning he had, which was the meaning he had been given, and it was a good one and it was about the heart. The verse is a cry, he said. The poet has been given the love and has not been taken out of the body, and he is still held in this world of matter that knows nothing, and he is asking why; and this is the grief of every devotee and the poet is describing it from inside.

Rāmānuja said that this was not what the verse said, and that the part left out was the part the poet had taken most trouble over.

He put it plainly and he put it once. The verse does not stand by itself, he said. It stands in a decade, and the verses on either side of it are spoken in joy. A poet does not break off in the middle of that to weep and then go straight back to rejoicing. Read with its neighbours, the verse is thanks: in the time when I knew nothing and had asked for nothing, you made me love your service; you found me in the not-knowing and did it anyway. To read it as a complaint about the body is to let the poet say the ordinary thing, which is exactly the thing the whole decade has stopped saying.

The room went quiet, which is what rooms do.

Then Mālādhara made his answer, and it deserves to be given at its strength, because it is not a foolish answer and nearly every learned man in the south would have made it.

He said, first, that he taught what he had been given. He had it from Āḷavandār by mouth over years, in the order Āḷavandār chose to give it, and a man who receives a meaning that way and then improves on it has not improved anything; he has broken the only thing that makes the meaning worth having, which is that it came down. Once you may say the old man did not see the whole of it, anyone may say it about you, and about him, and in three generations the poem will mean whatever the cleverest man in the room needs it to mean this morning.

He said, second, that the joy of a decade does not bind every verse in it. Every poet in that tradition weeps in the middle of his happiness and is happy in the middle of his weeping. It is how the thing is said. To smooth one verse down to match its neighbours is to mistake what kind of speech you are reading, and a man who does that with poetry will end by doing it with scripture.

He said, third, and this was the heavy one, that he had never heard this meaning from Āḷavandār. Not once, in all the years. And a meaning the teacher never gave is not a meaning of the tradition, however well it reads. A man who stands up in a teaching room with one is not making a point about a verse. He is proposing something, and he should say so, and he should say what it is.

Rāmānuja did not answer the third one. He said that he had never sat at Āḷavandār's feet, and was to him what Ekalavya had been to Droṇa, a pupil the teacher never taught; and that the verse says what it says, and that when somebody asks him what it says he will not tell them something else.

Then Mālādhara asked the question he had been going to ask from the beginning, which was where the reading had come from, because it had not come from him.

Rāmānuja told him. He had not had it from anybody; he had it from the verses on either side of it.

Mālādhara stood up, said that the session was finished, and went home. He sent word the same evening that he would not be teaching further.

Rāmānuja went to his house in the morning and sat outside it and was not admitted, and went again the next morning, and the next. He did not send anybody. He did not raise it in the maṭha and would not let it be discussed in front of him, and when one of his own students said something about the old man's obstinacy he stopped him in the middle of the sentence and made him leave the room.

The town took sides within four days, as towns do, and the sides were not about the verse. The men who had never been reconciled to a newcomer from Kāñcī being put over the temple found that they had strong views about the sanctity of a received meaning. The younger students, who could not have construed the decade, discovered that they were partisans of the plain sense. Two of the ten bodies of temple servants let it be known that they would be interested to hear the new head of the community set out his new readings at greater length, in public, with witnesses.

It was settled from outside, as these things generally are.

Goṣṭhīpūrṇa came to Śrīraṅgam that season for the festival, as he did every year, from Tirukkōṣṭiyūr in the dry country to the south and east. He was one of the five as well, and older than Mālādhara, and the two of them had sat together at Āḷavandār's feet when both of them were young men; and he was known for two things, which were the quantity of what he had been given and the extreme reluctance with which he parted with any of it. Mālādhara went to him and put the matter, and asked him to say whether such a meaning had ever been given.

Goṣṭhīpūrṇa said that it had. He had been in the room. He had heard that meaning of that verse from Āḷavandār's own mouth, in those words or very near them.

Then he said the rest of it, which Mālādhara had not asked for. He said that Āḷavandār had divided what he had among five men on purpose and had given each of them a portion and not the whole, so that no one of them could stand up afterwards and say that he was the tradition; and that Mālādhara had not been given this because it was not in his portion, and that there was no shame whatever in that, and that the shame was in walking out of his own room rather than asking a question in it.

And he said one more thing, and it stuck. He said that Kṛṣṇa had sat at Sāndīpani's feet and learned from him, and that Mālādhara was Sāndīpani now, and should know it: the man in front of him would say nothing that was not already in their teacher's heart. He told him to go back to his room and go on, and went out to the festival.

The sessions began again in the second street four mornings later. Mālādhara was in his place when Rāmānuja arrived, which meant he had come earlier than he needed to, and neither of them said anything about any of it, then or afterwards. The old man recited the decade again from the first verse, right through, and then gave the meaning as he had always given it, and then gave the other one, and named Āḷavandār, and went on to the fourth verse.

Three miles west of Kāñcī there is a village called Kūram, and in those years one family owned most of it.

It is small country and pleasant. A tank on the north side that holds through most of the year, paddy below it, a few groves of mango and tamarind, the road to Kāñcī running in from the east straight enough that a man standing on the bund can see a cart coming for a long time before it arrives. There is a temple to Ādikeśava with a low wall round it. There is a street of about forty houses. At the end of the street, where the ground rises a little, there was a house that was not like the others, two storeys of it, with a court in the middle and a well in the court, store-rooms along one side, cattle at the back, and a gate at the front that was wide enough to take a loaded cart and was made of teak.

The man who owned it was called Śrīvatsāṅka Miśra, which is the name he was given and which almost nobody used. The country called him after his village, the lord of Kūram, Kūrattāzhvān, and Kūreśa, which is the same thing in Sanskrit.

He was some years older than Rāmānuja. He was a big man, heavy through the shoulders, slow to get up and slow to walk, with a voice people had to lean in for, and a way of saying the thing that ended an argument so quietly that half the room did not notice the argument had ended. His memory was the kind that is talked about for centuries afterwards: he heard a text once and had it, whole, and could give it back a year later with the pauses in the same places. He had the Sanskrit learning of a man who had been taught properly and had gone on by himself after the teaching stopped.

His mother died when he was small. His father did not marry again, and gave his reason to the people who pressed him, which was that if he brought a second wife into the house and she failed to treat the boy well, he would have been the cause of an offence against one of the Lord's own, and he did not intend to put himself in the way of that. So the boy was brought up by his father and by the household, in a house with no mistress in it, and was given everything and was not spoiled, which is rarer.

There is a settled way of describing a rich man in that literature and it is worth knowing because they applied it to Kūreśa. They say he was free of the three prides. The pride of learning, which is the worst of them and is the brahmin's own. The pride of wealth. The pride of birth. A man may be free of one or two. The accounts are unanimous that he had none of the three, and they are not usually unanimous about anything.

What he did with the money was feed people.

It ran like this, every day, for years. The cooking sheds behind the house went at first light and did not stop. Anyone who came was fed. Not fed at the back and sent off, but fed sitting down, in the court, with the household serving, and given cloth if the cloth he had was finished, and given a place to sleep if the light had gone. The blind came, and the lame, and men with nothing, and men who had had something last year and had it no longer, and men who simply travelled and ate where they could, and children sent up the road by mothers who had nothing in the pot. It went on into the night. There were lamps kept burning on the gateposts and at the corner of the street specifically so that a man arriving after dark could find the house without asking, and the reason the accounts know that detail is that the village remembered it for generations after the family had gone.

He did not consider this generosity and would have been puzzled at being told it was. His position was that the grain came off land he had done nothing to deserve, out of a village he had done nothing to acquire, by the hands of men whose fathers had worked it before his father was born, and that a man in the middle of an arrangement like that who then behaved as though the heap in his store-room were his own doing had made an error of fact and not merely a fault of character.

His wife was Āṇḍāḷ. She was of the same kind and had a mind of her own and used it; there are readings of hers preserved in that tradition, put in her own name, which is not a common thing to find about anybody's wife in the eleventh century. She ran the house. She also, and this is the thing to hold on to, was the one who counted what went out, because somebody in a household that feeds three hundred people a day has to, and it was not going to be him.

She was a small woman, quick where he was slow, and she kept the accounts of that house in her head and gave them out to the store-keeper in the morning in the order they would be wanted. It was not sentiment with her. She knew what three hundred people cost, which he did not, and she knew in Cittirai what the store would look like in Aippaci, and twice in the years at Kūram she went to her husband and told him that the giving had to be cut for a season or there would be nothing to give at all, and both times he did what she said without an argument.

There is a remark of hers from that house that the family kept. One of the women helping in the court complained that a man they had fed the day before had come again, and had come the day before that, and was plainly making a living out of them. Āṇḍāḷ said that she had noticed him too, and had noticed that he ate very little, and that a man who has worked out how to be fed here and still eats very little is not making a living out of anybody; he is lonely. Give him the same as yesterday and do not look at him while he eats.

They had no children then.

He had come to Rāmānuja by way of Kāñcipūrṇa, the old man with the fan at Varadarāja's temple, who had no learning and no standing and was not a brahmin, and who had been telling people about the young man at Kāñcī for years. Kūreśa used to go into the city for the festivals and had been in the temple crowd on the days when Rāmānuja was carrying the water up from the Śalai well, and had watched him do it, and had gone home and said nothing about it to anybody.

Then the news came out to Kūram that Rāmānuja had gone into the temple alone in the morning and taken the ochre off no man's hands but the Lord's, and Kūreśa put down what he was doing and went into Kāñcī the same day. Mudaliāṇḍān came from the other direction and they met at the gate. The two of them went in and fell at his feet and asked to be taken in, and were, and they were the first two.

After that he used to go in three and four times in the week, and he brought things: cloth for the students, rice, oil, a copyist's fee when a manuscript was wanted. He never once put his hand to the expense of the house without asking, and he asked in a way that made it easy to refuse. When Rāmānuja went south at last, it was Kūreśa who walked out with him, a good way along the road, further than there was any reason to, and then turned round and came home to Kūram and picked up his life where he had left it.

He went on feeding the village for a long while after that.

There is one exchange from those years that has come down, out of the house at Kūram, and it will serve for the kind of man he was.

A brahmin of the place, a neighbour, who had watched the traffic through that gate for a decade and had views about it, said to him one evening that he was going to ruin himself, that a man has an estate in trust for his sons and not to be poured away on the road, and that in any case half the men eating in his court were not worth the rice.

Kūreśa thought about it for a while, which he always did, and then said: you may be right about the half. I do not know which half, and I am not going to find out by experiment.

The neighbour said that was not an answer.

Kūreśa said no, it was not, and asked him to stay for the meal.

In the evenings when the last of them had gone and the sheds were banked, the gate was shut. It took two men to do it. The leaves were teak and heavy and the strapping and the rings and the sockets were all of brass, hand-thick, because the house was old and had been built by people who expected to defend it; and when the second leaf came home against the first and the bar dropped into its bed, the whole gate rang like something struck.

Three miles east, on the hill at Kāñcī, inside the shrine, Perundevi asked the Lord what the noise was.

It was late and the temple was shut and the last of the lamps had been carried out. Varadarāja told her that it was a gate at Kūram, and whose gate it was, and then he told her about the man who owned it, and how long the lamps burned on the gateposts and why, and what was cooked in that court and for whom. She listened to the whole of it.

Then she said that she would like to see him.

Kāñcipūrṇa went out to Kūram the next morning with the message. He was an old man by then and it is three miles each way and he did it before the heat came up, and he delivered what he had been told to deliver, standing in the court while the household worked round him: that she had heard the gate and had asked, and had been answered, and now wished to see the man.

Anybody else in the Tamil country would have taken that as the best news of his life.

Kūreśa put his hands over his face and did not speak for a while, and when he did, what came out was not modesty of the kind people perform. He said: a worm like me. A wretch. Am I so large in his eye that he stops and speaks of me. My doors, making a disturbance in his house at night.

He said that pride is what stands in a man's way and that the getting rid of it is the whole of the road, and that he had been sitting here for years in a house with a gate that could be heard three miles off, being told by every man who ate in his court that he was a generous fellow, and had thought himself a servant.

Kāñcipūrṇa, who had spent forty years fanning the Lord and had never owned anything, said nothing at all to this, which was probably right.

It took two days to undo. He had the tenants up and gave them the land, their own holdings first and then the rest of it divided by what a family could work. He gave the house with the stores in it to the village to be used for the feeding, and named three men to run it, and handed over the grain in the sheds against a count. The cattle went to the men who had been keeping them. He kept back nothing at all, not the copper, not the cloth, not a vessel; he gave away the manuscripts, which cost him more than the land did; and when it was finished he stood in his own court with an upper cloth and a lower cloth and not a thing besides, and it was the first time in his life he had been correctly dressed.

He told Āṇḍāḷ to leave everything behind. He said it in those words and he said it twice.

They went out of the village after dark so as not to be made a procession of. He would not take the road east into Kāñcī because of what would have happened to him there; he turned south, for Śrīraṅgam, where Rāmānuja was, and that is two hundred miles on foot and they set off to do it with nothing to eat and no plan about eating.

The second night they were in the tract of forest that lies along that road, thin dry forest, the kind with no water in it and no houses, and the light went while they were still in it. She had never in her life walked anywhere after dark. She had never in her life been anywhere without four men within call. She kept up, and did not say anything for a long time, and then she said it: whether there was not danger in a place like this, whether there were not thieves.

He answered her at once.

He said: if you have anything hidden on you, there is danger. Fish live on the worms in the water. Fowls live on the worms in the ground. Death lives on what is alive. And thieves live on riches, and go where riches are, and will not come three steps out of their way for people who have none. So I think, lady, that you have brought something, although I told you to leave it all behind.

She stopped on the path and got it out of the fold of her cloth and put it into his hand, shaking, and asked him to forgive her. It was a cup, a small one, of gold. She said she had left everything, everything, and had kept back only this, because it was a long journey and she had thought he would want something to drink from.

He took it and threw it into the trees.

Then he said, 'Now walk on. Your fear has been cast out.'

They walked on. He did not say anything else about it and neither did she, then or on any of the days after it. Long afterwards, when she was an old woman and the story was being told in her hearing by somebody who had it second-hand and was making a good deal of the cup, she put in one correction and no more: that it had not been a large cup, and that she had not been carrying it for herself.

They were nine or ten days on the road. He begged in the villages at the hour when it is done and they ate what was given and slept in the pillared porch of whatever temple there was, and where there was no temple they slept against a wall. The country changed under them, dry and then not dry, and then they came down into the river land and the paddy started and the smell of the water came up, and then the Kollidam, wide and brown and shallow at that season, and they waded it holding their cloths up, and went through the northern streets of the island and in at the gate.

Word went ahead of them from the gate and Rāmānuja came out of the maṭha before it reached him twice.

What he did that afternoon is reported with a kind of astonishment by men who had known him for years. He sent every student in the place out into the street to meet them and told them how to stand and what to say. He came out himself into the sun and did not wait in the doorway. He took Kūreśa by both arms and held on to him and would not let go of him, and he was laughing, and the accounts use the word jubilant and it is the right word.

He did not say one syllable about the golden cup, which he heard about that evening from somebody else.

He did not say anything about the manner of the giving-away either, or the haste of it, or the fact that a man with no children and no other income had disposed of an estate in two days on the strength of a message from an old fan-bearer. There were men at Śrīraṅgam who said all of that within the week, and said it was rash, and said the village would eat the stores in a year and the three men named to run the feeding would be quarrelling by Kārttikai, and one of those men was right about the quarrelling.

Rāmānuja was asked directly, a few days later, what there had been in it to make such a noise about, since half the Vaiṣṇavas in the country would have done the same if their Lord's consort had sent for them.

He said that half the Vaiṣṇavas in the country would have gone to Kāñcī.

That night he tried to settle them, and could not, and the failure is the first thing the two of them ever properly argued about. He wanted Kūreśa fed from the maṭha, which fed a great many people and could feed two more without noticing. Kūreśa would not have it. He said he would live by gleaning, going out at the hour when it is done and asking at the houses of good men for that day's food, and he set his rule out and would not be moved off it: that he would ask only where the household was of the right sort, that he would take only what the two of them needed for the day, and that he would never keep anything in the house overnight against the next morning.

Rāmānuja argued with him about the last clause for a long time. He said that a man with a wife has no business making a rule like that, because the rule falls on her and not on him.

Kūreśa said that his wife had walked out of a house with eleven store-rooms in it a fortnight ago and had not looked back at the gate, and that he would ask her, and that if she said the rule was too hard he would drop it.

He asked her. She said it was not too hard.

So it stood, and it stood for the rest of their lives. The next morning Kūreśa went out at the hour when alms are gathered, in a town where nobody knew his face, with a cloth folded over his shoulder, and worked the fourth street from the top end down.

The house they had at Śrīraṅgam was one room and a court, in the sixth street on the northern side, with a tiled roof that had been laid a long time before by somebody in a hurry.

In it there were two brass vessels, a grinding stone, three mats, a lamp, a water pot, and a low wooden stand a hand high on which stood the small image Kūreśa had worshipped since his thread ceremony and which was the one thing he had brought out of Kūram, because it was not his to give away. There was nothing else. There was nothing else on purpose.

The way they lived is called gleaning, and it has a shape. A man goes out in the middle of the morning, at the hour after the household fires have done their work and before the eating begins, which is the hour at which it is right to ask and at which a householder has something cooked and has not yet sat down to it. He goes with a cloth and he asks at the doors he is entitled to ask at, and he takes what is put into it, and when he has the day's food he stops. He does not go on to the next street because the next street might be better. He does not ask at a house where the money has come in badly, and he does not ask at a house where the money has come in well but the man beats his servants, because what he is collecting is not calories.

And in Kūreśa's version there was the last clause, the hard one: nothing kept. Whatever was left at night went out of the house at night. The pot was empty when they slept and the day started at zero every morning for the rest of their lives.

Most days it worked. The street knew him within a month and there were women who watched for him and had it ready, and there were two or three houses he had to stop going to because they were putting in more than the day's food and would not be told. Some days were thin. Twice or three times in a year they ate one handful each and drank water and that was the whole of it, and this was understood between them and not discussed.

The morning in question began in the dark with the sound of the roof.

It was the season when the rain comes in off the sea to that coast and settles and does not move, not a storm, nothing dramatic, simply water coming down steadily out of a low grey lid from before first light. By the time it was properly light the street was a channel. The court had two inches standing in it and the drain was backed up. The fire would not take, and when it took it made smoke and no heat, and there was nothing to put on it anyway.

He waited. That is the thing that happened, and everything else follows from it. He sat in the doorway with his knees up and watched the water come off the eaves and waited for it to stop, because a man does not go out gleaning in rain like that; he would arrive at every door soaked, and be a nuisance, and be given something out of pity rather than out of the proper thing, and would be standing in the doorway dripping while the woman of the house went to find him a dry vessel.

It did not stop. It went on through the middle of the morning and it went on past the hour, and once that hour is gone it is gone. After it, the households have eaten. After it, a man at the door is not gleaning, he is begging, and the two are not the same act and everybody involved knows which one is happening.

So there was nothing, and there was not going to be anything until the next morning.

They did what there was to do. They bathed, which needed no fire and no rice. He performed the morning rites at the proper time. He set before the image on its low stand a fruit, which was in the house because somebody had put it in his cloth the day before and he had been meaning to give it away, and a cup of water, and offered them, and that was the household's worship for the day and it was complete; nothing in it requires cooked food, and nobody looking at that court from outside would have been able to tell that anything was wrong.

Then the day, which was long. It rained until the middle of the afternoon and then stopped and started again. He went to the temple at the hour he always went. He came back. He did not mention it and she did not mention it.

In the evening he performed the evening rites, and then he sat down with his back against the wall and recited the Tiruvāymozhi from the beginning, out loud, in the ordinary voice, and went a long way into it; and this, the account says, he treated as his food, and the word it uses means the food that falls out of the sky for people who have none. Then he lay down on the mat and slept.

She did not.

Some time in the night the drums went for the last offering of the day, the great turn, and they carry, and she lay there and listened to them the way anybody lies and listens to a sound they know the meaning of. That is the hour at which Raṅganātha is fed for the last time and the doors are shut on him and he sleeps. She had heard it every night for years and had never once thought anything about it.

She said, out loud, to the dark: when the man who is yours has eaten nothing all day, how can you sit there and be feasted.

She did not say anything else. The tradition says that the cry went into his ears like arrows and does not say anything further about how.

There was a man called Uttama Nambi who held an office in the temple and lived in the third street, a middling sort of functionary who had done his work for twenty years without anything ever happening to him. He was asleep on the raised platform outside his own house, as men did in that season between the showers, and he dreamed, and the dream was short and gave instructions.

The instructions were: my devotee Kūreśa is fasting. Get up, go to the temple, and take the food that has just been offered to me, and carry it on your head to his house, in procession, as it is carried for me.

He woke his own household first, because a thing like that cannot be done quietly, and by the time they had the temple open and the vessels out there were twenty people in it, and they went through the wet streets at that hour with the drums going and the lamps lit and the food on Uttama Nambi's head exactly as it is carried in the festival, and the doors opened along the way, and the whole of the sixth street was awake and standing in its doorways by the time they turned into it.

Kūreśa came out.

He would not take it. He stood in the wet street with all of it in front of him and said that the offered food is the Lord's income and is his to dispose of and not theirs, and that for it to be carried out of the temple at night and given to one household in the town was a thing he could not be party to; and then, because it had been sent, and he could not refuse what had been sent either, he said he would take two morsels, one for himself and one for his wife, and that the rest was to go back where it came from now, tonight.

They argued with him in the street. He took the two morsels. The rest went back.

Then he went inside, and he was not pleasant to her about it. He said, 'Good lady, you should not have done that. You should not have been guilty of it. Do not do it again.'

And he lay down and went to sleep out of humour with his wife, which is the detail nobody would have invented.

She was given an answer in the night, later, and it was this: the two mouthfuls you have eaten will be the seed of two sons in this house, and they will be counted as mine, and I will come in them as I came as Rāma the son of Daśaratha and as Kṛṣṇa the son of Vasudeva.

In the morning the rain had cleared off and there was that hard white light you get after it. The court had drained. She took the two vessels out and scoured them with ash, because they had been empty for a day and a night and had gathered nothing but there is a way these things are done. Half the island knew what had happened before the first offering, and it reached the maṭha early, and Rāmānuja heard it standing up, from a student, and asked one question, which was whether Kūreśa had accepted it, and was told how much of it he had accepted, and said nothing else about the matter to anybody, then or later.

Kūreśa went out at the usual hour with the cloth over his shoulder and worked the fourth street from the top end down, and got the day's food in it by the third house, because the whole street had been waiting at their doors for him since daylight; and that was the only part of the business that he found genuinely difficult.

Goṣṭhīpūrṇa lived in a hut.

The country called him after his village, as it called Kūreśa after his: the full one of Tirukkōṣṭiyūr. He was old. He had been young when Āḷavandār was in his strength, and of the five men among whom that old man had divided what he knew, he had been given the part that is not written down at all, the meanings of the three short formulae on which everything in that school finally rests; and he had kept them for something like forty years, and in those forty years he had given them, so far as anyone can establish, to almost nobody.

Tirukkōṣṭiyūr is a small place in the dry country to the south and east, inland, with no river near it. The temple there is not large but it is very old, and the thing about it that everyone notices is that the tower over the sanctum is taller than the tower over the gate, which is the wrong way round; and that the tower over the sanctum is built in eight members, one above and within the other, which is a form found in only three places in the whole country.

The people of the town did not know what they had living among them. This is stated in the accounts, and it explains the first journey. There was an old brahmin in a poor low hut at the end of a lane, with a wife and no property and no pupils, and the town knew him as that and as no more than that.

From the island to that town is about ninety miles by the way a man walks it: out at the southern gate, over the Kāverī at the ford, then south and east away from the water into the country of red gravel and black cotton soil and rock outcrops, where the palmyra stands in lines along the field boundaries and the tanks are dry from Cittirai onwards and the villages sit four and five miles apart with nothing whatever between them. Three days going hard. Four in the heat. Six if the rivers are up, because then there are no fords and a man walks upstream to find one.

He did it eighteen times. Both ways, that is something over three thousand miles on his own feet, and he was not a young man at the start of it.

The first time, he came into the town in the afternoon and asked the people in the street where Tirukkurugaip Pirāṇ lived. They said: there, in that poor low hut, and pointed down the lane.

He went down on his face where he stood, and came the rest of the way to the door full length on the ground, getting up and going down again, the whole length of the lane, in front of the town. It took a while. Whatever else that did, it settled one thing for Tirukkōṣṭiyūr permanently, and from that afternoon the town knew who was living at the end of the lane and behaved accordingly.

At the door he said what he had come to say, and it was short. 'Teach me, sir, the hidden doctrines of our faith. I am the humble feet of Mahāpūrṇa.'

Goṣṭhīpūrṇa looked at him and said, 'What have I to tell, and to whom?'

And then he gave him nothing at all, no welcome, no conversation, no fixing of another time. Rāmānuja did not say another word. He put his head down on the step, got up, walked out of the lane, and started home.

The second time he was received. That was the pattern of most of them. He would be taken in, and fed, and given a mat, and Goṣṭhīpūrṇa would sit with him and ask after the temple, and after Mahāpūrṇa's health, and what the rice had done that year on the island, and whether the river had taken the bund at the north-west corner again; and they would talk for a day, or two days, about everything in the world except the one thing; and then the old man would say, not this time, go now and come again, and Rāmānuja would go.

He never argued. That is recorded and it is not a small thing, since he had argued with everybody else he had ever met. He never wrote. He never sent a man with a message, and he never sent a gift, and he never asked anybody at Śrīraṅgam to put in a word for him, although half the men who could have put one in were his own students by then.

Once he arrived and Goṣṭhīpūrṇa was away at another village and nobody knew when he was returning, and he waited two days and turned round. Once he was met at the door by the wife, who was sorry about it and said so, and told him it was not a good day. Once he was kept three days and taught, carefully and at length, a verse of Āḷavandār's that he had known by heart since he was twenty, and then sent home. Once the old man asked him one question, and listened to the answer all the way to the end, and then got up and went out to see about his cow.

There was an occasion in the middle of all this when it looked as though the thing would be settled from above.

It was in one of those years, at the Mārgazhi festival, with Goṣṭhīpūrṇa in the town for it as he always was. In the temple, at the offering, the word came out through the priest, and it was an order, and it was heard by everybody standing there: instruct our Rāmānuja in the whole of it.

The answer Goṣṭhīpūrṇa made is the finest piece of lawyer's work in this entire history, and he made it standing in front of the shrine.

He said: but it was you who laid down the rule. Do not teach a man who has not served at least a year. Do not open high things to the unserious, or to the undutiful, or to those who have no love for me. Those are your words and not mine. So that if I am to keep the letter of your own law, I must wait, and I must try your Rāmānuja.

He was answered. The answer was that the rule did not touch this case, because the man in question had already put his body, his goods, his mind and his life into his teacher's hands, and that is all the rule is asking for.

Goṣṭhīpūrṇa bowed to it, and went home, and refused him five more times.

The reasons he gave, when he gave them, are preserved, and they are not flattering.

To his own people he said something like this. The man comes down that road with two or three others walking behind him and the village turns out to watch him arrive. Every teacher he has ever gone to has given him what he came for, and most of them gave it before he had finished asking for it; nobody has refused that man anything since he was a boy. I am not going to put what I am holding into the hands of somebody who has never had to want a thing for longer than it took him to send for it. He would have it and not know what it had cost, and the not knowing would come out of him afterwards in some other place, where I could not get at it to mend it.

And he gave the other reason too, which is the serious one and is about the teaching and not about the pupil. What he held, he said, can be taken the wrong way by a man in a hurry, and a man who takes it the wrong way concludes that nothing further is required of him and that his conduct is now his own business. That conclusion will not be drawn by one man in a hundred. It only has to be drawn once. And the man who is ruined by it is ruined by what I said.

At Śrīraṅgam they began to count. His opponents in the town, of whom there were several, made a joke of it in the fourth street: he has gone again, and he will be back on the ninth day with the same face. The students hated that and Rāmānuja made them leave it alone. Mudaliāṇḍān covered the temple each time and by the twelfth or thirteenth journey had it running so smoothly in his absence that some of the servants preferred it.

The seventeenth time, he broke.

He came back in and he was crying, and what the accounts say is that he felt the futility of it, which is a very exact phrase and is not the same as anger. Seventeen. Something like three thousand miles. No fault he could name in himself that he had not already tried to mend, and no reason given that he could get hold of, and he was not a young man and there was a great deal else he had to do.

A disciple of Goṣṭhīpūrṇa's came through Śrīraṅgam on his own business that week and called on him. And Rāmānuja, who had not complained to anybody in the temple, complained to this man, at length, and finished with it like this:

Is God not bound to save us from evil and give us good? And are his deputies on earth not bound the same way? How am I to become worthy, if the worthy will not take my unworthiness off me? And if the one who has it will not give it, how is the one who has not got it ever to be blessed?

The man went home and repeated it.

Goṣṭhīpūrṇa listened to it and then stood up.

He said, 'Has he an appetite like that? Then I must feed him at once. Every further moment I keep him waiting is a sin on me. Send and tell him to come to me alone, with his staff and his pennant.'

The message came up the road to Śrīraṅgam in the hands of the same man. It was delivered in the maṭha in front of a dozen people, and several of them asked what was meant by it, because Rāmānuja already carried his staff; the three staves bound together that a man of his order carries, with the small square of ochre cloth tied at the top, and he had never gone anywhere without them in his life.

He understood it the moment he heard it.

He said, 'Mudaliāṇḍān is my staff and Kūreśa is my pennant. I am never without them and they are never without me.'

They went out at the south gate before it was light, the three of them, and crossed at the ford while the water was still cold.

He went to Tirukkōṣṭiyūr eighteen times.

Seventeen of those journeys ended with him walking back out through the same gate he had come in by, with nothing, past the same tanks going hard in the heat, and starting again a few weeks later.

What he wanted from Goṣṭhīpūrṇa was eight syllables.

The aṣṭākṣara is not a secret in the sense that nobody knows it. Any Vaiṣṇava child in that country could say it, and did, several times a day. What Goṣṭhīpūrṇa held, and held because Āḷavandār had put it into his hands and not into anybody else's, was the meaning: what each of the three words in it actually does, what a man is committing when he says them, and therefore what he has done to himself once he has said them and cannot unsay them. That is the thing that gets handed over. It is handed over to one person at a time, by mouth, after the teacher has satisfied himself about the person.

Goṣṭhīpūrṇa was not satisfied. He would receive Rāmānuja, and feed him, and talk with him about other matters for a day or two, and send him away. The accounts are unembarrassed about the reason and what they say is not flattering. Rāmānuja came the first several times as a man who had already been given a great deal. Initiated by Mahāpūrṇa. Taught the Tiruvāymozhi verse by verse by Mālādhara. Carrying the whole Rāmāyaṇa out of his own uncle's mouth. Responsible, by then, for a considerable number of people at Śrīraṅgam who did what he said. He came saying I, and he said it the way a man says it when he has stopped being able to hear himself say it.

Seventeen times. He never once wrote and asked. He walked.

On the eighteenth Goṣṭhīpūrṇa looked at him for a long moment and said that he would give it.

He set the condition first, and he set it plainly. What Rāmānuja was about to receive he would tell to nobody. Not to a disciple, not to a friend, not to a dying man who asked for it. And the price of telling was stated, and the stating was not a figure of speech, because Goṣṭhīpūrṇa did not deal in those: whoever hands on the aṣṭākṣara without authority to hand it on goes to hell.

Rāmānuja swore to it. He swore to it standing up, in the middle of the floor of that hut, with the old man sitting in front of him, and there were no witnesses because there are never witnesses to this.

Then he was taught.

It took the rest of that day and part of the next, and what he was given was three words and the whole weight underneath them. The first word says whose he is, and it says it in a form that leaves no room to be partly somebody's. The second word takes away, syllable by syllable, the notion that he is his own to dispose of, and with it the notion that he is his own to protect; a man who has understood the second word has given up the right to look after himself and has no further business arranging his own safety. And the third word is in the case that means for, and what it says is that the service is for the other one's sake and not for the comfort of the man performing it, which is the difference between service and self-improvement, and which is the whole of the difference.

That is what eight syllables carry, and it is why they were handed over one man at a time.

When it was finished Rāmānuja came out of that house into the street at Tirukkōṣṭiyūr in the last part of the afternoon and stood there.

The street was doing what a small town's street does at that hour. Cattle coming back. Somebody's threshing floor being swept. Two women at a well with their pots down. He stood in it for a while and then went and sat on the step of the mandapa on the north side of the temple, and he was still sitting there when it got dark, and the men who had come with him from Śrīraṅgam left him alone because he was plainly not to be spoken to.

Nothing in any account says what he thought about that night. What the accounts record is what he did in the morning, which was to get up early and send for people.

The temple at Tirukkōṣṭiyūr has a tower over the sanctum of a kind there are only three of in the country. It is called the eight-limbed tower, because it is built in eight parts and every part of it is one of the eight, and the eight are the eight syllables. The people of that town had been walking past it all their lives. Rāmānuja went up it.

He did not do it quietly and he did not do it quickly. He sent word out first, and he sent it wide, into the Vaiṣṇava houses and then well past them, into the streets where nobody had ever been invited to anything. He used his own men to carry it and he gave them the message in a form that could not be softened on the way: that everyone was to come, and that everyone meant everyone.

The accounts take trouble over who came, because it is the point. Men of every community in that place and the places around it. People who would not have been let into the room where the thing was taught. People who had never in their lives been taught anything at all, and who came because they had been sent for by name and nobody had ever sent for them by name before. Weavers. Men off the threshing floors with the chaff still on them. The people of the streets outside the wall, who stood at the back out of habit until they understood that there was no back today. Women. Children brought along because there was nobody to leave them with.

They stood in the open ground under the tower and looked up.

When there were enough of them Rāmānuja said the eight syllables out loud, from the top of the eight-limbed tower, in a voice pitched to carry to the edge of that ground. Then he said what the eight syllables mean, in Tamil, slowly. Then he said it again, because the ones at the back had not had it the first time, and he went on saying it until it was clear that they had.

Goṣṭhīpūrṇa arrived while he was still speaking.

He had been told by somebody running, and he came up the lane and through the crowd, and the crowd got out of his way because of what he was, and he stopped at the front of it and stood and waited until it was finished. Nobody in the accounts describes his face and everybody who has told this story since has wanted to.

Then he asked him whether he understood what he had just bought.

Rāmānuja came down off the tower and stood in front of him and said that he understood it exactly. One man goes to hell. All of these go the other way. He said he did not find the arithmetic difficult.

Goṣṭhīpūrṇa did not answer for some time. Then he took Rāmānuja's head in both hands, and what he said the tradition has kept as nearly in his own words as it could: that he had guarded this thing for a lifetime and had been guarding it wrongly all along, and that a teacher who withholds what would save a man is not guarding anything, he is only keeping it. He said that from that day he was the disciple and Rāmānuja was the teacher. Then he gave him a name.

It is the name the Tamil country has used ever since, and still mostly uses, in preference to Rāmānuja and in preference to every title he was given afterwards. Emperumānār. Our Lord; and more than that, because of the comparative buried in it: one greater than my Lord. My Lord did not do this. You did.

Nobody in the sources explains where the authority for any of it came from. A man swore an oath and broke it inside a day, and the man he had sworn it to put his hands on his head and called him greater than God, and no account written since has felt any need to tidy that up. They let it sit there.

What happened at Tirukkōṣṭiyūr was told and retold for the rest of his life, and it was told by people who hated it as often as by people who loved it, and it did him damage that he never entirely repaired. He had spoken an initiatory mantra aloud from a temple tower to a crowd containing men who by the reckoning of his own community had no business hearing it, and he had done it within a day of swearing not to. There were brahmins at Śrīraṅgam and at Kāñcī who never forgave him for it. Some of them were still on it fifty years later. Some of them tried to kill him. One of them very nearly managed.

He did not defend himself about it at the time and he did not defend himself about it afterwards. As far as the accounts show, he never raised the subject again.

Before any of the walking to Tirukkōṣṭiyūr there was a year on a hill in the north.

The hill is Tirumalai, up in the Veṅkaṭam country, two hundred and fifty miles from the island, and it is not one hill but a range of them, seven, the way the pilgrims count them, folded round each other with the temple in a valley at the top. A man goes up from the town at the bottom by a path cut and worn into the rock, and it takes him the better part of a day, and the last part of it is steep enough that the old and the heavy are carried. There is forest on those slopes, real forest; there were tigers on that hill within living memory and there were elephants on it then. It is cold at night in a way the plains are never cold. Water runs off the rock in two or three places and one of those places is a fall in a gorge with a pool under it, a couple of miles from the temple by a bad path, and it is called the Ākāśa Gaṅgā, the Ganges out of the sky.

The Lord there stands. He does not lie down as he does at Śrīraṅgam and he is not seated; he stands in the dark of the sanctum with his feet together, very tall, very still, with the lamps in front of him and a smell of camphor that the stone has taken into itself over centuries, and the hill was old and famous and thick with pilgrims long before anybody in this story was born.

One man on that hill had spent his whole life carrying water from the pool in the gorge to the sanctum, every day, up and down the bad path, for the Lord's bath.

That was Śrīśailapūrṇa. He was born on the hill and had never lived anywhere else and had no other occupation and wanted none. The Lord called him grandfather, in the hearing of other people, and the hill got used to that. He was the fifth of the men among whom Āḷavandār had divided everything, and the portion put into his hands was the Rāmāyaṇa: not the poem, which anybody can get, but the reading of the poem as the school reads it.

He was also Kāntimatī's brother, which makes him Rāmānuja's mother's brother; and he was the man who had come down off this hill for the birth at Śrīperumbudūr and stayed a month, and who had given the child his name, and one line of reason for it, and gone home.

Rāmānuja came up the path with two or three others and Śrīśailapūrṇa met him at the bottom of it.

Rāmānuja was appalled. He said what a man says on such an occasion, that his uncle was older than he was and was his teacher and was the most qualified man on that hill, and asked whether there had really been nobody less qualified about the place who could have been sent down to meet him.

Śrīśailapūrṇa said that he had looked. He said he had looked everywhere, and asked everyone, and had not been able to find anybody on the hill less qualified than himself, and that was why he had come.

They went up together.

The arrangement they made lasted a year, and it had two halves, and the halves ran at the same time.

The first half was the water. Rāmānuja took the carrying over from him on the second day, and did it for the whole year, twice daily, down into the gorge and up out of it with the pot on his shoulder. It was the work he had done at Kāñcī for years with the Śalai well, the same shape of labour exactly, and his shoulders already had the mark of it. The path down to that pool is worse than the path up the hill; it is rock and root and it is wet at the bottom, and the pot cannot be set down anywhere on the way back. The old man walked with him. He could not have done otherwise, since he had walked that path twice a day for fifty years and his legs did not know what else to do in the morning.

The second half was the poem, and the poem was taught on the path.

It has twenty-four thousand verses in it. They went through the whole of it in order, from the boy in the hermitage to the end, at the rate the poem goes, which is the rate of a man walking; and where they stopped in the morning was where they picked it up in the afternoon. Some of it was done sitting on the flat rock above the fall while the pot filled. Some of it was done in the evening outside the old man's house with the cold coming down. The whole year of it is one continuous recitation with a great deal of water carried in the middle of it.

Now the question worth asking about that year is why the Rāmāyaṇa at all.

Here was a man who had gone through the Brahma Sūtras twice, once with a teacher who held the opposite of everything he held, who could take the Upaniṣads apart, who was about to spend the rest of his life on a commentary; and the school he belonged to sent him up a hill for twelve months to be told a story he had heard as a child. The reason the school gives is short. It calls the Rāmāyaṇa the śaraṇāgati-śāstra, the book of surrender, and means by that exactly what it says: that this is where the doctrine is kept.

A śāstra states a rule. It says what the act is and who may do it and what it effects, and a man who has read it knows the rule and does not know one thing more. The poem does not state the rule. The poem is a list of people who did the act, with their names and their circumstances and what it cost them and exactly what was said to them afterwards, and the list is arranged so that the cases get harder as it goes on.

Śrīśailapūrṇa taught it as that list. A boatman of a forest people who ferried them over the river and would not take a fare. An old woman living alone in the woods who had kept fruit for years against a visit she had no reason to expect. A monkey king who had been thrown out by his brother and had nothing to offer but his ruin. And then the hard one, at the end, at the shore, when the enemy's own brother came over the water and stood in front of them and asked to be taken in, and the whole council said no, and gave good reasons, and the best of them was that he was the brother of the man they had come to kill and had lived in his house all his life; and Rāma heard them out and then said that he would not turn away anyone who came to him once and said he was his, and that if he were the kind of man who would, the whole expedition was pointless because there would be nothing worth reaching at the end of it.

And Sītā's evidence, which the school treats as the strongest thing in the book, given in the burning city with the women who had tormented her for a year kneeling in front of her waiting to be killed: that no creature is without fault, and that this was not the day for that account to be settled, and that whoever comes to be forgiven is to be forgiven.

They came in that year to the death of the bird.

The great vulture Jaṭāyu fights the demon over the abduction, and loses, and is found dying on the ground by two men looking for a woman; and Rāma sits down on the ground beside a bird and performs the last rites for him with his own hands, and the poem takes its time about it. When they came to that, Rāmānuja said that the village where he had gone to school as a boy was named for the pit where that bird was buried, and that the image in the temple there is Rāma doing what he is doing in this passage, with Lakṣmaṇa standing behind him. Śrīśailapūrṇa said that he knew the place. Neither of them said anything else about it.

Which brings it to Lakṣmaṇa, because that is what the uncle had been going towards all year.

What he taught him about Lakṣmaṇa was this. Of all the people in that poem, he is the only one who never asks for anything and is never given anything. Nobody grants him a boon. Nothing in the story is his. He is not there out of duty, and the text is careful about that: when Rāma tries to leave him behind with an instruction to look after the mothers, which is a perfectly proper instruction, he refuses it, and it is the only order he ever refuses. He goes because he cannot be where his brother is not. In fourteen years in the forest he sleeps outside the door, and the reading Śrīśailapūrṇa gave was that he did not sleep at all. He fetches. He carries. He stands behind. He never once speaks for Rāma, or acts for him, or holds any office under him; when there is fighting he fights, and when there is nothing to do he waits; and the one sentence that is most his, out of all his speeches in the poem, is: tell me to do it and it is done.

That, Śrīśailapūrṇa said, is kaiṅkarya, and it is not the price of anything and it is not a stage on the way to anything. It is what the man wanted. There is nothing after it that he is waiting for.

It was on the rock above the Ākāśa Gaṅgā, near the end of the year, with the pot filling, that Śrīśailapūrṇa told him why he had given him that name on the twelfth day of his life.

He said that when he came down off the hill for the birth he had known what the family would expect of the child, because the family was learned and the child was the answer to a sacrifice and every man in Śrīperumbudūr had worked out the hour and knew what the hour meant. He said that he had sat in that house for eleven days listening to them, and then had given the child the name of the man in the poem who wanted nothing, and had given his reason in one line and had not explained it, because it was not an explanation that would have been welcome in the room.

Then he said, 'There is no smallness in being the second one in a great story. It is not a lesser part of it. It is the whole thing done properly, and it is the only part of it that cannot be done for show. I did not name you for Rāma.'

Then the pot was full, and Rāmānuja put it up on his shoulder, and they went back up the path, because the bath is at a fixed hour and the water has to be there before it.

While he was on that hill, Rāmānuja asked his uncle to go and fetch his cousin out of a Śiva temple.

Govinda was the son of Kāntimatī's sister, so the two of them had the same uncle and were brought up half in each other's houses, and they had gone to Yādava Prakāśa's school at Tiruppuṭkuzhi together and sat in the same room for years. He was the one who had found out what the pilgrimage north was for, and had told Rāmānuja in the forest to get out of the party and go, and had then gone back and stood in front of the man who was planning the murder and told him a flat lie: that he had not been walking with his cousin, that he had gone his own way, that he had no idea where he was or what had become of him.

Then he walked to the Ganges and back with those men. It is a long way. He was with them for months.

At Kāśī, in Māgha, in the cold, bathing in the river in the dark before dawn with several thousand other people, something came into his hand under the water and he brought it up and it was a liṅga. Yādava Prakāśa, when it was shown to him, said that Śiva had appeared to the boy himself, and gave him a name for it, which was the man who brought it in his palm, and the name stuck to him for years.

He left the party before it reached Kāñcī. He went to Mazhalai-maṅgalam, where he had been born, and set the stone up there, and began to serve it, and served it with the whole of himself, because that was the only way he ever did anything.

Some time after that Śiva came to him in a dream and told him to go to Kāḷahasti and take service in the temple there. On the same night the men who ran the temple at Kāḷahasti dreamed that they were to send for him. They came, with people and drums, and took him back in procession, and gave him office; and within a few years he held the working management of the place, with the signet ring and the rest of the insignia of it, and was very good at it. He wore the beads. He wore the ash in three lines across his forehead. He composed in Tamil on the glories of Rudra and the temple sang what he composed.

Śrīśailapūrṇa went north after him, and what he did there he did in three stages over some weeks, and he did not at any point argue.

The first stage was a tree on the road Govinda walked every morning between his house and the temple. Śrīśailapūrṇa sat under it with the two or three men he had brought, and sang, in Tamil, about Nārāyaṇa; and did it again the next day, and the next. Govinda slowed down, and looked, and went on. Nobody spoke to him.

The second stage was a palm leaf. Śrīśailapūrṇa wrote out on it a single verse of Āḷavandār's, the eleventh of the sixty-five, the one that sets out plainly that the great gods are themselves dependent and that the supremacy belongs to one; and he dropped it on the path where Govinda would walk, and went away. Govinda picked it up, read it, and put it down, and went on to the temple and did his day's work. On the way home he turned round and went back to look for it.

He found it and took it to the old man under the tree and asked whether it was his. They talked for a long time, and Govinda put every objection he had, and they were not bad objections, and each of them was answered out of the Tamil verses and not out of argument; and at the end of it he got up and went home mostly convinced, which is the worst state a man can be left in.

The third stage settled it. Govinda was up a tree a few days later, picking flowers for the god, which was part of his own daily service and which he did himself and would not delegate. Śrīśailapūrṇa came and stood underneath the tree and began, in a conversational voice, to expound a decade of the Tiruvāymozhi, the second of the second hundred, and then the fourth verse of it, which asks in so many words whether flowers and worship are fit to be offered to anybody but the Lord.

Govinda came down out of the tree. He did not climb down. He came down, and went flat on the ground in front of his uncle with the flowers still in the fold of his cloth, and cried, and what he cried about was the years.

The next thing he did was practical. He went to the Rudra-devotees of Kāḷahasti, the men he had worked beside for years, and handed over the keys of the treasury and the accounts with them, in order, with nothing outstanding. And they told him that Rudra had come to them in a dream the night before and had said that Rāmānuja had come into the world to give true knowledge to everybody, and that Govinda was going to him, and that he was not to be hindered. So they saw him off with people and drums, as they had brought him in.

On the hill Śrīśailapūrṇa performed the whole business over again from the beginning, the thread, the five marks, all of it, and then taught him the Tamil hymns, which took a while.

There was an afternoon in that period when Rāmānuja came across him bathing at an hour when there was no reason to bathe, and asked him why.

Govinda said that he had needed to be clean again, because he had had his hand inside a snake's mouth.

Rāmānuja asked him what he had been doing with his hand inside a snake's mouth, and Govinda said that the snake had a thorn stuck in the roof of it and could not get the thing out by itself, and that it had taken a while, and that afterwards he had come down to the water. He did not appear to think there was anything in this to discuss. Rāmānuja had a long look at him and did not pursue it, and the only reason anybody ever heard about it at all is that the man bathed at the wrong time of day and was asked.

He was a small man. So were the two others who stood closest to Rāmānuja to the end, his nephew and the Advaitin he had not yet met, and somebody in the next generation made a remark about it that has been repeated ever since, that the three men holding up that whole building would not between them have made two of an ordinary man. Embār had a light quick voice and talked more than either of the others, and laughed easily, and was the one the students went to when they had done something foolish and wanted it put right before Rāmānuja heard about it.

Another time, on that hill, he was found lying on the bed he had just finished making up for his teacher. Asked what he thought he was doing, he said that he would go to hell for it and did not mind going, and that he had wanted to be certain the bed was comfortable, and that there is no way of being certain except the obvious one.

When the year was up and Rāmānuja was going back south, he asked his uncle for a parting gift and named it: Govinda. Śrīśailapūrṇa agreed at once and told Govinda to treat Rāmānuja exactly as he treated himself, and they went down the hill.

Govinda got as far as Kāñcī and turned round and walked back up.

He could not do it. He had been with the old man for that year and could not be two hundred and fifty miles from him, and he came up the path and arrived at the house; and Śrīśailapūrṇa would not let him through the door. He stood in his own doorway and told his nephew that he had been given away, that he was another man's now, that the giving had been asked for and granted and was finished, and that there was nothing in that house for him any more. Then he sent him back down the hill.

Some while later Govinda's mother asked Rāmānuja to see her son married, and Rāmānuja did, and Govinda went through with it and then took no part in it whatever. Rāmānuja spoke to him about that too, and told him, as a householder must be told, that he should spend time alone with his wife.

Govinda came back a few days afterwards and said that he could not manage it, because he saw the Lord everywhere he looked and there was consequently nowhere in the house where he could be alone with anybody.

Rāmānuja gave him sannyāsa that day. He gave him the three staves and the ochre and the name he is known by afterwards, Embār, and told him that from then on he was not to be anywhere else; and he was not, for the rest of a long life, except when he was sent.

He was praised a good deal in later years and he took it, which people found irregular in a man of that school, and he was told so. He said that when somebody praised him it was not praise of him at all, since anyone who had known what he was at Kāḷahasti and saw what he was now could see the whole of the work and whose work it was, and that to refuse the compliment would be to take the credit.

The last of the five did not teach in a room. He taught in front of the Lord, at the evening service, by singing and by dancing.

The office is called the araiyar's and it is as old at Śrīraṅgam as the recovery of the hymns, because Nāthamuni set it up: he took the four thousand verses, put tunes to them, worked out how they were to be shown with the hands and the body, and taught the whole of it to his two nephews, and it has come down in that family ever since and nowhere else. What the araiyar does is not recitation. He stands in the space in front of the sanctum at the appointed point in the service, and he sings the verse, and he beats the time, and he performs what the verse is saying with his hands and his face and his feet, so that the Lord is shown the sense of it as well as the sound; and the people standing behind him get it too, the ones who cannot read and the ones who can.

The man who held it then was Tiruvaraṅgapperumāḷ Araiyar. He was born in the town, in the family, and had been doing it since he was a boy. He had in his house the only manuscript anybody knew of the third of the four collections of the hymns, which becomes important a long time later. Years before, the Vaiṣṇavas of Śrīraṅgam had sent him up to Kāñcī on their business, and he had got what he was sent for by standing in front of Varadarāja and singing until he was given it, which is the only method he ever used for anything.

Āḷavandār had given him a portion too, and his portion was the odd one, because it was not a text. He had been told to teach Rāmānuja some part of the Tamil verses, and then to teach him the last means.

He began, one night after the great turn when the doors had been shut and the lamps were being carried out, by asking Rāmānuja to tell him what he had been given, and by whom, in order.

Rāmānuja gave it to him standing in the corridor.

Mahāpūrṇa, first: the five marks, performed on the road at Madhurāntakam under the trees by the tank before either of them had got anywhere, out of order and in a hurry and with the tank water and no other provision; and with them the Dvaya, which is two lines long. The first line says: at the feet of Nārāyaṇa, who is with Śrī, I come for refuge. The second says: to Nārāyaṇa, who is with Śrī, be obeisance. The first line is the act and the second is what a man is afterwards, and the thing to notice about it is that she is in the first word of both lines and that nobody can say it without going through her. And after Madhurāntakam, six months at Kāñcī with that household in his house, the Tamil scriptures gone through from the beginning.

Goṣṭhīpūrṇa, second: the eight syllables, and what the three words in them do, which had cost what it cost. And then the other thing, which he had gone back for afterwards, alone, on foot, as he had been told to come: the final verse of the Lord's teaching in the Gītā.

Mālādhara, third: the poem, decade by decade, for as long as it took.

Śrīśailapūrṇa, fourth: the Rāmāyaṇa on the hill for a year, read as the book of surrender, with the water.

Then he named a man who is in nobody's list of five, and named him first among the lot: Kāñcipūrṇa, who had no letters and no standing and could not by the reckoning of that century be anybody's teacher at all, and who had given him six answers to six questions when he was young and stuck. Rāmānuja called him his teacher to the end of his own and was told repeatedly that the word was not available to him in that case, and went on using it.

The Araiyar heard the whole list out. Then he asked one question about that verse of the Gītā, which is the question he had been going to ask from the start.

He asked what the verse permits.

Rāmānuja said that it permits nothing. He said that the man who reads abandon all dharmas as leave to stop performing them has taken the verse apart at the wrong joint; that what is to be abandoned is the fruit of the act, and the act as a possession, and the notion that the man himself is the one bringing it off, and that the performance continues. And he said that on the other reading, the one that finds surrender in the verse, the prapatti is for a stated purpose and the purpose is in the verse's own words: it is so that bhakti may get started. The sins it clears away are named, and they are the ones that were standing in the way of loving him. It is not an alternative to loving him. It is what gets a man to the beginning of it, and the one who has been asked then does the carrying.

The Araiyar said that this was right, and that most men who are given that verse take it the other way inside a month, and that this was why Goṣṭhīpūrṇa had sat on it for forty years and had been half right to.

And then he told him what was left, and it was not another text.

He said: you have the three short ones now, and between them they hold the whole of it. The eight syllables tell you what you are, which is his and not your own. The two lines are the act of saying so, and once said it cannot be unsaid. The verse from the Gītā is his side of it, in his own mouth, promising. There is nothing after that.

Except that you will not be able to do it.

The Araiyar said it flatly and went on. He said that every man he had ever watched, including the great ones, including the one they had both loved, comes to the point of doing the thing and finds that the hand he is holding out is not steady, and that the holding has to be done from the other end or it is not done. And the other end, he said, is not in the sanctum. It is the man who taught you. What comes down to you does not come down out of the air; it comes down a line of men, each of whom was held by the one before him, and the one who is holding you is the one whose feet you know by sight. Put yourself there. They call it ācārya-niṣṭhā, standing in the teacher, and it is the last of the means and there is not one after it.

Rāmānuja asked him where a man is to stand who has had five teachers.

The Araiyar said: behind all five, and stop counting.

That was the doctrine and it took one evening. The teaching of the hymns took years, and it was done the way he did everything.

He would not explain a verse. If he was asked what one meant he sang it, and if the question came again he sang it again with the acting, and then he asked the man who had asked what it had said. A decade a fortnight, in the corridor after the service, with his breath still short from the singing. He never once told Rāmānuja that a reading was wrong; when the answer was off he sang the verse over, the same way, and waited. That is a harder correction to take than being told, because the man has to find his own error with the thing he got wrong still sounding in the room.

He was an old man by then and there were nights when he had to be helped up the steps and got into his position, and then the music started and it did not matter. Rāmānuja used to stand at the back of the hall for that part of the service, in among the householders, and there is a remark of his from those years that the temple kept: that he had read a great deal about the poet of Kurugūr, and had seen him twice, both times in the dark, in front of Raṅganātha, with his hands going.

There was one thing that old man owned which the tradition has never stopped talking about, and it was a bundle of palm leaf in his house. The four thousand verses fall into four collections, and the third of them, which has in it some of the oldest of the hymns and a good deal that nobody else had troubled to copy, existed in that town in a single manuscript, and it was his by inheritance, along with the sole right to recite it in the temple. He knew exactly what he was sitting on. He let people see it. He would not let it out of the house; and every word of that sentence matters a great deal about twenty years further on.

Once, after a decade in which the poet speaks as a girl whose people will not let her out of the house, the Araiyar came down off the platform very slowly and sat on the bottom step to get his breath and said: they will tell you afterwards that I danced it. I did not dance anything. She did that, and I was just not in the way of it.

Then he got up and went home with the cymbals under his arm, along the fourth street, the way he went every night of his life.

The man who came down to challenge him was called Yajñamūrti, and he was not a provincial.

He was born at Vinjimūr in the Telugu country, and he had gone north as a young man, and at the Ganges he had taken on the learned men of that city one after another in public and had not lost; and somewhere in the course of it he had put off the thread and taken the single staff, and become an ascetic of the school that holds the difference between the self and God to be in the end not there at all. He heard that there was somebody at Śrīraṅgam making a noise, and came south to deal with it.

They fixed the terms between them in the hall of the maṭha, in the presence of a great many people, and the terms were these.

Eighteen days. If Yajñamūrti was beaten he would take the faith of the man who beat him, and be initiated, and carry his sandals on his head, and take his name. That last item was his own idea, put in before a word of the argument had been spoken.

If Rāmānuja was beaten he would give up his work in the world. Not amend it. Give it up.

There was no arbiter. No panel was appointed, no king sent an officer, no third scholar sat at the side to keep score and pronounce at the end. Nothing in the arrangement said how the thing was to be decided, because both of them understood that a debate of that kind is decided by one of the two men knowing, and saying so.

They began the morning after the offering and they sat from then until the middle of the afternoon, facing each other on the floor with the hall filling up behind them, and the rule they kept was the old and honourable one: each man stated his opponent's position first, in his opponent's own terms, and got his agreement that it was fairly stated, before attacking it.

For sixteen days there was nothing between them.

Yajñamūrti's case, which is not a weak case, ran like this.

The texts say one, without a second. They say that art thou, and they say it to a man, about himself. They say of that reality not this, not this, striking away every description as it is offered, which is not a poetic flourish but an instruction. If the difference between the soul and God were real and final, then there are at least two things that are ultimate, and the texts have been saying the opposite in every chapter.

As to the difference we all experience: of course we experience it. A man experiences a snake and finds a rope. A sleeper experiences a city with streets in it. That a thing is undergone does not make it so; it makes it undergone. The whole business of knowledge is the correction of what was undergone.

As to attributes: every attribute is a limit. To say that reality is this and not that is to draw an edge round it, and what has an edge is an object in the world and not the ground of it. You say your Brahman has a countless heap of good qualities, and I say that a countless heap is still a heap and still a set of edges, and that you have made him large instead of making him ultimate.

And then the sharp one, which he brought out twice. Your doctrine, he said, is a doctrine of love, and love needs two, and so you have gone through the Upaniṣads looking for two and you have found two. I understand the wanting. I am telling you it is not an argument.

Rāmānuja's case ran the other way and it went at the same place every time.

A thing with no attributes whatever cannot be distinguished from nothing at all. You say reality is pure being. Being is then said of it, and either that is an attribute, in which case you have conceded the point and we are only haggling over how many, or it is not, in which case you have said nothing and the sentence is empty. The texts you rely on do not describe a blank. They say that Brahman is truth, knowledge, the unlimited: three words, doing three separate pieces of work, none of them a repetition of either of the others, and you cannot get the three of them out of a reality that has no qualities without treating the Upaniṣad as a figure of speech.

And what the relation actually is, he put like this, and he put it the same way ever afterwards. The self stands to him as a body stands to the one whose body it is. It is held up by him, it is directed by him, and it exists for his sake and not its own. That is not a metaphor about closeness and it is not a soft version of identity. It says three things and each is needed. Because it is held up by him, it is not independent. Because it is directed by him, it is not its own master. Because it exists for his sake, it has a purpose that is not itself. And because a body is not nothing, the self is real, and stays real, and is therefore able to love him; which identity would make meaningless, since nothing loves itself in the sense the hymns use the word, and which mere difference without dependence would make impossible.

That art thou, he said, read as a statement of identity, destroys the purpose of the sentence it stands in, because the sentence is telling a man what he is for.

Sixteen days of that, and the hall was full every day, and there was nothing to choose.

On the seventeenth day Yajñamūrti began to win.

The honest account of it is that he found the place where Rāmānuja did not yet have what he needed. He pressed, all that morning, on the standing of the relation itself: if the dependence is real and the two terms are real, what is the relation, and is it a third real thing, and if it is, what relates it to the other two, and if it is not, then you have identity after all and are refusing to say so. Rāmānuja answered, and answered again, and knew as he spoke that he was answering with the arguments he had and not with the one the case needed; and everybody in that hall who could follow it knew too.

At the middle of the afternoon Yajñamūrti got up in the middle of the exchange, without finishing it, and walked out of the maṭha and did not come back that day. He went like a man who has seen the end of a thing and need not stay for it.

Rāmānuja did not eat that night. He went into the small room where his own worship was kept, and shut the door, and sat in front of the image he had brought with him from Kāñcī, Varadarāja, whom the Tamil country calls the Lord of grace, and prayed; and his prayer has come down, and it is the lowest thing recorded of him.

He said, 'If I am beaten in this fight, that is nothing, because your cause cannot be beaten. It was set standing on the earth by the poet of Kurugūr and by Yāmunācārya, and whatever has gone well for it so far has gone well because you wanted it to. If it now pleases you to put a false teacher on the stage and let him dance there, let that be. It is your stage.'

Then he lay down on the floor of that room and slept.

What he was told in the night was short and had no comfort in it of the ordinary sort. He was told not to be vexed. He was told that what was happening was the getting of an able man for the work, since the work needed one. And he was told what to do in the morning: go in and use against him every argument against that doctrine that is to be found in the books of Yāmuna.

Which is to say: the man who had left a book unfinished in the middle of a sentence had written, years before, the thing that was needed, and it was lying on a shelf in that town, and had been there the whole time.

On the eighteenth morning Rāmānuja walked into the hall and Yajñamūrti looked at him and did not begin.

He got up instead. He said that there were to be no more words between them, that he confessed himself beaten, and he took Rāmānuja's sandals and put them on his own head; and not one syllable of argument had been spoken that day.

Rāmānuja would not take it. He said that he had not expected this from him, and that the case between them was still contested, and that they would argue it out and see where it came to rest.

And then he argued it, to a man who had already conceded, in front of the whole hall.

He asked whose the ignorance is. If it belongs to Brahman, then Brahman is eternally covered over by something he cannot get rid of, since there is nobody else to do it for him and nothing outside him to do it with. If it does not belong to Brahman, then there is something that is not Brahman, and your one has become two. And if you tell me that it has no beginning and yet is not a second reality, I answer that a thing which has always been there and is not him is a second thing whatever you agree to call it. You rode in here on the great elephant of monism, and it has walked into a bog that it dug itself, on the day it needed ignorance to explain why anybody should be arguing about this at all.

Yajñamūrti heard the whole of it out with complete attention. Then he broke his staff across his knee.

He asked for one thing before anything else was done, and it was the thing he had put into the terms on the first day: he wanted to be called by his conqueror's name. So the name he was given was made out of two: the Tamil name of Varadarāja, in whose room the prayer had been said, joined to the name Goṣṭhīpūrṇa had given Rāmānuja at Tirukkōṣṭiyūr. Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumānār. And he was put in charge of the daily worship of that same image, so that the Advaitin spent the rest of his life as the priest of the deity that had beaten him.

He wrote two books afterwards, both short, and neither in Sanskrit. They are in Tamil, and both of them are about the teacher as the means, and the tradition after him has been quarrying them ever since.

But that was later. First there was the expiation, because a man who has put off the thread has to be brought back by a procedure, and the procedure takes days, and Rāmānuja shortened none of it.

Somebody swept up the pieces of the single staff off the floor of the hall that evening and nobody knows what became of them.

At the end of it he was given the three staves bound together, and the small square of ochre cloth to tie at the top of them, and he put on the ochre cloth himself in the morning, in the month of Kārttikai, and went straight from that to the little room at the back and did the worship there for the first time, badly, with a man standing beside him telling him the order of it.

The word they used against him was new.

It was said in the hall on the north bank, at one of the public disputations that a river town holds in the cool months, and the man who said it was not a fool and was not being rude. He had come down from the Telugu country with two students and a reputation for fairness, and he had listened to Rāmānuja for the better part of a morning with his head on one side, and when it was his turn he began by conceding three things, which is what a good man does. Then he said the fourth thing. He said that what he had just heard was, whatever else it was, recent. He said it was a hundred years old at the outside, and that a hundred years is nothing, and that the reading he himself held had been in the field since before anybody's grandfather could remember a time when it was not. He was not claiming that age makes a thing true. He was claiming something narrower and much harder to answer, which is that a reading nobody had ever heard of until the day before yesterday has to carry the whole weight of its own proof, and an old one does not.

Rāmānuja answered him that day and answered him well. Then he went back across the water and sat down and did not say anything for some time.

The thing under all of it was five hundred and fifty lines of Sanskrit.

Bādarāyaṇa had written them nobody knows how long before, and what he had done in them was to take the Upaniṣads, which are enormous and scattered and say the same things in a dozen incompatible voices, and compress the argument of the whole body of them into a string of short prompts. They are not sentences in the ordinary sense. A great many of them are three words long. One of the most consequential is four: janmādy asya yataḥ, that from which the origin and the rest of this. The origin and the rest of what? Of this. Of what is in front of you. And yataḥ, from which, is doing the work of a whole theology in two syllables, because a thing can come from a cause the way a pot comes from clay, or the way a dream comes from a sleeper, or the way a shadow comes from a man, and those are three different worlds and the four words will carry any of them.

So the sūtras cannot be used by themselves. They were never meant to be. They are the notes of a man who had the argument by heart, set down so that another man who also had it by heart would not lose his place. Everything depends on who supplies the rest, and supplying the rest is what a bhāṣya is: a commentary that takes the four words, says what each one means, says what it does not mean, puts the strongest objection to that reading in the mouth of an opponent and lets him have his best swing, and then answers him, and moves to the next four words, five hundred and fifty times. A man who has written one has a country. A man who has not is a visitor in somebody else's.

There was a great commentary in the field. It had been written a long way back and it was magnificent, and in it the difference between the self and God is finally something that the awakened man stops seeing, the way a rope stops being a snake, and the plurality of selves and the plurality of things go the same way, and what is left at the end is one, without a second, and without anybody standing in front of it. The men who held it did not hold it because they were lazy. They held it because it is the most economical reading of some of the most famous sentences in the Upaniṣads and because the man who wrote it was a very great writer.

Against it stood what Nāthamuni had carried and Āḷavandār had hardened into a school: that the difference is real, that the selves are many and stay many, that the world is not a misapprehension, and that the Upaniṣads say so in a hundred places and are not speaking down to children when they do. And the school held further, and this is the part that mattered in the hall, that this was not their invention. They said it was the old reading. They said men had commented on Bādarāyaṇa this way before the other commentary existed, and they could name them: Bodhāyana above all, whom everybody simply called the Vṛttikāra, the man who made the gloss; and after him Taṅka, and Dramiḍa, and Guhadeva, and Kapardi, and Bhāruci.

Every one of those books was gone.

Not disputed. Not disproved. Gone, in the way that things go in a country where a book is a bundle of dried palm leaves tied between two boards and a fire in a store-room is an ordinary event and the white ant is patient. A palm leaf lasts three or four hundred years in the dry country if it is handled and oiled and kept off the floor, and rather less if it is not, and the only way a text survives past that is if somebody in every generation sits down and copies it out, which men do for the books they are using and do not do for the books they are not. The names survived in citation, in the way a road survives after the town at the end of it has been abandoned. Nobody in the Tamil country had handled a leaf of Bodhāyana in living memory. Men quoted him from quotations, and the quotations had been copied out of other quotations, and in two places the same sentence was given in two different forms by two men who had each seen it at third hand. When a southern Vaiṣṇava said in a hall that his reading was the ancient one, the other side had a perfectly honest answer ready, which was: show us.

Āḷavandār had known this better than anyone. He had spent a long life defending the position with everything except the one thing that would have settled it, and at the end he had begun a book of demonstrations and left it lying, and that book stops partway through a sentence. And he had died at Śrīraṅgam before Rāmānuja could reach him, and three fingers of his right hand were folded in when Rāmānuja came to the body, and the community standing round told him what the old man had wanted perpetuated, and Rāmānuja had promised all three out loud, hedging it three times over with a provided and a provided and a provided, and the fingers had opened. Of the three, the third was this one. Comment on the sūtras. Get the meaning out of them that is actually in them.

He had been carrying that for years by then. He had taken the ochre, and been given charge of a temple, and learned the Tiruvāymozhi line by line from an older man, and walked to Tirukkōṣṭiyūr eighteen times, and heard the Rāmāyaṇa on the hill out of his own uncle's mouth, and argued an Advaitin down over eighteen days and been given him as a disciple at the end of it. He could win a hall. He had proved he could win a hall. But a won hall is one man's cleverness on one afternoon, and it can be lost again on another afternoon by a cleverer man, and what he wanted was not a victory. He wanted a floor to stand on. He wanted to be able to say, without raising his voice, that this had been said before, and to be able to put the thing that said it on the mat between them.

The report came in the way reports came, which is by somebody walking.

A Vaiṣṇava from down near Madurai had gone north years before to bathe in the Gaṅgā, as men did, one in a thousand of whom came back. This one came back. He had been a long time in the north and had seen a good deal, and among the things he had seen was a country at the top of the world, ringed with mountains, where the learning had never been broken. He said they had a seat there, a foundation with a goddess over it, and a school, and, which was the point, a library. He said they kept everything. He said that when a book went out of use in the north the last copy of it went into that valley and stayed, because the cold is dry and the ants do not work up there, and because for four hundred years it had been the sort of place where a man was given a room and a lamp and left alone if he could read.

He had not seen Bodhāyana. He did not know the name. He said only that they kept everything.

Rāmānuja asked him twice, on two different days, and got the same account both times, which is a thing worth doing with a traveller.

That evening he came back from the temple and sat down on the mat in the hall where they worked, and the lamps were being lit, and there were perhaps a dozen men in the room and most of them were arguing about a leaking roof. He waited until that had run itself out. Then he asked how long it took to walk to Kaśmīr.

Nobody in the room knew. Mudaliāṇḍān, who knew what every other thing in that establishment cost and how long it took, said that he did not know, and that he would find out, and asked why, and got no answer. A young man said he had heard it was six months. Another said six months to the Gaṅgā and then you were still in the middle of it. Kūreśa said nothing at all, and went on folding the leaves he had been folding, and one of the others noticed afterwards that he had folded the same six leaves three times.

They argued about it for a month, and most of the arguments were good.

He was not a young man. The sources do not agree on the year and it does not matter; he was past the age when a household stops asking a man to lift things. He had a temple to run, a community of several thousand in the two river towns alone, a kitchen that fed a fluctuating number of people every day, a building programme, and a quantity of litigation about land. He had also, and this was the part nobody said out loud in front of him, a certain number of men in his own community who had not forgiven him for Tirukkōṣṭiyūr and were waiting, and who would be considerably freer with him a thousand miles away than they were with him in the next street.

The case against was put most fully by one of the senior men, who was not an opponent and who loved him, and who laid it out in order over an afternoon. First, the road. Second, the rains, which would stop them dead for four months wherever they happened to be when the rains arrived, and a sannyāsin does not travel in the rains: he settles in one place for the cāturmāsya and stays there, so the journey was not a journey but three journeys with two long sits in it. Third, the languages. Past the Kṛṣṇā nobody would understand a word of Tamil, and past the Narmadā nobody would understand a word of anything they spoke, and they would be reduced to Sanskrit, which is all very well in a hall and useless for buying a ferry crossing. Fourth, the food. Fifth, the money, of which there was none. Sixth, and he put this last because it was the real one: that the thing they were going to look for might not be there, and that there was no way on earth to find out except by going, and that a man could walk for two years and arrive and be told politely that no such work was in the collection.

Rāmānuja heard all six out without interrupting once, which was not always his habit. Then he said that the sixth was true and that he had thought about it, and that if the book was not there he would come back and write the commentary anyway and be told to the end of his days that he had made it up. He said he would rather be told that having gone than not having gone.

That ended it. The senior man did not pretend to be satisfied and did not raise it again.

The arrangements took another six weeks.

Mudaliāṇḍān was given the whole establishment: the temple work, the stores, the accounts, the kitchens, the quarrels, the building. He was Rāmānuja's own sister's son, a small careful man with a memory for numbers and no vanity about being right, and he took it without fuss and asked for one thing, which was a written instruction about what he was permitted to decide by himself and what was to wait. He got it, and kept it, and the tradition says the arrangements he made in those two years were still being followed two hundred years later.

Kūreśa was chosen to go.

He was the obvious choice and he was also the choice that cost the establishment most, which Rāmānuja knew. There was a line of his from years before, from the time Goṣṭhīpūrṇa had told him to come alone and he had arrived with two men: asked which was his staff and which his pennant, he had said that Mudaliāṇḍān was the staff and Kūreśa was the pennant and that he was never without them nor they without him. He was taking the pennant and leaving the staff.

Kūreśa had been the lord of Kūram, three miles west of Kāñcī, with a household that fed the blind and the lame and the poor of that village from morning until late at night, and he had given the whole of it away in a night and walked to Śrīraṅgam with his wife and arrived with nothing, and had lived ever since by gleaning: going out each morning to the houses of decent people for the day's food, and never storing a second day's. He was some years older than most of the men round Rāmānuja and he had the best memory anybody in that country had ever met. Men said of him that a thing heard once was a thing he had. He never said it about himself and got visibly uncomfortable when it was said in front of him.

Āṇḍāḷ, his wife, was told after it had been settled and not before, and said, in the hearing of two people who remembered it, that she had married a man who gave away a village in one evening without consulting her and that she had stopped expecting to be consulted, and that he was to take the thicker cloth. She stayed. She was not going to walk to the top of the world and she was not going to pretend she wanted to. She went on with the gleaning alone, at a house or two fewer, because a woman gleaning by herself is given less.

Besides those two there were a few young men. Their names were not kept, which is its own kind of fact: four or five in their twenties who carried the bundles and did the negotiating at ferries and slept across the doorway, and who walked to Kaśmīr and back and are not named anywhere. One of them was a Telugu speaker, which turned out to matter for the first six weeks and not at all after that.

What they took: two cloths each and one blanket between two; a water pot; a staff apiece for the young men and the three staves bound together for Rāmānuja; a bundle of blank palm leaves cut and boiled and dried, and two styluses, and a lump of lamp-black in a rag, because Kūreśa refused to travel without the means of writing and was right; a small brass image and the things for its daily worship, which added weight and was not discussed; needles and thread; a coil of cord; a pot of oil; and a bag of coined money so small that Mudaliāṇḍān was embarrassed when he handed it over, and said so, and was told it was for ferries only.

And the letters. This was the real preparation and it took most of the six weeks. In every place between Śrīraṅgam and the Kṛṣṇā where the four thousand were sung there was a household that would feed and house a party of Vaiṣṇavas on sight, and further north there were fewer, and past the Narmadā there were almost none, and the ones there were had to be found out and written to. So men were asked. Merchants were asked, because merchants go north and come back and know which town has what, and a horse dealer who came through twice a year with animals from the Kannada country sat in the hall for a whole evening and named towns while a young man wrote them down, and was wrong about two of them and right about eleven. Two letters went to Dvārakā and one to a family at Mathurā that a Tirupati man had married into. A list was made of the shrines on the route and of who at each one might be prevailed on. A copy of the list went with them and a copy stayed, so that word could be sent after them, and word was sent after them twice and reached them once.

The last thing Kūreśa did was go round his houses.

He had about six that he gleaned at, which he had been going to for years, and the women of those houses knew what he would take and what he would not and had a way of not looking at him while they gave it, which is the kindest thing a woman in that position can do. He went to each of them in turn on the last two days and told them he was going north and did not know for how long, and asked them to give to whoever came instead of him and not to give more than they could afford. At the fourth house the woman asked him where Kaśmīr was and he said he did not know, and she thought he was being funny, and he was not.

There were men in the town who said openly that the whole thing was vanity. Their case was not stupid either: that a man who had been given charge of the Lord's own establishment had no business walking out of it for two years to look for a book, that the doctrine had got on for four generations without Bodhāyana and would get on for four more, and that what was really wanted was not an ancient authority but a man who would stay at home and do his work. One of them said it to Rāmānuja's face in the street. Rāmānuja heard him out, agreed that the establishment would suffer, said that he was going anyway, and asked after the man's mother, who had been ill.

The night before, Rāmānuja went into the temple at the last service and stood a long time in front of Raṅganātha, who lies on his side with his head on his arm and does not get up for anybody, and said nothing that anybody heard.

They went out at first light by the north gate, into the cold part of the morning, on the day after the festival ended so that the crowd would be gone. Perhaps sixty people came to the edge of the town. Kūreśa's wife walked as far as the ferry and then stopped, because there is a distance past which walking with somebody becomes a performance, and she knew exactly where it was. The river was low. They took their sandals off to cross the sand, and put them back on at the north bank, and were on the road by the time the sun cleared the palms.

They walked for the better part of two years.

The first month was the easy one and they knew it at the time, which is rare. The road up out of the river country was the road everybody used, flat, busy, with a tank or a channel every few miles and a village every few hours and somebody selling buttermilk under a tree at the hot part of the day. They did twelve miles, fourteen on a good day, less when there was a shrine. A sannyāsin's party moves at the speed of its oldest man, and the oldest man was setting the pace and the young ones were quietly annoyed by how fast it was.

They went down the west first, which surprises people who look at it on a map. He wanted the shrines of the Malayāḷam country, so they went south and west through the gap in the hills where the wind comes through, into the wet country on the other side where the palms stand in water and the roofs are steeper because the rain is a different rain. At Tiruvanantapuram the Lord lies along his serpent in a shrine so long that he cannot be seen at once: there are three doors, and the head shows through the first and the middle through the second and the feet through the third, and the three are put together in the head afterwards. Rāmānuja stood at each of the three in turn and took his time.

Then north. The whole of the western sea-coast, month after month of it, with the hills on the right hand and the water on the left and a road that was sometimes a road and sometimes a cattle track along the tops of the paddy bunds. The Konkan in the hot weather is a long white glare. They crossed river after river, and the rivers on that coast are tidal at the crossings, so the ferry went when the water said and not when the passengers said, and they lost whole afternoons sitting on a bank with the boat visible on the other side and nobody in it.

The rains caught them in the Deccan.

The four months of the retreat were spent in a small town whose name has not come down, in two rooms off the courtyard of a Vaiṣṇava household that had not been warned they were coming and took them in within the hour. It rained the way it rains up there, which is with intervals, unlike the coast. Rāmānuja taught every day, because there is nothing else to do and because a stopped teacher goes sour. Word got round and men came in from the villages and sat in the courtyard under the eaves with their feet in the wet, and by the end of the four months he had two disciples in that town who had not previously known there was anything to be a disciple of. Kūreśa spent the retreat learning enough of the local speech to buy things, and taught the young Telugu-speaker to write, properly, with a formed hand, because the boy had been ashamed of his writing and had said so.

After the rains the country changed twice over.

First the food. In the Tamil country a meal is rice, and rice is what a meal means; a man is not fed until he has had it. In the Deccan it is millet, ground and patted out and cooked dry on an iron plate, with a pungent powder and a raw onion, and a Tamil brahmin eating it for the first time does not think of it as food, he thinks of it as something that has been given to him instead of food. Past the Narmadā it was wheat. Flat wheat cakes, made fresh and eaten hot, with buttermilk or with a pulse boiled to nothing, and no tamarind anywhere, and no coconut at all, and the smell of a northern kitchen is mustard oil and asafoetida and not sesame and curry leaf. The young men complained for three weeks and then stopped and after a while began to like it, which is the way of it. Rāmānuja ate once a day and ate whatever was put in front of him and made no remark of any kind about any of it, for two years, which the young men noticed and mentioned to each other.

Then the alms. A sannyāsin of that country goes out with his vessel and takes a handful from each of a few houses and eats once and keeps nothing. In the south everybody knew the rule; a woman at a door knew without being told how much to give and what not to give and where to stand. In the north nobody had seen a man with three staves before. They were generous and they were wrong: a woman would fill the vessel to the brim out of one pot and be offended when he would not take it, and the negotiation had to be done in Sanskrit through a boy, and it was exhausting, and some days they simply went without. There were weeks in the middle country where they ate on four days out of seven, and a fortnight north of the Narmadā when they had wheat cakes and water and not another thing, and Kūreśa, who had been the lord of a village and had fed several hundred people a day at his own gate, was the one who went round the houses doing the asking, because he was the best at it and because he had done it every morning for years and was the only one of them for whom it was not a humiliation.

Money went on ferries and on nothing else. It ran out at a river in the Gujarat country in flood, brown and half a mile across, where the ferryman wanted three times the price and got it from the party ahead of them, and they sat on the bank for two days. On the third day the man came and looked at them for a while and then took them over for nothing and would not say why and would not be thanked.

Their feet were the whole question. A man who walks for two years does not have the feet he set out with. The soles go hard as a horn and then they crack at the heel in the dry country, deep splits that open when the foot flexes and bleed a little and close at night and open again in the morning, and the only thing for it is oil and time and neither is available. Thorns are worse. The young men picked thorns out of each other by lamp-light with a needle, and one of them went lame for eleven days in the Mathurā country with a foot swollen to the ankle and had to be carried on a hired bullock cart, and was ashamed of it, and was told to be quiet. Rāmānuja's own feet were seen by Kūreśa every night, because washing his teacher's feet was his to do, and Kūreśa never said anything about them to anybody and there is no reason we should know what they looked like, except that fifty years later a man who had been one of the young carriers of bundles told somebody, who wrote it down, that after the first year they did not look like a brahmin's feet at all.

They came to the Yamunā country in the cold weather and stayed through Mārgazhi. Mathurā, where the God of the Gītā was born in a prison; Govardhana, a low long rise of rock that a boy is said to have held up on one finger for seven days while a village and its cattle stood underneath it out of the rain; Bṛndāvana, which is forest and dust and monkeys and was then a very small place. The frost came in the mornings on the grass by the river. None of them had ever seen frost. The young men put their hands in it.

At Ayodhyā he went down to the Sarayū and stood in it.

He had been named for Lakṣmaṇa in his first fortnight by his mother's brother, who had given his reason out loud in front of everybody; and the Sanskrit name the world had settled on for him meant born after Rāma, the one who came second; and he had heard the whole Rāmāyaṇa through, verse by verse, from that same uncle on the hill at Tirumalai, over the better part of a year, sitting on the floor of a small house and carrying water in between. Now he was standing in the river of the town the poem starts in. The accounts say nothing about what he said or did there, and it is possible that he said and did nothing. Kūreśa is recorded as having been ill that week.

Then Naimiṣāraṇya, which is forest, and a circular clearing where the reciters have sat since before anybody was counting; and Puṣkara, out in the dry west, a lake with steps all round it in a landscape the colour of a lion. The cold came on properly after that. One blanket between two is an arrangement that works down to a point and then stops working. They bought a second blanket with money they did not have, by selling the brass lamp, and Rāmānuja was not told until afterwards and was annoyed.

In the hills they picked śālagrāma stones out of the bed of the Gaṇḍakī, which is glacier water and so cold that a hand in it goes numb in a count of twenty: black stones, smooth, and when you break one there is a spiral cut inside it that no tool made. They went up to Badarī in the last weeks before the passes shut, into snow, which none of them had seen either, and Kūreśa's fingers were too cold to hold a stylus for eight days and he was more upset about that than about anything else on the journey.

Then west and north along the foot of the mountains, through the five rivers, into a wide flat country of wheat and horses where the people were tall and the wells were deep and nobody they met had ever heard of the Tamil country or of the four thousand songs or of any of it. They asked their way to Kaśmīr for a month. Then the road tilted up and kept tilting, and the pines began, and one afternoon they came over a rise and the valley lay underneath them with the river in the middle of it going silver in the late light, and the mountains standing all the way round it, white on the tops, and the young men stopped without being told to.

The valley was full of rice.

That was the first thing, and it was not what anybody had expected from a country at the top of the world: terraces of paddy going up the lower slopes in steps, and water running everywhere in cut channels, and the river winding through the flat of it with willows along the banks. It looked like home laid out under a colder sky. The smell was different, that was all: woodsmoke instead of dung smoke, and pine, and in the autumn the astonishing smell of saffron off the fields to the south of the city, where the crocus comes up purple in Aippaci and the whole district turns out to pick it, and a man can walk past an acre of it and not know what he is smelling.

The houses were wood. Brick at the bottom and wood above, with shingle roofs steep enough to shed snow, and inside the rooms were small and low and made to be shut. Every house had a brazier of live coals in a basket, and people carried them about under their cloaks, held against the belly, all day. The cloaks went to the ankle and had no sleeves to speak of, and the hands stayed inside. Walnut trees, almond trees, and the huge plane trees that the valley plants in its courtyards and lets grow for two hundred years. Mutton, which nobody in the party would eat. Rice, which everybody would. Bread baked against the side of an oven. Tea of a sort, boiled with salt.

They came in near the end of the good weather and were cold from the first night and did not stop being cold.

The city stood on the river with wooden bridges over it and a long lake to the north, and the lake had houses at its edge and gardens and boats. The boats were the thing the young men could not stop looking at: flat, long, paddled from a squat, with a hooped roof of matting in the middle, and whole families living in them, and the vegetables grown out on the water itself on beds of weed staked down and floated, so that a man went out in the morning and picked his greens from a boat. There was a market on the water. In the south, water is something you carry in a pot from a well; up there it was a street.

The learning was everything the traveller from Madurai had said and more organised than he had made it sound. The valley had been argued in for centuries without a break, and by people who wrote it all down. There were grammarians there of a standing that made the grammarians of Kāñcī provincial. There were the poeticians, who had built in that valley the whole apparatus by which the south still judged a verse, and who would take a half-line of somebody's love poem and spend a morning on the difference between what it says and what it suggests. There were Śaiva men of an order of subtlety Rāmānuja had not met and did not underestimate, holding a doctrine that was not the Śaivism of the Tamil country at all. There had been Buddhists in strength and there were still some, and the logic the whole valley used, on every side, had been sharpened against them for four hundred years. It was an intimidating place and the party from the south felt it.

The seat itself was not in the city. It was a walk out and then a walk up, two or three days north-west along a river gorge into a side valley, where a stone temple and the buildings of a school stood on a shelf above the water with the mountains behind, and the goddess of speech and learning lived in the temple and was called Śāradā, and the whole foundation was called after her. It was a very old place. Men came to it from the whole north to be examined, and the examination was not a formality; a man came away from Śāradā with a standing he could use anywhere between the two seas, or he came away without one.

They were received correctly and coldly, which is what happens.

The librarian was an old man with bad eyes and a black wool cap who had been in that building for fifty-one years, and he was the first person in the valley who was straightforwardly kind to them. He asked where they had walked from, and was told, and made them say it twice, and then sat down on the step and asked how long it had taken, and after that they were friends. He took Kūreśa into the collection on the second day and Kūreśa came out of it, as he said afterwards, not able to talk.

The books were bark.

In the south a book is palm leaf. The leaf is cut and boiled and dried and cut to a length, and the letters are scratched into it with a steel point, and lamp-black is rubbed over the scratches and wiped off, and the leaves are strung on a cord through a hole and tied between two boards. Up there they wrote on birch bark, in ink, with a pen. Thin cream sheets peeled off the tree and cured and trimmed, written across the width, stacked and stitched and wrapped in cloth. It smells different. It handles different: it does not clatter, and a stack of it is light, and the ink sits on the surface and can be read at a glance by a man with bad eyes, which is why the old man could still do his work. The whole room of it, shelf above shelf in the dry cold, with cedar chips scattered against insects that were not there anyway.

They kept everything. That part had been true. There were works in that collection that nobody in the south had heard the names of, and works whose names everybody in the south knew and nobody in the south had seen. There was no catalogue in the sense of a book. There was the old man.

He listened to the list Rāmānuja gave him: Bodhāyana first, the Vṛttikāra; then Taṅka, Dramiḍa, Guhadeva, Kapardi, Bhāruci. He did not say yes and he did not say no. He said that the name Bodhāyana was on a bundle that he believed was in the second room, on the high shelf on the north side, and that he had not had it down in thirty years, and that he could not take it down for a stranger on his own authority.

That was how it stood for a fortnight.

A fortnight in a cold room is a long time. They were given two rooms in the school's lodging and a daily measure of rice and firewood, and they were not molested and they were not welcomed, and every second day somebody sent word that the matter was being considered. Rāmānuja got up in the dark as he had always done, bathed in water that had ice at the edges of the pot, did his worship, and taught for three hours whether anybody was listening or not, and usually one or two of the younger men of the school were, standing outside the door in the passage where they could hear and could not be seen. He learned their names before the fortnight was out. He always did.

One of them came inside on the ninth day. He was about nineteen, with the cap and the cloak and a bad cough, and he sat down at the back without asking and stayed until the end and then asked a question about how a thing can be a mode of another thing and still be a thing, which was the right question and the one a good teacher hopes for. He came every morning after that, and on the last morning he brought a pot of walnuts, which is what a student with no money brings. He is not named anywhere and there is no way of knowing what became of him.

The cold was the difficulty nobody had planned for. The room had a small hearth and the firewood was measured and it was not enough, and the floor was stone and the blanket that had cost them a brass lamp somewhere in the desert was doing the work of four blankets. The young men slept together like dogs, which they would not have done at home and did not discuss. Kūreśa's hands were the problem; they swelled and split across the knuckles and would not close properly in the mornings, and he sat on them under his thighs for a count of two hundred before he tried to use them. The old librarian noticed, on about the fifth day, and the next morning there was a brazier basket outside their door with live coals in it and no message, and there was one every morning after that.

The pandits came round to look at him twice. They were courteous both times. They wanted to know what school he held, and he told them, and they had not heard of it, which he had expected; the valley knew Advaita and knew it in its strong form, and had its own quarrels with it, and had never heard of a southern Vaiṣṇava reading of the sūtras that took the difference to be real and permanent. One of them, a heavy man of about fifty with a good voice, asked him a question about the nature of the released soul that was meant as a trap and was a good trap, and Rāmānuja answered it in four sentences, and the man went away and told other people about it.

What happened at the end of the fortnight happened at night and the accounts give it in one breath, so it goes here in one breath.

Śāradā came to him in the cold room and asked him to expound a half-line of the Chāndogya: kapyāsaṃ puṇḍarīkam evam akṣiṇī, the eyes of the Person in the sun being like a lotus. It was the half-line he had been thrown out of his teacher's school over when he was a young man in Kāñcī, because his teacher had read the first word as the seat of a monkey and he had read it as that which is opened by the sun's drinking, and had wept, and the tear had fallen on the old man's thigh and scorched it. He gave her his reading. She said that the other reading had grieved her for a long time and that he had dried her eyes. Then she gave him the title by which the whole country has called him since, Bhāṣyakāra, the man of the commentary, and named the commentary itself before it existed, and put into his hands a small image of Hayagrīva, the horse-headed form, who is the lord of learning, which is to say that she handed over her own office; and in the morning the old librarian sent word that the bundle from the north wall of the second room was being brought down.

Word of the title got about the valley in a day and a half, and after that they were not ignored any more.

The pandits of the Śāradā school were not bad men and their objection was not unreasonable. A stranger had come in from a country most of them could not have placed within four hundred miles, had lodged a fortnight, and had been given by the goddess of the place a title that none of them held. Half of them thought it was a story got up by the southerners themselves. The other half believed it and minded more. Within the week a deputation waited on him and asked, with perfect civility, for a disputation.

He agreed at once, which surprised them.

They fixed it for four days later, in the pillared hall below the temple, and the terms were settled in the way terms are settled: a proposition stated in advance in a single sentence, a challenger, a respondent, three judges out of the school and one from the city, no interruption, the loser to say so out loud. They did not stake anything. Southern disputations in those years were often for a man's whole following, and the Kaśmīris found that vulgar.

The proposition was his: that the Upaniṣads teach a Brahman possessed of qualities, and that the plurality of selves is real and does not end.

The hall was full by the middle of the morning and the cold came up off the stone floor through everybody's legs. The heavy man with the good voice led for the school, and he led well, and it is worth setting down what he actually said, because the tradition's habit of reporting these things as routs leaves out the part that makes them worth having.

He began where anybody competent begins, with the sentences themselves. That thou art. All this is Brahman. One only, without a second. He put it that if scripture is a single body and not a heap, the sentences that assert difference and the sentences that assert identity cannot both be taken at full strength, and something must give; and that the rule for deciding which gives is the rule everyone accepts, that the later teaching corrects the earlier and the higher subsumes the lower, and that the sentences of identity come at the end and are given as the conclusion, and the sentences of difference come in the course of the teaching and are given as the road. He put it that a Brahman with qualities is a Brahman with parts, and a thing with parts is a thing that can come apart, and what can come apart is not what the Upaniṣads are talking about. He put it that if the selves are many and permanent, then release is not release but rearrangement, because the man who is released is still the man who was bound, sitting in a different place, still counting himself. And he ended on the point that is the strongest one the other side has and that no Vaiṣṇava has ever enjoyed hearing: that a God who has a body, a form, a consort, a colour and a favourite mountain is a God cut down to a size a man can be comfortable with, and that comfort is exactly what the Upaniṣads are trying to take away.

It took him most of two hours and he did not repeat himself once.

The young man with the cough was standing at the side of the hall and was seen to be unhappy, because a student in that position is watching two men he admires and has to want one of them to lose.

Rāmānuja answered for the rest of that day and for two days after.

He took the argument from the end of scripture first, and denied the rule as stated: that the sentences of difference are not a road to be kicked away, because a text that meant them to be kicked away would not go on asserting them after the conclusion, and it does, over and over, in the same breath as the identity texts and often in the same sentence. Then he gave his own reading of the identity texts, which does not weaken either side, and this is the hinge of everything he ever wrote. When we say that a man is tall, we are not saying that a man and tallness are two things or that they are one thing: we are saying one thing about one referent in two ways, and the two words hold together because one of them names what the other qualifies. Now take the relation of a body to the one whose body it is. When a thing is wholly supported by another, wholly directed by another, and has its whole being in being that other's, then a word for the body is a word for the ensouled whole, and to say of it that it is the self is not a figure of speech and not an exaggeration. It is the plain sense. So: that thou art. Literally. And thou remain.

Then he went after the quality-less Brahman, and he went after it hard, because it is the point on which he thought the other side had made a mistake so fundamental that everything downstream of it was wasted labour. A thing of which nothing whatever can be said is a thing of which it cannot be said that it exists, or that it is one, or that it is knowledge, or that it is bliss; and the Upaniṣads say all four, at length, with evident enjoyment, and the man opposite had quoted them doing it not three hours earlier. He said that to strip Brahman of every quality in order to honour him is to honour him out of existence, and that the honour is not worth the price.

Then he asked where ignorance lives. If the appearance of difference is caused by ignorance, whose ignorance is it? Not Brahman's, because Brahman is knowledge itself and an ignorant Brahman is a contradiction in four syllables. Not the self's, if the self is Brahman without remainder, because that is the same answer said slower. And there is no third party in the room. He said he had been putting that question in halls for thirty years and had been given many answers and none of them had been an answer.

The king of the valley came in on the second morning and stayed. He was a young man with a soldier's build and a considerable education, and he sat at the side without ceremony and listened to the whole of it, which is unusual in a king.

On the third afternoon the school conceded. The heavy man did it himself, on his feet, in one sentence, which is the correct way, and did not qualify it afterwards.

Then the king asked the question that was the reason for everything.

He asked Rāmānuja where all this came from. Not as a challenge; as a matter of record. He said that the man had argued for three days out of the Upaniṣads and the sūtras and out of nothing else, and that a reading must have a lineage, and he wanted to know what Rāmānuja's was.

Rāmānuja named them. Bodhāyana the Vṛttikāra, first and chiefly. Then Taṅka, Dramiḍa, Guhadeva, Kapardi, Bhāruci. He said he had never seen any of them.

The king turned round and asked his own librarians whether such works existed. The old man in the black cap said that one of them did, and that he had brought it down from the north wall eight days earlier, and that it had been sitting in the inner room ever since because nobody had asked him for it.

They brought it in that evening.

It was not what the south had imagined for two hundred years. It was a stack of birch sheets, a little over a hand's breadth, cream going to brown at the edges, stitched in gatherings and wrapped twice in a cotton cloth that had been renewed at some point in the last century, with a slip on the outside in a hand nobody could read fluently any more. The ink had gone rusty. The first sheet was damaged along the fore-edge and some of the outer letters were gone. It was not the complete gloss that the citations implied; it was an abridgement of it, made by somebody, sometime, for reasons nobody in the room could reconstruct. The old man said it had come into the collection before his time and that he had been told, as a young man, that it came from the plains.

They put it into Rāmānuja's hands and he sat down on the floor with it in the middle of the hall, in front of everybody, and opened it, and began to read, and forgot that any of them were there.

What he found in it, he found over eleven days.

They read in the mornings at a window for the light and at night by a lamp with a shade, two of them, out loud, Rāmānuja first and Kūreśa after him. The room was cold. The old librarian sat in the corner with a brazier basket in his lap and dozed and woke and dozed. A guard was put at the door on the fourth day, by the king's order, and the reason for the guard was not explained to the southerners at the time.

It said what they had always said it said. Not in their words, and not in every particular; there were places where the old gloss went at a sūtra from an angle Rāmānuja had never considered and one place where it flatly contradicted something he had been teaching for twenty years, and he stopped there for most of an afternoon and then said that the old man was right and he had been wrong. But on the thing that mattered, on whether the difference between the self and the Lord is real and permanent, and on whether the world is a misapprehension, the Vṛttikāra had stood exactly where they stood, centuries before the other commentary was written.

On the eleventh evening Kūreśa read the last sheet aloud and stopped, and they sat there, and nobody said anything for a while. The lamp wanted trimming and nobody trimmed it. Out in the passage somebody was stacking firewood.

The king came himself, which was decent of him, and he came at night.

He sat down on the floor like anybody and said what he had to say without dressing it. The book could not leave the valley. He was not asking; he was telling them, and he was telling them as a favour, because the alternative was that they would find out some other way. His pandits had been beaten in public in their own hall and had then watched the stranger be handed, by the king's own librarian, the one object in the collection that proved him right, and the mood among them had gone from sour to something the king had a name for and did not use. He said, in a flat voice, that there were men in that valley who would not stop at argument, and that a southerner found dead on a mountain road in the first week of winter would be a matter nobody would ever get to the bottom of. He said the bundle went back on the shelf in the morning and that in exchange he would see them safe as far as the plains.

Rāmānuja asked for it for a year and was refused. He asked whether copies might be made and was refused, and the refusal was reasonable: eleven days of reading is not eleven days of copying, and a fair copy of that bundle was three months' work for four men, and three months was exactly what he did not have and exactly how long it would take for something to happen to him.

He did not argue after that. He sat with his hands in his lap and the thing he had walked two years for lying on the mat in front of him, and the young men in the room said afterwards that they had never seen him look like that before or since.

Kūreśa said, from the side of the room, that it did not matter very much.

Rāmānuja asked him what he meant.

He said he had the passages that carried the argument. He said it the way a man says he has fetched the water. He had been reading it aloud for eleven days and going over it at night when the others were asleep, not because he had planned anything but because it was there and he could not leave it alone, and he had the joints of the argument and the wording at every place where the wording did the work. He said he could put it back on the leaf whenever it was wanted.

Nobody in the room made anything of it, then. That is worth saying, because of what the story has become since. Rāmānuja said, after a moment, that they would see. The king said nothing at all, because he had no way of knowing whether he had just heard something remarkable or a man covering an embarrassment. The bundle went back up on the north wall of the second room in the morning, wrapped in its cloth, and the old librarian, who had grown fond of them, put it up himself and stood there for a moment with his hand on the shelf.

The old man in the black cap came out to the gate on the morning they left. He said that he had been in that building fifty-one years and had put a great many things into men's hands and had never watched anybody read the way those two had read, and that if he were younger he would have gone south with them. Then he said, because he was a librarian, that the bundle would still be on the north wall of the second room when they were all dead, and he was nearly right: the collection stood for centuries after that, up in its side valley above the river, and what became of it in the end nobody in the Tamil country ever heard.

They left the valley eight days later with an escort of the king's men as far as the first of the five rivers.

Whatever it was that the offended pandits attempted after that, it did not work, and the accounts that describe it disagree about what it was. One of the young men went mad on the road for nine days and then stopped. It was the middle of winter and they were going down out of the mountains on a track with ice on it.

The road home was a year and it was harder than the road out, because the thing that had been pulling them was behind them now.

And this is the part that matters, and the accounts hurry it, and it should not be hurried.

Every evening, when the day's walking was done and the fire was going and the food had been begged and eaten, Kūreśa sat down with a bundle of blank leaves and a stylus and gave it back.

He did it in order. He would say a passage aloud and Rāmānuja would stop him and ask him to say it again, and then ask him what came before it, and then ask him what came three passages further on, to see whether the thing was a chain that could only be recited forward or a floor he could stand anywhere on. It was a floor. But it was not effortless and it was not a marvel and it cost him.

The testing was not gentle, either, and it was not meant to be. Somewhere in the hot country Rāmānuja began giving him a passage back with one word altered, to see whether he would catch it, and he caught it every time except once, and the once was in the third month and it was a particle, and Rāmānuja made him go over the whole of that section again from the beginning for three evenings. Kūreśa never objected to any of this and appears not to have thought there was anything to object to. What he did once, and only once, was ask to be allowed to write it all down then and there rather than carry it, and he was told there were not enough leaves and that the leaves they had were for the fair copy and not for a draft, and he said, very well, and went on carrying it.

The second rains caught them on the Godāvarī and they sat for four months again, in a village where the headman was a Vaiṣṇava and gave them a cattle shed with a new roof on it. Those four months were the best of the whole return, because for the first time in a year Kūreśa was not walking. He wrote every day. By the end of the retreat the first two of the four bundles were done, and when the rains lifted he was a different colour and had put on some flesh and could close his hands in the morning.

What it cost was this. A man who is holding several hundred pages of somebody else's Sanskrit in his head, with no copy anywhere in the world to check it against, cannot put it down. He cannot stop thinking about it, because stopping is how a thing goes. He went over it while he walked, all day, every day, silently, and the young men noticed that he had stopped talking on the road and thought he had become grand. He went over it before he slept and he went over it when he woke in the night, which he did most nights. He got headaches that started behind the right eye and lasted two days, and he did not mention them, and he would not lie down in the daytime because lying down in the daytime was not a thing he did. His eyes got bad that year, from working by lamp-light in the cold at the end of a day's walking, and they never got better, and that is a thing to remember about what happened to those eyes later.

Twice he could not find a passage.

The first time was near Puṣkara, in the dry, and it was a short passage and he had it back within the hour. The second time was worse. It was somewhere in the middle country in the hot weather, and it was one of the joints, one of the places where the old gloss turned from an objection to an answer, and he could get the objection and he could get the answer and he could not get the sentence that carried the weight between them. He sat up the whole night with a lamp and could not get it. He was no use the next day. Rāmānuja walked beside him and did not say anything about it, which was the right thing and probably the hardest thing, because a word of comfort would have made it a catastrophe. On the second evening it came back while he was washing his hands, and he stood there with his hands wet and said it out loud, and one of the young men, who was sitting six feet away and had no idea what he was hearing, said afterwards that Kūreśa's face did something he had not seen a grown man's face do.

By the time they came down into the Tamil country there were four bundles of leaves, tied between boards, carried by the youngest of them in a cloth on his back, and they had been kept dry through one monsoon by being wrapped in oiled cloth and slept on.

Men made a great deal of it afterwards and they still do. The word they use for a man of that kind means one who takes a thing at a single sitting, and it has been attached to Kūreśa's name for nine hundred years. He would not have it. There is a story from years later, at Śrīraṅgam, of a young disciple who came to him wanting to be told how it was done, and was told that there was nothing in it, that the work had been read aloud twice a day for eleven days in a cold room by a man who could not have done otherwise, and that anybody who had loved the argument as much would have had it too. The young man went away disappointed, which is what happens when you ask that kind of question of that kind of man.

The image of Hayagrīva travelled the whole way home in a cloth bag with the worship things, and was taken out every morning wherever they were, on a riverbank or in a shed or in a rest-house full of carters, and was given water and a flower if there was a flower and a leaf of something if there was not.

They came home the long way, down the eastern side, and the one thing from that stretch of road that has to be told is what happened at Purī.

He went into that temple as he went into every temple, and looked at the worship with the eye he could not switch off, and saw a dozen things he would have changed, and went to bed intending to begin changing them. That night the Lord of the place told him to leave it alone. The priests there had served him a long time in their own way and were attached to it, and he was not to disturb them. Rāmānuja woke up a long way from Purī, at a shrine on the coast to the south of it, with no memory of the road, and the tradition says he did not go back.

He was forty days from home after that. He came into Śrīraṅgam in the hot weather, two and a half years after he had walked out of it, and the town came out to the north gate, and Mudaliāṇḍān handed back the establishment in the afternoon with the accounts written up to that morning. Āṇḍāḷ saw her husband coming up the street and went on with what she was doing until he got to the door.

They began the work eleven days later.

The room was the hall on the east side of the house they used, which was long and low with a row of pillars down the middle and mats on the floor and a window at each end with no shutter. It faced a lane. That is the first thing to understand about the Śrī Bhāṣya: it was written next to a lane, with a bullock cart going past at intervals all morning and a man who sold curd calling his cry four or five times a day and two or three hundred people walking to the temple and back under the window. Nobody ever suggested moving. In that country a house is not a place you go inside; it is a place with a roof on it, and the noise is not an interruption of the work, it is the room the work is in.

The hours were set on the first morning and were not altered in the whole course of it. They sat down when the light was good enough to see a leaf, which is earlier than people think, and worked until the middle of the morning; then the temple, and the meal, and the sleep that everybody in that country takes in the hot part of the day; then again from the middle of the afternoon until it was too dark, and then a short stretch by lamp for the copying only, never for the dictation, because Rāmānuja would not compose by lamp-light and gave no reason.

The arrangement was this. Rāmānuja sat against the second pillar with his back to it and his knees up. Kūreśa sat on his right, a little in front, with a low sloping board across his lap and the leaf on it and the stylus in his right hand and his left thumb holding the leaf steady at the bottom. He wrote as it came. When Rāmānuja was going well, which was most days, it came at a speed that would have defeated anybody else in the room, and the scratch of the point going across the leaf was continuous, like an insect. When Rāmānuja stopped, Kūreśa did not look up. He waited with the point off the leaf and his eyes on the last word, because looking up at a man who is trying to find a sentence is an unkindness.

Behind them, in two rows, were the copyists. There were five of them at the start and seven by the end. They did not copy from the dictation; they copied from Kūreśa's leaves, a day or two days behind, because a man taking dictation makes a fast ugly hand full of his own abbreviations and a man copying makes a slow clean one, and the two jobs cannot be done by the same person. Each of them had his own board and his own stylus and his own way of sitting, and two of them were boys of fifteen and sixteen whose whole employment was to rule and prepare the leaves and who were allowed to copy the easier stretches.

The copyists were not interchangeable and the accounts of that house remembered them as individuals for two generations. The senior of them was a man from Nadātūr with a beautiful slow hand who could not be hurried by anybody and who once let a whole morning's work stand over to the next day rather than finish it badly, and was not reprimanded. There was a left-handed man who had taught himself to write right-handed as a boy because the left hand is not used for it, and whose letters leaned the wrong way and were perfectly legible, and who was the fastest of them. There was one who hummed. He was moved twice and went on humming and in the end everybody stopped hearing it. And the two boys who prepared the leaves were brothers, and the younger one had the better eye and the older one knew it, and that arrangement caused precisely the amount of trouble it always causes.

The leaves came from a stand of palms the establishment had bought for the purpose. They were cut young, dried in the shade, boiled, dried again in the sun, rubbed smooth with a stone and a little oil, trimmed to a length of about eighteen inches and a hand's width, and pierced with two holes for the cord. The whole process took weeks and went on continuously in the back courtyard all through those years, and the smell of the boiling was the smell of the house. Writing is scratching: the steel point cuts the letter into the surface of the leaf, and the cuts are invisible until a rag with lamp-black and oil on it is wiped over the whole leaf and wiped off again, and then the letters come up black out of the buff. The two boys did the blacking at the end of each day, sitting in the courtyard with their fingers filthy, and they had a system of stacking that they were proud of and a piece of string with knots in it for the numbering, and once, in the second year, a stack was dropped and went everywhere and they put it back in order in an afternoon without a mistake and nobody ever told Rāmānuja it had happened.

The heat that first hot season was the worst anybody remembered. By ten in the morning the hall was an oven with a draught in it and the leaf went slippery under a wet hand and the sweat ran off Kūreśa's forearm onto the board and had to be blotted with a cloth kept there for it. They put up a screen of woven palm on the west window and it helped for about an hour a day. Water was brought in twice a morning in a wide pot with a ladle. The copyists worked stripped to the waist with the sacred thread across the shoulder and a wet cloth on the head, and one of them fainted in the second summer and was carried out and came back the next day and was extremely embarrassed.

The shape of the work was the shape of the text. Five hundred and fifty sūtras, in four books, in sixteen quarters, gathered into groups, and every group taken the same way: the sūtra, then the doubt, then the case for the wrong answer put as well as its own best advocate would put it, then the reasons it fails, then the answer, then the scriptural authority. He had the whole architecture in his head before they started and he never lost his place in it. What he did not have in his head was the wording, and the wording was slow. There were mornings when they did four sūtras and mornings when they did four words. There were three days in the second book when nothing at all went onto a leaf, and Kūreśa sat there for three days with a prepared leaf and a stylus, and on the fourth morning Rāmānuja gave him a sentence of about forty words and then the rest of the section came out in a flood before the meal.

It cost money. Palm leaves are not free, and neither is a stylus, and neither are seven men who are not doing anything else, and the household was feeding them and their families for three years. Mudaliāṇḍān found it. He found it out of the temple's own provision in part, and out of gifts in part, and out of two men who were told what it was for and gave land, and he kept the whole of it written down in a way that could be shown to anybody, because he had been the administrator of a great temple for years and knew exactly how a man is destroyed by a rumour about money. He complained about the cost to Rāmānuja roughly once a month and was ignored roughly once a month and would have been disappointed by any other outcome.

Where the Vṛttikāra was needed, Kūreśa gave him out of his head. It was done without ceremony. Rāmānuja would say the name of a sūtra and Kūreśa would put the stylus down and recite, and Rāmānuja would listen with his eyes shut and then say, keep that, or say, what comes after it, and then start dictating. Twice in three years he asked for a passage Kūreśa did not have, and both times Kūreśa said so at once, and both times the thing was written without it.

Before the first word, on the first morning, Rāmānuja had said one thing to him, in front of everybody, and it was an instruction and not a courtesy.

He said that Kūreśa was to write what he was given, and that if at any point he found that what he was being given did not agree with what he himself held to be the truth of the matter, he was to stop writing.

Kūreśa said that he understood.

It happened in the second year, on a hot afternoon, in the second book, at the place where the commentary has to say what a self is.

They had come to it by the ordinary road. The sūtra says that the self is a knower, and that it is a knower for that very reason, and the whole labour of the section is to hold a line between two errors: against those who make the self a lump of knowledge with nobody at home in it, and against those who make it a mere spectator that knowledge happens in front of. Rāmānuja had been working towards the section for a week and was in the middle of a good day. He gave the definition.

He defined the self as that which knows. Knowership was its distinguishing attribute, the mark by which it is what it is and is not anything else, and he said it in a form that was tight and clean and would have held anywhere.

The stylus stopped.

He did not notice for a sentence and a half. He was going on, and it was going well, and then some part of his attention registered that the sound on his right had gone, and he looked round, and Kūreśa was sitting exactly as he always sat, with the board on his lap and the point lifted off the leaf and his eyes on the last word he had written.

Rāmānuja said it again, thinking he had gone too fast.

Kūreśa did not write.

He did not say anything either, and that is the thing to understand about the next minute. He had been told two years before to stop writing if he found that what he was being given did not agree with what he held, and he had been told to stop writing and not to argue, and he was doing precisely what he had been told to do, and he had no intention of adding to it. He sat there.

The seven men behind them had all stopped too, because a room like that goes silent in a fraction of a second when the sound at the front of it stops. There was a cart in the lane. The curd-seller called from two streets off.

Rāmānuja said, 'If you are the one writing this commentary, sir, then write it.'

Then he kicked him.

He was sitting cross-legged against the pillar and Kūreśa was a little in front of him on his right, and he turned and put his foot into him. It was not a gesture. The board went off Kūreśa's lap and the leaf went with it and the stylus went across the floor and one of the boys at the back put out a hand and stopped it against the wall. Kūreśa went over sideways onto one elbow and got up onto his knees and gathered the board and the leaf and did not say anything and did not look at anybody.

Rāmānuja stood up and walked out of the hall and went to his own room and stopped dictating.

He did not dictate for four days.

Kūreśa came to the hall the next morning at the usual hour because nobody had told him not to, and sat in his place, and when it became clear that there was going to be no work he went out and did the gleaning and came back with the food and then went and sat with the copyists and helped them, which is to say that a man who had been writing the Śrī Bhāṣya spent the day ruling leaves and blacking other men's letters. He did the same on the second day and the third.

Nobody in that house slept properly. Two of the older men went to Rāmānuja separately and got nowhere. One of the boys cried. Mudaliāṇḍān, who had a flat way of putting things, said in the kitchen that one of the two of them would have to say something first and that it would not be his uncle.

Āṇḍāḷ was told that evening, by a neighbour who had heard it from one of the copyists, and she asked her husband about it when he came in and he said that it was nothing and that the work had stopped for a few days. She asked him whether he had been hurt. He said no. She looked at him and did not ask again and put the food in front of him, and in the morning she went out and gleaned at seven houses instead of six, because a man who is not going to be given work to do is a man who will be at home at midday.

What Kūreśa had stopped over was one word that was not there.

He held, and he had held since he was a young man with a village and an income, that to define the self as that which knows, and to stop there, is to define a thing that cannot exist. Knowledge is not an ornament on a self and it is not a possession of a self; he would have granted all of that; it is what a self is made of, and Rāmānuja had that exactly right and Kūreśa had never disputed it. But a self is not only knowing. A self is also, and by its constitution and not by accident, another's. It belongs. Its whole nature is to be his, to be for him, to stand in relation to him as a thing that exists for the sake of something else and has no other sake. The word for that in this school is śeṣatva, and the noun under it, śeṣa, means what is left over, the remainder, the part of a thing that goes with the principal thing and is not counted separately from it: the accessory, the appurtenance, the property. Take that out of the definition and what is left is a knower standing on its own, complete in itself, requiring nothing, and a knower standing on its own is not a self at all, it is a small god; and the moment you have made it a small god you have made worship a courtesy, and service a hobby, and love an addition that a sufficiently self-possessed knower could dispense with. Kūreśa's own way of saying it, afterwards, was about light: that a self without God is not a diminished self, it is not a self, the way light without the sun is not dim light, it is nothing, there is no such thing.

And he held, further, that a definition which leaves it out has not merely left something out. It has said something. A thing defined by knowing alone is a thing marked off from bodies and stones and from nothing further, and to define the self that way is to define it as a body is defined, from the outside, by what it can do.

He said none of this to anybody for four days.

On the fourth day some of the younger men were sitting in the courtyard in the afternoon and one of them asked him straight out how he bore it. How he could sit there and be kicked in front of the boys and come back the next morning and rule leaves.

Kūreśa said that he did not see what there was to bear. He said he was his master's property, and that a man does what he likes with what belongs to him, and that it was no business of the property's.

Rāmānuja was in the passage. He had come out for water.

He stood there and heard it, and then he went back into his room and sat down, and the accounts say that he saw it at once, and the accounts are right to say so, because it is not a difficult step once a man's mouth has made it for you. There it was, out loud, in the courtyard, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. A man saying what he was. Not describing his feelings, not being patient, not forgiving anybody. Stating a fact about himself of the same order as his height. I am his. That is what I am.

And the definition on the leaf in the hall did not have room in it for the sentence he had just heard through a doorway.

He came out before the light went.

He went into the hall, where Kūreśa was sitting with the copyists and the boys with the blacking rag, and he said, in front of all of them, 'You were right, son, and I was not.' He said that the omission was his and that it was not a small one, that a self defined by knowership alone is a self that the whole of the rest of the book has no use for, and that if that sentence had gone out into the world under his name the foundation would have been laid wrong and everything built on it would have been built on air. He asked Kūreśa to take up the leaf and write the nature of the self as that whose being is to belong.

He did not explain himself. He did not say anything about the four days and he did not say anything about the kick, then or later, and neither did Kūreśa, and no account written since has felt the need to tidy it up on his behalf.

Kūreśa got the board back onto his lap and put the leaf on it and held it at the bottom with his left thumb. The light was nearly gone and it was the wrong time of day to start and nobody suggested waiting until morning. Rāmānuja began again four words before the place where the stylus had stopped, and this time the definition had three things in it and not one: that the self knows, that it is held in being by another, and that its whole nature is to be that other's. The point went across the leaf. Behind them one of the boys began, very quietly, because he could not think what else to do with himself, to rub the blacking into the day's other work.

It took them the better part of three years and it ran, when the leaves were finally counted and tied, to a stack a man could just get his arms round.

The morning it was finished was not a ceremony. Rāmānuja gave the last sentences and stopped, and Kūreśa wrote them, and there was the ordinary pause while everybody waited to see whether more was coming, and then it was clear that none was. The copyists went on copying, because they were two days behind and would be for another week. The boys went on blacking. Somebody went out for the water pot.

What is in it can be given in a morning, and it was, many times, in that same hall, because men came to Śrīraṅgam to hear it and he taught it out of the leaves to anybody who would sit down.

Take one of those mornings.

It is hot and it is going to get hotter. There are nine or ten men on the mats and two of the old copyists at the back with their boards, because they are making a second fair copy for a man from the Telugu country who is paying for the leaves. The window on the lane is open. A cart goes past at the wrong moment, twice.

He begins where he always began, with the difficulty and not with the answer.

Here is a man, he says, and here is God, and every honest account of the two of them runs into the same wall. If you say they are simply two, you have a God on one side and a man on the other and a gap between them, and nothing crosses a gap. Scripture will not let you say it, either; it says, over and over, in the oldest and gravest places, that all this is Brahman, that thou art that, that there is one only and no second. But if you say they are simply one, then the man is a mistake that will be cleared up, and everything he has done and suffered and loved was done by nobody, and the God he was worshipping was himself being confused, and when the confusion goes there is nobody left in the room to be glad about it.

So the whole thing turns on finding a relation that is neither of those. And there is one, he says, and everybody in this room is sitting inside an example of it.

You have a body, he says. Nobody in this room has any difficulty saying, this is my hand. Nobody thinks the hand is a second person, and nobody thinks the hand is the whole of the man, and nobody thinks the hand is an illusion. When you say that a man is tall you are not adding a second thing to him; you are saying one thing about one man in two ways. Now look hard at what makes a hand a body and not a tool, because it is not the flesh. A tool can be put down. A hand cannot be put down, and the reason is threefold: it is held in being by the man, it is directed by the man, and it exists for his sake and for no purpose of its own. Those three, and nothing about flesh or limbs or being visible, are what it is to be somebody's body.

Then, he says, take the three conditions and apply them without softening anywhere.

I am held in being. Not made once and released, but held, this moment, and if the holding stopped there would not be a diminished me, there would be no me. I am directed. And my whole nature, the thing that makes me the kind of thing I am rather than an attribute I happen to have, is that I am his and for him.

And that is why, he says, the great sentences are true as they stand. Not softened, not read as poetry, not kept for the unready. When a thing stands to another in that relation, then a word for the one is a word for the pair of them together, and the sentence that says thou art that is exactly as literal as the sentence that says this is my hand. You are that. And you are still you, because a hand that stopped being a hand would not have achieved anything.

Someone in the room will always ask the next question at this point and one of them asks it now. If we are his body, and this body of ours gets ill and grows old and does wicked things, does that reach him?

No, he says, and the reason is in the definition. My body's troubles reach me because I am tied to it by my own past doing, and I am carried along with it whether I will or not. He is not tied to anything and is not carried anywhere. He supports and directs and is the purpose, and none of the three lets anything back in the other direction. That is not a convenience invented to protect him. It is what the relation is.

Then the part that costs him most to get across, because men want a doctrine to reduce.

Three things are real, he says, and none of them will ever turn into either of the others.

There is matter: the earth and the water and this pillar and these leaves and this heat. It is not a dream and it is not a conjuring trick. It is called wonder-making in scripture, and that is because it is wonderful and because it hides what is behind it, and never because it is not there. A man who tells you the world is unreal has not made God greater, he has made God's work not worth doing.

There are selves, uncountably many, and they are many for good, before and now and afterwards. A self is small; it is not spread out through the world; it is a knower, and a knower it stays. It does not melt at release. A released self is not a drop going back into water. It is a person, who has stopped being dragged, and whose whole occupation is service, kaiṅkarya, which is not a task handed to him afterwards but the thing he was.

And there is the Lord, who has both of the others for his body, who is not a quantity of pure being with nothing to say about it but a person, with a real form, with a consort at his side, with qualities that are not decorations, who wants a particular thing and gets it.

The relation between them is called inseparability, and the word is exact in both directions: the modes cannot be without the substance, and the substance is never found without modes. There was never a bare Brahman sitting alone before the world, and there will not be one afterwards.

Now, he says, and here is why I have spent three years on this and not on something more useful.

Suppose, he says, that the other reading is right and the difference between the self and the Lord is finally not there. Follow it out honestly to the end. On that reading, what is the state of the man who has got what he was after? He is not looking at anything, because there is nothing other to look at. He is not saying anything to anybody. He is not glad, in the way you are glad when your son comes home, because being glad about someone requires someone. He has not arrived anywhere; he has been corrected. And the whole of what the Āzhvārs sang, the whole of it, every verse of the four thousand, which is one long address by somebody to somebody, is on that reading a beautiful mistake that the poets had not yet outgrown.

He says he will not have it. Not because he finds it cold, though he does. Because he has read the texts and they will not carry it, and because the price of it is the abolition of the worshipper, and the worshipper is not the problem. The worshipper is the point.

Difference, then, is real, and real permanently, and it is not the flaw in the arrangement. It is the condition of the only thing that was ever worth having. Two are needed for love. Take the two away in order to make the union perfect and you have not perfected the union, you have ended it.

And since it is love that the whole of this is for, the means has to be of the same kind as the end. Knowing about him is not enough and he says so flatly; a man may know a great deal and be no nearer. What is asked for is a knowing that has turned into love and become constant, so constant that it is more like seeing than like thinking, and that is what bhakti means in this book and it is not a mood. It is hard. It is very hard, and it has conditions, and a man may look at the conditions and know quite accurately that he cannot meet them, and that is not an unusual position; it is the ordinary one.

That is where surrender comes in, he says, and he is careful here in a way that men after him have not always been careful.

Prapatti is an act. A man does it once, with his whole mind, and what he does is to hand over the responsibility for his own rescue to the one who can actually perform it. Its content is two admissions and they are both plain: I cannot, and you can. And what it is for, he says, is to get a man to the beginning of the road. It takes off him the weight of the things he has done that stand between him and loving at all; it is the removal of the obstruction to bhakti and the start of it. It is not another road running alongside, easier and shorter, for the people who are not up to the first one. There is one road, and it is love, and surrender is how a man who cannot begin it is begun.

And the shape of that act, he says, is not a technique, and there is nothing to count. A man comes with no other refuge, which is a thing he either has or has not, and cannot arrange; he lays himself down, the whole of himself and not a part; and underneath it there is the one thing that cannot be counterfeited, which is a genuine knowledge of his own helplessness, because a man who still has a plan of his own has not done it yet. And one thing more, which is trust: that the one he has handed himself to will in fact do it. Whoever has that has placed himself where he will be carried. He does not carry himself afterwards either.

By now it is the middle of the morning and the light on the floor has moved across two mats and somebody's leg has gone to sleep. The copyists at the back have not been listening for some time, because they have heard it before and they are two days behind.

The book itself does not end in anything like that. It runs to the last quarter of the fourth chapter, on the state of the released, and it makes its last distinction, and then it stops on a note of housekeeping: a remark that the repetition of the sūtra signals that the treatise is now over. And then the last three words, which are the three words the whole country has remembered, a plain workman's sentence with nothing in it about God or release or love at all.

Thus, everything fits.

Two years after the leaves were tied, Āṇḍāḷ had twins.

They had been married a long time by then and had been poor for most of it, on purpose, and had no children, and she was past the age where anybody in that street was still saying anything about it to her face. The whole of what happened is told in the accounts as the consequence of one night of rain, when Kūreśa could not go out for alms because it rained past the hour, and the two of them fasted and he read the Tiruvāymozhi and went to sleep hungry, and she lay awake and heard the drums from the temple going for the night offering and said something to Raṅganātha about it that she had no business saying; and a man came to the door with food from the temple in the middle of the night, and Kūreśa would take two mouthfuls and no more, one for himself and one for her, and was cross with her afterwards when he worked out why it had come.

The boys were born in the small house off the sixth street, in the room where everything happened, with the women of the neighbouring houses doing what women do and Kūreśa standing out in the lane the entire time with his back against the wall.

He was told he had two sons and said, 'Ah,' and went on standing there.

He did not do the naming. He did not arrange it and he did not take any part in deciding it, and he was not being humble in the way that draws attention: he had a settled view, which he had said out loud years before and which everybody in that house knew, that the children of his body belonged to Rāmānuja's family and not to his, and that the sacraments of that family were Rāmānuja's to perform. When Āṇḍāḷ later pressed him about finding wives for the two of them he said that he was not going to worry himself about the arrangements of Bhagavān's household, and meant it, and she said what she thought about that, and the marriages got made anyway.

So on the twelfth day Rāmānuja came down the street.

He brought Embār with him, which mattered, and everybody in the lane saw it and knew that it mattered. Embār was his first cousin, his mother's sister's son, brought up half in the same house as himself; the one who had gone off into the Śaiva country as a young man and held an office there and worn a signet ring, and had put his hand into a snake's mouth to pull out a thorn because the snake was in pain and he had stopped noticing that it was a snake; and who had been fetched back south and turned by a single verse and had been Rāmānuja's ever since. Of the men round Rāmānuja he was the one with the best hands for a child. He had picked up more infants in his life than any other sannyāsin in that town, and mothers gave them to him without thinking about it, which is a real and unteachable thing.

The house was full. There is no ceremony in that country that a street does not attend. The floor had been washed that morning and the doorway had a pattern of rice flour on it, and there were two small lamps in the niche, and a cloth had been borrowed from somewhere to lay the babies on because the household's own cloths were all in use as clothes. The two of them came in and sat down on the floor, and the babies were brought out one at a time and put into their laps, and the older women stood along the wall and said the things that are said, and somebody had made more food than the household could have afforded, which means the street had made it: rice from one house and a vegetable from another and a sweet from the house at the end with the curd business, and two women had come at first light and cooked it all in Āṇḍāḷ's kitchen while she lay down, because she had been told to lie down and for once had done it.

The rite itself is short. There is water, and a little honey, and the name said into the child's right ear three times by the man who is giving it, quietly, so that the child hears it before anybody else does.

Rāmānuja looked at the first one for a while.

Then he named him Parāśara.

He named the second one after Kūreśa's own father, who was Śrī Rāma of Kūram and long dead, and that is the name the boy was called by in the house, and the name he is known by now is the other one that comes with it, Veda Vyāsa. The two names together are a pair and everybody in that room knew what pair they were.

Parāśara and Vyāsa are a father and a son, at the head of everything. Parāśara made the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, out of which the whole of this school's account of what the world is and how it got here is taken, and which Rāmānuja quoted more often than any book that was not scripture. His son compiled the Veda into its branches, and made the great poem, and wrote the five hundred and fifty lines that Rāmānuja had just spent three years on and two years walking for. The two of them between them are the ground a southern Vaiṣṇava stands on without noticing that he is standing on anything.

And an old man at Śrīraṅgam, dying before Rāmānuja could reach him, had left three fingers folded on his right hand, and the community standing round the body had said that he used to say, indirectly and often, that he wished three things perpetuated, and the first of them was that gratitude should be shown to the memory of those two. Rāmānuja had promised it out loud in front of them all and the fingers had opened.

A man may show gratitude to the memory of a sage by writing a book about him, or by founding a festival, or by endowing a recitation, and all of those had been available for twenty years and he had done none of them. What he did was to wait until there were two boys in a poor house in the third street, and give them the names, and let two people who had nothing at all carry them.

Nobody in the room made a speech about it. The naming took about as long as a naming takes. Embār held the second child while the first was being named and then they swapped, and the older women at the wall were watching the children and not the theology, and one of them said out loud that the smaller one had his mother's chin, which is the observation that gets made in that room in every century.

Āṇḍāḷ asked him afterwards, in the practical voice she used, what was to be done about the fact that there was no money in the house and now two more mouths, and Rāmānuja said that the establishment would send rice and that Kūreśa was not to be told, and Kūreśa was told within the day by one of the boys who carried it, and refused it, and took it in the end on the condition that it was called a loan, and there is no record of anything ever being repaid.

The older of the two, Parāśara, was the one everybody watched, and was watched from very early, and there is a good deal in the accounts about what Rāmānuja said and did over that particular child which belongs later in this story and not here. He was a quick boy and a beautiful one and a little too clever, and he knew he was the favourite of a great man before he was old enough to know what that would cost him. His father, who had given away a village in one evening and had never mentioned it since, took no visible interest in his son's prospects whatsoever and taught him Sanskrit himself, every morning, for years, sitting on the same mat.

The second boy was slower and steadier and outlived his brother by a long way, and did the work, and is the one the tradition mentions second and would have been sorry to lose.

For the first year they were simply two babies in a house with no money in it. Āṇḍāḷ fed them both herself, which is not a small undertaking, and went out gleaning with one tied on and the other left with the woman next door, and swapped them about because the woman next door had opinions about which of them cried more. Kūreśa went on with his mornings exactly as before. He was seen in the lane at the usual hour with the vessel, and he took what he had always taken and not a grain more on account of the children, and when somebody pointed out that there were now four people in the house he said that there were now four people in the house and went on up the street.

On the evening of the twelfth day Rāmānuja walked back up the street to his own house with Embār beside him, and the two of them had known each other for sixty years, and Embār said something to him about the second child's grip, and that is all the accounts have kept of that walk.

The deputation came to Piḷḷān first because they were afraid to come to Rāmānuja.

There were a dozen of them, mostly the younger teachers, and what they wanted was simple and they had wanted it for years. The Śrī Bhāṣya was done. The Sanskrit side of the house was secure; men were coming from the Telugu country and the Kannada country and the north to hear it, and any Vaiṣṇava who could get through it could now stand up in any hall in India and not be told he was reciting a novelty.

The Tamil side had nothing.

The Tiruvāymozhi is eleven hundred and two verses in Tamil by a man of the fields at Kurugūr whom the country calls Nammāzhvār, our own Āzhvār, and it is the last and greatest of the four thousand. It is a love poem and it is a theology and it is neither of those separately. Much of it is in a woman's voice, and the woman is the poet, and she is waiting for somebody who does not come, and she sends birds and clouds with messages, and her mother does not understand what is wrong with her, and the neighbours talk. It is recited at every stage of a Śrīvaiṣṇava's life from before he can understand it until after he can no longer sit up. It is sung over a newborn and it is sung to a dying man and the verses are the same verses.

And there was not one written commentary on it anywhere. What existed was what one man had been told by another man sitting on a mat, and where that had gone wrong nobody could check it, and where a verse was hard the tradition of its meaning had thinned out to almost nothing in three or four places. Rāmānuja himself had been taught it line by line by an older man, slowly, as a grown man who could already read anything in Sanskrit, and had quarrelled with that teacher over one verse and had the quarrel arbitrated, and knew better than anybody alive how much of the poem's meaning was sitting in the heads of about eleven men, most of whom were old.

Meanwhile there were men in that country, very able men, who read the poem as ordinary love poetry and said so in public, and said it not out of malice but because that is what the verses look like to a man who comes to them with the handbooks of Tamil love convention in his hand, which is how any educated man of that country came to any Tamil poem. There was nothing on paper to put against them.

Piḷḷān was the right man to send and they knew it. He was Śrīśailapūrṇa's son, out of the household on the hill at Tirumalai, which made him Rāmānuja's own uncle's boy and a cousin of a sort to half the establishment. He had come down young and had never really lived anywhere else. Rāmānuja called him his son in a particular way, not the son of his body and not the son of his teaching exactly, but the one who had got what he thought.

He was a mild man and a stubborn one, and he had the quality that makes a commentator, which is not brilliance: it is the willingness to stay with a line that he has not understood for as long as it takes, without deciding in the meantime that it means something convenient. He was also the only man in that establishment who was equally at home in both halves of it, able to follow the Śrī Bhāṣya at speed and able to sing the poem, which is rarer than it sounds and was the whole reason he was chosen.

He went into the assembly and put it in the form of a request and did it well. He said that Rāmānuja had written the Śrī Bhāṣya and had travelled the country and had established the reading, and that the Sanskrit was now protected. He asked him to protect the Āzhvārs' verses in the same way, so that they should not be misread.

Rāmānuja said that it needed doing and that he was not going to do it.

He gave his reason on the spot, in front of everybody, and it is one of the two or three most consequential sentences he ever spoke, and it is not a doctrine, it is a piece of judgement about how a thing stays alive. He said that if he wrote a commentary on those verses, men of limited understanding would take it that what he had found in them was what was there, and no one afterwards would dare to write past him. He said that the verses were full of meanings that teachers not yet born would bring out, and that to shut the door on those men would be an offence against the poems. And then he told Piḷḷān to write it.

He set the size as well, which tells you how much thought he had already given to something he had just declined to do. He said it was to be the length of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa: six thousand units by the measure they used for these things, which is a count of syllables and not of pages, and which is how the thing got its name, the Six Thousand.

Piḷḷān wrote it and it took him years. He wrote it in the mixed language, Tamil with Sanskrit standing in it undeclined and unapologetic, which is how a learned man in that country actually spoke when he was explaining something to another learned man, and which had never been used for a book before. That language came out of this room and this decision and went on to carry the whole commentarial tradition of the school for the next five hundred years.

What he put in it was largely Rāmānuja. He had heard him on the poem for twenty years, and the commentary is full of phrases that are Rāmānuja's own turns rendered into the mixed language, and anybody who has read the Śrī Bhāṣya and then reads the Six Thousand keeps hearing the same voice from the next room. This is the second of the three fingers. Āḷavandār had wanted a tribute of love paid to Nammāzhvār; he got a commentary, written by another man's hand, containing another man's lectures, which is the kind of arithmetic Rāmānuja was good at.

The rest of what he wrote came about in the same way, out of somebody asking for something.

A man came from the north who could not stay. He had a household and land and could give it a year and no more, and a year is not enough for the Śrī Bhāṣya, which takes three to teach properly and is then gone over for the rest of a man's life. So Rāmānuja made him a middle-sized commentary on the same five hundred and fifty lines, with the architecture of the argument kept and the great slow refutations cut down to their joints, and it is called the Vedānta Dīpa, the lamp: enough light to walk by, not enough to work by.

Then there were the men who could not even give a year. Village teachers, most of them, who would go home and be the only learned man in forty miles and would be asked questions in the street for the next thirty years. For them he made a third one, very short, which does nothing but say what each sūtra means, with the doubts and the opponents left out entirely, and that is the Vedānta Sāra. Three commentaries on one text, of three lengths, because three kinds of men had asked.

The Vedārtha Saṅgraha was older than all of them and is the book he had made first, before the journey north, and it is not a commentary on anything. It is a single argument run straight through from the beginning to the end, gathering up what the Veda is actually saying about the Lord, the self and the world, and putting the opposing readings one after another and dealing with them. Men who knew both books used to say that the Vedārtha Saṅgraha is where you find out what he thought and the Śrī Bhāṣya is where you find out that he can prove it.

The Gītā Bhāṣya came out of a different need, and it is the warmest thing he wrote at that length, and it opens with a single verse to Āḷavandār and nobody else.

And there was the small book that is not an argument at all, the Nitya Grantha, which simply tells a man how to do his worship at home: how to bathe, what to gather, what to say, how to make the offering, what to do with it afterwards, in what order, at what hour. Nobody counts it among the great works. He wrote it because people kept asking him what to do in the morning and he got tired of answering one at a time.

The three prose hymns came last and they are a separate matter and they belong to a day in Paṅkuni that has not happened yet in this story.

The accounts group the nine of them together and call them a set, and men have been reciting the list for nine hundred years the way a shopkeeper recites stock. It is worth saying what the list obscures, which is that not one of the nine was written because a man sat down to write a book. Every one of them was a request from a particular person that got answered at greater length than the person expected.

What the Six Thousand started is on record. Piḷḷān taught it to Kūreśa's elder son, and that son taught it to another man, who wrote a longer one, nine thousand; and his student wrote one longer still, thirty-six thousand, which is the one men mean when they say the commentary without qualifying it. Four commentaries in four generations, each one written because the door had been left open, each one saying things the man before it had not seen.

Piḷḷān finished and brought it, and it was read aloud in the hall over many days, with the copyists already working on it from the second day, and the account of what Rāmānuja said when it was done has not survived, which is a pity and is also usual.

Long before any king moved against him, his own people tried to kill him, and they very nearly managed it, and they did it over the accounts.

This is the part of the life that gets left out. It sits badly in the shape people want, where the saint is loved by his own and persecuted by outsiders, and it happened early, and it happened because of the reforms, and the reforms were exactly the ones everybody praises him for afterwards.

Understand first what a great temple was. Raṅganātha's establishment on that island was not a building with priests in it. It was the largest thing in the district by a long way: land in thirty villages, herds, oil presses, weaving, a treasury, a jewel store, a granary, grazing rights, tolls, and a permanent population inside the walls of several hundred men whose families had done one specified thing there for six or eight generations. The right to perform a particular service at a particular hour was a piece of property. It was inherited. It was divided among brothers, and litigated over, and in hard years it was sold. Attached to each of those rights was a share: so much rice, so much of the offered food to be taken away and eaten or sold, so much oil, a cloth at certain festivals, a measure of paddy at the harvest. Nobody thought this corrupt. It was how every temple in the country had worked for four hundred years and it was how those families ate.

Into that came a sannyāsin from Kāñcī with a head for organisation and no family in the place.

What he did over about two years, taking it in order, was this. He had the hours fixed. A vessel of water with a hole in it was set up where it could be watched, and a man was made responsible for calling the hour, and the services were to begin when they were called and not when the officiant arrived. He had the departments separated and named: one body for the repairs, one for the flowers and the vegetables and the fruit and the scents, one for the vestments and the stores of cloth, one for the animals, since the temple kept elephants and horses and deer and peacocks and doves and somebody had to be answerable for them. He had a cattle station made at a village a morning's walk away and five villages turned over to pasture for the temple herd, and he went and stayed there himself for days at a time, which nobody had ever done. He had the daily provision written down: what went in, what came out, what was offered, what was distributed, who signed. He had the recitation reorganised, and the singers and the reciters listed by name, and the order of the festivals set out.

And he changed the form of the worship itself in the sanctum, which was the deepest cut of all, because it moved the daily rite from one system of ritual to another and therefore moved the men qualified to perform it. Families who had gone in through that door every morning of their working lives found that the thing done inside was no longer the thing they had been trained by their fathers to do.

Set out like that it reads as competence. Stand in the street on the receiving end of it and it reads differently. A man whose grandfather's grandfather had carried the processional Lord on his shoulder on the fourth night of the festival, and who had a fixed share of the offered rice for doing it, was now being asked to be somewhere at a called hour, to hand in a tally, to take a lesser share or none, and in some cases to stand aside altogether while somebody else did what he had been born to do. Most of them took it and disliked it. A number of them talked. And a few of them decided.

He had no household. A sannyāsin of his kind ate by going out with his vessel to a few houses of decent people and taking a little at each, and the houses he went to were known: there were about seven of them and he went round them by turns and had done for years. It is the most obvious thing in the world once you think about it, and somebody thought about it.

They went to the master of one of the seven houses and talked to him, and he agreed. He told his wife what was to be done. She refused. He pressed her and went on pressing her, and in the end she did as she was told, because that is what the arrangement of that house was and she had no other.

He came at the usual hour. She served him out of the pot with her hands shaking and then went down on the floor in front of him, which she did not usually do, and got up and went straight out of the room without looking at him.

He stood in the street afterwards with the vessel and thought about her face.

Then he did a thing that is unpleasant to read and was the only way to be certain: he put the food down in front of a dog, and the dog ate it and went unsteady and lay down and died there in the lane. Rāmānuja said, of the poison, that it had come out of the ocean in the beginning and could go back to where it was born, and walked down to the Kāverī and tipped the whole of it into the water.

Then he stopped eating.

He did not accuse anybody. There was nothing to accuse anybody of that could have been proved, and the woman would have been destroyed and the husband was not the author of it. He simply stopped going out with the vessel, and stopped taking food from the seven houses, and for some days took nothing at all, and it frightened the whole town far more than an accusation would have. Arrangements were made about his food after that which were never afterwards relaxed, and who made them, and why the man chosen was chosen, belongs at the other end of this story.

The second attempt is recorded and the details of it are not. One account has it in the house of the head of the temple priests, by invitation. Whether that was a second plan or the same plan told twice, the effect was the same: it became plain to everybody, including him, that he could not go on living in that town and eating in it.

So he left.

It was not dramatic and there was no procession. He went up the river to Tiruvellarai with a few of the household, and the establishment went on running under Mudaliāṇḍān, and the temple went on with its hours called and its tallies kept and its shares reduced, and the men who had reduced them stayed at their posts, and the man who had ordered it lived eight miles away for two years.

Tiruvellarai is on the north bank, on a low outcrop of white rock that gives the place its name, and the temple there is older than Śrīraṅgam's and looks it. There is a tank cut into the rock, and a flight of steps going up the side of the hill that is worn into hollows, and the shrine at the top with the Lord standing in it. It is a quiet place. It was quieter then.

He did not sulk and he did not stop working. In two years at Tiruvellarai he installed an image of Azhagiya Maṇavāḷa there and set the worship of it going properly, which meant finding the men, and the provision for the men, and the land to pay for the provision, in a small town that had not been asked to support anything of the kind before. He had a lake made. That is a thing he did in three places in his life whenever he stayed anywhere long enough, and it is a plain unsentimental fact about him: a man arrives in a place, looks at the ground and the rainfall and the slope, and organises the digging of a tank, and two hundred years later there is rice growing because of it. He taught every day. Men walked up from Śrīraṅgam to hear him, eight miles out and eight miles back, and some of them did it several times a week for two years and thought nothing of it. He wrote letters. The business of the school went on with a river bend and a morning's walk in the middle of it.

Kūreśa walked up most weeks. Mudaliāṇḍān came on the first of every month with the accounts and a list of things he wanted decided, and went back the same day, and never once suggested that any of it should be simplified on account of the distance. Twice in the two years men came up from the temple itself, quietly, on temple business, and were given what they came for and fed and sent home, and nobody remarked on who they were.

He was there for two hot seasons and two sets of rains, and the tank he had made filled in the second of them and held, and the men whose fields were below it came and stood on the bund and looked at it.

At the end of two years they came and asked him to come back.

The accounts call the men who came penitent and do not say who they were, and it is reasonable to suppose that the ones who came were not the ones who had bought the poison. Something had shifted in the town. Two years is long enough for people to find out what a reform is worth by living without the man who made it, and long enough for a story about a dog in a lane to have been told in every street.

He came back. He did not undo a single one of the reforms, and he did not punish anybody, and there is no record of him ever naming a man in connection with it, then or later.

At the very end of his life, when he was a hundred and twenty years old by the tradition's reckoning and past most kinds of caution, he said something on this subject that was remembered and written down. He apologised to the temple servants for what he had done to them.

There is a stretch after that which the accounts pass over in a paragraph and which was, by any measure a man would use while he was living it, the best part of his life.

Nothing in it makes a story. He was back at Śrīraṅgam, the reforms had settled into being simply the way things were done, the great commentary was written and being taught and copied and carried away by men who walked in and walked out again with it on their backs, and the establishment had stopped being a group of people round a man and become an institution with a shape. The number who could be fed in a day went up. The buildings went up too: store-rooms, a hall for the teaching that did not face a lane, lodgings for the men who came from a distance, and a good deal of work on the walls and the tanks in the temple itself.

He travelled a great deal in those years and never for very long. Kāñcī, where the man with the fan had been dead some years by then and where he still went up to Varadarāja's hill and still, when he was there, carried the water from the Śalai well himself. The hill at Tirumalai, where he had spent a year carrying water and hearing the Rāmāyaṇa. Tirukkōṣṭiyūr, which he had walked to eighteen times as a younger man and where Goṣṭhīpūrṇa was very old. Down south into the dry country, and across to the shrines on the coast, and twice into the Telugu country. He went on foot, always, with a few men, and he was received at the far end by crowds that got larger every year, which he handled by talking to whoever was actually in front of him and ignoring the size of the thing.

Men arrived and stayed. That is the real business of those years and it does not narrate. A boy came from a village with nothing, and was there for thirty years, and taught somebody else. A wrestler got himself attached to the establishment in a way that scandalised people. A learned man came to demolish him and stayed to eat. A householder gave a field. Another sold his wife's jewellery and gave that. There are names on a list from those years, seventy-four of them eventually, and the list came later and belongs later, but the men on it were arriving now, in ones and twos, through the gate, in the ordinary way.

The shape of a day did not change in twenty years. Up in the dark, the river, the worship, the temple before the town was awake. Then the teaching, and the Śrī Bhāṣya was taught at the first hour to whoever was far enough along for it, and there were usually nine or ten of them and sometimes thirty. Then the establishment's business, which was mostly other people's quarrels: two families over a share, a man who had been given a service and was not doing it, a widow whose brothers had taken her land, a dispute about a wall. He heard those himself, sitting on the veranda in the middle of the morning, and he was a good deal shorter with people than the accounts make him sound, and the tradition preserves two or three of his rulings, all of which are brisk. Then the meal. Then the sleep. Then the afternoon teaching, which was the Tamil, and which anybody at all could attend, and which is the reason the recitation of the four thousand in that town has never been the property of the learned. Then the temple at evening. Then a lamp, and the going over of it again with four or five heads in the circle of light.

And in the middle of it Yādava Prakāśa came down the street.

He was an old man by then, very old, taller than anybody and thin as a stick, and he had walked from Kāñcī. He had carried the single staff for sixty years. He had been the first teacher of the Vedānta between the two great rivers, and had had forty students at a time, and had been consulted by the king's officers, and had never taken a fee for saying a thing he did not hold; and he had taught a boy of sixteen from Śrīperumbudūr whose father had just died, and had grown fond of him, and had been contradicted by him about the meaning of a word, and then about another word, and had thrown him out, and taken him back, and joined in a plan to drown him at Maṇikarṇikā because a death in that water would count as merit and would leave everybody's hands clean, and had seen him walk into Kāñcī alive and had embraced him in front of the school with his face arranged.

What turned him is given two ways. One account says his mother, who was a devotee of Varadarāja at Kāñcī and had her own opinion of her son's philosophy and had not kept it to herself for thirty years. The other says Varadarāja came to him in a dream. The two do not exclude each other and mothers have been the occasion of worse dreams.

He came into the hall at Śrīraṅgam and there was a silence of the kind that a room makes when nobody knows what is about to happen, and there were men in that room who knew the whole history and were not disposed to be generous. Two of the older ones had been students in that school at Tiruppuṭkuzhi themselves and remembered him from the other side of the mat. One of them got up and went out.

He went down full length on the floor in front of the man who had been his student.

Rāmānuja got him up off the floor and took him by both arms and did not say anything for a moment. Then he gave him what he had come for.

The old man took the ochre from him, and the three staves in place of his one, and a new name, and lived at Śrīraṅgam as one of the household from then on. He was not made much of and did not want to be. He sat in the back at the teaching like anybody.

Then Rāmānuja asked him to do a piece of work, and the work was well chosen, because it was the one thing in the world that man was better qualified for than anybody alive. He asked him to write the rule.

There was no book of ascetic rule worth the name. A man who took sannyāsa did what his teacher had done, and the details had gone soft in a hundred small ways: how a staff is carried and how it is cut, what a man may keep and what he may not, how he begs, how many houses, what he does in the four months of the rains, how he bathes, what he does when he is ill, what is to be done with his body. Yādava Prakāśa had lived every hour of that for sixty years and had a mind that liked order and had spent his life making distinctions. He sat down at the age he was and wrote the fullest manual of ascetic rule the language has, and it is still the fullest, and the school has used it ever since.

And here is the thing, and it is stated once and not laboured.

Years before any of this, on an ordinary morning at Kāñcī, Rāmānuja had gone into Varadarāja's temple by himself and taken the ochre with no teacher to give it to him, and had come out with the three staves, and the tradition has described what he did that morning, step by step, ever since. It describes it out of that book. The rule by which his own renunciation is recounted was written, long afterwards, by the master who had helped plan his death.

He could not have been following it. It did not exist. The order of the thing is the other way round, and it is better that way: the book came out of the man, and the man came out of the morning, and the morning had no book behind it at all.

The old man lived on at Śrīraṅgam for some years and died there, and nothing says in which year, or who was with him.

So the years went. The rains came in Aippaci and the river came up under the walls and went down again. The festival in Paṅkuni came round, and the twenty-one days of recitation in Mārgazhi, and the boys who had ruled the leaves for the Śrī Bhāṣya were grown men with students of their own and were teaching it out of the copies they had made. Kūreśa gleaned in the morning and taught in the afternoon and had two sons in the house who were beginning to be a handful. Mudaliāṇḍān ran everything and complained about the drains. Embār was getting stout. Āṇḍāḷ ran a household on nothing and did it so well that nobody noticed her doing it.

One evening in that period, towards the end of a good year, Rāmānuja came out of the temple at the hour when the lamps had just been lit along the second wall, and stood at the top of the steps for a minute because the light was doing something to the river, and then went down into the street and home, and there was no news from the east that day.

Nobody called him Kṛmikaṇṭha while he was alive.

The name came afterwards and it came out of the way he died. A swelling started at the nape of his neck and would not be reduced by anything the physicians of that court could do, and in time it opened, and what came out of it had worms in it, and he was a long while dying and he was not quiet about it. After that the Vaiṣṇavas of the Tamil country called him the worm-throated king and have called him nothing else in nine hundred years. It is not a regnal name. It is not cut on any stone anywhere, and no officer of his ever wrote it at the head of a grant. It is what a beaten community does with a memory when it has nothing else to do with it.

What he was is easier to say. He was a Cōzha king, and in that century a Cōzha king sat at the head of the most thoroughly organised thing anywhere south of the Vindhyas. The country ran on water and the water was managed: tanks, channels, sluices, the annual desilting, the fines for letting a bund go. The villages governed themselves through assemblies that drew lots from pots for the committees, and the committees kept accounts, and the accounts were audited, and when a dispute could not be settled it went up. Land was surveyed and the survey was written down. Temples were endowed and the endowment was written down, on the walls of the temple itself, in letters a man standing in the courtyard could read: so many acres, at such a boundary, for so many lamps, for so much oil a day, for the feeding of so many, in perpetuity. The standard measures were cut into the stone beside the door of the temple so that nobody could argue afterwards about what a measure was. That was the kind of state it was. It did not leave things unwritten.

He was a Śaiva, as his father had been and his father before him, and there was nothing whatever remarkable in that. The Cōzha house had built for Śiva on a scale that has not been attempted again. Half the learned men in his kingdom were Śaivas and wrote for Śaivas and were paid by Śaivas, and the whole apparatus of the court, its poets, its chaplains, its almoners, its grants, ran that way by long habit. A Vaiṣṇava in that country was not persecuted for being one. He was simply somebody who had chosen a smaller room in a very large house.

What changed was not the king's faith. It was that the smaller room had been getting noticeably less small.

The four thousand Tamil songs had been recovered and set going again in the temples. A line of teachers had run down from Nāthamuni through three generations to Āḷavandār, and out of Āḷavandār's school had come a man at Śrīraṅgam who had finished the commentary the school had lacked for four hundred years, and who had been given the title for it in the north, and who taught it in a hall to as many men as could get into the hall. Śrīraṅgam itself had come under that man's hand: its kitchens, its stores, its accounts, its garlands, its singers, its festivals. Pilgrims went there in numbers that had to be fed. Landholders had begun making over fields to it. Men of standing in the towns along the river were taking the five marks and wearing the white clay on their foreheads and saying so in public. And in the temples the Tamil of the poets was being recited beside the Sanskrit of the Veda, at the same hour, before the same god, by men some of whom had no business, by the reckoning of the learned, reciting anything at all.

There is a thing that happens to an establishment when it notices a movement, and it is not fear exactly. It is irritation that has found a shape.

Before ever an officer came up the causeway at Śrīraṅgam, this is some of what had already been done. At Cidambaram, where the Lord dances in a hall of gold and where the Cōzha house had spent more than it spent on anything, there had stood within the same enclosure a shrine of Viṣṇu, lying down in the northern court, old, and attended, and not in anybody's way. The king had it taken up. What was done with the image after it came off its pedestal was done at night and by men who did not tell anybody: it went north, out of that country altogether, up to the hill at Tirumalai, and it was a long time before anyone at Cidambaram found out where. The priests who had served it went where men go when the thing they have served for four generations is carried out of the door on poles; which is to say, to relatives, to other towns, to whoever would take them, and some of them did not go anywhere and were still sitting outside that enclosure years later.

In the towns the grants began to move. An endowment made for lamps before Viṣṇu was found, on inspection of the record, to have been irregularly constituted, and was reassigned. A feeding house lost its fields. A village that had two temples found that one of them now had an officer in it asking questions about the register and the other did not. None of it was lawless. All of it was done by men with authority and documents, which is how this sort of thing is generally done and is why it is so hard to resist.

Then came the proclamation, and the proclamation was a piece of work.

It was one sentence in Sanskrit. Śivāt parataraṃ nāsti. There is none higher than Śiva. Eight syllables, a comparative in the middle of them, and no room anywhere in the grammar to stand. It did not deny Viṣṇu. It did not forbid his worship or close his temples or touch his lands. It simply ranked him, and required you to agree to the ranking in writing, in your own hand, under your own name. A man could go on doing everything he had always done and sign it. That was the cleverness of it. It asked for very little and it asked for the one thing that could not be given.

Copies went out to every district. Officers took them town by town, and in each town the learned men were called together, and the sentence was read, and the palm leaf was put on the mat with the stylus beside it, and the officer waited. And the country did what a country does.

Many signed because they were afraid, and had families, and had seen what an officer with a register could do to a family. Many signed because they held it to be true, and were pleased to be asked, and went home lighter. Some signed because they were told what the reward was, and the reward was land, or money, or the confirmation of a title that had been doubtful for a generation, and a man with three sons thinks about land. And some would not sign, and did not argue about it either, and went out of their houses at night with what they could carry and were not in that town in the morning. There were villages in the Kāverī country that year with nobody left in them who could conduct a funeral properly.

The officers worked through the lists the way officers do, from the top of a district downwards, and the lists were about standing. They took the heads of schools and the heads of temples and the men whose names were known two districts away, because the whole point of the exercise was the names. A signature from a man nobody had heard of proved nothing. A signature from a man everybody had heard of finished an argument.

And there was in that court a minister named Nālūrāṇ.

He was a Vaiṣṇava. He wore the marks. He had taken the five sacraments, and he had taken them at Śrīraṅgam, and the man who had given them to him was Kūreśa. He had sat in that hall and heard the commentary expounded and had been counted, by the man who taught him, among his own. Then he had gone into the king's service, because a man has a living to make and he was good at it, and he had risen, and by this time he stood where the king could hear him without raising his voice.

He listened to the reports coming in from the districts, the piles of signed leaves, the tallies by town, and he saw what the men running it had not seen, which was that it was not working. He put it to the king plainly, and the tradition has kept the sense of what he said. What is the use, he said, of collecting names from every man alive. It proves nothing and it convinces nobody. There are two men at Śrīraṅgam. One of them is the head of that community and the other is the first of his disciples, and every Vaiṣṇava in this country from here to the western hills looks at what those two do. Get their signatures. Then the thing is settled and there is nothing left to argue about.

He knew exactly where to send them and exactly who would be in the room, because he had stood in that room himself.

The king gave the order. Officers were sent south and west along the river road towards the island, with the leaf, and the stylus, and an escort, and instructions that were not complicated.

They came up the causeway in the late afternoon, when the light was going flat and yellow along the river and the sand was giving back the day's heat. Four officers and an escort, on horses, with a clerk on foot behind them carrying a box.

Śrīraṅgam saw them a long way off. It is an island and there is one way on to it from the north and the whole northern street can see who is coming across. By the time the horses were in under the first gate, word was in the fourth street, and by the time the officers had dismounted, the flower sellers had begun putting their baskets away early, which in that town was the way men said out loud that something was wrong.

The clerk's box held a palm leaf in a cloth, a stylus, an inkhorn of lampblack for rubbing into the cut letters, and the copy of the register in which the signature would be entered and dated. The officers were not rough. They asked, correctly, for the head of the monastery. They were told he was in the temple and would come out at the last offering. They said they would wait, and were given water, and sat on the stone platform outside the eastern wall of the maṭha with their backs against the wall and their sandals off, and the boys of that street stood at a distance and looked at the horses.

What was on the leaf was the one sentence. There is none higher than Śiva.

A great deal has been written since about what signing it would have cost him, and most of it is beside the point. It would not have cost him his own soul; a man's soul is not in his handwriting, and he had spent forty years establishing exactly that a man belongs to the Lord by the Lord's holding of him and not by anything of his own, including his correctness. What it would have cost was everybody else. He was not one Vaiṣṇava among many any more. He was the man who had gone to the north and come back with the argument and set it down in a book, and the book was being copied in house after house, and he had set the best men of two generations to teach in their own towns, and there was not a Vaiṣṇava household between Kāñcī and the far south that did not know his name and take instruction from somebody who took instruction from him. A signature from him did not settle a question about him. It settled a question about the school, about the commentary, about the four thousand songs and their standing, about whether the whole thing had been a mistake of the last hundred years. Every man who had signed already in every town in that country, out of fear, and had gone home ashamed, would have been told within a month that the Bhāṣyakāra himself had signed and there was no shame in it. That is what was in the box.

He came out of the temple after the last offering with the others around him and the officers stood up, and the senior of them said what he had been sent to say, which was that the king required him at court. Not the signature, here, now. The king required him. There is a difference between the two and the difference was deliberate: a signature taken at a gate can be disowned, and a man who has walked into a hall and stood in front of the throne cannot easily walk out of it again with nothing given. The officers said they would lodge at the northern gate and leave in the morning. They were polite about it. They had been chosen for that.

That night there were six of them in the room behind the hall, with one lamp, and they were there until it was nearly light.

Mahāpūrṇa was the oldest man in the room by a great distance. He was very old. Nobody in that house could have said exactly how old, and he had stopped being interested in the question. He was the man who had come north on the road to fetch a young householder out of Kāñcī, and had not got as far as Kāñcī, because they met at Madhurāntakam by the tank and he had performed the five sacraments there on the spot, out of order, before either of them had reached anywhere, because he was not willing to carry the thing one more day than he had to. He was the first teacher. He was also the man who, when a Śrīvaiṣṇava of the fourth community named Māraṇēri Nambi had died and there had been nobody else to do it, had performed the funeral rites himself and carried the fire; and when his own disciple came and asked him how he could have done it, had answered that the regulations on that subject were the roar of the ocean, which is a sound a man hears all his life and does not obey. Rāmānuja had been the one asking. He had never forgotten being the one asking.

Mahāpūrṇa had a daughter in that town, Attuzhāy, married into a household that did not treat her as well as it should have, and she came to his house most days.

Kūreśa sat where he always sat, which was on the floor near the door, because he had a horror of sitting anywhere that might be a seat of honour. Beside him was Mudaliāṇḍān, Rāmānuja's sister's son, who ran the temple's establishment and who therefore knew to the measure what the kitchens held and how many were eating and what would happen to all of it if this went the wrong way. Embār was there, the cousin, who had been a Śaiva at Kāḷahasti and had handed back the keys of that treasury and come south. And Kiḍāmbi Āccān, who cooked for Rāmānuja and cooked for nobody else and had held that appointment since the year the priests of the temple tried to poison him.

The first thing said in the room was said by Mudaliāṇḍān, and it was arithmetic. Between the temple's own people and the men in the seats of teaching and the households that had come in behind them, there were some thousands who would take whatever happened at that court as an instruction. There were five hundred eating at Śrīraṅgam every day out of the temple's stores. If the king's men put a decree on the gates of Śrīraṅgam, as they had put one on the gates at Cidambaram, the stores stopped, and the five hundred did not eat, and that was not a matter of doctrine.

Somebody in the room said that a man may write what is put in front of him with his hand and hold in his heart the opposite, and that there is authority for it when life is at stake. That case was put, and it was put properly and at length, because it is not a contemptible case. There is a Vaiṣṇava household in every second street of that island, and the officers of a king who has already had one image carried out of its own temple do not need much encouragement.

Mahāpūrṇa did not argue with that case on its own ground. He said that he had watched his own teacher die in that town and had held his hand, and that Āḷavandār had gone with three things not done, and that one of them had been done since, in this house, by the man sitting in front of him, and that he was not now going to stand and watch it written off with a stylus to save a grain store. Then he said the thing he had said before, that where a Vaiṣṇava is, that place is the Lord's, and that includes a hall with a throne in it.

Rāmānuja said very little for a long time. When he did speak he said that he would go, and that he would answer any question the king wished to put to him in front of whoever the king wished to have present, and that he would not sign. He said it without heat. He had been driven out of that temple once already, over the reforms, by his own temple servants, with poison in a bowl of milk, and had spent two years at Tiruvellarai before they would have him back; and a man who has been through that has a particular kind of calm about being summoned by anybody.

Nobody in the room said the obvious thing, which was that the officers had not come to hear an answer.

Outside, the island did not sleep either. In a town like that nothing is private. The women of the fourth street knew by the second watch of the night what was in the clerk's box, because a boy who carried water to the escort at the northern gate had heard the officers talking among themselves about how long the ride back would take, and had told his mother, and she had told the house opposite. Men went out and stood in the street in twos and threes and came back in. In one house near the eastern gate a family began quietly putting the small brass things into a cloth, not because anybody had told them to go anywhere, but because that is what hands do. The temple's own servants, the garland-makers and the drummers and the men who carried the palanquin, were awake in their quarters and were saying to each other what they had been saying for years, which was that all of this had started when the sannyāsin began going through the registers, and that men who look into other men's accounts should not be surprised when the accounts look back.

Towards the end of it Kūreśa asked one question, and it was a question about procedure. He asked whether the king's men had ever seen Rāmānuja. Not whether they knew who he was; whether any man in that escort had ever stood in front of him and looked at his face.

Mudaliāṇḍān said he did not think so. They had come up the causeway asking for the head of the monastery, and the doorkeeper had had to point him out at the temple door.

Kūreśa said nothing further and the lamp was nearly out and they went to their mats for what was left of the night.

When the others had gone to their mats Kūreśa did not go to his. He waited until the room was empty and then said what he had been holding since the officers' escort came in under the gate.

He said that he would go instead.

Rāmānuja said no, and said it in a way that did not invite the subject again.

The argument that followed ran most of what was left of the night and it was conducted in low voices, because there were men asleep on the other side of the wall. It has been retold in that community for nine hundred years and the shape of it is not in doubt, whatever words the two of them actually used.

Rāmānuja's case was the obvious one and he put it hard. The summons was to him by name. A man does not send another man into a room he has been called into himself; there is no doctrine anywhere that permits it and no reading of surrender that requires it. And there was the particular fact of who was offering. Kūreśa had a wife in a house four streets away and two boys in that house, one of them still small, and he had no property of any kind left, because he had given away a village, and the family lived on what he gathered every morning and never kept a second day's food in the place. If anything happened to him nothing at all stood behind them except the goodwill of neighbours. Rāmānuja said that, and then he said that he had already cost that household one fortune and did not propose to cost it a father.

Kūreśa's case was made in pieces over a long time and not in one speech.

He said first that the summons was not to a name. It was to a robe. The officers had come up the causeway asking for the head of the monastery, and not one man in that escort had ever looked at Rāmānuja's face, and the thing they would take into that hall and set in front of the throne was whoever walked out of this door in ochre carrying three staves. He said the ochre was not Rāmānuja's private property in any case: it was the order's, and a man wearing it was a function before he was a person, which was the whole point of wearing it.

He said next that the two of them were not interchangeable, and that this was the argument and not a consideration against it. What the king wanted was the Śrī Bhāṣya signed away. The man who could be made to sign it was the man who had written it. Anybody else could stand in that hall and be refuted or humiliated or hurt, and the commentary would still be in a dozen houses being copied, and the men he had set to teach would still be teaching out of it, and nothing whatever would be settled. Send the author and the king wins or loses everything in an afternoon. Send a disciple and the king has caught a disciple.

He said that he could answer anything that court could put to him. That was not boasting; the whole community knew what his memory was, and so did Rāmānuja, who had used it in Kaśmīr.

And then, when Rāmānuja went on refusing, he said the thing he had said once before, on the day in the hall when the commentary was being dictated and he had stopped writing over a definition and had been kicked for it. He said that his body was his master's property and not his own, and that a man does not ask permission to spend what is not his, and that Rāmānuja could forbid him and he would not obey.

Rāmānuja forbade him.

That is the argument he lost. He did not lose it by being out-reasoned. He lost it the way such arguments are lost, which is in the morning.

He went down to bathe before dawn, as he did every day of his life, in the enclosure behind the maṭha where the water was brought up and heated. Kūreśa served it to him. That was his own service and he had never let anybody else do it: the vessel filled and tested against the inside of the wrist, the water poured slowly over the shoulders, the cloth ready.

Halfway through it the doorkeeper came round the corner of the wall and stopped, and did not speak loudly enough for the man in the water to hear, and said in Kūreśa's ear that the king's officers were standing up at the gate and had asked for the horses to be brought.

Kūreśa set the vessel down on the stone. He did not say anything to Rāmānuja and he did not look at him. He went into the room where the ochre cloths were folded and the three staves stood in the corner, and he took off the white cotton of a householder and put on the ochre of a sannyāsin, which he had no right whatever to wear, and took up the tridaṇḍa, and walked out through the hall and down the steps and up the street to the northern gate with the staves in his hand.

The officers turned round. He said, 'I am Rāmānuja. Proceed.'

They did not question it. He was the right age, near enough, and he was in the right cloth, and he came from the right house, and he had walked up to them instead of being fetched. One of them went to have the horses brought and the others fell in beside him, and they went out through the gate and down the causeway.

Mahāpūrṇa was standing in his doorway in the fourth street when they passed. He had been awake all night and he was outside because at that age a man is outside at that hour.

He saw the ochre and saw who was in it, and understood the whole of it in the time it took them to go past his door. Nobody had asked him to do anything. He had not been summoned, he had not been named in the proclamation, he had no part in the affair, and there was not the faintest reason in the world for him to be in it. He stepped down into the street and went after them, and when he had caught them up he walked with Kūreśa and was not sent back.

He was very old. He had to be helped up on to the cart at the second halt.

Rāmānuja came out of his bath and called for his cloth and his staff and nobody brought them. Then Mudaliāṇḍān came in and told him.

What he said then is kept, and it has two halves and the second half is the one nobody expects. The first half was about the two of them: what will become of Kūreśa and Mahāpūrṇa in this. The second half was an instruction, and the instruction was that he wanted Kūreśa's white garments brought to him, so that the king's men would not know him on the road.

Mudaliāṇḍān said he must not stay in that house another hour.

So they dressed him in the clothes Kūreśa had stepped out of, which were on the floor where he had left them: the white cotton of a man with a wife and a house and an occupation, a cloth for the waist and a cloth for the upper body, still damp along one edge from the bath water. A sannyāsin is his three staves and his ochre and his begging vessel and he is nothing else that anyone can see. They took all of it off him and left it in the room.

He went to his chapel and stood in front of the small image he had worshipped every day for forty years, and he said what he had to say in a state that the sources do not attempt to soften. He recited a verse of one of the poets, a hard one, the one that says that when men speak hatefully of the Lord his servants sicken, and that if such men crossed that poet's path he would put their heads on the ground. He said it out loud in an empty room. Then he spoke to the Lord directly about the king, and what he said was that he left it to him, how and when; and that he himself was leaving this country, and would do from elsewhere whatever there was to be done.

Then he went out by the western gate with his people, on foot, in a householder's white, at about the hour when the first offering was being made in the temple behind him.

They were about forty-five, it is written. Mudaliāṇḍān; a good many of the young men; two who were sent back almost at once with instructions to find out what had happened at that court and to follow after and tell him. They went west and away from the river road because the river road was where the horses were.

The king's men worked out before noon that they had the wrong man, from something somebody said at a halt, and rode back. Rāmānuja's party was crossing a wide sandy bed with no water in it, and he told the men with him to take up handfuls of the sand and say a verse of Periyāzhvār over it and throw it behind them as they went. When the riders came on to that sand their horses' feet stuck and their own feet stuck, and they stood there in the middle of a dry river shouting that these brahmins were using magic, and by the time they were out of it there was nothing ahead of them to follow.

The towers of Śrīraṅgam stayed in sight for most of that first day, because the country there is flat, and then in the late afternoon there was a fold of ground and they were not in sight any more.

It is three days from Śrīraṅgam to Gaṅgaikoṇḍacōzhapuram at a walking man's pace, and more at the pace an escort keeps when it has an old man with it; they took five.

The king's city stood on flat black soil in the middle of the best rice land in the south, and everything in it had been built inside three generations and built to be looked at. The temple rose out of the plain in stages like something growing, and beside it lay the lake, sixteen miles of embankment holding water brought down by channel, which the court called the Cōzha's Ganges and which watered a country. The palace was north of the temple behind its own wall. There were goldsmiths' streets and weavers' streets, and quarters for the men of the audit, and a mint, and a school of a hundred and eighty students endowed by a queen, with the endowment cut on a wall so that the students would always know what they were owed.

They were lodged for two days in an outer courtyard while the court did whatever courts do. Nobody was unkind to them. They were fed. Mahāpūrṇa slept a great deal of those two days, which he had not done on the road.

In those two days a guard of the outer court got into the habit of sitting near them in the afternoon. He was from a village near Kuḍandai and he had an uncle who was a Vaiṣṇava, and he wanted to know, without quite asking it, whether there was going to be trouble. Kūreśa answered his questions and asked him some of his own, about the lake and how the channels were opened, and about what the feeding arrangements at the great temple were and who audited them, which was not politeness; it was the way his mind worked, and he had run a village himself once.

Mahāpūrṇa said very little in that courtyard. Once he said that he had been in three kings' cities in his life and had found them all the same, and that the noise was the thing he minded, because in a temple town the noise has a shape and an hour to it and in a king's town it just goes on. Once, when Kūreśa said something about what he intended to do when they were brought in, the old man told him to be careful. Kūreśa said he would be careful. Neither of them believed it.

On the third morning they were brought in.

The hall had a raised floor and a double row of pillars and a good deal of light at one end, and the king sat at the light end so that anybody standing in front of him had to look into it. Down both sides were the men of the court: the chaplains, the heads of the Śaiva establishments that ran the schools and the feeding houses and a considerable proportion of the land, the officers of the districts with their registers, the clerks with their boxes, the poets, and the minister Nālūrāṇ, who stood where a minister stands, and who had been the one who knew which house to send to.

Nālūrāṇ looked at the man in ochre and knew within a breath that it was not Rāmānuja, because he had taken the five sacraments from him and had sat in front of him and had been taught by him.

He did not say anything. That is the whole of what is recorded about him in that hall.

Kūreśa stood in the middle of the floor with the three staves in his hand and Mahāpūrṇa beside him, and the leaf was brought out on a tray.

The king asked whether he understood what was required. Kūreśa said he did.

Then he asked leave to say something before he was asked to write, and he was given it, and what he said first was the mild thing. He said that the Vaiṣṇavas of that country had no quarrel with anyone. They did not preach against Śiva, they did not obstruct his festivals, they had never asked a Śaiva to sign anything, and their own scriptures stood on the same ancient authority as everybody else's and asked for nothing more than to be left standing. He said that he had come a long way to say this in the king's hearing and that it could all be over in a sentence.

The king said that was not what the paper said.

So Kūreśa gave him the other thing, and gave it at length, because it had been asked for. He set out the case from the Veda and the Upaniṣads and the smṛtis and the purāṇas: that Nārāyaṇa is the cause from which the whole of it comes, and the one who holds it while it lasts, and the one it goes back into; that the four-faced Brahmā is his son and Rudra is Brahmā's son and therefore the grandson; and that a thing that is caused is not higher than what caused it, and that this is not a matter of preference or piety but of what the texts actually say, and he would take them in order if the court wished. He began to take them in order.

He was very good at it. He had the whole apparatus by heart and could produce a passage with its context and its commentary at the speed of ordinary speech, and the men down the sides of that hall who knew what they were listening to began to shift, because the passages were coming in a sequence they recognised and did not want completed.

The king stopped him.

What he said has been kept, and it is the most honest sentence spoken in that hall all morning. He said that Kūreśa was plainly a very clever person, and that a very clever person can make a text say whatever he had already decided it would say, and that he was not going to listen to any of it. Then he said: here is my proclamation. Sign it, and not one word more.

There is a thing about that moment which the accounts do not hide, and it is that Kūreśa did not appear to take it very seriously. He had been under arrest for five days, he had watched an old man he loved being helped on and off a cart, he was standing in another man's clothes in front of a throne, and what came over him was not terror. He looked at the leaf the way a man looks at a document that has a flaw in it.

He asked for the stylus. They gave it to him. He went down on one knee beside the tray, because a palm leaf is written on the flat, and he wrote one line, and then he signed his own name underneath it, and handed the leaf back.

What was on the leaf when it went back to the king was two lines, and the two lines made a couplet, and the couplet was metrically sound.

The king's line: śivāt parataraṃ nāsti. There is none higher than Śiva.

The line under it, which Kūreśa had put there: droṇam asti tataḥ param. A droṇa is higher than that.

Now, both of those words are the names of gods and both of them are also the names of grain measures, and every man in that kingdom knew it, because grain measures were the one thing that country was most exact about. Tax was assessed in them. Temple endowments were written in them: so many measures of paddy a day for the lamp, so many for the offering, so many for the men who carry the palanquin. The standard vessels were kept at the temple and their capacity was cut into the stone. A śiva is a small measure. A droṇa is a considerably larger one, and any boy who had ever been sent to fetch grain could have told you which way round they went.

So on the surface of it the couplet says: there is no measure bigger than the small one, but the big one is bigger than that. It is a flat, obvious, childish falsehood about vessels. Read that way the king's sentence has been not denied but reduced to a piece of arithmetic that is wrong, and the man who wrote it has complied in full: the words were written, in his own hand, and signed.

And underneath that, read the other way, which is the way it was written and the way everybody in the hall took it, it says that something is higher than Śiva.

Kūreśa had obeyed the order exactly and destroyed it completely, and he had done it in four words, and he had signed his name to the doing of it.

The leaf went up. The king read it. Somebody at the side of the hall explained the measures, because it had to be explained to be enjoyed, and there was that particular silence that happens in a room where several people have understood something at the same moment and none of them is going to be the first to make a sound.

The king was not a fool and he did not need it explained twice. What had been done to him was not a refusal, which he was prepared for and had procedures for. It was a joke, made in front of his own court, by a man he had brought four days across his own kingdom under escort, and the joke would be all over the south inside a fortnight and would be repeated for as long as anybody remembered his name.

He gave the order without taking very long about it. He said: pull out the eyes of this jester.

Two men of the household guard came forward from the wall on the left side of the hall. That was their work. There was no special officer for it in that court and no separate place set aside; it was done by whoever was standing nearest with the authority to do it, and it was done where the order was given, so that the court could see the order carried out.

Kūreśa put up his hand and told them not to trouble themselves. He said that he would do it himself, and he gave his reason, which was that his eyes ought not to go on existing after what they had just been looking at.

He set the three staves down on the floor. Then he did it with his own hands, and it took him two movements, and he did not make any sound while he was doing it.

The staves rolled a little way on the stone and one of them came to rest against the foot of a pillar. He stayed where he was, on his feet, in the middle of the floor.

The king then turned to the old man.

Mahāpūrṇa was asked whether he would sign. He said that he would not. He was asked why, and he answered the question, which took him some time, because he answered it properly: he gave the passages, in order, in a voice that did not carry much past the middle of the floor, and he stopped twice to get his breath and then went on from where he had stopped. Nobody interrupted him. When he had finished he said again that he would not sign it.

The king commanded his men to take his eyes.

They had to hold him, because he could not stand unsupported for as long as it took. Two of them held him and a third did it. He cried out twice.

Then the hall was as it had been, with the two of them standing in the middle of the floor and the court along both sides, and the king said nothing further to either of them. The order had been carried out. There was no sentence, no imprisonment, no confiscation and no further instruction. They were not charged with anything and there was nothing to be charged with; the men had come to get a signature and the signature was on the leaf.

An officer went and picked up the leaf from the tray, and looked at it, and took it out of the hall, and what became of it is not known. Somebody picked up the three staves and put them against a pillar. The clerk of the court made the entry for that morning in the register, which would have been the date, the names of those present, the business transacted and the disposal of it, in that order, because that is how those registers are kept, and there is no reason to think he left any of it out.

The floor was washed while the hall was still full. Two men came in with water and a cloth and did it at the place where it was needed and went out again, and the court stood back for them and then closed up again, and the next business of the morning was called, which was a matter about a channel and two villages that had been before that court twice already. It was heard, and an order was made in it, and the clerk wrote that down too. The hall sat until the middle of the day as it did every day.

Then they were put out of the palace, through the side gate on the eastern wall, which is the gate the palace used for anything it did not want carried past the front.

They went down three steps into the street. Kūreśa had his hand on Mahāpūrṇa's arm and Mahāpūrṇa had his hand on Kūreśa's shoulder and neither of them could see, so they stopped at the bottom of the steps because there was nowhere to go from there that they could find.

Attuzhāy was standing across the street.

She was Mahāpūrṇa's daughter, married into a household at Śrīraṅgam, and she had followed them the whole way from the island. Nobody had known. She had kept behind the escort on the road for five days at whatever distance she could manage without being noticed, and slept where she could, and had been in the city for the two days they were in the courtyard, and had been outside the palace since the morning.

What she had with her was a water pot, a spare cloth, a small bag of parched rice and the thin gold wire out of her ear, half of which she had already sold in the city in order to eat. She was a grown woman with a household of her own.

She came across the street and took them each by a hand and led them away from the gate.

She got them off the main way into the shade at the side of a wall and sat them down. She had a cloth and she had a water pot, and she wet the cloth and washed their faces, both of them, and wrung the cloth out and did it again, and went and got more water, and did it again after that. Her father's had not stopped bleeding and she kept the folded cloth pressed against it for a long time. There was blood down the front of the ochre robe and down the front of his cloth and on both their hands and on her hands and on her clothes.

She did not say very much while she was doing it. Neither did they.

The street they were sitting in was a street of that city on an ordinary morning in the hot part of the year. It was the hour when the shadows are short. Men went past with loads and did not stop, because a man who stops in a street in a king's city over something that has plainly come out of the palace makes himself part of it. Two or three women did stop. One of them brought water without being asked and went away again without saying anything. A dog came and stood at the corner and then went off.

The guard from the village near Kuḍandai came out of the eastern gate about an hour later, off duty, and found them at the wall and stood there. Then he went and got more water and a second cloth, and helped Kūreśa get the old man up when it was time to move, and walked with them as far as the end of the street, and then stopped, because he had to go back.

They went out of the city on the road they had come in by. They had no cart. The escort was not required to take them anywhere; it had been required to bring them, and it had brought them.

It is three days from that city to the island if a man can walk properly. Mahāpūrṇa could not walk properly. They went the way people go who have to, which is a short distance and then a sit down, and then a short distance again, with Attuzhāy on one side of her father and Kūreśa keeping hold of the two of them and putting his foot forward into ground he could not see. They got out past the last of the houses and past the tank and into the fields, where the road runs on a low bund between paddy with the water lying in it, and the sun came round and went down in front of them and it was easier after that.

They did not reach any village that night. They stopped where they were, on the side of the road, and Attuzhāy went to a house within sight and came back with rice, and they ate some of it. She made her father drink twice in the night. The second time he asked her what the hour was and she told him, and he said that they should start early because of the heat.

They started before it was light. A man who cannot see walks with his weight back and his front foot feeling, and he goes at about a third of the pace he used to, and on a bund road between flooded fields there is a foot and a half either side of him and then water. Kūreśa found the edge twice that morning. Attuzhāy walked in front with her father's hand in hers and told them what was coming: a cart, a stone, a place where the bund had gone down and been patched. She had not slept.

By the middle of the morning the old man was stopping every forty or fifty steps. They got him into the shade of a palmyra at one of those stops and he stayed there most of the middle of the day, and Kūreśa sat beside him with his back against the trunk, and the two of them talked a little about ordinary things: about Attuzhāy's household, and about a man at Śrīraṅgam who had been ill in the spring and whether he had got better.

In the afternoon they went on again. There were bullock carts on that road going the other way with the season's grain in them and the drivers walking beside the wheels, and one of them pulled over and let them by, and the man had a good long look and said nothing and started up again.

Word travels along a road like that faster than anybody on it. By the evening of the second day people in the villages ahead of them already knew what had been done at the court and to whom, and one or two of them came out to the road to see.

On the third day he stopped and said he was not going any further.

They were in open country. There was a field on the left of the road with the stubble still standing in it and a margin of hard ground at its edge where the bund came down, and a tree, and that was the whole of what was there. It was some way from anywhere. Behind them, an ordinary day's walk back, was the king's city; ahead of them, more days than any of them had in them, was the island.

Attuzhāy said that he must hold on, and get to Śrīraṅgam.

He said no, and then he told her why, and the why is the reason this is remembered.

He said first the thing about place. Have you not heard, he said, that wherever a Vaiṣṇava happens to die, there God is beside him? He was present at the death of the bird in the wilderness, who was old and was cut out of the air and fell where there was nobody, and Rāma came and sat by him on the ground and did what a son does. And they say, he said, that the best place for a Vaiṣṇava to die is on a Vaiṣṇava's lap, or in a Vaiṣṇava's house. And this is not bad country either, he said, whatever you think of it. Our own ancestors died not far from here. Nāthamuni, who got the songs back, went in this country.

Then he said the other thing, and this is the part that was not consolation but a ruling.

He said: if we let ourselves grieve over this, over not dying at Śrīraṅgam, then everybody who comes after us will draw the conclusion from it. They will say that Mahāpūrṇa wept because he was dying in a field, and they will build on it, and inside two generations it will be settled doctrine in this community that a man has to get himself to Śrīraṅgam to be saved. Then what will you do with the ones who cannot get there? No. Our rule is that a man who has handed himself over may die wherever he happens to die and God is beside him there, and I am not going to be the reason that rule is lost.

Then he lay down on the margin of the field with his head on Kūreśa's lap and his feet on his daughter's.

He was Mahāpūrṇa. The Tamil country called him Periya Nambi, and the line of teachers ran Nāthamuni, Uyyakkoṇḍār, Maṇakkāl Nambi, Āḷavandār, and then him. He had sat with Āḷavandār at the end and had been in the room when the three fingers of that dead hand were folded in, and he had been one of the men standing there when the vows were spoken over the body and the fingers opened.

He was the one sent north to fetch the young man from Kāñcī, and he never got to Kāñcī, because they met halfway at Madhurāntakam by the tank, and he would not carry it another day, and so he performed the five sacraments there on the spot under a vakula tree in the afternoon, out of order and in the wrong place and with no preparation, and gave him the Dvaya and gave him the name. He had lived six months in that household at Kāñcī teaching him, and had left it because his wife and the other wife quarrelled at a well, and had gone back south without making any trouble about it and without ever once referring to it again.

He had performed the last rites of a man of the fourth community with his own hands and carried the fire for him, and when his own disciple came and put the question to him he had told him that the regulations were the roar of the ocean.

He had a daughter who came to his house most days, and when she came to him with a domestic difficulty he sent her to Rāmānuja, because he did not consider that he owned anything with which to help her, including his own judgement.

He was very old and he had walked into that hall because he saw a younger man walking past his door in the wrong clothes.

Once in the afternoon he asked Kūreśa whether it was still hurting him. Kūreśa said not so much now. The old man said that was a lie and left it there.

He lay in the field for some hours. He was not in much pain by then. He asked once what time it was. He said something about Āḷavandār that the two of them could hear and that has been kept only in outline, which is that his mind was on his own teacher; and he went on lying there with his head on Kūreśa's lap, and at some point in the late part of the afternoon he stopped.

Two men came along the road at dusk. They were the sort who go about looking for bodies nobody has claimed, in order to dispose of them and get the small merit that attaches to it, and they saw the three figures at the field edge and came over and made their offer, decently enough.

Kūreśa thanked them and said no. He said that God was with them, and that the men should go on down the road and look after the people who were really abandoned.

They went on.

Within the hour four or five Vaiṣṇavas came up that road. They had heard in a village behind what had happened at the court and had been walking since the morning to find them. One of them was from Madhurāntakam, which is the town by the tank where the sacraments had been given all those years before, and it was he who took charge of the practical side of it.

They did it that night by the full rite, the brahma-medha, which is the form used for a man who has renounced and is not the ordinary form, and every step of which has to be done in order and in the right words. Kūreśa conducted it. He could not see any of it. He was told where things were and he put his hands on them and did what was to be done, and the men from the village said the responses, and the fire was built at the edge of that field and it burned most of the night.

Attuzhāy sat on the other side of it.

In the morning they gathered what there was into a pot and the man from Madhurāntakam carried it, and they walked to where the nearest water was and did what is done, and the observances that follow were begun there and were kept by Kūreśa for the full term, day by day, in whatever place he happened to be standing on the day. A guru's obsequies are the disciple's to perform and there was no argument about who the disciple was, although the man who had the best claim to that word was some hundreds of miles to the west of them, in a forest whose name he did not know, and had not yet been told that any of this had happened at all.

In the morning they walked to the nearest village, which took them most of the day, and rested there a day, and then the Vaiṣṇavas of that place took them on by stages, and in about a week Kūreśa came back on to the island.

He went to the temple first, and he went alone, and he went slowly because he had to feel the way with his feet, and he knew every stone of that path and every step of that entrance and had walked it twice a day for thirty years.

At the gate the guards stopped him. There was a royal order on the gates of Śrīraṅgam by then: no follower of Rāmānuja to be admitted. The guards knew perfectly well who he was, and they were not cruel men, and they had watched him come up the street, and what they offered him was a way through. They said that the order was strict but that he was a good man on his own account and they would make an exception for him. They said he had only to say that he had left Rāmānuja.

Kūreśa put his hands over his ears.

What have I just heard, he said. If I must leave Rāmānuja in order to go in, then I had better give up this God of mine as well. Without Rāmānuja there is no God for me.

Then he turned round and felt his way back along the wall, and somewhere along it his legs went under him, and he sat down on the ground and cried.

He took his two boys and his wife and went south to the hill at Tirumālirunjōlai, where the Lord stands in his own country among the jack trees and is called the beautiful dark one, and he lived there for twelve years and made a long Sanskrit poem to that Lord which is still recited, and he did not come back to Śrīraṅgam in all that time.

At Śrīraṅgam the news went through the streets in an afternoon. The temple went on. The offerings were made at the appointed hours, because they are made at the appointed hours whatever has happened, and the men who made them that day were the same men who had made them the day before, and some of them were glad.

Two young men had been sent west after Rāmānuja on the morning he left, with instructions to find out what had happened and then to follow and tell him. Nobody at Śrīraṅgam knew where he was by then. Nobody at Śrīraṅgam knew where he was for a long time.

They went west because west was where the king's writ got thinner.

The Kāverī country is flat and open and full of people, and a party of that size on foot cannot cross it without being seen and reported by the middle of the next morning, so they left the cultivated land as soon as they could and went up into the Koṅgu country, where the soil goes red and thin and the villages sit further apart, and then further up, towards the hills, where the roads stop being roads.

There were about forty-five of them, it is written. Mudaliāṇḍān was with him, his sister's son, who had run the temple establishment at Śrīraṅgam and who for the next twelve years would be the man who went and came back. Most of the rest were young. They had left in the clothes they stood in. They had no money, because the house at Śrīraṅgam had never held money that was its own, and what they ate they got by going into a village in the morning and standing at doors, and there were days when forty-five men at the doors of one village was more than the village had. They walked at the pace of the slowest and the slowest was an old man in a householder's white who was well past the age when men walk anywhere.

After that they were in forest for a long time.

The account calls it trackless and that is not a figure of speech. In the belt of country at the foot of those hills there were no roads at all in that century, only the lines the forest people used, which are visible to men who know them and invisible to men who do not, and which do not go where a traveller wants to go; they go to water and to honey trees and to the places where game comes down. A party that size cannot keep together in it. One man stops to shift a load and four go on and a screen of bamboo closes between them and after two hours of shouting nobody is anywhere.

They came apart somewhere under the Nīlagiri. Men found each other in twos and threes over the next days and went on looking for the rest. Rāmānuja was with a handful.

One of the disciples, going along a clearing at the edge of the forest, came on men ploughing.

They were forest people with a patch of cleared ground and a plough between them, and when he told them who he was and what had happened, they stopped ploughing. It turned out they were Vaiṣṇavas, and that their teacher was a man called Tirumalai Nallāṉ Cakravarti, who was an old disciple of Rāmānuja from the Kāñcī country. Nallāṉ Cakravarti was the man who had once found a dead body come floating down the river past that town, and had seen on its shoulders the marks of the discus and the conch, and had therefore taken it out of the water and cremated it himself with the full rite; and the town had declined to eat with him afterwards, because of what the man had been; and the Lord of that town had let it be known that the man was bad in their opinion and good in his.

The last thing that teacher had said to these men before he died was that Rāmānuja was to be held in their hearts as the great teacher and that his feet were their way.

They left the plough standing in the furrow and went to look for him. They looked for six days, and they did not eat during those six days and did not drink, which was their own idea and which nobody had asked of them.

On the sixth night it rained. It was a black night with a wind in it and cold for that country, and the searchers had given up for the dark and made a fire in an open field, and it was the fire that did it. Rāmānuja's party had been walking in the wet since the afternoon and had eaten nothing that day, and they saw a light a long way off across the field, and Rāmānuja, who by then could not manage much more, asked the men with him to get him over to it.

So the two groups came together at a fire in a field in the rain.

The forest men looked at the party coming out of the dark and one of them said, 'What is our Rāmānuja doing out there?'

Rāmānuja did not say anything.

His disciples asked them how they knew him.

They explained about their teacher and about what he had told them, and one of Rāmānuja's men said, 'Then here he is,' and pointed.

They went down on their faces in the wet field and got hold of his feet and cried.

Then they fed them. They had grain, and honey out of the forest, and they went and got new pots to do it in, which they did not have to be told to do and which is the detail worth keeping: new pots, bought or made or fetched from somewhere in the night, because these were brahmins who had been walking for a fortnight and there would be a question about vessels, and the forest men had thought of it before anybody could be embarrassed. They parched the grain in the new pots and pounded it and mixed it with the honey, and forty-odd men sat round a fire in the rain and ate it out of their hands.

The scattered ones came in over the next two days.

From there the forest people took them on, six days further, up into a fastness in the hills where their own headman lived. His wife took them in while he was out. When he came back from hunting and was told there were guests and no food ready, what he said was that there could be no question of the household eating while these men were hungry, and he sent up the valley to a brahmin of a neighbouring village named Kaṭṭalai-vāri, with provisions, so that the thing could be done properly by somebody entitled to do it.

Kaṭṭalai-vāri's wife was called Koṅgil. She came and prostrated and asked to be allowed to cook for them.

They said no.

She did not argue. What she asked next was whose men they were, and to whose feet they belonged, and that question started a conversation that went on for a long time and that the accounts remember her for.

They came down out of the hills at last into open country again, and worked east along under the line of the Kāverī, and came to a place called Śāligrāma, which is two small villages in dry uplands west of where the river bends.

The people there were Śaivas of the strict western kind, and they had heard something about who was coming, and they gave them nothing. Not hostility exactly. They simply did not come out, and the well was the village's well.

Rāmānuja told Mudaliāṇḍān to go and stand in the water at the source the village drank from, and put his feet in it.

He did it. The village drank that water, as it drank it every day, and the hostility went out of the place. Men who had turned their backs on the party in the morning came round in the evening and stood about and began to ask questions, and within a few days a number of that village had taken the marks, and after that the place was a Vaiṣṇava place and has been one since; and there is a small shrine standing there over the spot with Rāmānuja's feet in it, and the spring beside it with steps down into the water, and people still go down the steps and put the water on their heads.

A young man of that country attached himself to them there. He was a Telugu speaker and the Tamils called him Vaḍuga Nambi, the Telugu Nambi, and in Sanskrit he is Āndhrapūrṇa. He had a quality that became the most talked-of thing about him, which was that he was interested in Rāmānuja and was not much interested in anybody else, including God, and he never pretended otherwise and was never made to.

They stayed some weeks at Śāligrāma in the Narasiṃha temple on the edge of the village, and it was there that Rāmānuja began teaching again, which he had not done since the island.

And at Śāligrāma, or at the first tank of decent size they came to in that country, he did the thing that had been waiting to be done since the morning he came out of his bath at Śrīraṅgam and there was no ochre in the room.

He went down into the water and bathed. Then he took off the white cotton he had been wearing and put on ochre again, and had three staves cut and bound for him, and was, to anybody who looked at him, a sannyāsin once more, for the first time in some hundreds of miles.

He had worn that white cloth every step of the way: through the sand of the riverbed, through the Koṅgu country, through the forest, through the six days of being lost, through the rain in the field, through the hills. It was a householder's cloth and it was not his. It belonged to Kūreśa, who had taken it off in a room at Śrīraṅgam in order to put on ochre that was not his, and had walked up to the northern gate in it and told four officers of the king that he was Rāmānuja.

By the time it came off, the man it belonged to had been blind for months.

Nobody had been able to get word across, and Rāmānuja did not know.

The country he had come into was not a Vaiṣṇava country and had not been one for a very long time.

It is high ground, the tableland behind the western ghats, red soil in some parts and black in others, with bare granite pushing up through it in domes and ridges the way bone shows through at a knuckle. The rain comes on the far side of the hills and what gets over is not much, so everything depends on holding what comes down: the streams off the hills are caught behind bunds thrown across the gaps between one rocky spur and the next, and below each bund is a stretch of wet land, and around each stretch of wet land is a village, and beyond that it is dry and grazed and stony. A man who wants to do anything lasting in that country builds a tank. Everything else follows from it.

The kings of it were the Hoysaḷas. Their capital was at Dvārasamudra, which is a day and a half north, a town laid out around a great tank with temples going up in it in a style nobody else was working in, stone cut like ivory, whole walls of it. The king at this time was keeping a second establishment at Toṇḍanūr, which sits under a pair of rocky hills with a gap between them where two or three streams come down and join, and in the dry months of that year the gap was a stony bed with a little water working through it and the villages below were drawing from wells.

He was a Jain, as his house had long been, as his ministers largely were, as his generals were, and as the men who did the accounts and the men who endowed the schools mostly were.

Jainism in that country was not a sect on the margin. It had been the establishment for five or six hundred years and it had the manner of one. Its teachers had made the grammars and a good deal of the mathematics and most of the early literature in Kannada, and a boy sent to learn letters in a town of that region very often learned them from a Jain. The merchant families of the trade routes were Jain and their money had built for four centuries. Its monks went naked or nearly, ate once, begged, and kept a discipline about harming things that went down to the water they strained and the ground they swept in front of their own feet. And when one of them judged that his body had finished being useful he would stop eating, deliberately and by rule, and take some weeks about it, and afterwards his people would cut a stone with his name on it and how long it had taken, and set it up; and the hillsides in that country are covered with those stones.

Twenty-odd miles north-west of Toṇḍanūr there is a bare granite hill with a naked man standing on top of it cut out of the living rock, ten times the height of a man, who has stood so long without moving that the creepers have come up his legs; and they carry the oil and the milk and the saffron up the steps to the top of his head on scaffolding every so often and pour it down over him in front of a plain of people. He was already old when Rāmānuja came into that country. He can be seen from a long way off.

That was the place.

What came into it was a party of about forty-five men with nothing, most of them young, speaking a language nobody there spoke, led by an old sannyāsin who had been walking for months and had been in white cotton for most of them.

They were not molested and they were not welcomed. They were lodged, because the place they went to was a temple, and the temple was a small old shrine of Nṛsiṃha on the outskirts of Toṇḍanūr with a few fields, and the man who looked after it did not turn away men of that kind. There were Śrīvaiṣṇavas in that town already, a handful of families, the residue of who knows what earlier movement of people; and the Tamils and the Kannadigas among them could make themselves understood to one another at the second attempt.

They were there some months before anything happened. The young men swept the Nṛsiṃha temple and repaired what could be repaired and went out at the right hour with their vessels, and learned the words for rice and water and thank you, and then more words. Rāmānuja taught in the mornings under the tree by the temple wall, in Tamil, with a Kannada-speaking boy from one of those families sitting at the front turning the harder sentences round for the men at the back who needed it. The town looked them over and decided they were harmless. The Jain monks of the place, who came through the same lanes on their own rounds at their own hour, passed them without a word either way, which is what monks of two orders generally do.

One of that handful was a man called Toṇḍanūr Nambi.

He lived on alms and had done so for years, which in a town where the Jain monks did the same made him legible to everybody. He had no position and no learning to speak of. What he had was the run of the palace: he went in and out, he was known at the gate, the women of the household talked to him, and over a long time he had become one of those men who are in no way important and are told everything.

He came out to the Nṛsiṃha temple, and he came back, and he came again.

There was trouble in the king's house that year. The king had a daughter and something had taken her. She did not know people. She said things nobody could account for. She went out of the women's apartments and into the street and out along it without her clothes, and had to be brought back, and would go again. The Jain physicians had been over her and there were men called in from further off who dealt with that kind of case in the way such men do, with recitations and smoke and things tied on, and after all of it she was as she had been.

Her mother was the queen, Śāntala Devī, who was a Jain and the daughter of a Jain mother and a Śaiva father, and who had a name in that country in her own right for what she had built and for what she knew about music and dancing.

Toṇḍanūr Nambi told the queen about the sannyāsin at the Nṛsiṃha temple. He said that this was a man who had been asked to do this exact thing once before, years ago, in the Tamil country, for a king's daughter with the same affliction, when the great teacher of the place had tried and had not been able to; and that the girl had got up whole.

The queen told the king, and the king said what a father says. His words were taken down in the form of a bargain, and they are: if he will cast this out of our daughter and give her back her sense of shame, we will fall at his feet and take him as our teacher.

Men were sent to the temple on the outskirts with the invitation.

Rāmānuja refused it.

His reason was not diplomatic and he did not soften it. He said that he did not set his foot in the cities of kings. He had lived a long life without doing it. He had watched what happened when the king of his own country got interested in what men believed: an image lifted off its pedestal and carried out of its temple by night, a leaf and a stylus carried from town to town, a hall with a throne at the light end of it, and two men of his own household walking out of it who had not yet been heard from. He was in this country at all because a king had sent officers for him. He was not going to walk up the steps of another one.

Toṇḍanūr Nambi did not argue about principle. He argued about what was wanted.

He said: Melkoṭe.

There is a hill about ten miles north of Toṇḍanūr, a long grey ridge with a flat top and a spur running out of it, and on that hill, under the forest, there had been a temple of Nārāyaṇa, and there was not one now. The old books said what had been there. The place had gone back to bush so long ago that nobody in the villages under it could say what had happened, and men went up for firewood and did not go up for anything else. Rāmānuja had read about it and had been talking about it since he came into that country, the way a man talks about something he intends to do.

Holy sire, said Toṇḍanūr Nambi, that hill is in this king's dominions. You mean to clear it and find what is under it and put the worship back. You cannot do that with forty-five men and no money. You want a king to take the thing up. Here is one, and his daughter is ill, and he is asking.

The accounts say plainly that this was what persuaded him, and they do not dress it up. He was not won over on the merits of kings. He was shown a building project and he took the terms.

He got up and went with them, and walked through the gate of the palace at Toṇḍanūr, which he had said he would not do.

The king's name was Bittideva.

He was a young man still, vigorous, a fighter who had taken territory in three directions and would take more, and there was one thing about his person that everybody in that country knew and nobody said to his face. A finger of his hand was missing.

How it had gone was told this way. He had been taken, as a young man, by a power from the north, and had been let go again with a mark on him to say that he had been somebody's prisoner and was not in his own right a sovereign, and the mark was the finger. And there had come a day when he wished to feast the leading men of his own community, the Jain households of his capital, and they had declined. The queen warned him they would. His own kinsmen told him why, in words the accounts preserve: our custom does not allow us to eat in the house of a man who is short of a finger. Have you forgotten what they call you. Bittideva, the finger-lord.

He was extremely angry about it for a long time afterwards.

That is one of the reasons given. In that country they tell it differently and give another: that it was a woman of his own household who mocked him into it, and that what she mocked was the same thing, the priests who would not sit at his table. Both stories are about the finger and about a man being put outside his own people over a body he did not choose.

His daughter was brought out into the hall where the sannyāsin was standing.

Rāmānuja did not recite anything over her and did not touch her. He told his disciples to bring the water in which his feet had been washed and to sprinkle her with it. They did it.

The thing went out of her. She stood there and understood where she was and who was looking at her, and she turned round and ran into the inner apartments and got clothes round herself, and came back out and went down in front of him and said that he was not an ordinary man and that if he had been she would not have got up.

The king was beside himself. He said in front of that whole hall that he would take this man as his teacher, and he sent the order out that afternoon.

The Jains of his kingdom heard about it within days and they did not wait to see what else would happen. They came to Toṇḍanūr in a body, and the number the accounts give is twelve thousand, which means a great many. They came to the Nṛsiṃha temple where he was living, and they did not come to riot. They came with a demand that was entirely in order and that put him at a disadvantage at once. They said: before you interfere with our king, argue with us. Religion and philosophy, on the merits, in the open, as it is done. Settle it first.

They were teachers from the schools on the hill where the great naked image stands, and heads of houses from Dvārasamudra and the towns along the trade road, and with them the merchants who paid for all of it, and behind those the ordinary people of a dozen towns who had walked in because word had gone round that the king had changed and their teachers were going to put it right. They camped in the fields outside Toṇḍanūr for two days while the arrangements were argued over, and men went back and forth about the ground, the hour, and who should be allowed to speak, in the way such things are always argued over before they begin.

What he said when he heard it is one of the few things in his whole life in which he sounds frightened, and it was said in private to Toṇḍanūr Nambi, and it has been kept exactly. Running from the lightning I have walked into the thunder. Frightened of the scorpion I have put myself in the mouth of the snake. Getting out of the fetters I have put my legs in the stocks. What is the way now?

Toṇḍanūr Nambi asked him whether this was not the moment to let them see what he actually was.

Rāmānuja said, then let it be so.

He went into the side room of that temple and had a curtain hung across the doorway between himself and the crowd. Behind the curtain he became a serpent with a thousand heads, and he answered the Jain disputants in a thousand ways at once, and by the end of it there was nothing left of their case. There is a painting of him on the wall of that temple at Toṇḍanūr with the hoods of Śeṣa spread above his head, and men who go there are shown it.

After that the king was formally received. He was given the hot mark of the discus on the shoulder and the rest of the five sacraments, and he was given a new name, which was Viṣṇuvardhana, the increaser of Viṣṇu, and he used it ever after, and it is the name that is on his grants.

The mark is made with a heated seal and it is put on the shoulders, the discus on one and the conch on the other, and it is not a ceremony a man forgets undergoing. A king receiving it kneels like everybody else. His officers stood along the wall and watched their sovereign kneel to a penniless Tamil ascetic who had walked into the kingdom three seasons earlier with nothing but the men behind him, and several of those officers were Jains, and they went on being Jains, and they drew their own conclusions about what the year was going to be like.

Nothing further is recorded anywhere about the girl.

Then this is what he did.

He took away the endowments the Jain houses of worship held. The grants that had gone for generations to the bastis of his kingdom, the villages, the fields, the oil, the daily grain, were cancelled or resumed, and the whole revenue was transferred to five new temples of Nārāyaṇa which he founded and named, at Beḷūr, at Talakāḍ, at Gadag, at Haradanahalli and at Toṇḍanūr itself. The one at Beḷūr he built on a scale that is still difficult to take in, and the tradition of that place says he began it on the day he changed his religion.

And he destroyed seven hundred and ninety Jain houses of worship.

The stone went into the ground at Toṇḍanūr. There is a gap between two rocky hills there where the streams come down and join, and an embankment was thrown across the gap, and the material it was built out of was the material that came off those buildings: seventy-eight cubits high, and thick at the base beyond what anybody had attempted there before. The water came up behind it and made a lake. It was named Tirumalasāgara. Below the bund he established a feeding house, endowed out of the resumed Jain grants, where the men of Rāmānuja's establishment were to be fed.

The bund is still standing and the lake is still there and it still waters that country. Later rulers of another faith admired it and gave it a name of their own, the lake of pearls, on account of the colour of the water.

The carts went for months. A building comes down faster than it goes up, and dressed stone is worth carrying, and the distances in that country are not great. Schools that had taught letters in those towns for three or four hundred years stopped teaching them. Some of the monks went north and some went west towards the coast, and some of them stayed where they were and lived on what the merchant families could still give them, which for a while was less than it had been. A number of them, on hills or in places too awkward to be worth the trouble, were left alone, and are standing today.

The tradition that keeps all this keeps it approvingly, and has never seen any reason to be quiet about the numbers.

The queen did not convert.

Śāntala Devī went on being a Jain in the house of a king who was no longer one. After the conversion she built a Jain temple of her own, and had it called by her own title, which was a name for a woman who has no rivals worth counting. Her mother had been a Jain and her father had been a Śaiva and she had lived her whole life in the middle of that and appears not to have found it difficult. She kept her position at that court, and her standing in that country, and the endowments she made went where she wanted them to go.

Her husband's chief general, Gaṅgarāja, who had won him most of what he held, was a Jain, and stayed one, and went on building Jain temples in that kingdom for as long as he lived, and nobody stopped him.

And of the queen it was written, when the time came to write something, that Jinanātha was her favourite and Viṣṇu was her God.

She died some years later, up at Śivagaṅga, and they set up her stone.

Rāmānuja, meanwhile, had got what he had gone into the palace for. The king had put his name to it. Gangs of men were to be assembled with axes and bill-hooks, and the ridge ten miles north of Toṇḍanūr was to be cleared, from the bottom up, in whatever direction the sannyāsin pointed.

What set the whole of it going was that he ran out of clay.

A Śrīvaiṣṇava wears the mark. Two upright white lines with a red line between them, and the white is not paint and not ash: it is a particular white earth, tirumaṇ, dug out of certain beds and made into a paste, and the mark is put not only on the forehead but on twelve places of the body, in order, with the right name said at each one, so that a man carries on his own skin the statement that he is not his own. It is done after the morning bath, every morning, by everybody, before anything else happens. A man who has to go through a day without it is in a condition his own community finds hard to look at.

They had been out of the Tamil country for years. What they had brought with them had been used up long before, and what could be got locally was chalk and lime and not the thing, and the men had been eking out the last of it and then doing without.

Then he had the dream.

The Lord of Melkoṭe stood in front of him and said, in so many words: I am very near you, Rāmānuja, on the Yadugiri hill, and I have been waiting for you to arrive; and you will get your tirumaṇ there as well. Come soon.

He told the king in the morning. The king had gangs assembled out of the villages that same week, with axes and bill-hooks and fire, and sent them at the foot of the ridge, and they began to cut their way up it in the direction Rāmānuja pointed; and as Rāmānuja went up the hill behind the cutting, the king walked behind Rāmānuja.

It was Tai, the cool month, which is the only month in which men in that country will do that kind of work all day.

The hill is a long grey whaleback of rock running north and south with a spur off it, and the top is flat enough to put a town on, and the whole of it then was under forest that had come back over it, thorn and scrub on the lower slopes and bigger stuff in the folds where the water ran. There was a pond on the shoulder of it, stone-edged, older than anybody, which the local people called the Kalyāṇī and drew from when they came up. Under the forest there were lines of dressed stone lying about in the leaf mould, and courses of wall, and the villagers below knew perfectly well that something had been there once and had no story about what.

The clearing of it was hard, dirty work done by men who had been taken off their own fields to do it. Thorn scrub has to be cut at the root and dragged and burned, and the smoke of it sits in the folds of a hill all day and gets into everybody. They lost two men to snakes in the first weeks. Water had to be carried up, because the pond was above most of the work and the work was below it, so there were lines of women going up and down the slope all day with pots, and a hut at the bottom where the food was cooked for however many hundred were on the hill. The king's officers counted heads in the morning and paid in grain.

They cut and searched the whole of the first day and found nothing.

That night he saw the place. The account gives what he was shown with a precision that is unusual in this kind of material, and the precision is the point, because the whole of the next morning turned on it. He was shown that the Lord lay covered over in an anthill; that there was a champaka on one side of it and a vakula on the other; that it stood at the south-west corner of the Kalyāṇī pond; and that the anthill itself was overgrown with tulasī. He was shown, at the same time, that the white earth lay at the north-west corner of the same pond. And he was told that along the way between where he was and the places he had been shown, fragments of tulasī leaves would be lying strewn on the ground.

A vakula is the tree he had been given the five marks under, on an afternoon by a tank at Madhurāntakam, a great many years and several hundred miles before.

In the morning they went and looked at the ground, and there were tulasī leaves on it.

Not a plant; leaves, broken, scattered along, the way they are scattered where somebody has carried a basket of them. They followed the line of them through the cutting and over the shoulder of the hill and it brought them to the pond. Then they went round the pond to the south-west corner, and there was an anthill there, the hard red kind that stands as high as a man's chest and takes years to build, and there was a champaka growing on one side of it and a vakula on the other, and the whole mound was covered over with tulasī gone woody and old.

They took it down with their hands and with baskets, and under it was the image of Nārāyaṇa, standing, whole.

Milk was sent for and brought up the hill in pails and poured over him where he stood, and then the rest of it was done in the order the Pāñcarātra prescribes, which takes a while and which Rāmānuja knew and nobody else there did. He performed the worship himself for three days, with his own hands, and would not let anybody else do it while it was being set going.

Then the hymn was given. He dedicated to that Lord the ten verses of Nammāzhvār that begin oru nāyakamāy, which are the verses about a man who has had the whole earth under one umbrella and has held it and eaten off it and has come to the end of it, and about what that is worth. The king was standing there. Nobody explained it to him and there is no sign that anything needed explaining.

Then Rāmānuja walked round to the north-west corner of the same pond and drew his staff along the ground, and where the staff went through the leaf litter and the top soil it came up white. The beds were there, a fine white clay, soft, slightly greasy between the fingers, the real thing. They dug some and worked it and he put the mark on the twelve places of his body for the first time in a considerable while, saying the names in order as they are said, and then everybody else did.

That clay is still dug there. It goes out of that hill in sacks and it has gone as far north as Kāśī for as long as anybody can trace, and the people of that country will tell you that it was brought to the hill in the first place by the Lord's own bird out of a white island in the ocean of milk. The diggings are where they always were, on the north-west side of the pond, and men are working them on any ordinary morning.

After that he built a town.

The scrub was cleared off the flat top of the hill and burned. Streets were laid out and pegged, and rows of houses put up along them, and the whole place given a name: Tirunārāyaṇapuram, the town of the Lord Nārāyaṇa, though the Kannada country has always called it Melkoṭe, the upper fort, because that is what it looks like from below. A temple was raised over the anthill, and the anthill was not moved, so that the god stands in that sanctum today on the ground he was dug out of. Festivals were instituted, monthly and annual, with the order of each of them written out. A monastery was established on the hill with the rule that a sannyāsin was always to be living in it and answerable for the affairs of the temple, and there has been one in it from that day to this; there is an old jujube tree in its courtyard.

He also did what he had done at Śrīraṅgam, which was the unglamorous half of his life's work: he set down in writing who was to do what, on which day, with what, and out of whose stores, and how many men were required for each office, and fifty-two officers were appointed and their duties fixed.

The king paid for it. He gave what the building cost, and land on both banks of the river lower down, eight townships of it, with his own officers put over them under the old titles, for the maintenance of the establishment and the feeding of pilgrims.

And then he had to put people in it. A town is not a town because it has streets. He sent for families, and families came: brahmin households out of the Tamil country who had heard where he was and had reasons of their own for leaving, and Kannada households from the villages below the hill, and men of the trades a temple town cannot do without, garland-makers, potters, oil-pressers, a smith, men who could cut stone and men who could keep accounts. They were given house sites along the pegged streets and the sites were entered in a register. Within a few years there were lamps burning on that ridge at night where there had been nothing at all but scrub and rock, and people at the bottom of the hill could look up and see them.

They were still carrying baskets of spoil off the summit in the second year.

A temple needs two images and they do different work.

The one in the sanctum is fixed. It is set in its place at the founding and it does not move again; it is stone or it is earth or it is what was found under the anthill, and it stays behind the threshold where the people come to it. The other one is cast in metal, the five metals in their proportions, and it is made to be carried. That is the one that goes out: on to the platform, on to the shoulders of eight men, down the street with the drum in front and the flute beside it, out among the houses, past the doors of people who cannot walk as far as the temple, into the tank at the water festival, round the streets at night with the lamps going. Everything a temple does in public it does through that image. A sanctum without one is a house with the shutters closed.

There had been one on that hill. It was not there.

What had happened to it was what happened to a good deal of metal in those centuries. An army had come down from the north long before, a long way from its own country, and had gone through the temples of a whole region taking what could be carried, and the images had gone north in carts with the rest of it, and the treasuries of the north had them stacked in rooms and nobody there had any use for them at all beyond the weight of the metal.

Rāmānuja was told where his was. He was told in a dream, and what he was told was: our moveable representative is alive. His name is Rāmapriya, the beloved of Rāma. He is in the northern capital, in the treasury of the emperor there. Go and bring him.

So he went north.

It is the second-longest journey of his life and almost nothing about it has come down, which is a pity. He was an old man. It was months on the road each way. He took a party with him and among them were men of the forest and the hills who had come in behind him in that country, and some of the Tirukkulattār of the villages below Melkoṭe, who walked with him the whole distance and carried what had to be carried and slept across the door of wherever he slept, and who were the reason the thing came back at all.

What such a journey is, they had all learned once already. You go by the shrines, because the shrines are where a party of that kind can be fed and put up, and the stages between them are what they are. You cross the big rivers where the ferrymen are, and pay them, and wait a day when the water is up. The language changes twice and then changes again, and after the second change nobody can explain anything and it all has to be done by a man who knows thirty words and a good deal of gesture. The food changes. The wheat country begins and there is no rice for weeks, and the men who had been brought up on rice were unhappy about it and said so. It gets cold in a way that men from the Kāverī do not have clothes for. They went up through the Deccan and out on to the plains beyond it in the season when the dust hangs over that country all day, and they walked into the northern winter, and an old man of that age on that road is a thing his people have to manage hour by hour.

The capital when they got to it was a city of a kind none of them had seen. It was walled and the walls were being worked on. There were more horses in one street of it than in a district at home, and the men on them were from somewhere else again and spoke another language over the top of the two languages already in that market. Meat was sold openly in the bazaars. There were no temple towers on the skyline. Nobody in the place had ever seen a man in ochre with three staves, and he was followed down the street by children.

At the northern capital he asked to see the emperor and was given audience, which he got because a sannyāsin of that age walking in out of the south is a curiosity anywhere, and he asked for what he had come for, and it was granted him at once and without conditions. There is no sign of any negotiation. The man said yes.

What the accounts do say about him is that his interest in the old man was not only curiosity, and that he treated him with something a good deal warmer than protocol required, and went with him himself instead of sending an officer. He had a room full of other people's gods and no quarrel with any of them. Somebody had asked him for one of them back. He was the first ruler Rāmānuja had had anything to do with in a long time who wanted nothing from him.

He was taken to the apartments where the plunder was kept.

There were a great many images in those rooms. They had been brought from everywhere and stacked where there was room for them, and they were dusty and they had no marks and nobody had kept any record of where any of them had come from. He was left to look, and he looked along the rows, and went along them again, and Rāmapriya was not there.

He slept badly and in the night he was told the rest of it. I am not in that room. I am with the daughter of the king. She has made a plaything of me, and to her petting and her fondling I am a living person. Come there and find me.

The next day he told the emperor, and the emperor took him into the women's apartments himself, where no other man went at all, and walked him through them.

The girl had the image on a low couch with a cloth over it. She had had it for years, since she was a child, since somebody had given it to her out of the stacked rooms because it was pretty. She dressed it. She talked to it. She put it to sleep beside her at night and she woke it in the morning, and everybody in that household had long ago stopped remarking on it, the way a household stops remarking on anything that has been going on for years.

Rāmānuja came in and looked at it and called it by its name.

The image got down off the couch and walked across the floor to where he was standing.

He put his arms round it the way a man does who has found a child he had given up, and he gave it the name it has been called by ever since, which is Selvappiḷḷai, the wealthy boy, the fortunate boy, and which in Sanskrit is Sampatkumāra.

Then they went south.

The girl followed them.

Nobody sent her and nobody could stop her. She came out of that palace and down all those hundreds of miles behind them, and no account describes any of it: not what she ate, not who went with her, not what her father did when he found out. She arrived at the hill in the Kannada country where the town was being built, and she came up the new street to the temple, and she got as far as the sanctum, and she was found at the Lord's feet.

They call her Tulukka Naccihār. There is an image of her, small, at the feet of that Lord in that sanctum, and she has been worshipped there ever since; and there are days in the year when what is offered to him is what is cooked for her and in her manner, and the temple has never made any difficulty about it.

The establishment of the processional image was done in form: the installation, and then the whole calendar of festivals for the year written out and fixed, with the establishment appointed to conduct each of them, and the endowment for each of them settled so that it would not fail in a bad season.

And when it was all standing, Rāmānuja said a thing about that hill which is very large and which has been handed on without any softening. He said that anybody who made his home in that place would come to the same state that he himself would come to.

The town filled up on the strength of it.

The image goes out in the month of Paṅkuni now, at the end of the hot bright part of the year, on the sixth night with the diamond crown on him, and the crown comes up the hill under guard and goes back down again under guard when the festival is over, because it is not kept on the hill; and a great many thousands of people stand in the streets he laid out and wait for him to come round the corner. Three crowns have been given to him by three rulers over the centuries and he wears each of them on its own day. The one he wore first is the one nobody can account for and the tradition says was always his.

The girl's shrine is where it has always been, low down, at the feet.

They lived outside.

Every village in the south had a boundary, and inside the boundary were the streets, and outside it, at a stated distance, downwind and downstream, was the settlement of the people who did the work that the village could not do without and would not touch. In the Tamil country they were called by various names and in the Kannada country by others. They ploughed. They did the harvest work, and the transplanting, and the threshing. They cut and carried the thorn and kept the field bunds in repair. They took away the dead animals and dealt with the hides, and made the drums and beat them, and kept the burning ground, and did the night watch, and carried the news from village to village, and carried loads, and dug.

The rules about them were exact and everybody knew them. They did not walk in the streets of the village; they went round. They did not draw from the village well; they had their own, or they waited for somebody to pour. They did not sit where others sat, did not eat off what others ate off, did not learn letters, did not hear the recitation. They did not go through the gate of a temple. Not into the outer court, not to the gate itself. In some places they were required to announce themselves at a distance so that nobody would come on them unprepared.

The drum was theirs. No village could bury or burn anybody without the drum, and the drum was made of a skin nobody else would handle and beaten by men nobody else would sit beside, so that every household in the country depended for the one rite it could not omit on people it would not let past the door.

This had been so for as long as there had been villages there, and it was not a local cruelty or an abuse of a good system. It was the system, and it was administered by decent men who would have been astonished to be asked to defend it.

When Rāmānuja came into the Kannada country with nothing, these were among the people who took him in.

It was forest people who found him in the rain and fed him out of new pots. It was men of those settlements below the ridge who cut the scrub on the hill at Melkoṭe and carried the water up and dug out the anthill with baskets and dug the tanks; and when he went north after the processional image it was men of that community who went the whole way with him and came the whole way back, and slept across the door of the room the image was in, and carried it. The tradition is not vague about why he did what he did next. It says he did it because they had helped him.

On that road north there were four or five months of nights, and on every one of them somebody had to be awake. A party carrying nothing is robbed in that country; a party carrying a metal image out of an emperor's treasury is a different proposition altogether, and everybody in the party knew it. The men who did the watching were the men who did the watching at home, because it was their trade and they were good at it, and they arranged themselves round the sleeping place in the way they arranged themselves round a threshing floor, and woke each other in turn, and were on their feet before the rest of the camp every morning. They carried the image between them on the march. Nobody else was allowed to carry it and nobody else wanted the weight.

What he did was give them a name and give them days.

The name was Tirukkulattār. It is a Tamil word and it is worth taking apart, because the whole of it is in the word. Kulam is a family, a lineage, the people you belong to and are entered under. Tiru is the honorific, and in that community it is never merely an honorific: tiru is Śrī, and Śrī is the Lady, Lakṣmī, the one who sits on his chest and never leaves it. So the name means: the people of the Lady's family. Her own household.

He did not call them noble, and he did not call them blessed, whatever has been said since. He put them in a lineage and he named the woman at the head of it, and every man of his school knew exactly what that meant, because the whole architecture of his doctrine went through her. Nobody in that school approaches the Lord directly. You go to her and she takes you to him, and she does not weigh you first; that is the point of her, and it is what the Āzhvār does in the verse about not being able to leave her, and it is what Rāmānuja himself does in the first sentences of his own surrender, where he goes to her before he goes to him and asks her to take him in. To put a community into her family was to put them on the only road there was, and on the same side of it as everybody else.

And then there is what the privilege actually was, which has to be stated exactly, because it has been enlarged in the telling and enlarging it is a lie.

It was not general entry. It was certain named days in the year. Three days at Melkoṭe is the figure that has come down, and an older reckoning says one day only, in three temples: Melkoṭe, and Śrīraṅgam, and one other in that country. On those days they came, and they came as a body, in their own procession, and they were received.

And they went in as far as the flagstaff.

The flagstaff of a great temple stands in front of the sanctum on the main axis, beyond the outer gate and the outer court, at the point where the inner enclosure begins. It is a pillar with the bird on it, and it is where the world stops and the household begins. Everybody who comes to that temple passes it. From the flagstaff the way lies open, up the paved path, through the pillared hall, through the doorway, to the lamps at the far end and the shape of him standing there in the dark with the flowers on him.

As far as that. No further. Not into the inner enclosure. Not to the sanctum, not to the offering, not to the giving out of the food, not up the steps. On the other three hundred and sixty-two days of the year, not through the gate at all.

That is the whole of it.

The arrangements were made the way he made all his arrangements, which was in writing and in detail. The days were fixed in the temple's calendar along with everything else that was fixed in it. The officers who were to receive them were named by office. It was laid down that they were to be given the consecrated food, and where, and by whom. None of this was left to goodwill, because he had spent his life watching what happens to things that are left to goodwill, and because he was not going to be at Melkoṭe for ever and he knew it.

Now consider a man of that settlement below the hill at Melkoṭe, in that century, with that name on him.

He had never in his life walked up the middle of a street. He had never stood in a doorway and waited to be spoken to. He had been going round the outside of the village since he could walk, and he had taught his own children to go round the outside of it, and that was not a grievance he carried; it was the shape of the ground, like the hill and the tank.

And on the stated day he washed, and put on what he had, and got his wife and his children and his father, and came up the hill with the drums going in front, his own drums, the ones his own people made; and the officers of that temple, who were brahmins and were not in the main enthusiastic, stood aside and let the procession through the gate, because the founder had set it down in writing and the founder's word was the constitution of that place. And he walked up the paved way between the pillars, in the shade, on stone that was swept every morning, with the smell of the camphor and the hot ghee coming down the hall towards him, and he stood at the flagstaff in the middle of the day and looked up the length of it at the lamps, and the god was there at the end of it with the gold on him, and nobody could tell him to move.

Then he went back down the hill in the evening with his family. And it was talked about in that settlement until the next one; and his sons would go, and his sons' sons, and they have gone ever since. The name stayed on the community. Centuries later there were men of it in that country running their own temples and their own houses of teaching and administering the five marks to their own people with the authority to do it, and the name they used for themselves was the one he had given them.

The gate went back to being what it had always been the following morning.

The town on the ridge cost more than money and the sources are not shy about the bill.

Start with the Jains, because they paid most of it and nobody asked them.

Their houses of worship were gone in that region and their endowments were gone with them, and the men who had taught letters in those towns for four hundred years had no roof to teach under. They did not forget it and they did not keep quiet about it either. In that country, in the towns under the great hill, the story they told about Rāmānuja was not the story his own people told. They said that when the king had been turned, the Tamil ascetic went up the steps of the hill at Śravaṇabeḷgoḷa to the colossus, to spoil it, so that it could not be worshipped any more.

Anybody may go up those steps and look. There is no mark on that image anywhere. The stone is as it was cut. The one thing on it that is not as it should be is a finger of the left hand, which is shorter than the others and has a piece missing below the first joint, and which somebody long ago tidied up with a chisel so that the shortening would look deliberate.

Gaṅgarāja, who had won the king most of his kingdom and who never stopped being a Jain, went on founding Jain temples in that same country until he died, and no one interfered with him, and one of them is standing.

And the queen went on being what she was until she died.

The trade road went on working, because trade roads do, but the men who had financed four hundred years of building in that country had learned what their money was worth against a king's enthusiasm, and a good deal of it went elsewhere after that, north and west, and did not come back.

Then his own people, who were the second party to pay, and who objected, and whose objection was not frivolous.

He had settled brahmin households on that hill and given them streets and sites and a temple to serve, and the fifty-two offices of that temple were in their hands, and then he had fixed in the calendar the days on which the men from the settlements below the hill were to come in at the gate with their drums and stand at the flagstaff.

What they said was this, and it is worth putting at its strongest, because they were not inventing it.

They said that the rules of approach are not local customs which a founder may set aside because he is grateful to somebody. They said that the whole of temple practice is one thing, that the offering and the recitation and the bathing and the distances are a single fabric, and that a man who pulls a thread out of it at one place because it suits him has not made an exception, he has said the fabric does not hold. They said that a temple which was known to have done this would be a temple whose consecration learned men elsewhere would query, and that the first people to suffer for that would be the town itself, which lived on pilgrims. They said that he was an old man and would not be there for ever, and that he was binding men who had not agreed to be bound, and their sons after them. And one of them, or several, said the thing that is always said and that is never entirely wrong: that he was able to do this because he was who he was, and that the Dharmaśāstra makes room for the acts of great souls precisely because such acts are not precedents, and that he was quietly turning his own exception into everybody's rule.

What they did about it was not dramatic. Nobody rioted on that hill. Some of the officers made themselves unavailable on those particular days and found men of lower standing to stand in for them. Some performed their office and then bathed afterwards, which is a statement everybody understands and which nobody can be reprimanded for. A few households left the hill within a few years and went back east, and gave other reasons.

It came to a head once, in the way these things come to a head, over nothing. On one of the fixed days an officer whose duty it was to carry the lamp out to the hall did not appear, and the office stood empty for the length of the afternoon, and the procession from below came up the paved way with the drums and stood at the flagstaff and the lamp was not where it should have been. A younger man went and got it. Nothing was said at the time and nothing was said afterwards, and everybody on that hill knew exactly what had happened and who had done it and why, and it was not raised.

He did not argue any of it out in public, and he did not reply to it, and he did not repeal anything.

And he did not go further, either, which is the other half of the ledger and belongs in it.

When they were in the hills coming west and the headman of the forest people sent up the valley for a brahmin so that his guests could be fed properly, and that brahmin's wife, Koṅgil, came and prostrated herself and asked whether she might cook for them, they told her no. When the forest men fed them at the fire in the rain, the food came out of new pots, and it came out of new pots because everyone concerned, on both sides, had understood the difficulty without a word being said. The men of the Tirukkulattār stood at the flagstaff on three days of the year and did not go up the steps on any of the three. He never once said that the rules were wrong. He said that this man, and these people, and that community, were inside, and he did it one case at a time, and paid for each case separately, and the general question he left where he found it.

His own community afterwards, over the centuries, became one of the most closely fenced in the whole of that country, and the men who have said so most bluntly have always been its own.

And then there was what it cost him personally, which is easy to overlook because he was busy.

He was in his eighties. He had a town, a hill, a temple, a king, a calendar, a monastery and a rule of service, and he had built all of it in a country whose language he learned late and never spoke well. He had walked to the north and back for a metal image. He had got exactly what he came into that country to get.

And in all that time he had almost no news from the east.

That is the fact that sits underneath the whole of the western years. The island was more than two hundred miles away over the hills, there was a royal order on its gates, and the road between was a road nobody with the wrong marks on his forehead wanted to be found on. Two men had been sent after him on the morning he left Śrīraṅgam and they did not find him for a very long time. Men went east from Melkoṭe from time to time and came back with the kind of news travellers bring, which is to say a piece of one thing and the rumour of another. The hard news had reached him early and whole, brought up by one man: that the old teacher had been blinded at that court and had died on the road home, that Goṣṭhīpūrṇa was dead too, and what had been done to Kūreśa's eyes. What he did not know, and went on not knowing, was where Kūreśa was living now, or whether he was still living at all.

He performed for Mahāpūrṇa, at some point in those years, the observances a disciple owes a dead teacher. Somebody had brought word that far.

For the rest of it he asked, and asked the next man, and got what men get. That a great many Vaiṣṇava households had left the island. That the king had been ill and then that he had not. That Kūreśa's wife had been seen in the south, or that it had been somebody else. Men who had been sent with money for the families at Śrīraṅgam came back with the money and said they could not find anybody to give it to. He went on sending it.

Twelve years is a long time on a hill. The festivals came round and were done properly and got better every year. Children who had been carried up that ridge on their mothers' hips were carrying water for the temple. Old men of the party that had come west with him died there and were burned on the slope, and the first of the men born on the hill took their offices. Vaḍuga Nambi cooked for him and looked at him and did not look at anything else. Mudaliāṇḍān went east and came back, went east and came back. The fifty-two officers did the work of a day that started before four in the morning, the way it starts everywhere.

In the evenings, up on that ridge, the light goes off the plain first and stays on the rock a while longer, and the eye goes a long way east from up there over the tops of the lower hills, further than it goes in most places in that country.

Māruti Āṇḍān went to the dead king's own city to make sure of it before he would carry the news west.

He had been sent east months before that, and not for news. Rāmānuja had sent him to find Kūreśa. Nobody at Melkoṭe knew where Kūreśa was living or whether he was living at all, and the letters that came up into the hill country came by way of pilgrims and took whatever time they took and arrived with half of what they had set out with. So Māruti Āṇḍān walked east across the whole width of the peninsula, through the passes and down the Kāverī, which is a journey of weeks in the best season, and he found Kūreśa, and sat with him, and was given a message to carry back.

The message was eleven words long. Tell my master that so long as his life has been saved from that man, a life which holds the world up, the loss of my eyes is of no account whatever.

Āṇḍān was still in the river country when the other thing happened. The king died. He died of a carbuncle at the nape of the neck, which festered and would not close and bred worms in itself, and he was a long time about dying and was in great pain the whole of it. The accounts name him Kṛmikaṇṭha, the worm-throated, and they name him nothing else, and they did not invent the name after the fact; it was what his enemies were already calling him, and the manner of his death is why it stuck.

Āṇḍān heard it in the street like everybody else. Then he did the thing that makes him the man he is in this story. He did not turn round and run west with it. He went to Gaṅgaikoṇḍacōzhapuram, where the court was, and stood about in that town until he had it from people who had no reason to lie to him and every reason to know, and only then did he start walking. On the road he met another of their people, Ammaṅgi Ammāḷ, and the two of them went up into the hills together.

They came into Melkoṭe in the middle of the day and were told he was at the tank. The tank at Melkoṭe is called the Kalyāṇī, and it is where the buried image had been found at the south-west corner, and it is stepped on all sides, and in the hot months it goes down and leaves a white rim. Rāmānuja was on the steps, wet, with two men holding his cloth for him, because he was well past eighty by then and the steps at that tank are high and worn round at the edges. He came up. They put their heads down on the stone.

He was told the king was dead. He was told how, and where, and that it had been checked.

What he said first was to Nṛsiṃha, whose small old temple stands on that hill and is the reason anybody ever built there: that the slayer of Hiraṇya had done it again; that as he had saved Prahlāda then, he had now saved Kūreśa. It is worth noticing what that puts in whose place. In the story he was quoting, the demon is the king and the boy tortured for his faith is the boy the whole world remembers. Rāmānuja was not putting himself in the boy's place.

Then he turned to the two men standing there with their feet split from the road, and said he had nothing to give them. He said it plainly, as a plain fact: how far you have come, and what you have borne to come, and I have no way to pay you for it. Then he said that the best thing he had was the Dvaya, the two sentences, and that they should take it. And he gave it to them there, standing on the step, wet, with the water going off him.

Afterwards he made a joke, and it was the only joke anybody recorded him making that year. This tank is called Kalyāṇī, he said, and it turns out to be kalyāṇī, which means auspicious.

He had been in that country twelve years.

He had come up into it with nothing, in another man's white householder cloth, an old sannyāsin in flight with four or five men and no money. He had cured a girl, argued with the Jain teachers of a very Jain country, and seen a king change sides and destroy a great deal in the changing. He had dug a buried image out of an anthill on the word of a dream and built a temple over it and brought another image back from the north. He had given a name to people the country had no name for except abuse. He had put a dam across a valley, and set up festivals, monthly and annual, and trained the men who would run them, and there were now fifty-two officers in that temple, appointed by him, each with his own charge, and the number is remembered exactly because the establishment kept its own books.

Now he wanted to go home, and he did not have the authority to.

He had been given Śrīraṅgam by Raṅganātha and told to stay there always, and he had left it, and however good the reason it had been a leaving. So he went to Nārāyaṇa on the hill at Melkoṭe and asked for leave to go, and the account of what happened is brief and is not flattering to anybody's idea of how these things work. Nārāyaṇa gave no answer for a long time.

Rāmānuja asked again. He put it as an argument, which is what he did with everything. The command was that I should stay at Śrīraṅgam for ever. I was driven out by things I did not choose. Everything here is now done. May I not go back.

Then the answer came, and it was three words. Be it so.

The fifty-two took it badly. They came and asked him how they were to live without him, which is the question people ask when they already know the answer and want it said out loud by somebody else. He got them up off the ground and dried their faces and told them what he would do about it, and what he said he would do he afterwards did: an image made in his own likeness, left standing in that temple, with his own power put into it, and it would answer every purpose they had. They have it still.

Then he gave them three charges and they are worth having in the order he gave them.

The first was about the image he had brought from the north, the one he had named Sampatkumāra and the Tamil country calls Selvappiḷḷai. Look after him for me, he said. He is like a son of mine standing at the edge of a well. That is how much I love him.

The second was about money, and he did not wrap it up. See that the temple's services are all properly done. Do not cheat God of what is his. Do not cheat each other.

The third was about each other again, because he said it twice. Stay friendly among yourselves. Do not slacken in what you do for him whom we have set up in this country.

And he left them a written code of procedure, every office and every duty and every day of the calendar, so that the arguments they were certainly going to have would at least have a text to have themselves about.

Then he came down off the hill.

He went east in the dry season with a small party and a great deal of attention. He was an old man and he travelled the way old men travelled, in short stages, resting through the middle of the day, carried over the bad ground and walking the good, and there was a halt every time a village turned out on the road, which was most villages. At Tirumalai he stopped and did a piece of work he had been meaning to do for years: he installed Govindarāja at the foot of the hill, in the town below Veṅkaṭeśa, where the image had come down to after being turned out of its own place in the east. That is a whole story of its own and it belongs to the hill and not to this day. He was there long enough to see it properly begun and then he went on.

From the road he sent word south to Tirumālirunjōlai, to the house where Kūreśa was living, to say that he was coming home and that Kūreśa was to come home too.

The Kāverī country opens out flat and green after the hills and it was the first green he had seen in twelve years that was his own. They came in along the north bank, past Tiruvellarai, where he had sat out two years once for reasons that had nothing to do with kings. Then the river, and the island, and the towers standing up out of the palms with the walls going out and out around them.

What the accounts say about the entry is that the whole place came out, and that there was nothing to be done about the crowd except go slowly through the middle of it. He was carried the last part of it. People who had been children when he left were bringing their own children to look. There were also men standing in the streets who had signed the paper twelve years before and who were now going to have to live in the same town with him again, and nobody has written down what their faces did.

He went in. The accounts give Raṅganātha a line, and it is a domestic line, the kind of thing said in a family at a door: son, you have been away from us a long way and a long time, you must be very tired.

He said that while the Lord was there with his own people about him, there was no such thing as tiredness, for him or for anything that exists.

Then he came out of the sanctum, and he did not go to his own monastery, where his room was, and his books, and his bed, and a hundred and fifty men waiting to be told what to do. He turned the other way, into the street where the house was, and walked.

Twelve years before, Kūreśa had come back on to the island blind, and had gone up to the temple because that was what he had done every day of his life in that town, and had been offered a way through the gate if he would say that he had left Rāmānuja, and had put his hands over his ears and gone away again.

He left Śrīraṅgam after that and went south to Tirumālirunjōlai, which is the hill outside Madurai where the Lord is called Kaḷḷazhagar, the beautiful thief. He took the boys and their mother and he stayed twelve years. He had been the richest man in his own village once, with brass-bound doors so heavy that the noise of them closing at night carried three miles to Kāñcī, and he had walked away from the lot of it in one evening and never referred to it again. At Tirumālirunjōlai he lived the way he had lived at Śrīraṅgam. He begged the day's grain and cooked it and never kept anything back for tomorrow, on the ground that keeping tomorrow's food in the house is a way of saying something about tomorrow that a man has no business saying.

And he wrote. He had a memory that took a thing whole on one hearing and never gave it up, which was why he had been the man sent north for the lost commentary, and that memory now had nothing to look at and a great deal to work on. What came out of those years was a hymn to the Lord of that hill, a hundred and thirty-two verses, and the first verse of it says two things one after another that are difficult to put together. It says: having taken refuge at the feet of Hari, and having got my understanding from the prince of ascetics who is Rāma's younger brother, I am therefore unafraid. And then it says what he wants, which is to look at the feet he has just said he has taken refuge at.

He wrote four more hymns over his life, and the last of the five is to the Goddess and is eleven verses long, and the tradition says he left her till last.

The sons grew up in that house. The elder one, Parāśara, was the quick one and everybody knew it by the time he was small. Somebody read to them. Somebody read to their father too, every day, because a man does not stop needing the text in front of him simply because he cannot see it, and the reciting of the four thousand in that house went on morning and evening as it had at Śrīraṅgam. Twelve years is long enough for a household to become ordinary in any condition whatever.

His wife was with him through all of it. Her name was Āṇḍāḷ, which is a common enough name in that country and belongs also to a poet of an earlier century who is not this woman and must not be confused with her. She was the one who, on a night at Śrīraṅgam years before, when it had rained all morning past the hour when grain could be begged and there was nothing in the house, had spoken to Raṅganātha out of the dark and asked him how he could sit there being fed while a man of his was going hungry. Food had come up the street from the temple within the hour, carried on a man's head in procession. Her husband had taken two mouthfuls of it, one for each of them, sent the rest back, and then been out of humour with her for two days for having said it. She had not apologised at the time and there is no sign that she ever did.

Then word came up the road from the north that Rāmānuja was coming back, and that Kūreśa was to come home.

So he came north again, by slow stages, with a man's hand under his elbow at the bad places, into a town he had last left on his hands and knees. The decree had died with the king who signed it. The guards at that gate were different men or the same men with different orders, and nobody now was going to ask him to say anything at all before letting him in.

He was at Śrīraṅgam when the crowd came through the streets. He did not go out into it. He could not have found his way through it if he had. He stayed in the house and somebody stood at the door and told him what was happening, which is how a blind man attends a public event.

What he heard, in the end, was the crowd going quiet in the wrong direction. Then footsteps he knew.

He came out of that door fast, faster than a blind man should, and got to the ground and took hold of Rāmānuja's feet with both hands and held on, and cried on them, and then could not speak at all. He lay there like a man under a spell. They had been apart for twelve years, counting from the night the robes were exchanged.

Rāmānuja got out one sentence. It took him a while and his voice would not do what he told it. What he said was: Kūreśa, you have given your eye, the eye of our faith, for the faith.

And Kūreśa, when he could, said this. Master, I must at some time have sinned by thinking that the mark on your forehead was crooked. So what I have got is what I deserve.

Rāmānuja said: you, sin. No. The sin must be mine, and you have paid for it. Come, let us go.

Then he took him by the hand and led him to the monastery, and that is how he went home after twelve years, with his friend's hand in his.

The household had to make room for him that night, and it was done in a hurry, because nobody had let themselves expect him. They gave him a cell off the eastern side that had been a store until that afternoon, and somebody remembered in time that a blind man cannot be put into a room he has never stood in and then left there, so Mudaliāṇḍān walked him round the four walls of it with his hand on the stone, twice, and then round it again counting the paces, which is how a room is taught to a man who is never going to see it. Āṇḍāḷ came up the next morning with the cooking things, looked at the arrangements, said nothing about them to anybody, and had them altered inside a week. The two sons were grown men by then and had to be introduced to people who had last seen them as children; and both of them had their father's voice, which several of the older men of the household found hard going that first evening, and said so afterwards.

He did not do anything about it for some days and then he did.

What he did was give an order. He was a man who gave orders; it was his trade by then, and the household ran on them, and he did not usually argue about them afterwards. The order was: Varada of Kāñcī gives people what they ask for. That is what he is for and it is his name. Compose a hymn to him and ask him for your sight.

Kūreśa said no. He said it respectfully and he said it plainly. Sire, this material sight I do not want.

It is worth being exact about what that refusal was and was not. It was not modesty and it was not resignation. Kūreśa's position, which he had held all along and never varied, was that he already had the only sight he had any use for: he could see Rāmānuja and he could see the Lord, inwardly, all day, and had been able to since long before anyone laid hands on him. He did not think blindness had cost him anything he wanted. What he thought it had cost was other people's peace of mind, and he was sorry about that, and that was as far as it went in him.

Rāmānuja was not moved by any of it. He said it again.

So Kūreśa obeyed, because obedience was the whole of his position too, and he composed the hymn. A hundred and one verses to the Lord who stands on the small hill at Kāñcī, and the poem is full of eyes, which is not a thing a man does by accident. There is a verse in the middle of it that asks the Lord, who is dark as a rain-cloud and whose hair is black as a heap of collyrium and whose hands and feet and eyes are all lotuses, to make himself the possession of the poet's eyes, always. A blind man wrote that line and chose that word for it.

When it was done he came to Rāmānuja with news. He said that the Lord had come to him in the night and had granted him sight; and that the sight granted was the inward kind, the seeing that goes on in the high place and never breaks off.

Rāmānuja was annoyed. The accounts say so in that word and do not soften it. He had asked for one thing and had been handed another, and he had not spent a lifetime being exact about language in order to be fobbed off now.

That is not what I want, he said. Come. We are going to Varada.

So the two of them set out for Kāñcī, one of them past eighty and one of them blind, with a few men and the road north and east out of the river country in front of them; and Kūreśa carried the hymn in his head, where he carried everything, and had been told to say it again when he got there.

Nālūrāṇ had been Kūreśa's student.

He had sat in that house at Śrīraṅgam and been taught, and had then done well for himself, and by the time the trouble came he was a minister at the king's court. The king was going round the country with a paper that had one sentence on it, and every learned man was being required to put his name under the sentence. Most of them did. It was a dull business, and the officers carrying it about were collecting signatures from anybody who could write, and it was Nālūrāṇ who pointed out to his master that this was not how the thing should be done.

What is the use, he said, of taking names from everyone indiscriminately. There are two men at Śrīraṅgam. Get theirs. That will be a stroke of policy.

He named them. He named his own teacher, and his teacher's teacher.

Out of that piece of advice came the summons, and the exchange of robes in the dark, and an old man of over a hundred going to the court because he would not let a younger man go alone, and dying of it on the road home with his daughter holding his feet; and a blinding; and twelve years of one man in the hill country in the west and twelve years of another on a hill outside Madurai. All of it from one sentence said by a man who wanted to be useful to his employer and who had been given, in that house, for nothing, everything he knew.

One thing about him is worth being clear about, because it is usually blurred. He was not a Śaiva and he was not an enemy of the faith. He was a Śrīvaiṣṇava, brought up in it, taught in it by the best teacher available to him, and he was holding office under a king who was going about the country making Śrīvaiṣṇavas sign a paper against their own belief; and what he did with his position was to improve his master's procedure. No account says the king asked him for names. He offered them.

The Tamil country knew his name. It has never stopped knowing it. The accounts say it plainly every time they come to it: he was a disciple of Kūreśa. They do not elaborate. They do not need to. And after that one piece of advice they record nothing further about him whatever, not where he went, not what he did, not when he died, until an afternoon at Kāñcī twelve years later.

Kāñcī is about a fortnight north and east of Śrīraṅgam for men who can walk it properly, and longer for these two. They went in short stages. Rāmānuja was well past eighty and Kūreśa was not young either and could not see, and the arrangement on that road was the one they had used since the day they came home: somebody walked at Kūreśa's left elbow and put a hand under it at the bad places and said nothing.

They went in the cool part of the year. A party of that kind moved at the pace of its slowest man and stopped when the sun got up, and lay through the middle of the day under whatever there was, and went on at four. In the villages along that road people came out, because the news of who was on it went ahead faster than the party did, and at every halt there was rice and buttermilk put down in front of them by households that had nothing much and gave it anyway, and somebody in every village wanted a word and usually got one. Kūreśa ate what was put in his hand. He had been eating what was put in his hand for twelve years and had long ago stopped being awkward about it.

Rāmānuja had not been in Kāñcī for a very long time. He had learned there, and been thrown out of a school there, and put on the ochre there, and carried water up from the Śalai well to that temple every morning of the years he lived in the town, in a pot, on foot, before it was light. The streets were the same streets. The flower market still opened at four and the smell of it was still thick enough to walk through. The men arguing in the pillared hall by the tank were the grandsons of the men he had argued with, and some of them came out to look at him.

Varadarāja stands on a low hill inside his own walls, upright, with one hand raised, which is the posture of a god about to give something away. His name means the one who gives. His consort Perundevi has her shrine a little to the north, and a man of that country with something to ask went to her first if he had been brought up properly, and these two had been brought up properly.

Then they went up the hill, and Rāmānuja told Kūreśa to say the hymn again from the beginning.

It was the middle of the afternoon, which is the dead part of a temple day, the doors shut in most places and the stone still holding the morning's heat. There were the people who are always there: the man sweeping, two or three old men against the pillars where the stone is cool, somebody's children, the temple men going about their work with one eye on what was happening. Rāmānuja's own people stood back. Kūreśa was put where he was to stand and turned to face the right way, because he could not do that for himself, and then he began.

It is a hundred and one verses and it takes time. It opens by asking the Lord who is the crest of the elephant hill to extend his blessing, the Lord whom the word of the Upaniṣads declared to be the one who has no equal and nobody above him. In the middle of it comes the verse about the eyes. And the last verse of the hundred and one is not a request at all. It is a statement of title, and it is the shortest account anybody in that tradition ever gave of what a man's claim on God actually consists of. I have taken refuge at Rāmānuja's feet, he says. He was the lamp of Yāmuna's line. Yāmuna came of Nāthamuni's line. Nāthamuni came of Nammāzhvār's line. And Nammāzhvār was the servant of the Goddess. Therefore, Varada, I am fit for you to look at.

He had got some way through it when Rāmānuja was called out.

Nothing in any account says what for. Some piece of business, somebody at the gate, a thing that needed the old man himself and would not wait ten minutes. He went out. He expected to be back before the end.

Kūreśa went on and came to the end of the hundred and one, and the Lord of that hill came and stood in front of him, and told him to ask for what he wanted.

What Kūreśa asked for was that Nālūrāṇ should be saved.

He did not ask for his eyes. He asked that the man who had told the king where to aim, and who had thereby put out those eyes and killed that old teacher, should be given whatever he himself was going to be given, and be saved exactly as he was saved.

The Lord said: be it so.

The accounts have one word about the manner of it, and it is the word that makes the whole thing what it is. They say he asked it absent-mindedly. He was not being magnificent. He did not deliberate, weigh the alternatives, and choose the higher one. He was asked what he wanted, and that was what was in him, and it came out first, the way the true answer does when nobody has given you time to compose a better one.

Rāmānuja came back in at a run and was told what had happened.

And he was furious.

Son, he said, you have gone against what I wanted. You have spoilt it.

Then he turned from him to the Lord standing there and did the asking himself, out loud, in front of everybody, an old man of eighty-odd in ochre with his hands up.

Lord, can you not grant my prayer. Give him back his sight.

There was a pause, and then the grant came, and it came with a boundary in it.

We grant him that sight, said Varadarāja. But except me and you, he shall see nothing else.

Rāmānuja tested it at once, because he was the kind of man who tests a thing the moment it is handed to him. He told Kūreśa to look at the Lord and say what he saw. Kūreśa looked up and described him: the standing figure, the raised hand, the colour, the ornaments, everything that was there.

Then Rāmānuja said: now describe me.

And Kūreśa turned his head and looked at him and described him, and went on describing him, and everything he said was exact. Not the man he had last set eyes on across a room at Śrīraṅgam twelve years before, but the man standing in front of him now: the frame, the ochre, the way the staff sat in his hand, what age had done to the face, and the upright mark on the forehead that he had once caught himself thinking was crooked, and had been paying for ever since.

Nobody stopped him. He was allowed to finish, and he took his time about it, and the men sweeping had stopped sweeping.

It is worth saying once what the boundary meant, since nothing in the accounts says it and nobody in that enclosure said it either. He had a wife and two sons who had been small children when he lost his eyes, and he never saw their grown faces. He never saw the river he had lived beside all his life again, or the towers of his own temple, or the face of the Lord lying along his serpent at Śrīraṅgam, whom he had served since he was a young man and for whom he had gone to that court in the first place. What he was given was a man in ochre and a standing figure on a hill a fortnight's walk away, and nothing else in the world for the rest of his life.

They went home to Śrīraṅgam the way they had come, in short stages, and at the bad places on the road somebody put a hand under his left elbow, because the road was not one of the two things.

There are seven walls at Śrīraṅgam, one inside another, and the town lives between the outer two.

That is the fact to hold on to about the place, because everything else follows from it. The five inner enclosures hold the shrines and the halls and the tanks and the store-rooms. The two outer ones hold houses, streets, shops, wells, a market, and several thousand people going about an ordinary life. Set the whole length of those walls end to end and it comes to something over six miles. A man living in the fourth street was living inside the temple, and his rent, his water, his neighbours' quarrels and the road outside his door were all, in the end, temple business. So when Rāmānuja took the administration of Śrīraṅgam into his own hands he was not taking over a shrine. He was taking over a municipality with a god in the middle of it.

He had done it once before and it had nearly killed him. The first time he set about the accounts there were men in that temple who decided the simplest answer was to poison his food, and they very nearly managed it, and he had spent two years at Tiruvellarai until the place sent word that it was sorry and would he come back. Then there had been the years of the books, and then the summons, and then twelve years away. He came back to a temple that had been running itself for twelve years with nobody asking hard questions, and the chronicle of that temple, which is written by his own people and has no reason to be unkind, says without any softening that the affairs of the place had got into a most unsatisfactory state.

Raṅganātha gave him a title for the work. Udayavar, the one who owns it. It is not a compliment; it is a job description, and it is the name Śrīraṅgam still uses for him in preference to all the others.

The handing over was done publicly and on paper, or rather on stone. The king's officers handed the temple to Mudaliāṇḍān with ceremony, on Rāmānuja's instruction, and the instructions themselves were cut into the stone at the Ārya Bhaṭṭāḷ gate, so that a man who wanted to know what the rule was about anything could walk to the gate and read it, and a man who wanted to pretend he did not know the rule had a harder time of it than before.

At the top he made one division and it held as long as he lived. Kūreśa was to take the teaching: the commentary, the classes, the spreading of the doctrine. Mudaliāṇḍān was to take the temple: the buildings, the people, the money, the day. The blind man had the ideas and the nephew had the keys.

Under them he put ten groups of servants with a chief over each, and the chiefs were called simply the ten persons. Not all ten groups can now be named. Five can. There were the Bhāgavata Nambis, who did the offices at the shrines. There were the Śrīpādam-tāṅguvār, the bearers of the holy feet, who carried the processional image on their shoulders and whose work is physical and dangerous and is done barefoot on wet stone. There were the Viṇṇappam-seivār, those who make the petition, whose office was to put requests to the Lord and bring the answer back, which is a real office in a temple and not a figure of speech. There were the Āryabhaṭṭāḷ, who belong to that gate. And there was a fifth body whose name survives and whose work does not.

Then he did the thing that tells most about him. He put in a clock.

A vessel of water was kept at a fixed place in the temple, and a man was given the office of watching it, and other men were given the office of calling out the hour as it came, from one end of the enclosure to the other, all day and all night. The place where it stood has been called the clock gate ever since. The point of it was punctuality. He had come back to a temple where things happened when somebody got round to them, and he took the view that if the Lord is actually in there then being late with his bath is not a small matter, and that the way to stop people being late is not to exhort them but to tell them what time it is.

After that the departments. There was a department for repairs, because a building of that size is always falling down somewhere. There was a department for procuring the day's flowers, vegetables, fruits and perfumes, which meant contracts with gardeners and a man who knew what jasmine should cost in Vaikāsi. There was a department for the vestments and the uniforms, keeping them, mending them, knowing where each was. And there was a department for the animals, because that temple kept elephants and horses and doves and deer and peacocks and parrots, and somebody had to feed them and clean up after them and call the physician when an elephant went off its food.

He opened a cattle station at Cōzhaṅganallūr and turned five villages into pasture for the temple cows, which is a serious piece of land policy and was probably the single largest thing he did with anybody's money. And the detail that goes with it is the one worth keeping. He used to go out there and stay, for days at a stretch, several times a year; and because he could not do his worship without an image in front of him, he had images of Kṛṣṇa and of Raṅganātha installed at the cow-shed, so that the days he spent among the cattle would not be days off.

Money came in from land and from gifts and from two men, Vaṇḍar and Śuṇḍar, whose whole office was to take service under kings and send the proceeds back. It went out through a treasurer, and the treasurer was Dhanurdāsa, who was a wrestler from Uṟaiyūr and not a brahmin, and that appointment is dealt with further on because it caused trouble and he expected it to.

The kitchens were the largest single operation in the enclosure and the most closely written down. How much rice, in what measure, for which offering, at which hour. How much ghee to it. Who receives the grain at the door and who weighs it and who is allowed to put a hand into a vessel and who is not. What is cooked for the morning offering and what for the night, and who takes the food in, and what happens to it afterwards, which is the part that fed several hundred people a day. Every one of those is a question about a meal being cooked for somebody who is present in the room, which is why a man who had written a commentary on the Brahma Sūtras was prepared to spend a morning on the ghee.

The flower-workers began before light, because an offering is made before the sun is up and a garland has to be strung after the flowers are picked and not before. The tulasī had to be fresh that morning and there were rules about who might cut it.

For the recitation he fixed a roster, and the roster is the part of his administration that has outlasted everything else. Sanskrit on one side of the sanctum and Tamil on the other, every day, by named men in a named order. Among those reciting in his time were Kūreśa, and Amudanār, and Garuḍa Vāhana Paṇḍita, who wrote a life of the poets himself. And what was recited in the temple at that period is on record: the Śrīraṅga Māhātmya, the ritual sūtras of Āśvalāyana and Āpastamba and Bodhāyana, grammar, the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras and the Vedānta Sūtras, Āḷavandār's sixty-five verses to Raṅganātha, and the commentaries and the three prose prayers of Rāmānuja. His own books were being said aloud in that temple while he was alive to walk past and hear them.

One change went deeper than all the rest and made him more enemies than all the rest. He replaced the system of worship. The priests at Śrīraṅgam had been following the Vaikhānasa manner; he put the Pāñcarātra manner in its place, which is the manner his teachers had defended in writing against learned men who held the Pāñcarātra books to be no scripture at all. The chronicle calls it a restoration, not a change, which is what the winning side always calls it. What it meant on the ground was that families who had held the right to stand in that place and do that thing, by descent, stopped holding it.

His own household ran on the same principle as the temple, which is that everything is somebody's named job. Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumānār, who had come to him out of an eighteen-day argument, had the worship in his private chapel. Kiḍāmbi Āccān and Kiḍāmbi Perumāḷ had the kitchen. Vaḍuga Nambi had the oil-bath and the personal attendance. Gōmaṭham Śiṟiyāzhvān carried the water-vessel and the sandals. Ammaṅgi boiled the milk, and that was the whole of his office. Ukkal Āzhvān served the meals and Ukkal Ammāḷ held the fan. Maṟṟoṉṟillā-Māruti-y-āṇḍān was the steward and Tiruvaraṅgamāḷigai the storekeeper and Tūya-muni-vēlam the waterman. Māruti-p-periyāṇḍān attended him at the times when a very old body has needs and cannot wait. Akalaṅka-nāṭṭāzhvān had the office of winning arguments with people who came to start them. And a man called simply Rāmānuja's soldier was the bodyguard, which was not decorative either.

Most of it was still running two hundred years after Mudaliāṇḍān was dead.

At four in the morning a man in the second enclosure watched the water go down in a vessel and called the hour, and another man took it up further along, and in a dozen places inside those walls people who had been waiting to hear it began.

The four thousand songs had been sung in that temple before Rāmānuja was born, and it is important to say so, because he is often given credit for something he inherited.

Nāthamuni was the man who put them there. Having got them back, he set them to music, with tunes of his own making and steps to go with them, so that the meaning could be shown as well as said; he established three festivals in the year for the performing of them; he taught the whole thing to his two nephews; and since he was running the Śrīraṅgam temple at the time, he put the recitation into the daily service. That was four generations before. By Rāmānuja's day the Tamil was in the building and nobody could get it out.

What was not settled was what it was.

A great many people were prepared to have the songs sung in a temple as a devotional practice, in the way that a fine thing may be done in a holy place without anybody having to decide its standing. What they were not prepared to do was call it scripture. And their case was not stupid, and it should be put at its strongest, because the men who made it were learned men who had thought about it for a long time.

The Veda, they said, has no author. That is not a pious compliment paid to it; it is the whole of its authority. It was not composed by anybody, it was heard; its words stand in a fixed order that no man arranged and no man may alter, and its force is in the sounds themselves, which is why it is transmitted by mouth with a discipline that costs a boy twelve years. A Tamil song is a different kind of object altogether. Somebody made it. It has an author with a name, a village and a caste. It can be paraphrased. It changes in translation, which means the sound is not doing the work. Set a made thing beside an unmade thing and call the two of them equal, they said, and the Tamil is not raised by it; all that has been announced is that the Veda is a poem.

There was a second objection underneath the first and it was rarely said aloud in those terms. If the Tamil is scripture, then the qualification to recite scripture is broken, because there is no qualification governing Tamil. Anybody can learn it. Anybody can say it out loud in the street. That is what it was made for.

What Rāmānuja did was to settle it in favour of the Tamil, not by an argument but by a timetable.

He put the two sides of the sanctum on the same footing in the daily worship: Sanskrit recited on one side and the Tamil of the poets on the other, every day, by named men, with the same standing, at the same hours, with the same provision for their maintenance. The tradition has a term for the result, and the term is the thing itself: the twin Vedānta, the two ends of the Veda, Sanskrit and Tamil, and the word Vedānta is used of the second without apology or qualification.

And it is worth saying without any softening who wrote the canon he did that with. Nammāzhvār, who made a thousand of the four thousand, was a Śūdra of the cultivating community, and never claimed otherwise, and the tradition never pretended otherwise. Tiruppāṇ Āzhvār was of a community that could not enter the town, let alone the temple, and the story the tradition tells about him is that he had to be carried in on a brahmin's shoulders because his own feet were not allowed on that ground. Āṇḍāḷ was a girl. A Śūdra, an outcaste and a woman, and their words are recited before the Lord at Śrīraṅgam every morning with the Veda on the other side of the room, and were put there on the authority of a brahmin sannyāsin who knew exactly what he was doing.

He also rebuilt the great recitation festival. One year the image of Nammāzhvār could not be brought to Śrīraṅgam for it, for reasons nobody has written down, and rather than let the festival go short he had another image made and installed in time; and while he was at it he had images of the other poets made, and of Nāthamuni, and installed them all together. The poets got shrines of their own in that temple because a festival was about to fail and a man in a hurry solved it. He then went through the arrangements of the festival itself and rewrote them, and introduced a better method for the reciting of the Tamil, and the shape he gave it is the shape it still has: ten days, and then ten days, with the whole four thousand recited through before the deity, and a gate opened in the middle of it that is opened on no other day of the year.

That is the part the tradition likes to tell. Here is the other part.

The man who held the offices in that temple was called Periya Kōil Nambi, and he was nobody's fool. He was a considerable scholar, court pandit to more than one crowned head, and he held, by descent, the sole right to perform the ceremonies and to read the Purāṇas in the temple. He was not hostile to the Lord; he had served him all his life. He was hostile to being reorganised, and he had the standing and the hereditary title to make reorganisation very difficult, and he used both. He simply did not give Rāmānuja access.

Rāmānuja decided to remove him.

Then Raṅganātha appeared to him in a dream and told him not to. The words the chronicle gives are that the Nambi was his own devotee, that he had served him a very long time, and that he was to be shown every consideration.

Rāmānuja took this badly. That is the chronicle's own word for it: he was piqued. And what he did next was to decide to leave Śrīraṅgam and go back to Kāñcī, which at his age and after everything else was not a small threat and was not meant to be. His own temple's chronicle records all of this about its own hero: that he wanted a man out, that God told him off for it, and that he sulked.

It was Kūreśa who stopped it, by offering to take the man on himself, and he took him on the long way, by teaching him, and it worked; and at the end of it Periya Kōil Nambi wanted to become Rāmānuja's disciple. Rāmānuja would not have him. He sent him to Kūreśa instead, on the ground that the man who has reformed you is the man you belong to. And because the Nambi wrote Tamil of a quality that stopped people in the street, Rāmānuja gave him a new name: Amudanār, the nectar man.

The offices, however, had still not moved. They moved like this.

Amudanār's mother died. On the eleventh day there is a rite in which one man stands in for the dead person and is given a great feast, and at the end of it he must be asked whether he is satisfied, and until he says that he is fully satisfied the rite is not complete. And the man who eats that meal cannot take part in any temple service for a full year afterwards. Amudanār wanted an advanced Śrīvaiṣṇava for it and came to Rāmānuja to ask him to name one.

Rāmānuja named Kūreśa at once. Kūreśa accepted at once.

He ate the meal. At the end of it Amudanār asked him whether he was satisfied, and Kūreśa said that he would be satisfied when the control of the temple was handed over to Rāmānuja. Amudanār could not refuse and did not. The keys came across that day, and the right of performing the ceremonies came with them, and Kūreśa did not go into that temple to serve for a year.

There is no way to tell that story as a triumph. It was a manoeuvre, it was planned, it used a man's mother's funeral and a form of words he could not get out of, and Kūreśa paid a year of his own service for it with his eyes open.

And Rāmānuja was unhappy about it. Not at the time, apparently; afterwards. The chronicle says he was far from happy that Amudanār had been deprived of rights that were his by descent, and that he thought the man's gifts were being wasted, and that they could be used. So he went to Tiruvaraṅgapperumāḷ Araiyar, who held the manuscript of the Iyaṟpā, and borrowed it, and taught it to Amudanār himself, and gave him the recitation of the Iyaṟpā in that temple permanently. He undid about half of what his own lieutenant had done to the man, and he left the other half standing.

What Amudanār did with the rest of his life was write a hundred and eight verses in Tamil about Rāmānuja, in a chained metre where the end of each verse begins the next and the last one comes round to the first, so that the whole thing is a closed ring. His name is in every one of the hundred and eight.

At a festival, with Rāmānuja present, Raṅganātha ordered the instruments stopped and the poem recited in public in front of everybody. Rāmānuja would not let it into the collection until he had listened to the whole of it and satisfied himself that it was not an exaggerated panegyric on himself. Then he let it in.

Its first verse does not begin with him. It begins with the lady who dwells on the Lord's chest, and goes from her to the poet who sang that Lord's glory, and only then to Rāmānuja, who bowed at that poet's feet and was saved; and it ends by telling the poet's own heart to go on saying his name.

There were exactly seventy-four of them, and the list survives, and it can be read straight through in a couple of minutes.

The office was called siṃhāsanādhipati, which means the holder of a lion-throne, and the men who held it were also called ācārya-puruṣas, teacher-men. A throne here is a seat of teaching authority. What was given with it was the right to initiate: to take a man through the five marks, to put the mantra into his ear, to be his ācārya and to be answerable for him, and to hand the same right on to a successor in the same family. It was not a monastic order. Most of the seventy-four were householders with wives and children and land. It was not a set of buildings either, although buildings came later. It was seventy-four points at which the thing he had spent his life on could go on being transmitted whether he was alive or not.

It is worth knowing what the right amounted to in practice, because it was not abstract. A man who wanted in came to the house of a teacher-man and was taken, on a chosen day, through five things. Two marks were put on his shoulders with a heated seal, the discus on the right and the conch on the left, and that hurts, and is meant to be permanent. The upright clay mark was drawn on his forehead and he was taught how to draw it himself. He was given a new name, a servant-name, with the word servant in it. He was given the mantra, into the ear, and the meaning with it. And he was told that he now belonged to somebody, and shown to whom. Afterwards his name went into that house's reckoning of its people, and when he was in difficulty it was that house he went to, and when he died it was that house that saw to it that the thing was done properly. Seventy-four such houses, spread across the south, each keeping its own list.

The seats went down in families. A holder taught his son or his son-in-law or, failing those, the ablest man in the house, and handed over before he died, and the line kept the name of the village it had started in. The whole arrangement rests on the assumption that a thing of this kind is best carried by a household rather than by an institution, which is an assumption about human beings and not about theology, and on the evidence of the next eight hundred years he was right about it.

The tradition has an explanation for the number and it comes out of irrigation.

Nāthamuni had used an image about teachers. Rain that collects in the hollow of an animal's hoofprint will be drunk by sparrows, he said; the same rain collected in the Vīrāṇam tank waters the country. The Vīrāṇam is the great Cōzha tank in the east, and what makes a tank of that kind useful is not the water but the sluices, the outlets cut into the bund, each one feeding its own channel into its own set of fields. Rāmānuja, on that reckoning, was the Vīrāṇam of the succession, and the seventy-four are its sluice-gates, and the number is the number of outlets in the bund.

The first five seats were not given to his own men.

They were given to the families of his teachers. Seat one to Soṭṭai Nambi, of Āḷavandār's descent, the old man who had died before they ever met and whose unfinished work had been the whole commission of his life. Seat two to Puṇḍarīkākṣa, of Mahāpūrṇa's descent, who had put the marks on him at Madhurāntakam on the road and had died blinded by a roadside sixty years later. Seat three to Teṟkāzhvāṉ, who was Goṣṭhīpūrṇa's own son, and whose father had made him swear an oath and then embraced him for breaking it. Seat four to Sundarat Tōḷuḍaiyāṉ, of Mālādhara's descent, who had taught him the Tamil songs and had quarrelled with him over a line of them. Seat five to Rāmānujam Piḷḷai, of the line of Śrīśailapūrṇa, who was his mother's brother and had given him the name he went by.

That is the mechanism of the whole thing and it is easy to miss. He did not displace the previous generation's families to make room for his own. He seated them first, at the head of the list, by name, in the order in which he had learned from them. A man who does that is not building a party. He is making it impossible for anybody afterwards to say that the new arrangement was a break.

Then his own.

Seat six is the house of Kūram, and it is one seat holding three men: Kūreśa, and his two sons, Parāśara Bhaṭṭar and Śrīrāmap Piḷḷai, whom the tradition also calls Veda Vyāsa Bhaṭṭar. Seat seven is Mudaliāṇḍān and his son Kandāḍai Āṇḍān, father and son in one seat again. After that they come one by one. Nadātūr Āzhvān at thirteen. Eṅgaḷāzhvān at fourteen. Ananthāzhvān at fifteen, who was sent up the hill to Tirumalai to make a flower garden for Veṅkaṭeśa and dig a tank for it, and whose crowbar is on the wall of that temple to this day for reasons that are a story of their own. Piḷḷaip Piḷḷai Āzhvān at twelve, in whose lap Kūreśa would die. Embār at twenty-three, the cousin he had been brought up with, who had once been a servant of Śiva at Kāḷahasti and had come back. Kiḍāmbi Āccān at twenty-four, who cooked for him. Tirumalai Nallāṉ at twenty-nine, who had cremated a dead man that nobody else would touch. Tirukkurugai Pirāṇ Piḷḷān at thirty-nine, the son of his own uncle, whom he called his son in knowledge, and who wrote the first commentary on the Tiruvāymozhi because Rāmānuja refused to write one himself and said why: that if he wrote it, small men would decide that was all there was in the poets, and nobody afterwards would dare go further.

Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumānār at fifty-six, who had been an Advaitin ascetic called Yajñamūrti and had argued for eighteen days and broken his own staff on the last of them. Toṇḍanūr Nambi at fifty-seven, who had lived on alms in a Jain town in the west, and who talked a queen into sending for a stranger, and then talked the stranger into entering a king's house against his own rule, and who therefore made Melkoṭe possible. Marudūr Nambi at fifty-eight, of whom nothing whatever is known except that he stood next to Toṇḍanūr Nambi in life as he does on the list. Vaḍuga Nambi at sixty-three, the Telugu man who worshipped Rāmānuja's sandals and said so. Vaṅgipurattu Nambi at sixty-four. Śrī Parāṅkuśa Nambi at sixty-five, whom Kūreśa called the master of Tamil.

And then seats sixty-six to seventy, five in a row, each of them an Ammāḷ: Ammaṅgi Ammāḷ, Paruttik Kollai Ammāḷ, Ukkal Ammāḷ, Soṭṭai Ammāḷ, Mudumbai Ammāḷ. Five consecutive women, grouped deliberately, placed immediately after the Nambis and before the last four. Ukkal Ammāḷ is the one who held the fan in his own household.

The establishment as a whole was counted in a verse that his people kept, and the count is worth having in the order the verse gives it. Seven hundred ascetics. Seventy-four thrones, the teacher-men. Twelve thousand Śrīvaiṣṇavas. Three hundred women under vows. Many kings. And men of the holy thread, and men without it, the Sāttādavar, the threadless, named in the same breath and in the same community as a standing category and not as an exception.

The threadless are the ones to stop at, because they are the proof that the thing was structural and not a set of kind acts. A Sāttādavar is a Śrīvaiṣṇava who does not wear the sacred thread, because his birth gives him no claim to one, and who has nonetheless been marked, named and given the mantra, and is therefore inside. They are a body with their own usages and they exist still. Rāmānuja did not invent a category for them as a concession; the verse counts them along with everybody else, in the same sentence as the kings.

Two men who ought to be on that list of seventy-four are not on it.

Dhanurdāsa holds no seat. He was the treasurer of the whole establishment, he had the run of the house, Rāmānuja held his hand in public and refused to be told not to, and the verse that closes the Tamil collection at every festival to this day was written by him. He holds no seat.

Amudanār holds no seat either. He had the Iyaṟpā recitation for life, his hundred and eight verses were taken into the canon in Rāmānuja's own lifetime and with his own vetting, and the tradition calls that poem a gāyatrī. He holds no seat.

That is the boundary of what he changed. Inside it, a man of any birth could be initiated, could serve, could recite, could hold the money, could be embraced in the street. At the line where authority became hereditary and a family became an authority, the old rule held, and he did not break it, and nothing in any account suggests he tried.

How a man got on the list is not written down anywhere. What can be seen from the list is what he was looking for, because the seventy-four are not the seventy-four cleverest men he knew. Several of them wrote nothing at all. Some of them are there because of one act: a garden, a corpse, a conversation with a queen. They were sent out afterwards, each to his own country, and the countries are still there in the family names, Kāñcī and Kūram and Nadātūr and Mudumbai and Toṇḍanūr and Ukkal, and the descendants of those seats are the teacher-families of that tradition now, eight hundred years and more downstream.

There is one more institution that is often run together with this one and should not be. The fifty-two he left behind at Melkoṭe were temple officers with charges in a particular temple on a particular hill. The seventy-four were something else entirely and were not tied to any building.

The seventy-fourth and last seat on the list went to a man called Āṟkāṭṭup Piḷḷāṉ, of whom not another word has come down.

Mudaliāṇḍān was his sister's son.

He was born at Pēṭṭai, to Ānanda Dīkṣitar and Nācciyāramman, and he was given the name Daśarathi, which means the son of Daśaratha, which is to say Rāma. His uncle's name means Rāma's younger brother. Nobody arranged that either.

He and Kūreśa came to Rāmānuja together, at Kāñcī, on the day they heard he had taken the ochre. They walked in, got down on the floor and asked to be taken into the community by the five marks, and they were the first two he ever initiated. On the morning of his own renunciation, when a man declares that he is giving up everything he is attached to, Rāmānuja is recorded as having said that he gave up attachment to everything except Āṇḍān.

They were his two hands and he said so, years later, at Tirukkōṣṭiyūr, when Goṣṭhīpūrṇa opened the door and found three men on the step instead of one and wanted to know why. Rāmānuja's answer was that he had been told to come with staff and pennant, and had done so, and that Daśarathi was the staff and Kūreśa was the pennant, and that he was never without them nor they without him. The names stuck. The tradition calls Mudaliāṇḍān the staff of the king of ascetics, and also his sandals, and also simply Rāmānuja's golden feet, and the last of those is the one his descendants use.

There is an episode in his youth that shows the shape of him. He went to Tirukkōṣṭiyūr on his own account to ask for the final verse of the Lord's teaching in the Gītā and its meaning, and Goṣṭhīpūrṇa, who had made a career of not giving these things away, took him into the household and kept him there six months and let him serve. At the end of six months he sent him home without it. He did it kindly. He put his own feet on the young man's head and told him that Rāmānuja himself would teach him that verse when his qualities had finished growing, and sent him back up the road.

He walked back to Śrīraṅgam with that in him. Rāmānuja took one look at his face in the doorway and taught it to him on the spot.

What he did with the rest of his life was administration, and it is worth resisting the temptation to apologise for that. He ran the largest temple in the Tamil country for decades: the ten groups and their chiefs, the kitchens, the stores, the buildings, the calendar, the money, the disputes, the appointments. When Rāmānuja went off on his journeys it was Āṇḍān who was left holding it. When the king's officers formally handed the temple over after the exile, it was into his hands they put it, by ceremony, with Rāmānuja standing there telling them to. And the arrangements he administered were still running two hundred years after he was dead, which is a thing that can be said of very few men's paperwork.

He was also, repeatedly, the one sent. He went west with him out of the west gate that night, and of the forty-odd who went he is the one the accounts keep naming. Through the Jain years he was in the western country, and a great many of the conversions there are credited to his work rather than to his uncle's. He was the one sent east across the peninsula to find out whether Kūreśa was alive. He was the one who went to the dead king's capital to check the news before he would carry it.

And there is the business at Śāligrāma, on the road west, which is the strangest thing in his file. Rāmānuja told him to go and touch the village water-source with his feet. He did it. The people of that place bathed in it afterwards and came away changed and attached themselves, and one of the men won that way was a young Telugu who became Vaḍuga Nambi and spent the next fifty years doing nothing but personal service to Rāmānuja. There is a small shrine on the spot with a pair of feet in it and it is still looked after by the descendants of that household.

He was generous in a way that is difficult and therefore worth recording. Embār once gave the five marks to a man who was already Mudaliāṇḍān's disciple, which by any ordinary reckoning of these things is an intrusion, and people expected trouble. What he said was that when a man has fallen into a well, if two men take hold of him it is easier to get him out; the fellow is in the world, and if two of us are pulling, so much the better.

His own account of what he was doing in that household he put like this: when a lion leaps from one hill to the next, the small creatures living on its body are carried over with it.

Around him stood the rest of the inner circle, and they were not a committee. They were a set of very particular men.

Embār was Rāmānuja's cousin, the boy from Madhuramaṅgalam he had been brought up half beside. He had saved Rāmānuja's life on the road north as a young man and had then gone on alone, and had ended up at Kāḷahasti as a servant of Śiva, wearing the beads and the three horizontal lines of ash, singing Rudra's praises, and managing that temple's affairs. Getting him back took his uncle three attempts and the third one was the good one. Śrīśailapūrṇa sat down with his disciples under a tree on the path Govinda walked every day and sang about Nārāyaṇa until the young man was curious. Some days later he wrote out a verse of Āḷavandār's on a palm leaf and dropped it on the path. Govinda picked it up, read it, put it down, walked on, and then came back for it. Then, on a third day, he found him up a tree picking flowers for Rudra, and began lecturing on the decade of the Tiruvāymozhi in which Nammāzhvār establishes that flowers and worship are fit to be offered to one Lord only, and asked the question in the poet's own words: are flowers and worship fitting for anyone but him. Govinda came down out of the tree onto the ground at his feet and cried about the years. He handed the keys of the Kāḷahasti treasury back to the local devotees of Śiva, who told him, when he did, that Rudra had appeared to them in a dream the night before and said that emperumānār had come into the world to give true knowledge to everybody and that Govinda Perumāḷ was not to be hindered. So they let him go, and were pleased for him.

That is the man who was afterwards found washing himself for ritual purity one day and, when asked why, said that he had put his hand into a snake's mouth to take out a thorn that was hurting it. Rāmānuja found it out only because of the bath. He was married off at his mother's request and never took any interest in it; told to spend time alone with his wife, he came back and said that he saw the Lord everywhere and so there was no such thing as alone; and Rāmānuja gave him the ochre on the spot, named him Embār, and told him to stay near him always, which he did until the end.

Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumānār had been Yajñamūrti, an Advaitin ascetic of some celebrity, who came to Śrīraṅgam to argue and got eighteen days agreed for it. It ran even for sixteen. On the seventeenth it began to go against Rāmānuja and Yajñamūrti walked out of the hall early, as a man does when he knows he has won. On the eighteenth morning he came in, looked at Rāmānuja's face, said that there was to be no more argument and that he was beaten, and put the other man's sandals on his own head, before a word of the day's debate had been spoken. There was no arbiter and there was no verdict. Rāmānuja objected, said the case was still contested and that they should argue it out and see where it landed, and then argued it out anyway, at length, on the self-contradiction he said was buried in the other man's system. At the end of it Yajñamūrti broke his staff across his knee, which for a man of that order is the whole of a resignation, and asked to be received. He was given the worship of Rāmānuja's own private chapel to look after, and the two books he wrote afterwards, having been a Sanskrit pandit all his life, are in Tamil.

Vaṅgipurattu Nambi had a grievance and got the best sentence out of Rāmānuja that anybody ever got. He had been promised the manual of image-worship first, and then Rāmānuja, up at Tirumalai and worn down by Kūreśa and another man importuning him, taught it to them instead. When Nambi came to him about it he did not pretend it had not happened. He said: listen, Nambi, I never understood until today how Kṛṣṇa, who is God and can do anything, let himself be tied up with a rope by an ordinary woman. Now I know. My own will was set, and my disciples' asking bent it, though I had given you my word first. That is how it is done.

And behind all of them, every day, there was a man called Gōmaṭham Śiṟiyāzhvān whose office was to carry the water-vessel and the sandals. He walked behind Rāmānuja with those two objects for the better part of a lifetime, and that is everything anybody knows about him.

Āṇḍāḷ walked out of Kūram in the evening with one gold cup hidden in her clothes.

She had married the richest man in that village and had kept his house for him while he fed the blind and the lame and the poor at the door from morning until late at night, and then one evening he came in and said that they were leaving, and they left with nothing, on foot, in the dark, the two of them. She did as she was told about the nothing, except for the cup, and she kept the cup because her husband would want something to drink out of on a road.

They were in forest by nightfall and she had never travelled like that in her life, and she asked him, trembling, whether there was any danger of thieves in such places. He answered her the way he answered everything, which was as though it were a question in logic. There is danger, he said, if you have something hidden on you. Fish live on water-worms and fowls live on land-worms and death lives on life and thieves live on property. I think you have brought something with you, although I told you to leave it all behind.

She got the cup out and put it in his hand and was frightened. He threw it into the trees and told her to walk on, and said: now your fear has been taken away.

She lived the rest of her life on begged grain, and it is worth being concrete about what that meant for the woman keeping that house, because her husband had a rule. He would beg only what was needed for that day, at the houses of decent people, and nothing was ever to be stored for tomorrow. So there was no jar with anything in it. Every single morning of thirty-odd years began with nothing in the house and with a woman waiting to see what would come through the door before she could think about a meal, and if it rained past the hour when grain could be asked for, that was that. She did not complain about it in any account anybody kept. Of the food that came up the street on the rainy night she and her husband ate one mouthful each, and she was told in a dream before morning that the two mouthfuls were the seed of two sons and that he would count them his own. They were born at Śrīraṅgam, and were named, on Rāmānuja's instruction, after Parāśara and after Vyāsa, which paid off one of the three promises he had made to a dead man's hand. When they were old enough to be married she pressed her husband to see to it, and he would not, and what he said was that the boys belonged to God's household and it was God's business to find them wives. She is quoted in the commentaries in her own right, for conclusions of her own on points of doctrine, which is not a thing the commentaries do for many people.

Attuzhāy was Mahāpūrṇa's daughter. Her name means the one who belongs to the tulasī.

Her father was the man who had put the marks on Rāmānuja at Madhurāntakam, and whose whole character was that he had handed himself over so completely that he had nothing of his own left to act with; and this had consequences inside his own house. His daughter was married, as girls were, into a household that was not kind to her. She went to her mother-in-law and asked for somebody to go with her to the river when she went to bathe, which is a reasonable request in a country where a woman does not go to the water alone. The mother-in-law said that if she wanted a maidservant she should have brought one with her from her own family.

So she went to her father. And her father, who would not use his standing for himself and would not use it for her either, told her that since they were all of them entirely dependent on Rāmānuja, she should go and ask Rāmānuja.

She went and asked him.

Rāmānuja looked round the room, which had a considerable number of men in it, and picked out Mudaliāṇḍān, and told him to go with her and do it. Āṇḍān, who was his nephew, the head of his disciples, the man who ran the Śrīraṅgam temple, said yes, and went, and carried the water-pots, and walked with her to the river and back, and did it again the next day, and went on doing it.

Her husband's family began to get uncomfortable. They were being visited every morning by the most important man in the movement, in the character of a maidservant, in their own courtyard, where the neighbours could see him. They asked him to stop. He said that it was his master's order and that he would go on. They went to Mahāpūrṇa about it and Mahāpūrṇa sent them to Rāmānuja.

And Rāmānuja said: you wanted an assistant for her. I have sent one. If you do not want him, send him back.

They sent him back. They also, from that time, took proper care of her, which was the entire object of the exercise. He had not argued with them about the treatment of women or the duties of a husband's family. He had simply kept sending Mudaliāṇḍān until it stopped.

She is in the story once more, and it is the worst day in it. When the summons came from the court, and her father went with Kūreśa because he would not let him go alone, she followed the two of them without telling anybody. She was there when they were brought out. She took them both by the hand and led them away out of sight of the place, and washed the blood off their faces with water, and did what could be done to stop it, and got them onto the road. Her father died on that road, at over a hundred, and he died with his feet in her lap.

Nothing else about her is recorded. Not her husband's name, not where she lived afterwards, not when she died.

The three hundred women are a different kind of fact and a harder one. When Rāmānuja's establishment was counted, in a verse his own people kept, the count runs: seven hundred ascetics, seventy-four thrones, twelve thousand Śrīvaiṣṇavas, three hundred women under vows, and many kings. Three hundred women living under vows as a recognised body, counted in the same breath as the ascetics and the thrones, not as an appendix to them. They are called by a Tamil word that means, roughly, the bound mothers. What their rule was, where they lived, who admitted them, what they were required to do and not do: none of that has come down. The number has, and the fact that somebody thought it worth counting has, and five seats out of the seventy-four went to women called Ammāḷ, placed in a block in the list, one of whom held the fan in his own household.

It is also worth looking for a moment at the women who were simply in that place every day, because the temple could not have opened its doors without them and the chronicle records them only as functions. The flower-gardens along the channels were worked by women, and it was women who came in through the gates before four in the morning with jasmine and tulasī wrapped in wet cloth, and sat in rows on the stone stringing garlands with their knees up, and were paid by the temple for it. Women brought the curds and the milk and the plantains in on their heads and were paid for those too, and the accounts he set up had to have a line for each of them. Women swept. Women came in to the shrines all day in a slow continuous river with children on their hips, and it was mostly women who sat against the cool pillars at noon when everybody else had gone to sleep. Nothing he wrote down about the ordering of that temple touches on the question of what a woman may or may not do there, and the arrangements he made presuppose on every page that half the work of the place was in their hands.

There was a woman he met on the road near Tirukkōḷūr, and the tradition calls her simply the lady of Tirukkōḷūr. He found her walking away from the town and asked her, sharply, what she meant by leaving a holy place.

What she said in answer took a long time and it has been written down and kept. It is a list. It is a list of things she had not done, each one attached to somebody who had done it, and it runs to eighty-one items, and she went through them all. Did I put my finger into a snake's mouth, like Embār. Did I say that the rules were no more than the noise the sea makes, like Mahāpūrṇa. Did I do this, like that man; did I do that, like this woman. Every single item is somebody else's virtue and her own conclusion is the same each time, which is that she is not the sort of person who deserves to live in a town like that one.

He let her finish. Eighty-one of them, on a road, standing. The accounts give her more space than they give most of the seventy-four.

And there was the milkmaid, who was called Tumbaiyūr Koṇḍi, and who had been supplying the curds to the monastery kitchen for a long time and had not been paid. She came with her bill.

Rāmānuja told Kiḍāmbi Āccān to give her food in the monastery first, so she was fed. Then the account was gone through and settled, and she was asked what she wanted, and she said she did not want the money. She wanted mokṣa.

He told her he could not give her that, and that the only person who could was Śrīnivāsa up on the hill at Tirumalai.

She said that in that case she would like it in writing.

He wrote it out for her, and she took the paper and went off north and climbed the hill; and she had not got to the top before the Lord of that hill met her on the path, and took the paper off her, and gave her what was written on it, there, on the way up.

Dhanurdāsa was a wrestler, and he lived at Uṟaiyūr, which is across the water from Śrīraṅgam and had been a capital in its day and still had the manners of one.

He fought in the king's court. He was not a poor man; the accounts are careful to say he was very wealthy, and that he had standing in that kingdom on account of his courage, which in a wrestler means what it sounds like. His name means servant of the bow. He was not a brahmin.

His wife was Ponnācciyār, which means something like the golden lady, and the Sanskrit accounts translate the name rather than transliterate it. She was beautiful, and the particular thing everybody said about her, and the thing her husband said about her, was her eyes.

What Rāmānuja saw, on a street at Śrīraṅgam during the Cittirai festival, was this. Dhanurdāsa was walking in front of his wife holding an umbrella up over her head with one hand to keep the sun off her, and with the other hand he was laying a cloth down on the ground in front of her so that her feet would not have to touch the road. He was going backwards along a public street in a crowd, doing both those things at once, in front of everybody who knew him.

Rāmānuja stopped and had him called over.

He asked him what he thought he was doing, serving a woman in that manner.

And Dhanurdāsa told him, in the street, without any embarrassment whatever. Her eyes, he said, are so beautiful that I am entirely surrendered to that beauty, and there is nothing I will not do to protect it.

It is important to hear what he actually said, because the version that gets repeated softens it into a joke about a man following his wife's glance, and the real thing is much stronger and much stranger. He did not say that he loved his wife, though he did. He said that he was the property of beauty. He had given himself to a quality, and the quality happened to be present in his wife's face, and his whole conduct followed from that and he was not going to pretend otherwise for a passing sannyāsin.

Rāmānuja did not tell him he was wrong.

That is the hinge of the entire episode and every other detail hangs off it. He did not tell him that the body is a bag of skin, or that beauty fades, or that a man should be ashamed to be ruled by a woman's face. He accepted the man's own terms exactly as they had been stated. He asked one question. If I show you something more beautiful than those eyes, will you be surrendered to that.

Dhanurdāsa said yes. He said it at once, without haggling, because on his own principles there was no other answer available to him, and he had never pretended his principle was anything else.

So Rāmānuja took him into the temple, and stood him in front of the Lord who lies along his serpent there, and asked the Lord to show him the eyes that had once been shown to Tiruppāṇ Āzhvār. Tiruppāṇ Āzhvār was an outcaste poet of an earlier century who had not been permitted to set his feet on that ground and had been carried in on a brahmin's shoulders, and who, having been shown those eyes, said afterwards that eyes which have seen what he had seen will not look at anything else again.

Dhanurdāsa was shown them.

From that day, the accounts say, he stopped eating and sleeping properly, and stayed like that for some time, in the way of a man who has been hit by something and has not finished being hit.

And Ponnācciyār understood it too. She did not have it explained to her and she did not have to be won round. She came and surrendered on her own account, and asked to be told what to do next, and the two of them between them gave away everything they had at Uṟaiyūr and moved across the water to Śrīraṅgam to serve.

The marriage was not broken. Nobody was sent home to her parents, nobody took vows, they did not separate. They lived in that town as husband and wife for the rest of their lives and the tradition regards them jointly, as a pair, and preserves her opinions as well as his.

He was given a new name and it is the one the Tamil country uses: Piḷḷai Uṟaṅgāvilli Dāsar, the servant who is the bow that does not sleep. It was given because of how he behaved during the processions. He walked in front of the Lord with one hand on his sword the whole way, watching, and he had told people that if the palanquin so much as jolted he would kill himself with it on the spot; and the tradition's own comment on this, recorded without any solemnity at all, is that since he never did kill himself we may conclude the bearers were careful.

Rāmānuja made him the treasurer of the whole establishment. He held the money.

That appointment was not accepted quietly, and the trouble came to a head on the last day of a festival at the temple tank. Rāmānuja was coming up the wet steps and took Dhanurdāsa's hand to steady himself, in front of a large number of people, and some of his brahmin disciples thought that a sannyāsin had no business taking that particular hand, on account of the man's birth. They did not gossip about it. They came and said so to his face, which is to their credit.

He did not argue the doctrine with them. He set them a task.

Go to Dhanurdāsa's house, he said, and steal whatever jewels you can get.

They went, being obedient men and rather appalled. Ponnācciyār was lying down in the house. They came in quietly and began working the ornaments off her, and she woke up, and understood what was happening, and concluded that these were Śrīvaiṣṇavas who must be doing this out of poverty; so she lay still and let them take what they liked off the side they had started on. When they had finished that side she turned over, as though in her sleep, to give them the other one.

That frightened them badly and they ran.

They were still outside in the dark when Dhanurdāsa came home, and they heard the two of them talking through the wall. He was asking her why the jewels were gone from one side only. She told him what had happened. And he was upset with her, and what he was upset about was this: that she should have lain there like a stone and let them take everything in whatever way they chose, and that by turning over she had frightened them off and they had gone away with only half.

The disciples came back and told Rāmānuja what they had seen and heard, and said what they thought about the pair of them now. The next morning he explained the whole business to Dhanurdāsa and gave him his wife's jewels back.

The joke the tradition is making, and it is making it deliberately, is that the man whose house was robbed to prove he did not mind being robbed was then put in charge of the money.

He asked one question in public that is worth keeping. During a class, he stood up and said: if Rāma had to argue for that long with Sugrīva and Jāmbavān and the rest of them before he would accept Vibhīṣaṇa, who had walked away from everything he had, then what is going to happen to me, who still have a house and a wife and am attached to both.

Rāmānuja's answer was a chain, and he ran down it link by link. If I am saved, he said, you are saved. If Mahāpūrṇa is saved, I am saved. If Āḷavandār is saved, Mahāpūrṇa is saved. And so up through the line to Nammāzhvār, who has stated in his own verses that he was saved; and the Goddess is putting our case for us at the other end. So we are all going.

Kūreśa, who had spent his life on the texts, used to watch him during the classes on the Tiruvāymozhi, because Dhanurdāsa would go to pieces in them; and what Kūreśa said to him about it was that people like themselves learn the matter and then explain it to others, whereas he simply melted at the thought of the Lord, and that his way of it was the better one.

There is a line in the Tiruvāymozhi that speaks of the milk-sweet men of Tamil, the men of music, and the devoted; and Kūreśa, going through it in a class, assigned the three to three men in that room. Śrī Parāṅkuśa Nambi was the master of Tamil. Tiruvaraṅgapperumāḷ Araiyar was the musician. And the devoted one, he said, is Dhanurdāsa.

He had two nephews, called Vaṇḍar and Śuṇḍar, who were employed taking service under kings and sending the proceeds back to the temple, and who were once got by a trick into worshipping in a Jain shrine, and who fell down insensible when they were told where they had been, and were brought round with the dust of their uncle's feet. They are on the household roster with everybody else.

He wrote one verse in Tamil. It says: we have the true wealth, and there is nothing lacking to any living creature in the four-quartered world, and we have said so out loud, because we have taken hold of the people who have taken hold of the feet of Rāmānuja, who is himself at the feet of the one who lifted up the hill.

It is the verse with which the Tamil collection is closed, at the end of every festival, in that temple, still.

By the end of his life the kitchen at Śrīraṅgam was a security appointment, and everybody in the establishment knew it was one, and the man who held it had got it by swearing at an old and venerable ācārya on a sand bank in front of a hundred people.

The arrangement by then was elaborate and nobody pretended otherwise. One man cooked and nobody else went into that room while the fire was in it. One man carried the vessel and did not set it down between the hearth and the door. Rice came from named fields into a store that two men held keys to, and if either key was not there the store was not opened that day and the household ate what was in the house. Milk was boiled where he lived and not brought in already boiled. Water came from one well and from no other well. Leaf plates were counted out and counted back.

The men who did these things were not servants. They were senior men of the establishment, several of them heads of households with students of their own, and three of them stand on the list of the seventy-four. The work was held to be the best work in the place, and there was competition for it, and Rāmānuja let it be understood that he did not think about any of it, which was not true.

None of it had been designed. It had accumulated, one item at a time, the way arrangements of that kind do, each item added after something had gone wrong.

What had gone wrong the first time was in the years before he went west, when he had first put his hand into the temple's accounts and the men who lost by it had worked out what to do about him. They got at one of the seven houses where he begged, and the food that came out of that house that day would have killed him, and killed a dog instead. He did not accuse anybody, because nothing could have been proved and the woman who had carried the dish out would have been destroyed by the asking. He never ate from those seven houses again.

What he did instead was stop eating at all.

That was the thing nobody had expected and nobody knew how to deal with. He would not be argued out of it and he would not discuss it. He went on not eating, day after day, in a town that had just tried to kill him and now had to stand in the street and watch him starve for it; and when it had gone on long enough that men who had never agreed with him about anything were frightened, they sent south for the only person then alive with the standing to make him stop.

Goṣṭhīpūrṇa came from Tirukkōṣṭiyūr. He was old and it is a long way and the season was the hot one.

The Kāverī was down to sand. The party went out across the bed at the middle of the day to meet him, which is a thing nobody does in that month if it can be helped, because the sand at noon in Vaikāsi will take the skin off a foot. Rāmānuja went out with the men closest to him, and when they came up to Goṣṭhīpūrṇa they all went down flat on the ground in the customary way, faces down, on that sand.

And Goṣṭhīpūrṇa did not tell them to get up.

He stood there. He said nothing. The moments went by and he let them go by, and the men lay on the burning sand with their palms and their foreheads and their forearms on it, and it went on long past the point where it had stopped being a greeting.

He was doing it on purpose and he was watching. What he wanted to find out, before he went back to his own town and left Rāmānuja to the people who had just poisoned him, was which of these men loved him enough to stop being well behaved.

Kiḍāmbi Āccān got up and swore at him.

He got up off the sand and told that old and venerable ācārya, in front of everybody, in language that nobody in that tradition uses to a teacher, exactly what he thought of a man who would leave Rāmānuja lying on a sandbank at noon for the pleasure of making a point.

Goṣṭhīpūrṇa turned and looked at him with an expression that the account describes as approval, and said: Āccān, you are the man I have been looking for. Now that I have found you my fears for his safety are over. I appoint you his bodyguard. And nobody but you is to cook for Rāmānuja from this day. That duty is yours and no one else's.

So Kiḍāmbi Āccān became master of the hearth, which in that household was the senior appointment, and he had been given it by another man's guru on a riverbed as a security measure. Everything about the arrangement of that kitchen for the next fifty years follows from a poisoned meal and a hot afternoon.

Āccān was born at Kāñcī and his formal name was Praṇatārtihara, the remover of the distress of those who bow down, which is a name taken from the Lord of the hill at Kāñcī. He appears in the accounts almost always in connection with food and water, which is exactly what he was for. There is a small episode that gives him. He was serving water to a line of Śrīvaiṣṇavas and Rāmānuja watched him do it and corrected his method, some matter of how the vessel was held or how the hand was placed; and what Āccān said in reply was a line of the Āzhvār's: you have engaged me in service without letting my service go wrong.

Around him the rest of the household was arranged on the same principle, which is that where a man's body is concerned, one named person does one named thing and nobody else does it. Kiḍāmbi Perumāḷ worked with Āccān in the kitchen. A man called Ammaṅgi had one office and one only, which was to boil the milk. Tūya-muni-vēlam was the waterman and nobody else drew that water. Ukkal Āzhvān put the meals in front of him. Vaḍuga Nambi did the oil-bath and the personal attendance, which meant he had his hands on the old man's body every few days for decades. And one man on the roster is listed as Rāmānuja's soldier, which was not a title of honour.

Vaḍuga Nambi is worth a paragraph because he is the extreme case of the household's temperament. He was a Telugu, won on the road west, and his devotion was not to the Lord. It was to Rāmānuja, flatly and without qualification, and he said so whenever anybody gave him an opening. He had obtained a pair of Rāmānuja's sandals and he performed the full daily worship to them, with the water and the flowers and the rest of it. When they travelled he packed those sandals in the same bundle as the images Rāmānuja himself worshipped, and when he was told that this was not appropriate he said that his object of worship was every bit as glorious as his master's, so there was nothing wrong with the arrangement. After some relatives who were not Śrīvaiṣṇavas had visited him he destroyed all his cooking pots, and then went and picked up the pots Mudaliāṇḍān had thrown away and used those instead.

There is one more story about him and it is a small one. He had eaten the remnants of Rāmānuja's food, which in that household is the most sought-after thing there is, and afterwards he wiped his hands on his own head instead of washing them, because he was not going to rinse that off into a drain. He was told to go and wash properly. The next day, having eaten food that had been offered to the Lord, he went and washed his hands, carefully, at once. Rāmānuja asked him what he thought he was doing. He said he was following the instruction he had been given the day before. Rāmānuja said: you have beaten me without any trouble at all.

There was at least one further attempt, and it came from higher up. The head priest of the temple disliked him, invited him to his own house for a meal, and intended to finish the business there. Nothing came of it. The two attempts together say the same thing about the opposition: it was not doctrinal and nobody in it was arguing about the nature of the soul. It was about money, and offices, and who had been getting what out of that temple before he arrived; and it had already driven him out of Śrīraṅgam once, to Tiruvellarai for two years, long before any king took an interest in him.

Nobody was arrested and nobody was named. The man who owned that house is not identified in any account, and neither is his wife, and there is no record of Rāmānuja ever saying a word about it afterwards in public or asking anybody to do anything about it. He simply stopped eating from any house at all, and after the business on the riverbed he ate from one hand to the end of his days.

The accounts do not give the woman a name. They give her the hands that would not keep still, and the prostration, and the way she went out of the room with her eyes down, which is how he knew.

There were men in that town who had been angry with him for fifty years and were not going to stop.

The oldest grievance was the tower. As a younger man he had climbed the tower at Tirukkōṣṭiyūr and said the eight syllables out loud, and then their meaning, in Tamil, slowly, twice, to a crowd he had deliberately gathered out of the streets where nobody was ever invited to anything; and he had done it within a day of swearing to his own teacher that he would tell it to nobody. The men who minded about that were not fools and their objection was not snobbery, or not only. Their position was that an initiatory mantra is not information. It is handed to one man at a time by a teacher who has satisfied himself about that man, and the handing is itself part of what is handed; and a thing shouted from a tower to four hundred people is a different thing from the thing that was given to him, whatever the syllables are. He had, on that view, not enlarged the gift. He had destroyed a copy of it and called it generosity.

Some of those men were young at Tirukkōṣṭiyūr and were old at Śrīraṅgam and had not moved an inch in half a century. Their sons had the argument by heart.

The second grievance was property, and it is the one that produced the violence. When he took the temple in hand he took offices away from families that had held them by descent. Periya Kōil Nambi lost the right to perform the ceremonies and to read the Purāṇas, which had been his family's, and the manner in which he lost it was a manoeuvre at his own mother's funeral rite. When the manner of worship was changed from the Vaikhānasa to the Pāñcarātra, the priests who had stood in that sanctum by inheritance stopped standing in it. Men who had been quietly taking a percentage of a very large revenue stopped taking it. These are not opinions. These are households that ate less in the following year, and they knew exactly whose doing it was, and one set of them put poison in his food and another set invited him to dinner with the same idea.

The third was caste, and here the record is more complicated than either side now finds convenient.

His own brahmin disciples came to him in a body because he had taken a wrestler's hand on the steps of the tank in public. That was said to his face and it was said by men who loved him. Earlier in his life, when his own teacher Mahāpūrṇa performed the funeral rites of Māraṇēri Nambi, who had been a disciple of Āḷavandār and was a Śūdra, local Śrīvaiṣṇavas complained about it, and the man they complained to was Rāmānuja, and Rāmānuja called his teacher in and asked him to explain himself. Mahāpūrṇa's answer was that he had done what Nammāzhvār's verses required, that the poet had twice declared himself the servant of the Lord's servants whatever their birth, and that the ordinary regulations about caste in such a matter were no more than the noise the sea makes.

Rāmānuja took the correction and never went back on it. But he had been the one who asked the question, and everybody knew he had been, and that fact was quoted afterwards by both sides for their own purposes: by the strict men to show that he had once agreed with them, and by his own people to show how far he had been brought.

And there is what happened to men without his protection, which is where the sanction can actually be seen. Tirumalai Nallāṉ, one of his own, found a dead man floating down the river at Kāñcī with the discus and the conch marked on his body, and cremated him for that reason; and the town of Kāñcī resented it and stopped eating with him. That is how it worked. Nothing is announced. A man simply finds one morning that nobody will sit down with him.

There is a fourth kind of opposition and it is the hardest to see because it left no wreckage, only limits. When the excluded community was given the right to go into the temples, the right they were given was not entry. It was entry on named days, in named temples, and as far as the flagstaff and no further. When the Tamil canon was put beside the Veda, it was put beside it in the recitation and not in the schools of grammar and exegesis, where the learned men of that town went on doing exactly what they had always done and never conceded a word of the point. Every one of the reforms that got through is shaped by what would not go through, and the shape is the record of the resistance. He took what he could get and he did not pretend afterwards that he had got more.

For what Rāmānuja himself did, that is what should have happened, and it did not.

He had let a Śūdra's verses be recited in the sanctum with the Veda. He had made a wrestler his treasurer and held his hand where people could see. He had given the mantra and the marks to men of communities that were not supposed to receive either. He had gone alone into the hut of a low-caste disciple and sat there singing for an afternoon. He had opened three temples, on named days, to people who by every rule in force were pollution at fifty paces. Any of those, done by a man of ordinary standing, was enough.

Being put out of caste is not a metaphor and it is worth saying what it consisted of. Nobody would eat in the man's house or let him eat in theirs. No family would give a daughter to his son or take his daughter. The barber would not come to him and the washerman would not take his cloth. He was not invited to the ceremonies and nobody came to his. And when he died there was a difficulty about who was permitted to burn him, which in that world is the thing that frightened a man most, because it reaches past his own death into what becomes of him afterwards.

They did not do it, and his own tradition knows perfectly well that they did not, and says so in one sentence that a devout man wrote about him long afterwards and did not think twice about: had an ordinary person done as Rāmānuja did, he would have been put out of caste, but they dared not.

The justification offered was that the rule books make an allowance for great souls, and that great men alone can do such things.

What that concedes is worth seeing. It does not say the rule was wrong. It says the rule stood, and that this particular man was too large to have it applied to him. The exemption was given to the person and not to the principle, and everybody involved understood that perfectly, including him.

Why they did not dare is not mysterious. He ran the largest temple in the country and had its revenues and its appointments in his hand. He had seventy-four teaching seats with families attached to them across the south. The verse his people kept counts seven hundred ascetics and twelve thousand Śrīvaiṣṇavas and many kings. He had a king in the west who had changed religion for him and a king in the east who had formally handed him the temple back with ceremony. His name was known in every Vaiṣṇava street from the hill at Melkoṭe to the hill at Tirumalai. And the thing itself had already been tried twice: his own temple servants had driven him out for two years and had then sent to ask him to come back, and a king had driven him out for twelve and had died of a carbuncle, and Śrīraṅgam had come out into the streets to carry him in again.

A man they could not starve, could not exile, could not poison and could not out-argue was not going to be brought down by the withdrawal of dinner invitations.

It should also be said, because it is in the record and because it is the sort of thing a book of this kind usually leaves out, that he did not ask. When he changed the worship of that temple he did not consult the Śrīvaiṣṇavas of other places who had an interest in it, and he certainly did not consult the strict men of Śrīraṅgam itself. He decided, and he wrote it down, and he had it cut into the gate. The manner of it made enemies of people who might have been argued round, and there is no sign anywhere that he considered the manner to be a question.

He did not defend himself about any of it. As far as anybody has written down, he never raised the subject of the tower again for the rest of his life, in public or with his own people, and he never explained himself about Dhanurdāsa's hand, and he never set out a general position on caste in anything he wrote, and he wrote a great deal.

What it cost him in private is largely invisible, and the reason it is invisible is worth stating once. The accounts of these years were written by his own establishment, in his own temple, by men who had won. They record in detail what was done to him by kings, because that is a story with a saint in it. They are much thinner about what was done to him by neighbours.

He walked out through those streets to the river before light and back again twice a day as long as his legs held, in ochre, with a man carrying his water-vessel behind him, and the accounts are careful to say who came out to meet him on that road. They do not say who stayed inside.

He went down to the river before it was light and he came back with a crowd behind him.

That was the shape of every morning for decades. Out through the gates in the dark, along the lane between the houses to the Kāverī, into the water for the bath, the standing prayer at the first light with the water going past his knees, and then back up the bank and home; and by the time he turned round there would be twenty or thirty or sixty men on the path, disciples, students, men with a question, men who simply wanted to walk where he was walking. One of them carried the water-vessel. One of them carried the sandals. It was not a procession and nobody organised it and it happened every day.

The river at that hour is cold and the sand is cold and there are other people in the water further along, women at one stretch and men at another, and buffaloes standing in it downstream, and the birds going over. Somebody is always washing clothes on the stones. The town behind is beginning: the first conch from inside the walls, the doors of the flower-women's street, a cart. It is the best hour of the day in that country and he had it every day of his life for sixty years.

A washerman worked on that stretch of the river, and he washed for the Śrīvaiṣṇava households of the town. It is worth knowing what that trade was. He collected the cloth, carried it to the water, beat it on a stone, spread it on the sand or on a wall, folded it and brought it back; and because of what he was, the cloth he brought back to a brahmin house had to be washed again by the household before anybody could wear it, which meant that the whole of his labour counted, ritually, as nothing. He knew that. Everybody knew it. It was the arrangement. One day he washed the Lord's garments as well, and did it particularly well, and brought them along and showed them to Rāmānuja.

Rāmānuja took him into the temple, and the washerman with him, and put the case to the Lord directly, in the way he had of speaking to him as though a matter of business were under discussion. Look at how carefully this man has washed your clothes, he said. Wound about you, these would show you off very well.

And the answer was taken and given: that for the service done that day by this washerman, the offence of his ancestor was forgiven, the washerman of the Kṛṣṇa descent, the one who had refused the clothes at Mathurā and been killed for it.

The consequence was liturgical and has outlasted everybody. From that day the cloth is taken for the Lord's use from the washerman's own hand, exactly as he brings it. A brahmin does not take cloth from a washerman's hand and wear it; it has to be washed again first. That is the whole point, and it is not an argument about caste but a daily fact about a piece of cloth, renewed every time it happens, which is every time it happens.

The people he had named at Melkoṭe were on his mind in these years too, and the name is the thing to start with. The word he gave them was Tirukkulattār. Tiru is Śrī. It is the Goddess's own syllable, the one at the front of the temple's name and the front of the Lord's. Kulam is a family or a lineage. So the name he gave to the community that the country called by half a dozen words of abuse was: the people of the Lady's family. Not the noble ones, not the blessed ones, whatever later glosses have made of it. Her relatives.

And then the privilege, which must be stated exactly, because overstating it would be a lie and the overstatement is now everywhere.

They were given entry to three temples: Melkoṭe, Śrīraṅgam, and Beḷūr in the Hassan country. The entry was on set days. One account says once in the year, another says three days in the year, and the two accounts cannot be reconciled. On those days they might come in through the gate and go as far as the flagstaff, which stands in the outer court in front of the sanctum, and no further. On those days they might bathe in the temple tanks. On those days the objections that were ordinarily raised about their presence in the holy streets were suspended. Beyond the days, nothing changed.

Why they were given it the accounts answer plainly. They were given it because they had helped him: they had gone north with him for the processional image and carried it home, and kept watch over it every night of the road; the earliest notice of the privilege says that these were the people who assisted Rāmānuja, and leaves it there. It happened in the western country in the years of the building, and it was substantial enough that he set about paying for it in the only currency he had, which was access; and that he was still arranging the payment years later and several hundred miles away, in a temple that was not the one they had helped him with.

That was the arrangement, and it is not temple entry as anybody now uses the phrase.

What it was worth is a separate question from what it was, and the answer is that it was worth a great deal, because of what the alternative was. These were people who could be beaten for standing too close, whose shadow falling across a brahmin's food was held to have ruined it, who lived outside the settlement by law and custom and habit, and for whom the temple was a building they had never been inside and had grown up not looking at. To be told that on a named day of the year a man of that community might walk in through that gate, bathe in that tank, stand at the flagstaff where the god is visible down the length of the hall, and that nobody was permitted to say a word to him about it, is not a small thing when the alternative is never, on any day, at any hour, for any reason, for ever.

He also opened religious instruction to them, which cost nothing and was resented more; and he had the five marks administered to them, which made them members of the community with everything that follows from membership.

The other half of the man is in the same file and this book is not going to leave it out.

Years before, at Kāñcī, when he was young, he had wanted to eat the remnants of Kāñcipūrṇa's food, because Kāñcipūrṇa was the man who spoke with Varadarāja and was not a brahmin and would not become Rāmānuja's teacher for that reason; and the attempt failed, through his own wife's scruple, and what he said when it failed was that perhaps it was God's will that he should not break the caste rules even in a special case. Be it so, he said. And he did not try it again.

He objected to his own teacher burning a Śūdra's body and had to be put right about it. He took a wrestler's hand in public and then proved his point by a staged robbery rather than by an argument. When one of his own men at Kāñcī cremated a corpse that came down the river with the Lord's marks on it, and the town stopped eating with him for it, the answer came from Varadarāja and not from Rāmānuja: that the man was bad in the town's eyes and good in his; and in another telling the Lord himself put on a brahmin's dress and came and sat down at that funeral meal when nobody else would.

He never wrote a page setting out a general position. He acted in particular cases, some of them boldly and some of them not at all, and the tradition kept the record of both kinds without deciding between them, which is more honest than most of what has been written about him since.

Which brings us to the hut, and to the thing he did that morning that is the exact measure of him.

There was a disciple of his called Paṭṭini-p-Perumāḷ. He was of low caste. He did not live in the sacred town; he lived out beyond it, off the road, in a hut on his own, and what he did with his days was sing the songs of the Āzhvārs and go under in them, the way a man goes under who has nothing else in his life and does not want anything else. Everybody knew he was there. Nobody went.

Rāmānuja's road back from the river ran past that hut.

One morning he stopped on the path. Then he turned round to the twenty or thirty men behind him and told them to go on ahead to Śrīraṅgam without him.

He waited until they had gone. Then he went in through that door alone, and sat down in that hut with that man, and the two of them sang; and he stayed as long as he wanted to stay, and nobody knows how long that was, and there is no record of anything either of them said.

Then he came out and walked back into the town by himself, and the men who had been walking behind him were already inside the gate, which is where he had sent them.

There is one day in the year at Śrīraṅgam when the two of them sit together.

It falls in Paṅkuni, under the star Uttiram, at the end of the cool season before the heat comes up properly. On every other day of the year Raṅganāyakī has her own shrine and her own attendants and her own hours, and the Lord lies along his serpent in his, and they are approached separately, by different doors, with different words. On that one day she is brought and seated beside him on the same seat, and the tradition gives the day both to her birth and to her marriage, and does not think there is any difficulty in giving it to both.

The town filled up for it. The drums started early, the hangings went up in the halls, the extra lamps came out of the stores, the flower-women had been at work since two in the morning and the kitchens since the night before; and all of it ran on a roster the old man had written out years earlier and Mudaliāṇḍān had been enforcing ever since.

He was very old by then. He went in that morning the way he went in every morning, and he came to where the two of them were sitting, and he stopped.

What he did then took the rest of the day, and three pieces of prose came out of it, and they are the only place in everything he wrote where he speaks in his own person. Everything else he made is argument: this is what the text says, this is why the other reading fails, this is the objection and here is the answer. These are not that. They are called the gadyas, which only means prose, as against verse, and it is the plainest possible name for them.

He went to her first.

That is the architecture of the thing and it is not an ornament. The first of the three prayers is headed as a conversation between Raṅganāyakī and Rāmānuja, and he does not reach the Lord at all until she has answered him. It is the same move Nammāzhvār makes in the Tamil, in the decade that begins akalakillēṉ, I cannot leave: the poet goes to the Lord by way of the lady who dwells on his chest, not round her and not past her. The Tamil side of him and the Sanskrit side of him meet at that point and nowhere more exactly.

What he said to her was a single enormous sentence, because that is how his Sanskrit works when it is not arguing. She whose own nature and form and qualities and majesty and lordship and condescension are exactly what Nārāyaṇa wants and are matched to his. Whose host of good qualities is without boundary, without any measure that can be put past it, beyond counting. Who lives in a forest of lotuses. The Blessed Lady, Śrī, the goddess, who never departs from him, who is without flaw, the queen of the god of gods, the mother of every world, and our mother, and the refuge of those for whom there is no refuge. Having no other refuge, I take refuge in her.

Then he told her what he wanted, and it was not a favour but a standing: that his surrender at the Lord's feet should be real, and should stand exactly as it truly is, and should not be interrupted, and should be made with a view to one end only, which was the obtaining of unending service.

Her answer is one short line of Sanskrit and it is the shortest speech anybody makes anywhere in the whole corpus.

Let it be so for you. By that alone, everything will come about.

Then he turned to Raṅganātha, and the address to him is the longest sustained piece of naming in the language he wrote. He goes through the form and the ornaments and the weapons and the attendants and the worlds; and then, when the naming has run itself out, it changes into the only kind of names that are any use to a man asking for something. You who do not examine the particulars. Refuge of the whole world. Remover of the distress of those who have bowed. Single ocean of the tenderness a cow has for its calf, towards those who have come to you. Owner of all the worlds, and our owner. Whose resolve never fails. The one who provides for the man who asks. The friend in a disaster. Possessor of Śrī. Nārāyaṇa. Refuge of those who have no refuge.

Having no other refuge, I take refuge at your two lotus feet.

And then he told him what he was.

By mind, by speech, by body: offences without number, running in me from time that has no beginning. Things that were not to be done, and were done. Things that were to be done, and were not. Offences against you. Offences against those who are yours. Offences that cannot be borne. Those whose fruit has begun and those whose fruit has not yet begun; those done, those being done now, those that are still to be done: bear with them all, to the last one.

The turned-about knowledge running in me from time that has no beginning, about myself and about the whole world; and the turned-about conduct, in every matter whatever; what is going on in me today and what will be going on hereafter: bear with all of it.

And this māyā of yours, made of the strands, set moving by the beginningless flood of my own acts, which hides what you are, and breeds the turned-about knowing, and breeds in me the notion that it is mine to enjoy, and stands about me as body, and as senses, and as the things enjoyed, and in its unseen form: out of that, carry me across. I am the one saying, I have become your servant, I have come to you for refuge, I am yours.

He asks forgiveness there for sins he has not committed yet. The grammar is unambiguous about it and it is not a slip; he has sorted the whole of his own wrongdoing by organ, by kind and by tense, the way he sorted everything, and then handed the entire sorted heap over in one imperative.

After that comes a direction to himself, in the middle of his own prayer, to call the two sentences to mind. And then a handful of old verses, which he did not write and which everybody in that tradition knows: father, mother, wife, sons, kinsmen, friends, teachers, jewels, money and grain, fields and houses, letting all of them go, and all desires with them, I have come for refuge to the feet that strode across the worlds. You alone are mother and father. You alone are kinsman and teacher. You alone are knowledge and wealth. You are everything to me.

Then he asks for what he has come for, and this is the part that decides what kind of man he was.

He does not ask to be released.

Not once, in any of the three, at any point. The word for liberation does not appear as the object of a request anywhere in them. What he asks, over and over, in every variation the language allows, is to be made a servant. Make me the man those three verses describe, the one who knows. Make me possessed of the higher love that those three passages speak of. Make me one whose whole nature is higher love, higher knowledge, highest love. And then the refrain, which he says in an odd way that should not be tidied up: may I be the enjoying of the Lord. Not may I have it. May I be it. And out of that enjoying, and the love it causes, and with no other purpose whatever, fitted to every condition there is, taking its one delight in belonging to another: may I become an eternal servant.

The word for servant there is kiṅkara, and it is built out of a question. It means: what shall I do. The servant it names is the one standing in the doorway waiting to be told.

What he has just done is the whole of his teaching, and it is usually got backwards. He has not offered surrender as an easier road for men who cannot manage love. He has surrendered in order to be given love. The thing he asks the Lord to produce in him is the love itself, the higher knowledge, the highest love, because he does not think he can produce it and does not pretend to. Surrender is what gets a man to the beginning of the road. It is not a way of not walking it.

Then the prayer changes speaker, and the last part of it is the Lord answering, in the first person.

Though you have not one single thing in you that could serve as a means to this. Though the sins that stand against it are without end. Though the offences against me are without end, and against mine, and the ones that cannot be borne. Though what you are has been made by a beginningless and turned-about sense of I. By my grace alone, in whatever manner you have said the two sentences: the obstacles are gone and their causes with them, the love and the knowledge are given, my own nature and form and qualities stand open to you as they are, and there is nothing left of you but the delight of being mine. Be an eternal servant.

You are that already.

And then, at the end of it, the most exactly located sentence he ever wrote. Free of even the smell of the three kinds of suffering, saying the two sentences with their meaning held in your mind, until the body falls: dwell here, at Śrīraṅgam itself, at ease.

He was not told he would be taken out of the world. He was told to stay where he was.

The whole thing closes with two lines of verse, and they are a refusal. At the last hour, let the remembrance go. Whatever that remembrance was going to accomplish, which is the service of you, do it for me now, today, as a thing being done. He was an old man and he knew what happens to an old man's mind at the end, and he was declining to let anything rest on it.

The second of the three prayers is short and is addressed to the Lord of that temple by name, and its one personal cry is five words long: I know no other way. Give me, by your compassion, the servanthood that love born of experiencing you brings about. Make me that, yourself.

The third is not a prayer but an instruction, written in the third person for anybody to use, on what to call to mind daily; and at its centre a man asks a run of questions beginning with the same two words. When shall I see him with my eye, the Lord who is my family's lord, my family's god, my family's wealth, my delight, my mother, my father, my everything. When shall I take his two feet on my head. When will he look at me with that cool look, and in a voice deep and sweet, tell me what to do.

He finished some time in the evening.

The lamps were lit along the walls by then and the crowd in the outer court had thinned to the people who stay. Somebody came and put a hand under his arm. They went out through the halls and past the flagstaff and out of the gate into the street, where the drums were still going at the far end of the town, and he walked home.

Kūreśa was very old, and he had been blind for a long time, and he had never once in all those years kept food in the house overnight.

That rule was his own and he had made it the week he arrived at Śrīraṅgam with nothing. He would go out in the morning with a cloth and a begging vessel and take what a day needed from the houses of decent people, and whatever came in was eaten that day, and the vessel went back empty to its shelf. He had come to Śrīraṅgam out of a village where the poor of four districts had been fed at his gate from morning until late at night, and he had shut the doors on that and walked away from it, and from that night on he lived on what he could get between sunrise and the hour when it was no longer decent to knock. When his eyes were taken at the Cōzha court he went on doing it. Āṇḍāḷ walked at his elbow with her hand on his sleeve and told him where the steps were, and the two of them went round the same streets they had always gone round, and the women in those houses learned to come out and put the food in and say who they were, because he could not see them any more.

He could see two things. When they had gone up to Kāñcī, in the years after the return, and he had sung before Varadarāja, and Rāmānuja had asked for his eyes and had been given a bounded thing instead of the whole of it, what he got back was the sight of Varadarāja and the sight of Rāmānuja, and nothing else in the world for as long as he lived. So he could see his teacher. He knew when Rāmānuja came into a room without being told, and he described his face to people who asked, down to the way the ochre sat on the shoulder. And at Śrīraṅgam, in the place he had grown old in, he went in through the enclosures on festival days and stood in front of Raṅganātha where the whole town stood, and saw nothing at all.

He did not complain about that, and as far as anyone recorded he never mentioned it. He had been standing at that door once before, on the day he came back blind, and the guards had told him that the king's order shut out every follower of Rāmānuja and that they would let him in if he would say he had left him, and he had put his hands over his ears and said that if that was the price he would give up the Lord instead, because without Rāmānuja there was no Lord for him. Then he had groped his way back down the steps and sat on the ground and wept. He had gone off south after that and spent twelve years at Tirumālirunjōlai making a hymn of a hundred and thirty-two verses to the Lord there, and the first verse of it says that he is unafraid, and near the end of it he says what he wants, which is to see those feet.

He had four hymns by then and he made the fifth in his last years, the short one, eleven verses to Śrī, and the tradition's note about it is that he did the Lord's four first and came to hers at the end. His two sons were grown men with work of their own. Parāśara Bhaṭṭar read the Purāṇas in the temple and was already the kind of man other men waited to hear. Veda Vyāsa Bhaṭṭar was the steadier of the two. Āṇḍāḷ was old. They lived in a shed of woven palm by the family house, because that was what there was.

One morning he went in and stood in front of Raṅganātha for longer than usual.

What the accounts say is that the Lord spoke first and said that he looked like a man with something in him that he had not said. Kūreśa answered in verse, because that was how he answered, and went on for some while. When he had finished the Lord told him to ask for something. Kūreśa said that there was nothing left to ask for; everything had been given him already. The Lord said no, ask again, and ask for more, and if not for your own sake then for the sake of the love I have for Śrī, and for the love I have for my Rāmānuja.

Kūreśa said that he would like to be let out of the body.

The Lord said let it be so, and then added a thing nobody had asked for, which was that what he had just granted would not stop with him: it would go to every person who had any connection with Kūreśa of any kind whatever.

Word of it came up the street to the maṭha inside the hour. Rāmānuja was sitting with the men who read with him in the mornings. He heard it out, and then he stood up, and took the upper cloth off his shoulder and threw it up into the air.

The men in that room had been with him for forty years and none of them had seen him do anything of the sort. They watched the cloth come down.

Then the joy went out of him and he grieved, and he did not sit down again, and he went out of the maṭha with the whole assembly behind him and down the street to the shed.

He came in and stood over him and said what a man says when he is angry and has no right to be. He asked how Kūreśa could have done a thing like that without asking him first.

Kūreśa said nothing.

Rāmānuja said, 'Why will you not speak, Āzhvān. What did you want, going in front of me.'

'To keep the order right,' Kūreśa said.

'Do not talk to me in riddles today. Say it plainly.'

So he said it plainly. There is a decade of the Tiruvāymozhi in which the poet describes what happens when a freed soul arrives in that country: the ones who are already there come out through the gates to meet him and wash his feet and bring him in. Kūreśa said that he had thought about that for years and it was the wrong way round. The elder does not go out to meet the younger. The younger goes out to meet the elder. 'If I stay,' he said, 'you go first and I come after, and then they bring you in and I am not there. This way I am at the gate when you come.'

Rāmānuja was quiet for a while and then he said that Kūreśa had forgotten the rule of the place he was going to, which is that all the differences here are finished there, and that he was trying to carry across into that country the one relation he had here, master and servant, and would not put it down even for that. Then he said that in all the worlds there was nothing to match him.

After that he knelt down and put his arms round him and held him and said the Dvaya into his ear, the two sentences of it, which is the first thing that is given to anybody in that community and is given once. Then he sat back and spoke to the people crowding the doorway, because somebody was certainly going to ask why a sacrament was being administered to a man who had been living inside it for eighty years. He said: our Kūreśa needs nothing of the sort and I know it. I am giving it to him because he should not go out of the world without having heard it from my mouth. A prince who has chewed the spices after dinner a thousand times still asks for them after the last dinner. The Dvaya has been this man's food every day of his life and I am going to serve it to him one more time.

Then he said, 'Āzhvān, I salute you. You have my leave to go.'

Kūreśa could not say anything at all. He came off the mat and went down at Rāmānuja's feet and lay there like a dropped log, and Rāmānuja got him up quickly and Kūreśa took the feet and put them on his head and then held them against his chest, and asked for the water from them. They brought it and he drank it, and what he said as he drank was the verse he had made himself years before, the one every Śrīvaiṣṇava says before he recites anything at all: that there is a man who was so besotted with the gold of the Lord's two feet that he reckoned everything else in existence a blade of grass, and that at that man's feet, his teacher, the one ocean of mercy, Rāmānuja, he took refuge. He had written it about Rāmānuja and it was now the thing Rāmānuja was recited under, and it is what a boy in that tradition learns to say first, before the hymns, before anything.

Then he called Āṇḍāḷ over and asked her what she wanted.

She said, 'What you want. I have nothing of my own.'

He called the two sons and told them there was nothing here to mourn, because they had the Lord of this temple for a father and his consort for a mother and had been brought up by the pair of them, and that they were not to forget that it was Rāmānuja who had saved them. He told them to do as Āṇḍāḷ said. He told them never to offend a holy man in thought or word or act and to keep in their company as long as they lived. Then, because they were both crying, he pulled them up off the floor and said that they had no business crying either way: if they were crying because he was their father by blood then they were meddling in something they had no part in, and if they were crying because of the other relation, then the crying itself put that relation in question.

Then he lay down, with his head towards the temple. Piḷḷai Piḷḷai Āzhvān sat and took the head into his lap. Āṇḍāḷ sat at the other end and took the feet into hers. It was how Mahāpūrṇa had died, on the road out of the Cōzha country, with Kūreśa holding the head and Mahāpūrṇa's own daughter Attuzhāy holding the feet; because Mahāpūrṇa had always said that the right place for a Vaiṣṇava to die was on a Vaiṣṇava's lap, and Kūreśa had been the one holding him when he said it. Kūreśa put everything out of his mind except Rāmānuja's feet, and went.

Rāmānuja was told at once and came at once. Parāśara Bhaṭṭar was weeping in the yard and Rāmānuja took hold of him and said that nobody sheds tears over an auspicious thing, and then gave him the funeral to conduct and told him what order to do it in. They performed the full rite, the brahmin one and the Vaiṣṇava one together, and left nothing out of either.

The elder of Kūreśa's two sons grew up inside the temple, which is not a figure of speech at Śrīraṅgam, because the town is inside the temple. Seven walls stand one within another and the streets and the shops are between the outer two, and a boy who lived in the third or the fourth enclosure went to sleep hearing the last service and woke to the first one, and had the whole of it by heart before he could read, the way a boy in a weaving street knows the sound of a loom without ever having been taught it.

He had less of a childhood in a house than most. His father had given him to the Lord as a son, a formal thing, done at Rāmānuja's word, so that the boy was on the temple's books and not only in a family; and when he was very small it was said that the goddess in her own shrine took charge of him, and he was fed there. His father was going blind by then and then was blind. There was nothing in that house to inherit but the begging vessel and five hymns.

Embār taught him, and not his father, and not Rāmānuja. That had been settled on the day the two boys were named, when Embār had carried them through the street with the Dvaya going over them all the way, and Rāmānuja had told him that a man who takes charge of two bodies has taken charge of the rest as well.

So the boy got an old man who had come the long way round. Embār was Rāmānuja's cousin. They had been at school together under Yādava Prakāśa at Tiruppuṭkuzhi, and it was Embār who had walked up the road in the dark on the Ganges journey and told Rāmānuja that the party he was travelling with meant to drown him. Then he had gone north on his own, and become a Śaiva, and ended up running the temple at Kāḷahasti with the rudrākṣa beads on him and the ash in three horizontal lines across his forehead; and his uncle Śrīśailapūrṇa had come up from Tirumalai and got him back by degrees, sitting under a tree on his road and singing, and then dropping a palm leaf with a verse on it where he would pick it up, and at the last by lecturing on a decade of the Tiruvāymozhi in which the poet says that flowers and worship are fit for one Lord and no other, while Embār was up a tree picking flowers for Rudra. He came down out of the tree and that was the end of that. The men who kept the Kāḷahasti shrine let him go without a quarrel and told him that Rudra had come to them in a dream the night before and said he was not to be stopped.

There is a thing they used to tell about the boy at that age. He went missing one afternoon, in the way small children do in a town of seven walls, and they looked for him along the river gate and through the flower sheds, and found him asleep on the floor of the goddess's shrine with the priest stepping round him, because the priest had not liked to move him. Nobody made anything of it at the time. It is only that when he was grown and writing, and had to explain why he of all people should be allowed to praise her, he did not argue the point; he simply wrote as a person with the freedom of the house.

That was the man who sat the boy down in front of him and took him through the lot: grammar, the sūtras, the Śrī Bhāṣya, the four thousand verses in Tamil, and the discipline, which was the part that took longest, because it is not information. Embār had his own ideas about discipline. He had once lain down on the bed he had just made up for his teacher, and when he was found out he said that he knew perfectly well that it would send him to hell and he did not mind, because he had wanted to be sure the bed was comfortable before the old man got into it. He accepted compliments too, which was thought irregular in that community, and when somebody took him up on it he said that praising him was praising Rāmānuja, since he had been brought up out of a low state by Rāmānuja and everybody knew it, so where was the harm. Rāmānuja let that stand.

He was hard on the boy about one thing only, and he was hard on him about it for years. Bhaṭṭar had the kind of mind that gets to the end of a sentence before the sentence does, and he would supply the conclusion while the old man was still laying out the premises, and he was generally right, and Embār would stop and wait and then start the premises again from the beginning. Once the boy asked him why, since the answer was the answer whether it took a morning or a moment.

Embār said that he was not teaching him answers.

'What then.'

'How the thing sits,' Embār said. 'You have the whole of it in your head now and you are twelve. In forty years a man will come and say to you that the self is nothing but knowing, and you will have to feel the wrongness of it before you can say where it is wrong, and the feeling comes from having sat through the premises when you did not need them. Your father felt it. He put his stylus down in the middle of a dictation and would not write, and he was right and the Bhāṣyakāra was wrong, and it cost him a kick. Sit still.'

Rāmānuja had given Embār the commission in a sentence, years before anybody had any reason to need it. He said that Embār was to prepare the boy thoroughly for the position he was going to occupy, in doctrine and in conduct both, by a complete course. He did not say what the position was. Nobody asked.

What he had seen is not written down anywhere, and there is no scene in which he announces it. What can be got at is the ordinary evidence. The boy took a thing at one hearing, which his father had also done, and it is a trait the tradition keeps a word for and used about them both. He made verses without appearing to work at them. And he could read the Purāṇas aloud in the temple, which was his father's office and became his, and reading aloud in that temple is not recitation only; a man stands up in front of a crowd that knows the text and expounds as he goes, and is judged on it every day.

There is a morning when Rāmānuja came out of the sanctum and the boy was in the middle of a passage, and Rāmānuja stopped where he was and heard him out to the end of it and did not go on. Kūreśa was in that crowd. He could not see his son and knew where the voice was coming from.

Not everything about him was easy. The man who had the Tamil recitation at Śrīraṅgam in those years was Amudanār, who had been the temple's hereditary guardian and Rāmānuja's most effective obstacle, and had then been won round by Kūreśa and had become Kūreśa's disciple and not Rāmānuja's, and had written a hundred and eight verses in Tamil about Rāmānuja which the Lord of the temple himself had ordered recited in the streets. Amudanār and Bhaṭṭar were therefore both Kūreśa's, in different ways, and they did not get on. Amudanār sent Bhaṭṭar a message once through a third man. What he said was that Bhaṭṭar's relation to Kūreśa was only a bodily one, whereas his own was a relation of the mind.

The message was delivered. Bhaṭṭar heard it and said that this was perfectly true, and that the only trouble with it was that Amudanār should not be the man saying it.

The community wrote that down and kept it, both halves, and has gone on copying it out ever since without tidying either man up.

What he made later can be listed quickly because the point of it is one small thing. He wrote eight verses on the three great mantras, and they are still the first thing many people are given. He wrote two hundred verses to Raṅganātha. He wrote a commentary on the thousand names of Viṣṇu. And he wrote a poem to Raṅganāyakī, the goddess of that temple, and would not call it a hymn. The word for a hymn is stava, and his father had used it for his own poem to Śrī, the short one of eleven verses that he made at the end when the others were done. So the son called his a kośa, a treasury, and left the other word alone.

He was not given a long life. The tradition says so and does not soften it. He died at Śrīraṅgam a good while before he should have, sitting up, having just been given a public acknowledgement in that temple for a piece of work on a Purāṇa, and he recited a Tamil poem of Tirumaṅgai's as he went, and people who were there said he was smiling.

In the introduction to his own commentary on the thousand names, where a man is expected to say who he is, he did not name a school and did not name a teacher. He said that he was born to Āzhvān, and that Āzhvān's great wealth was the connection he had with Rāmānuja.

He had outlived everybody who taught him.

Mahāpūrṇa had gone first and worst, blinded at a very great age and dying on the road out of the Cōzha country with his head on Kūreśa's lap and his feet on his daughter's, and telling the two of them, who were begging him to hold on until they reached Śrīraṅgam, that it did not matter in the least where a man died so long as he died among Vaiṣṇavas. Goṣṭhīpūrṇa had died during the years in the west, and the news came in the same report that brought the news of the blinding, one messenger with all of it, and Rāmānuja got it standing in a strange country twelve years from home. Goṣṭhīpūrṇa's own son did the rites. Mālādhara, who had gone through the Tiruvāymozhi with him line by line and had walked out of the room over one line and had had to be arbitrated with, was gone. Tiruvaraṅgapperumāḷ Araiyar, who taught by singing it and acting it out in front of the Lord at the evening service, and who had handed over the Tamil recitation right when Rāmānuja came and asked him for it, was gone.

Kāñcipūrṇa had gone long before any of them. He had been an old man already when Rāmānuja was a student, fanning the Lord at Kāñcī and carrying messages between a young brahmin and God because the young brahmin could not get a word out of God himself, and he is the reason there is a story at all, since it was Kāñcipūrṇa who told a childless man at Śrīperumbudūr where to go and what to perform. Rāmānuja had once tried to eat the leavings of his food and had been prevented, in his own house, by his own wife, and had concluded from it that he was not to try again, and had not.

Śrīśailapūrṇa, his mother's brother, who named him on the twelfth day and gave his reason for the name in one line, and who had taught him the whole Rāmāyaṇa on the hill in a year while he carried water up for the service, had died on Tirumalai. His son Piḷḷān was alive and at Śrīraṅgam, and was the man Rāmānuja called his son by adoption of the mind. Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumānār was alive, and old: the Advaitin ascetic Yajñamūrti, who had come to argue for eighteen days and had nearly won on the seventeenth and had conceded on the eighteenth before anybody had opened their mouth, and had asked afterwards to be called by his teacher's name and been allowed it.

Mudaliāṇḍān was old.

He was Rāmānuja's nephew, his sister's son, born Daśarathi at Pēṭṭai, and he had come to Kāñcī with Kūreśa on the day they heard that Rāmānuja had taken the ochre, and the two of them had asked for the five marks together, and they were the first. Rāmānuja used to say that Daśarathi was his staff and Kūreśa was his pennant and that he was never without either of them. He had run the temple. When Rāmānuja went off on his journeys it was Mudaliāṇḍān who was left with the whole of Śrīraṅgam, the stores, the accounts, the kitchens, the repairs, the pasture villages, the men who announced the hours; and when Rāmānuja came back from the west after twelve years the temple was handed to him again formally, in front of witnesses.

He was also the man who had spent an indefinite period as a woman's maidservant. Attuzhāy, Mahāpūrṇa's daughter, had asked her husband's mother for someone to walk with her to the river and was told to provide her own attendant. She went to her father. Mahāpūrṇa, who did not do anything for himself if it could be handed to Rāmānuja, sent her to Rāmānuja. Rāmānuja looked round the room and picked out Mudaliāṇḍān, who was by then the senior man among his people and known everywhere as a scholar, and told him to go and be her attendant. He went, and carried her things down to the water, and did it every day. The in-laws could not stand it for long. They came and asked him to stop and he said that he was under orders. They went to her father and her father sent them to Rāmānuja, and Rāmānuja told them that they had asked for an attendant and he had sent one, and if they did not want him they were free to send him back. After that the family behaved.

Now his son Kandāḍai Āṇḍān was doing most of the work. It showed in the small things. The accounts were being read out by a man in his forties while a man in his eighties sat against the wall and listened with his eyes shut and put in a correction about once an hour, and the corrections were always right. Somebody else went up the steps to the store rooms. The seats at the morning reading had been reassigned twice in five years without anybody announcing a reassignment, because men stopped coming and other men moved along the mat.

Nothing says when Mudaliāṇḍān died, or where, or who was holding him. That is not unusual. They do not say it of Attuzhāy either, and there is nothing at all about the rest of her life, or her husband's name, or what became of her; and there is nothing about Rāmānuja's mother after she brought him to Kāñcī as a boy with almost nothing and put him with the best teacher in that country; and there is nothing about his wife after the morning he sent her to her parents with money. Whole people simply stop being mentioned. A community that kept the exact wording of a quarrel between two men about who had the better claim on a dead man's friendship did not keep the day its chief of staff died.

Nadātūr Āzhvān was growing old, and in years to come, when he no longer had the wind for it, he would send his own grandson to Eṅgaḷāzhvān for the Śrī Bhāṣya rather than let the boy have a worse course than he could get elsewhere. That was how it went in those houses. A man handed his own descendants to somebody better placed to teach them, and nobody thought it a slight.

There were more funerals in those years than anything else, and he went to all of them that he could walk to. There is a way that goes on in a community built on transmission, where the rite for a dead teacher is performed by a man who was taught by him and is watched by a man who taught him, and the watching man is the one everyone is looking at sideways. He did not sit at the back. He stood where the family stood and put his hand on whoever was doing the work and told them the order to do it in, and he was still, in his hundreds, the person in the room who knew the whole order without being prompted.

What can be said is what a room looks like when that has been going on for thirty years. In the mornings there was a reading of the Śrī Bhāṣya, and the men in the front row at the reading were not the men who had been in the front row. Kūreśa, Mudaliāṇḍān, Nadātūr Āzhvān and the two Bhaṭṭars had been given that reading as their allotted work when the establishment was first organised, and of those five one was dead, one was past coming, one was very old, and two were young men. Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumānār had the chapel and the daily worship. Kiḍāmbi Āccān and Kiḍāmbi Perumāḷ had the kitchen. Vaḍuga Nambi did the oil for the bath and whatever else came up. Gōmaṭham Śiṟiyāzhvān carried the water pot and the sandals. Dhanurdāsa the wrestler kept the money. Ammaṅgi boiled the milk. Ukkal Āzhvān served the food and Ukkal Ammāḷ held the fan. One man was the steward and one was the storekeeper and one was the waterman and two of them had the job of going and standing about in the courts of kings and coming back with endowments. One had the job of winning arguments.

Most of those names were on that list because Rāmānuja had put them there forty or fifty years earlier, and by now the work was being done by sons and by sons' sons, under the same names, because a name in that establishment was an office and went down in a family. It had been built to last past the people in it, which is a thing men do when they have watched enough of them go.

At the morning reading there was a young man in the third row from Kūram who had a slight stammer and had been sent by his family because the family held a seat and somebody had to sit in it. He had been coming for two years. One morning he got a question out, badly, in four attempts, about a place in the second chapter where the argument doubles back, and the room was patient in the way rooms are when they wish a man would finish.

Rāmānuja answered it at length and then stopped and said that it was the same question Nadātūr Āzhvān had asked him, in that room, in the first month of the dictation, when the book was nine days old and there were nine of them in it and the copyists had not caught up. He said that Āzhvān had not got it out any better.

He sat in the middle of it, and there was nobody in that room whose grandfather he had not known.

The day started the same way it had started for sixty years, and it took longer.

He was woken before the first service and he was not quick getting up any more. Two men stood at the door with the water pot and the towel and waited, and the waiting was a fixed part of the morning and nobody hurried it. Then down through the enclosures and out of the eastern gate and along to the steps at the river. The Kāverī runs high in some seasons and is a bed of hot sand in others, and the steps are steep and worn into hollows where fifteen generations have put their feet in the same places. Somebody went down first and stood in the water facing up, and somebody came behind with a hand under the elbow, and that was how an old man got into a river. Coming out was worse than going in. On the mornings when the water was low he did not go down at all and they brought it up to him in pots, and he did not like that and did it anyway.

Vaḍuga Nambi did the oil. That had been his allotted work for thirty years and he would not give it to anybody, and he was not young himself. The oil went on warm, and it took an hour, and it was the hour in which most of the day's business actually got settled, because a man lying on a mat being rubbed has to listen. Then the bath, then the marks on the twelve places, then the white cloth, then the ochre.

He ate what Kiḍāmbi Āccān gave him and refused everything else, and had not eaten anything else since the year the temple servants put poison in his alms. The arrangement had been made by Goṣṭhīpūrṇa, who came all the way from Tirukkōṣṭiyūr at the time and went about it like a man appointing a guard, which is what he was doing, because Āccān had earned it by swearing at Goṣṭhīpūrṇa's own face in public for leaving Rāmānuja prostrate on burning sand. By the end there were not many teeth left and the food was soft: rice, a little of the sour thing with it, curd, buttermilk in the afternoon, and less of any of it than the young men imagined. He had been thin all his life. He was thin now in the way of a man made out of rope.

He walked to the temple twice a day and would not be carried. This was discussed. There was a palanquin available and there were fifty men who would have taken a corner of it, and he went on foot, slowly, with a hand on somebody's shoulder, through the streets where people came out of doorways to stand still while he passed and went back in when he had gone.

His hearing had gone thin and he had stopped pretending otherwise. He made people sit closer. At the morning reading the front row was now very close, near enough that he could have touched any of them, and a man who wanted to ask something had to come up and kneel and ask it into the side of his head, and the room waited while he did. It made the sessions longer and it made them quieter. His sight was better than his hearing and he could still read, holding it out at arm's length in the door light, though he mostly did not need to, because he had written a good deal of it and remembered the rest.

He slept badly and had done for years, and the arrangement in the last of them was that a man sat up in the room. He would wake at some hour of the night and talk, and whoever was sitting up would answer, and in the morning that man would be sent to bed and another would take the night. Vaḍuga Nambi took more of those nights than his share and was told to stop and did not. What was said in them is not recorded. Nobody wrote down what an old man says at two in the morning, and it is a pity, and it is also the right decision.

He had the ordinary illnesses of that country and that age. There was a season of fever when they thought it was over and it was not. He had trouble with his legs in the cold months, which at Śrīraṅgam means a few weeks in Mārgazhi when the wind comes down the river before dawn and everybody is cold and nobody admits it, and in those weeks he was carried down the last three steps and nothing was said about the principle of not being carried. Money passed through his hands constantly and none of it stopped there. The establishment held land and villages and a cattle station and a treasury, and he possessed a staff of three joined sticks, a water pot, a pair of sandals and two cloths, and when the second cloth wore out somebody produced another one and he did not ask where from.

People came a long way to see him. They came up from the far south and down from the Telugu country and across from the west, from Toṇḍanūr and Melkoṭe where there were now fifty-two officers running a temple he had put up on a hill, and they came for one thing, which they were sometimes shy of saying and sometimes said straight out. They wanted to touch his feet. He had been given the five marks by Mahāpūrṇa, who had them from Āḷavandār, who had them from Maṇakkāl Nambi, who had them from Uyyakkoṇḍār, who had them from Nāthamuni, who sat under a tamarind tree at Kurugūr and recited eleven verses twelve thousand times until the poet came and gave him back the four thousand songs that the country had lost. He was the last man alive who had been touched by anyone in the first half of that list. There were men in their sixties queuing in a courtyard to put their heads on the feet of somebody whose teacher had sat at the feet of Āḷavandār, and they did not think it a small thing, and he did not tell them it was.

Letters came in and went out. Seventy-four seats of teaching had been established across the country and the men who held them wrote with questions: a disputed reading, a case of conduct, a man who wanted the five marks and whose family objected, a village where two of them were quarrelling over precedence. He dictated the answers. The answers were short. A great deal of what an old ācārya does is settle quarrels about who sits where, and he did it without visible irritation and apparently without much interest.

In one of those years Kandāḍai Āṇḍān, Mudaliāṇḍān's son, came and asked him for something and did not get an immediate answer.

What he asked for was permission to make an image of him and set it up at Śrīperumbudūr. He put it carefully, and he had a verse ready, and the verse said that Rāmānuja had risen on this age the way the sun rises, to open the flowers and burn off the dark. Then he said the practical part, which was that after Rāmānuja was gone there would be people born in every generation who would need somewhere to go and something to put their heads against, and that the town he was born in had a temple and no such thing in it.

Rāmānuja gave the permission.

Āṇḍān brought a sculptor called Rāmānujadāsan and sat him down in front of the old man, and the sculptor looked at him for a number of days. That is the ordinary way of it and there is nothing remarkable in the arrangement, except for what it means, which is that somebody sat in a room in the twelfth century and studied that face at close range for as long as he needed and then went away and made it in metal. They brought the finished thing back and stood it up. Rāmānuja went over it from the head to the feet without saying anything, taking his time.

Then he said he was satisfied, and he put his arms round it and held it, and gave it everything he had.

That is how the accounts put it and they do not enlarge on it. He held the metal figure the way a man holds a person and when he let go of it the thing had in it whatever he had been carrying, and the men who were standing there went and told other men, and it has been told ever since in the same four or five words.

Then he gave the instructions for the installation, which were exact, because he had been raised in a house where a man's father performed every rite of the first year on its proper day and did not shorten one of them for convenience. It was to go to Śrīperumbudūr. It was to be installed in Puṣya, in the month when Jupiter would be standing in that asterism. Puṣya is the star of Rāma's coronation.

They packed it in cloth and straw and put it on a cart, and Kandāḍai Āṇḍān went north with it up the road towards Kāñcī, and Rāmānuja came out into the street to watch the cart go, which he did not usually do, and stood there until it was round the corner.

At Śrīperumbudūr on the appointed day they took the cloth off and set it in its place and lit the fires and began.

At Śrīraṅgam, at the same hour, Rāmānuja was taken ill.

It came on him suddenly and it startled him, and the people in the room saw him startled, which was not common. Then they watched him work out what it was. He counted the day and the month and the star and understood that they were at that moment installing the figure at Bhūtapurī, and that what had gone out of him had arrived where he had sent it. He sat with that for a while. Then he said that his work here was finished and that he would not be much longer, and he sent a man north that afternoon with a message to Kandāḍai Āṇḍān to come back at once and not to wait for the end of the festival.

Then he began to teach, and he went on teaching for some days, and this is the first of what he said.

He had them brought into the hall in the maṭha, which was not a large hall. The senior men sat in front on the mat and behind them the rest sat on the floor, and behind those it was standing room, and men stood in the doorway and in the yard outside the doorway where they could hear about half of it and had it repeated to them afterwards. There were seven hundred ascetics in that community by then and twelve thousand householders and a good many women, and obviously they were not all at Śrīraṅgam; but the hall was full and the yard was full and the street had people in it.

Embār sat at his right. Piḷḷān was on the mat, and Kiḍāmbi Āccān, who had left the kitchen to somebody for the morning, and Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumānār, who was nearly as old as Rāmānuja and had been an Advaitin ascetic for the first half of his life and had walked into an argument in this town and lost it over eighteen days. Parāśara Bhaṭṭar was there, not in the front. Amudanār was there, who had the Tamil recitation and had once been the chief obstruction to everything. Dhanurdāsa was there with the treasury keys on him. Vaḍuga Nambi came in late because he had been seeing to the oil and sat down at the back where he could see the front of the room.

He said: listen, children. Men come in three kinds.

There are the ones who are turned towards God. There are the ones who are turned against him. And there are the ones who are turned neither way, who are simply about their own business, which is most of the world.

When you meet a man of the first kind, he said, be glad the way you would be glad to walk into a room full of flowers and sandal and good smells. Be glad the way you are glad when the moon comes up and the light spreads out over everything, or when the wind changes in the evening and comes off the water. Be glad the way you are when you come round a corner and find your own people.

When you meet a man of the second kind, be afraid of him. Be afraid of him the way you are afraid of a snake in the room or a fire in the roof. Do not argue with him and do not stand about admiring your own courage. Get out.

And when you meet a man of the third kind, take no more notice of him than you take of the stones lying along the road you are walking on. If he shows any willingness, teach him. If he shows none, be sorry for him and let him alone.

The reason they are turned away, he said, is not stupidity and it is not wickedness. It is that they are in love with two things, and the two things are pleasure and money, and there is no room left over.

Then he said something to the men in the front row, and it was sharper than anything he had said to the rest.

If holy men go and pay court to the rich because they are rich, he said, it is exactly as though a king's wife went out into the streets to beg. And if you let yourselves be drawn by a man on account of his money, then whatever you have learned is worth nothing at all, because you have not learned the one thing, which is how to tell a gem from a piece of glass.

Nobody in the front row said anything.

Then he said: there are six ways you can spend your days, and I will give them to you in order.

Read the Śrī Bhāṣya and teach it to other people. That is the first.

If that is above you, read the Tiruvāymozhi and get other people to read it.

If that is beyond you as well, then go to a holy place and build yourself a hut there and live in it. Any of them. This island, or the hill at Tirumalai, or Kāñcī, or Tirukkuṟuṅguḍi, or the one nearest to where you happen to be standing. A hut is four posts and a roof and you can put one up in a morning.

If you cannot manage that, do some service in a temple. Any service. Somebody has to string the garlands and somebody has to carry the water up and somebody has to sweep.

If that is not open to you, then take the Dvaya and stay with it, and turn over what is in it, and let that be your day.

And if even that is difficult, then find a good man and attach yourself to him and stay near him.

A man in the middle of the hall asked how he was supposed to find a good man, if it came to that, since good men do not walk about labelled.

Rāmānuja said that it was not difficult and that people made it difficult in order to have something to be uncertain about. Look at who he keeps company with. Look at what he does with a thing when there is nobody there to see him do it. Look at how he speaks about a man who is not in the room. That is all of it, and a cowherd can do it as well as a pandit, and generally better.

Somebody else asked whether a man on the last of the six was on the road at all or only near it.

He said that he had given six ways and that there were six of them, and he went on to the next thing.

He gave them in that order and he did not go back and qualify any of them, and he did not say that the first was the real one and the others were allowances. He had spent sixty years building a thing that ran on the sixth. He had given the treasury of his establishment to a wrestler who had taken up with him because of his wife's eyes and had never read a line of the Brahma Sūtras in his life. He had gone up an eight-limbed tower at Tirukkōṣṭiyūr and shouted the meaning of the eight syllables at a crowd of people who could not have got past the first rung on any reckoning, and had been given the name the whole country calls him by as the reward for it.

A man going round that hall could have put a number on everybody in it. Embār and Piḷḷān and the Bhaṭṭars were on the first. Amudanār was on the second and had made something on it that the Lord of the temple had ordered recited in the streets. The men who had come in from Melkoṭe and were going back in a week were on the third and the fourth. Dhanurdāsa had been on the sixth for forty years and was sitting in the front of the room with the money of the establishment on his person, and had got there by way of a woman's eyes, and had never been put on any other rung and had never asked to be.

There was an old servant of the maṭha standing in the doorway with a broom against the wall beside him. He had swept that hall every morning for longer than most of the men sitting down had been at Śrīraṅgam. He was not a reader and he was not going to become one. He had been given the Dvaya years back in the ordinary way and he said it, morning and night, and he could not have told anybody what the second sentence of it was doing that the first one was not.

He had come to the door because the hall was full and he could not get in to do the floor.

He heard the first one go past and then the second and then the rest of them down to the last, and then he waited for the next thing, and the next thing was that Rāmānuja stopped talking about it. The men in front began to shift and pick up their cloths. He took the broom off the wall and stood out of the doorway to let them come through, and then went in and started at the far corner, which is where he always started.

On another of those mornings he told them a story in which he came out badly, and he told it on himself, which he had not often done.

There had been a man called Māraṇēri Nambi, a long way back, before any of this. He had been a disciple of Āḷavandār and he was born in the fourth of the four orders, which is to say that he was a Śūdra, and he was by every account that survives a great Śrīvaiṣṇava. When he died, Mahāpūrṇa performed his funeral rites. Mahāpūrṇa did it himself, with his own hands, in front of whoever was standing there.

Some of the Śrīvaiṣṇavas of that place would not have it, and they did what people do, which was to go and complain to somebody senior. The somebody senior was Rāmānuja. He was young then, and he had been given the five marks by Mahāpūrṇa on a road halfway between two towns before either of them had got anywhere, and he was still a householder, and he was already the man people brought things to.

He sent for his own teacher and asked him to account for himself.

He told them in the hall that he had done that. He said it plainly and did not put any gloss on it.

Mahāpūrṇa had not been troubled by the question. He said that he had acted according to what the Āzhvār wanted, and he named the two decades of the Tiruvāymozhi where the poet says what he is: not the servant of God only, but the servant of God's servants, and of their servants, and of the servants after those, however far down the line it runs and whatever any of them were born. Then he said the other thing, the one the community wrote down and has repeated for the pleasure of repeating it. He said that the rules about all that were the roar of the ocean. Meaning a noise the sea makes, which a man who lives beside it stops hearing.

Rāmānuja said that he had been wrong and his teacher had been right, and that he had been shown it in one sentence by a man who did not raise his voice to do it.

Then he said what he had to say about birth, and it was short, and it was not new to anybody in that hall who had been paying attention for the last fifty years.

He said that a Śrīvaiṣṇava's standing has nothing to do with the order he was born into. It comes from one place only, which is his attachment to the Lord and to the Lord's people, and there is no second source for it and no quantity of birth that can supply the want of it or diminish it where it exists.

Somebody in the hall said, carefully, that there were rules, and that the rules were in the books, and that he had spent his life on the books.

Rāmānuja said that he had, and that the man was quite right, and that this was the difficulty and had been the difficulty for sixty years, and that he was not going to stand up at the end of his life and pretend it was not. Then he said: I will tell you what I have actually done, and you can decide what it amounts to.

He said that the four thousand verses now recited in this temple every day, beside the Veda and with the same standing as the Veda, were made by twelve poets, and that one of the twelve was a Veḷḷāḷa, and one of them was outside every community there is and sang from the far bank of the river because he would not walk on the ground in front of the shrine, and one of them was a girl. He said that this was not something he had arranged as a favour to anybody. It was what the songs were, and the songs were what the tradition rested on, and anybody who wanted to keep the tradition and get rid of that had a problem with the arithmetic and not with him. He said that the man holding the money of this establishment was a wrestler from Uṟaiyūr. He said that there were three hundred women in this community living as ascetics under his own rule, and that the community had in it, as a recognised body with a name, the men who wear no thread.

He did not say that he had abolished anything, and he had not. He had got the excluded people of the western country a name, and the name he gave them was Tirukkulattār, which is to say that they belong to the family of Śrī, and it was not a compliment, it was a statement about whose house they were in. He had got them set days at named temples and entry as far as the flagstaff and no further. That is what it was, and it was worth having in that century to those people, and it was not the same thing as the doors standing open.

He knew what he had done and what he had not. He had made an inventory of it more than once in his life and it had cost him sleep.

Then he sent for the temple servants.

They came over from the temple in the afternoon in a group, the men who did the daily work of the place: the ones who lit and trimmed, the ones who carried the vessels, the ones who put the garlands on and took them off, the ones who walked in front with the umbrellas, the ones who announced the hours by the water clock at the gate that the town calls the clock gate, the ones who swept the long corridors that nobody ever sees swept. Some of them were the sons and grandsons of the men who had been doing it fifty and sixty years before.

Their fathers had tried to kill him.

That is not a way of speaking. When he first came to Śrīraṅgam and was given charge of the place and began to go through the accounts and the offerings and the rosters and the stores, the men whose living had been made out of the slack in all of that understood exactly what was happening to them, and they arranged for poison to be put into his alms at one of the seven houses where he begged. The woman of that house could not do it cleanly. Her manner was wrong when she handed it over and he saw that her manner was wrong, and he put the food down in front of a dog and the dog died. After that a man from Tirukkōṣṭiyūr came down and made a permanent arrangement about who cooked for him, and it held to the end. And after another round of it, some years on, he left the island altogether and went up to Tiruvellarai and stayed there two years, because his own people had made Śrīraṅgam impossible for him over what he was doing to their revenues. He had been driven out of that temple once by the temple, long before any king drew up a document about it.

They came in and stood, forty or fifty of them, not sure what it was about. A few of the older ones had been sent for like this before, over shortages, and had a shortage face on. One of them, a man who had charge of the vessels and had held the office thirty years and had been fined twice in the early days, stood at the back and stayed there.

He had them brought closer because he could not hear well. It took some arranging.

He said: faithful servants of our Lord, my time here is finished and my service alongside you is ending. In the doing of my work among you I will have given offence to some of you and I will have caused pain to others. Since I am about to leave you, it is proper that I ask every one of you to forgive me what I have done badly.

Nobody had expected it and nobody knew what to do with it.

Then one of them found his voice and said, why are you talking to us like this, we are your servants. He said that the way he was speaking was strange to them, and worse than strange, because it frightened them. Are you going to leave us orphans, he said. Are you going to go and leave us lying here like bodies with nothing in them.

Rāmānuja told them not to talk that way.

He said: you lose nothing at all by losing me. Your Lord Raṅga is here. He does not leave and he is not going anywhere. He is lying there on his serpent perfectly at ease, and look which way he is facing, look where he is looking: he is looking south, and he is looking south because Vibhīṣaṇa is down there, and he has been watching that direction since before this town was built. Do not be sparing with him. Keep at the work and keep awake in it. And keep the company of his own people, all your lives, all of you.

Then he said goodbye to them, and they went back over to the temple, and it was the hour when the evening lamps had to be got ready, and they went and got them ready.

Embār came in that evening on his own, which he was entitled to do and rarely did.

He was born Govinda at Madhuramaṅgalam, and their mothers were sisters, and they had been carried about half in one house and half in the other before either of them could walk. They had gone to school together at Tiruppuṭkuzhi under a man who eventually tried to have one of them drowned in the Ganges, and it was Embār who found it out and came and said so on the road at night, and then could not go back to the party he had betrayed and went north instead and was lost to them for years.

Rāmānuja got him back through an uncle and a palm leaf. After that he never left.

There is one story about him that everybody in that community knows and it takes four words to tell, which is that he once put his hand into the mouth of a snake. There was a thorn in it. He got the thorn out and then went and bathed, because a man who has had his hand in a snake's mouth is ritually unclean, and it was the bath that gave him away: Rāmānuja asked him why he was bathing at that hour and got the explanation, and sat down. There is another one about a bed. He had made up his teacher's bed and then lay down on it himself before the old man got into it, and when he was caught at it he said that he knew perfectly well it was worth hell and he did not mind, since he had wanted to be sure it was comfortable first. He was called the shadow of Rāmānuja's feet, which was not a title anybody conferred, only a thing people started saying because it was descriptive. When his mother wanted him married Rāmānuja arranged it, and afterwards told him to spend time alone with his wife as a man should, and Embār came back and said that there was no alone, because wherever he looked he could see nobody but the Lord. Rāmānuja gave him the ochre the same day, and named him Embār, and told him that from then on he was not to be anywhere else.

He sat down and said that he wanted to know what was going to happen.

Rāmānuja said he would tell him in the morning in front of everybody but he could have it now if he wanted it now. Then he told him. Parāśara Bhaṭṭar was to lead them. It would be done publicly, the next day, in the Lord's own presence, and it would be done by an act and not by a declaration, because a declaration can be argued with afterwards and an act cannot.

Embār said, 'He is thirty.'

'He is.'

'Piḷḷān is fifty and is your son by every measure but one, and he has written the commentary on the Tiruvāymozhi that you would not write yourself. Āccān has been in your kitchen since before Bhaṭṭar was born. Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ was a teacher of another school before he was a disciple of this one, and he has more grey in his beard than I have. And I am older than all of them and you are about to put a boy over the lot of us.'

'I am,' Rāmānuja said. 'Say the rest of it.'

'The rest of it is that you are right,' Embār said, 'and I would like to hear you say why, because they will ask me and I would rather have it from you than invent it.'

Rāmānuja said that Piḷḷān would do the rites and hold the men who needed holding, and that Piḷḷān knew it and wanted nothing else. He said that Āccān's work was not a lesser thing than anybody's and that Āccān would be insulted to be offered this one. He said that Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ had spent half a lifetime on the other side of the argument and had come across in full, and that there were still men in this community who remembered it, and that the man who leads after me must not be a man anybody can point at, not because the pointing would be just but because the community will be weak for a while and weak communities do a lot of pointing.

'And Bhaṭṭar.'

'Bhaṭṭar was given to the Lord of this temple as a son before he could speak and the Lord took him,' Rāmānuja said. 'He is the child of the man who went into that court in my clothes and came out of it without his eyes. If the thing I have built is worth anything, then the son of Kūreśa at the head of it says what it is worth, and it says it without anybody having to make a speech.'

Embār sat with that.

Then he asked about the rest of it. What about the seats, he said: there are seventy-four of them and they are in families, and the first five of those families were given a seat because their grandfather taught you. What happens when one of them puts an idiot in the chair.

'Then the seat is worth less for a generation and the country will find that out,' Rāmānuja said. 'I put the office into families on purpose, because a thing that lives in a family lasts and a thing that lives in a clever man does not. You will get idiots. You will also get the one in five who would never have been found any other way.'

'And Melkoṭe.'

'Fifty-two men are running Melkoṭe and they have been running it for years without me and they do not need a letter from a dead man.'

'And the books.'

'The books are copied,' Rāmānuja said. 'They were copied while I was still arguing about them, which is why I let the copyists sit in the room and be a nuisance. There is no manuscript anywhere in this establishment that exists only once.'

Embār said that this was all very well and that Rāmānuja had answered every question except the one he had come with.

'Which is what.'

'What I am supposed to do in the mornings.'

Rāmānuja did not answer that for a moment. Then he said that Embār had been at his right hand at the morning reading since before there was a book to read, and that he could sit in the same place and the reading would go on, and that the difference would be that there would be nobody sitting to Embār's right; and that he had no advice about it because he had never had to do it himself, having been given Mahāpūrṇa and then having lost him only once and at a distance.

Then Embār said, 'He is still thirty.'

'Yes,' said Rāmānuja. 'So you will hold it.'

Embār looked up.

'You will hold it,' Rāmānuja said again, 'and you will hand it to him when he is ready and not before, and you will be the one who decides when that is, and nobody will ask you to explain the decision. I told you to prepare him years ago. You did not ask me then what you were preparing him for. You are the only man I have who will run a thing for years in order to give it away at the end, and you have done it once already, because you had him from the day he was born and you gave every hour of it to a boy who is not yours.'

'He is mine,' Embār said.

'Then you have no difficulty.'

They sat there for a while. The evening service had started over at the temple and they could hear the Tamil going, which at that distance comes through as a shape without words.

Embār said that he would do it, and then he said one more thing, which was that he wanted it understood that he was not the successor and would not be called it, and that when the time came he intended to walk into a room and put the thing in Bhaṭṭar's hands in front of witnesses and go and sit down at the back.

Rāmānuja said that was exactly what he had in mind.

Before he went Embār asked one more thing, which was whether he should say any of this to Bhaṭṭar beforehand.

Rāmānuja said no. He said that a man who is told in advance has time to arrange a face, and that he wanted to see Bhaṭṭar's actual face when the water came round the wrong way, and so did everybody else in that temple.

In the morning it was done the way he had said it would be done. He took Bhaṭṭar into the presence of the Lord, in front of the assembly, and when the water and the offered food came round he had Bhaṭṭar receive them first, before himself. Everybody in that temple understood what they had just watched. Then he turned to the assembly and said that this man came next after him and they were to regard him accordingly.

Embār held it afterwards, as arranged, for as long as it needed holding, and at the end of his own life he called Bhaṭṭar in and put the community into his hands and told him to run it from Śrīraṅgam; and the last instruction he gave him, which is the only sentence of Embār's that the tradition bothered to keep from that day, was that Bhaṭṭar was to hold at all times that Rāmānuja's feet were his refuge and there was no other.

Vaḍuga Nambi had no particular interest in God.

He came from Śāligrāma, out in the west beyond Mysore, which is grey rocky country with black soil in the low parts, and he was a Telugu, which is what his name says: the Telugu Nambi. He was got in the ordinary way, by an accident of the road. Rāmānuja and his people were passing through on one of the western journeys and Rāmānuja told Mudaliāṇḍān to go and put his feet in the water the village drew from. Mudaliāṇḍān went and did it and said nothing to anybody about why. The men and women of that place bathed in it the next morning as they did every morning, and a number of them were not the same afterwards and came and asked to be taken on, and one of them was this man.

He came back to Śrīraṅgam with them and stayed, and the work he was given in the establishment was the oil. That meant the bath, and it meant the rubbing before the bath, and it meant a great deal else that is not a formal office and gets done by whoever is nearest: the cloths, the lamp in the room at night, the getting up off a mat and the getting down onto it. He held that for the rest of Rāmānuja's life and would not let anybody else near it, and in the last years, when a man had to sit up in the room, he took more of those nights than his turn and was told twice to stop and did not.

What he attached himself to was Rāmānuja, and he never afterwards attached himself to anything else, including the Lord, and he was entirely open about it, and the tradition has kept every instance it could get hold of because it could not decide whether to be scandalised or envious and in the end settled on envious.

He got hold of a pair of Rāmānuja's sandals and performed the full daily worship to them, the whole formal sequence, the water and the sandal paste and the flowers and the food, the way a householder does it to his image. When they travelled he packed the sandals in the same bundle as the images Rāmānuja himself worshipped. Somebody pointed out that this would not do. He said that his object of worship was every bit as glorious as Rāmānuja's objects of worship, so there was nothing wrong with the arrangement, and he went on doing it.

There was an evening when he was in the back of the maṭha boiling milk. Namperumāḷ came along the street outside in procession with the drums and the lamps and the whole town out, and Rāmānuja called through the building for him to come out and see.

Vaḍuga Nambi called back, 'If I come out to worship your perumāḷ, my perumāḷ's milk will burn. So I am not coming.'

He stayed where he was. The procession went past. The milk did not burn.

Another time they were both in the temple and Rāmānuja was standing in front of Raṅganātha in the way he stood there, which people who saw it never managed to describe and kept trying to, and Vaḍuga Nambi was standing beside him looking at Rāmānuja. Rāmānuja noticed it, eventually, and told him to look at the Lord's eyes, which are the thing about that image.

Vaḍuga Nambi answered him with a line of Tiruppāṇāzhvār's. Tiruppāṇāzhvār was the poet who would not set foot on the ground in front of that temple and sang from the other bank of the river until he was carried in on a brahmin's shoulders, and the last verse of his ten says that the eyes which have seen this, my nectar, are not going to look at anything else.

He said it about Rāmānuja, to Rāmānuja's face, standing in the sanctum of the temple the verse was written about.

Rāmānuja did not correct him. The account says he was pleased and that he gave him his blessing and they went on with the service.

He was like that about everything and it made him difficult to live with. He ate the remnants of Rāmānuja's food, which was his right, and then wiped his hands on his own head instead of washing them, and Rāmānuja told him to go and wash. So the next day he washed his hands after taking the food that had been offered to the Lord as well, which is not done, because that food leaves nothing to be washed off. Rāmānuja asked him what he thought he was doing. He said he was doing what he had been told to do the day before.

Rāmānuja said, 'You have beaten me without any trouble at all.'

Once some relatives of his came to visit who were not Śrīvaiṣṇavas, and after they left he broke every pot in his kitchen, and then went round to where Mudaliāṇḍān's household had thrown out their old pots, and picked those up, and cooked in them.

And once he heard a Śrīvaiṣṇava reciting the eight syllables on their own, without the line of teachers said first, and he said that this was an improper use of the tongue and walked off.

He also said the most uncomfortable thing anybody in that circle ever said about Kūreśa, and it is preserved in a canonical book, in three words, with a commentary attached to explain what he meant. He called Kūreśa and Mudaliāṇḍān men of two banks. His meaning, which the commentary sets out without flinching, was that both of them, for all that they had given their lives to Rāmānuja, were from time to time to be heard praising the Lord on his own account and asking the Lord for their release, and that a man who does that has a hand on each bank of the river and has not committed himself to either.

Nobody ever recorded Kūreśa's answer, or Mudaliāṇḍān's. It is possible that neither of them thought it needed one. What is recorded is that the three of them went on living in the same establishment for forty years and eating the same food, and that in the roster of who did what, Kūreśa had the morning reading and Vaḍuga Nambi had the oil, and neither of them would have swapped.

Kiḍāmbi Āccān, who cooked, is the one who got the worst of him day to day. Āccān had to feed him and Vaḍuga Nambi would not eat until Rāmānuja had eaten, and would then eat only what was left, and if there was nothing left he did not eat, and Āccān took to putting more rice on than the arithmetic required and saying nothing about it. There is no story in which they quarrelled. They were both men who had come into that house by the same door, which is that they had each once done something about Rāmānuja's body: one of them swore at a guru in public to get him off a burning sandbank, and the other one warmed oil for him for thirty years.

In forty years of it there is not one occasion on record where Rāmānuja told him he had the thing the wrong way round. He told him to wash his hands. He told him once to look at the Lord's eyes, and was answered with a verse, and let the answer stand. He never made an example of him in the hall and never used him to illustrate anything; and when men came and reported that Vaḍuga Nambi had said something outrageous again, which happened regularly, he heard them out and sent them away and did nothing.

When the work was given out at the end, every man in that establishment got a charge. Piḷḷān got four senior men to look after. Bhaṭṭar got the community. Kiḍāmbi Āccān kept the kitchen. There were books assigned and offices assigned and men told where to go.

Vaḍuga Nambi was given nothing to do.

What he was told was where to sit. Rāmānuja told him that when it came to it he was to take the feet.

A hundred and twenty years earlier an uncle had come down off a hill in the north and named a newborn child for the brother who went into the forest not because he was told to but because he could not be anywhere Rāma was not, and who slept outside the door, and who wanted nothing on his own account. The man who was to hold the feet had wanted nothing on his own account for forty years.

He did not change. There is no account in which he ever changed, and the accounts had every opportunity, because he outlived Rāmānuja by a long way, back at Śāligrāma where he had started, and the community had decades in which to record him coming round to a more ordinary position. What they recorded instead is what happened when he died. Somebody brought the news to Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumānār and said that Vaḍuga Nambi had gone to the highest heaven.

Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumānār corrected him. He said that Vaḍuga Nambi was a man fixed on his teacher and on no other object, and that the proper way to report it was that he had reached Rāmānuja's feet, and that one should not say of him that he had gone to the highest heaven.

He wrote, in his own language and in Sanskrit, a hundred and eight names, and they are not the hundred and eight names of the Lord. They are Rāmānuja's. A Tamil poet at Śrīraṅgam later made a hundred and eight verses on the same subject in imitation of them, and those went into the temple's own liturgy, and are recited in the streets at every festival; and the man who was imitated is the man who would not come out of the kitchen to watch the procession go by.

The verse that is said before anything of his is recited calls him the noble one of Śāligrāma, true disciple of Rāmānuja, dweller in Śāligrāma, the man endowed with the fifth means.

There are four.

Kandāḍai Āṇḍān got back from the north inside the fortnight, which was fast, and came straight in off the road.

He had left the figure standing in a temple at Śrīperumbudūr in a town that had almost nothing else in it, in a country where the paddy and the palmyra go on flat to the horizon and travellers do not slow down, and he had come back down the same road at speed because he had been sent for. He said what he had to say about the installation, which was short, and then he sat down against the wall and did not say anything else.

Rāmānuja began seeing them one at a time.

He did that over two or three days and it was mostly done sitting up on the mat with the door open and a man kneeling at his side because of the hearing. What was said in most of those is not written anywhere. What comes down is the shape of it, which was that each man was told what he was to do afterwards and who he was to do it with, and that the telling was practical and not affectionate, and that several of them came out of the room and had to stand in the yard for a while.

Dhanurdāsa came in with the keys. He had had the treasury of the establishment for something like forty years, having come into the community out of the king's wrestling court at Uṟaiyūr because Rāmānuja had asked him a question about his wife's eyes and then out-bid him; and in all those forty years there had been men in that community who did not think a man of his birth should be holding the money, and Rāmānuja had never once argued with them about it, having settled the matter years ago by a demonstration instead. He put the keys down on the mat.

Rāmānuja told him to pick them up.

Then Rāmānuja said one more thing to him, which the accounts keep, which was about the sword. Dhanurdāsa's habit for decades had been to walk in front of the processional image in the street with his hand on his sword, having told everybody who would listen that if the Lord were so much as jolted on the way he would kill himself on the spot. He had never had to. Rāmānuja told him that he was to go on walking in front, and that the community would very shortly be shaken about a good deal worse than the Lord had ever been, and that he was not to do anything about it with the sword.

Piḷḷān was given four men and told to guide them: Kiḍāmbi Āccān, Kiḍāmbi Perumāḷ, Eṅgaḷāzhvān and Nadātūr Āzhvān, who were all old and all senior and were now to be attached to a man younger than three of them. Piḷḷān was the son of Śrīśailapūrṇa, the uncle who had named Rāmānuja, and Rāmānuja called him his son in the mind, and it was Piḷḷān who had written the commentary on the Tiruvāymozhi that Rāmānuja had refused to write himself. He was told he would do the last rites when the time came.

Bhaṭṭar was told to guide everybody, including Piḷḷān, and to lead the community.

Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumānār came in and sat down and was there some while. He had been Yajñamūrti once, an ascetic of the other school with one staff, who came to Śrīraṅgam to take this school apart and agreed to eighteen days for it, and had it very nearly won on the seventeenth, and on the eighteenth morning conceded before anybody had spoken; and he had asked afterwards for one thing only, which was to be allowed to carry his teacher's own name, and had been allowed it. He was the man in that community who had changed his mind about everything once, in public, in the middle of his life. What was said in that room is not recorded. He came out and went over to the chapel, which was his allotted work, and saw to the evening worship.

Then he had them all brought in together, and he made them swear.

This is the one part of it that reads like a man laying a hand on a table. He told them that when he was gone they were not to wander off the road he had marked out for them. Then he told them the other thing, which was practical and hard: they were not to let grief over him interfere with the performance of the duties that fell to each of them. If they did that, he said, they would forfeit their connection with me, and with Mahāpūrṇa, and with Āḷavandār; and they would be acting against what Nammāzhvār wanted, which is a heavier matter than any of the rest of it.

Then he said: come up to me, each of you, one at a time, and swear on my feet that you will do what I have told you and will not step off the lines I have drawn.

It began in the middle of the morning and it was still going in the middle of the afternoon. The room held perhaps forty men at a time and the rest were in the yard and out in the street, and the line went out of the doorway and along the wall in the shade and then round into the sun, and men sat down on their heels while they waited and got up again. Somebody brought water along the line twice. A small boy belonging to one of the temple families went up and down with a leaf of something and was not stopped. The temple went on with its own day about a hundred paces away, the drums for the midday offering, and everybody in the line heard it and nobody moved.

So they came up one at a time, seven hundred ascetics' worth of them who were present and the householders who were there and the men with offices in the temple and the men who had come in off the road that week, and each one put his hands on the feet and said it, and Rāmānuja put his hand on each of them as they did it. It took a long time. Nobody counted.

When it was over he told them to go away and eat.

That instruction is recorded in a plain form and is worth keeping in its plain form: he told them to withdraw and to eat of the food that had been offered in the temple and prepared for them, and to come back afterwards. They did not want to go. They went, because he had just made them swear about exactly this kind of thing, and they went over to the temple and were fed in the usual place in the usual way, and they came back.

Some of them could not eat. That is not in the accounts and does not need to be. The accounts say only that the food was consecrated food and that it was prepared for them and that they went and took it and came back, which in that community is not a detail about catering: the last thing he made them all do together was eat what had been given to the Lord, in the ordinary way, at the ordinary hour, sitting in rows on the floor of the hall where they had been sitting in rows on the floor for years.

Then he gave them his last words and his blessing.

And then, with the room full and everybody in it waiting for whatever a man says at that point, he turned to Parāśara Bhaṭṭar and gave him one more instruction, which was the last one he gave anybody about anything.

He said: son, there is a servant of some reputation up in the uplands, in the Mysore country. He is a Vedāntin. His name is known. Go there, beat him in argument, and bring him over to us.

That was all of it. There was nothing attached to it about how, and nothing about what to do if the man would not come, and no doctrine in it of any kind. It was a job that had been on his list for a long time and had not got done, and he was giving it to somebody who could do it.

Bhaṭṭar went, in due course, after everything else was over and the community was in his hands. He went up into the western country, to the town the man held, and the argument did not take long, and there was no verdict and no arbiter and no crowd worth mentioning, and the Vedāntin gave in. Then he gave up the world, and became Bhaṭṭar's disciple, and walked back down to Śrīraṅgam behind him and lived there until he died under a new name, which was Nañjīyar.

Bhaṭṭar did not have long. When he died, not old, sitting up and reciting a Tamil poem, the man who took the community after him was Nañjīyar, and it was Nañjīyar who made the second commentary on the Tiruvāymozhi, nine thousand units long where Piḷḷān's had been six.

On the evening of the day he was given the instruction, Bhaṭṭar went out of the maṭha into the street, and found one of the men who had come in from Melkoṭe and was going back that month, and asked him how the road ran to the uplands and how many days it was on foot.

It took three days.

On the morning of the first of them he did the usual things, in the usual order, more slowly than usual. He was taken down to the river and brought back. Vaḍuga Nambi did the oil. The marks were put on in the twelve places with white clay out of a ball that had come from the north-west corner of a tank in the western country, the way they had been put on every morning of his life since he was a boy at Kāñcī. He ate a little of what Kiḍāmbi Āccān brought and left most of it. Then he sat in the door for a while and looked at the street, which nobody remembered him doing before, and then he said that he would lie down.

He lay down in the room he had slept in for sixty years, and he did it the way a man lies down at the end of an ordinary day, without any announcement, and closed his eyes. They turned him so that his head was towards the temple. Embār sat down at the top of the mat and took the head into his lap. Vaḍuga Nambi came and sat at the other end and took the feet.

Then the reciting started, and it was two things at once.

One party was made up of the older men and they took the Veda. They had the Taittirīya, and the section they were given was the Brahmāvallī, and after it the Bhṛguvallī, and they went through both and then began again at the beginning and kept going. The second sentence of the Brahmāvallī is: satyaṃ jñānam anantaṃ brahma.

The other party had the Tamil, the four thousand verses of the twelve poets, and they began at the beginning of those and worked forward.

Neither party waited for the other. They went at the same time, in the same room, and in the yard outside the room where the overflow stood, and nobody attempted to arrange them into turns. Anyone standing in the street would have heard the two of them coming out of the same doorway, which does not make a pleasant noise and was not intended to.

That went on for three days without stopping. Men dropped out of both parties to sleep and eat and other men came in and took up the line where it had got to, and the sound did not break. It is a thing that community can do, because everybody in it knows all of it, and a man who has to leave the line can hand the next verse to the man beside him without either of them stopping.

Embār did not move for three days. They brought water to where he sat and held it for him. Twice in the course of it somebody offered to take the head so that he could straighten out his legs, and he said no, and after the second time nobody asked again. Vaḍuga Nambi at the other end had the easier position and the worse one, because he could see the face and Embār could not.

The temple went on with its own day about a hundred paces off. That is one of the things people who were there remembered afterwards and put down: that all three days the drums went at the ordinary hours, the morning offering and the midday one and the evening one, and the elephants were fed and the garlands came in off the carts from the gardens and the corridors were swept, and the whole enormous machinery of the place ran exactly as he had arranged it to run, while he lay in a room outside the fourth wall and it ran without him for the first time.

On the second day the town stopped pretending to work. The shops between the outer two walls did not open. People came in from the villages on the north bank and from Uṟaiyūr and from up the river and stood in the streets, and the streets were not wide, and the men of the establishment had to keep a lane open from the maṭha to the temple gate. Men got up onto the roofs of the houses opposite and sat along the parapets with their legs hanging over, and were still there the next day. Nobody drove them off.

It was hot, and it was long, and nothing whatever happened in it. The hours were called from the water clock at the gate and everybody in the street heard them called and counted them. In the afternoon a wind came up the river and moved the dust about and dropped again. Women stood along the north side of the lane, a good many of them, including the ones who lived in that town under his rule as ascetics, of whom there were said to be three hundred in the community altogether; and they stood there the whole of the second day and the whole of the third.

The men who could get in went in a few at a time and came out again. Piḷḷān was in and out all three days, because he had things to arrange and knew what they were. Bhaṭṭar sat inside the door with his back against the frame and got up whenever anybody needed the doorway, which was often, and sat down again. Kiḍāmbi Āccān cooked for the hundreds of people in the street, which is what he did with it. Dhanurdāsa stood in the lane with his hand where it always was and did not come in at all until the third day, and then came in and knelt and went out again within a minute.

Messages were going out on the roads north and west. Nobody had ordered that; it happens by itself. A man who was travelling anyway carried the news to the next town and it went on from there, and word reached Kāñcī, and Kūram, and Tirukkōṣṭiyūr where a man had once climbed a tower, and Tirumalai, and eventually the western country; and the men who got it in those places sat down where they were standing.

On the evening of the second day the men in the yard tried to get the two parties to take turns, on the reasonable ground that neither could be heard properly. Embār said from inside the room, without turning round, that they were to leave it as it was. So it was left as it was, and the two of them went on over the top of each other for another day and a half.

He spoke a few times on the first day and less on the second and not at all on the third. What he said is not recorded, and that is not because nobody was listening. It is because there was nothing in it that the community thought it had a right to keep. He had already said everything he was going to say publicly, and made them swear to it, and had them fed.

It was the month of Tai, in the bright fortnight, on the tenth day. The star was Tiruvādirai.

At noon on the third day it stopped.

He had not moved for some hours. The reciting was going on both sides, and the Tamil party happened to be somewhere in the middle of the second thousand, and the Veda party was where it always was, and he went out of the body without any commotion at all. The accounts say the aperture at the crown of the head opened, which is what that community says of any ascetic who has finished, and they do not go on about it. He was a hundred and twenty years old.

Embār knew first, because he had the head.

Then the room understood, and the room went down. The men in it came off their heels and onto the floor all together, and the word the account uses is the word for trees in a storm: a stand of forest with the roots out of the ground, flat, all one way. It went out through the door into the yard and out of the yard into the street and up onto the roofs, and men who had been sitting on parapets with their legs over the edge for two days got down into the street to be on the ground. There was a great deal of noise and none of it was in words, and the people who tried afterwards to write about what they heard said that men were making sounds with their throats shut.

What they managed to say, when they could say anything, was a line somebody had ready. It said that when he had come into the middle of them they had been given light to know by, and that his going out left them in the dark, and they said it to each other over and over for the rest of that day because it was the only sentence anybody could get through.

The Veda party had stopped. The Tamil party at the back of the yard, who could not see into the room and had not been told, went on for four or five verses more before the noise reached them and they broke off in the middle of a line.

Embār sat where he was with the weight of the head on his knees and did not put it down. It was some while before anybody thought to come and take it from him, and when they did he let them, and then found that he could not stand up, and two men had to get him onto his feet and walk him out into the light.

An ascetic of that tradition is not burnt. He is buried, sitting up, and the rite for it is a separate rite with its own sequence, and it is long.

Piḷḷān took it, and did the whole of it himself, and was not a young man, and did not sit down. That had been settled in the room a few days before, and it was settled that way for a plain reason, which is that Rāmānuja called him his son in the mind and a son does this work. They did the whole of it. The observances, the sacraments, the procession, the interment, every stage of it in order and none of it shortened, and where there was a choice between a shorter form and a longer one they took the longer one. They modelled it on the obsequies that had been done for Āḷavandār at that same temple three generations before, which was deliberate and was noticed, and it was the same body of men in the same enclosures doing for the pupil's pupil what had been done for the man who left three fingers folded.

The procession went at the pace of a procession. It came out of the maṭha and along the lane where the people had been standing for three days and in at the gate, and the crowd came in behind it and filled whatever there was to fill, and men who could not get in went round the outside of the wall to be on the right side of it. It is more than six miles of wall at that temple if a man walks the whole circuit of the enclosures, and the accounts say the enclosures were full, which may be a way of speaking and may not.

They did not take him out of the temple.

That is the fact of the matter and it is the only one of its kind. Śrīraṅgam has seven walls one inside another and the town is between the outer two and the shrines are in the inner five, and there is no other person at all whose remains are inside that ground. He was put in the fifth enclosure, at its south-west corner. The tradition says the place was not chosen by his disciples, and that they asked and were told.

The shrine was built over the place. It is a small building for what is in it. It stands in a corner rather than on an axis, in a part of the enclosure that people walk through on their way to somewhere else, and anybody who has been to Śrīraṅgam has gone past the door of it several times without necessarily being told what it was.

What that community holds about what is there is this. It holds that what sits in that shrine is Rāmānuja's own body, in the sitting posture, and not a figure cast in metal or cut in stone; and that it has been sitting there ever since the day they put it there, and can be seen by anybody who walks round to that corner, and that a man who looks carefully can see the nails on the fingers.

What is done there, twice every year, is this. Sandal paste is applied, and saffron, and camphor mixed into the saffron; and nothing else is applied, and nothing else has ever been applied, and the colour it has is the colour those things give it. It is done by men whose fathers did it and whose grandfathers did it, on the same two occasions in the year, and the line of men who have done it has not been broken since the twelfth century.

There has never been an examination of any kind, and nobody has ever made a statement about how. There is no account anywhere of a method and no claim about the properties of anything. There is a belief, which is very old and is held by a great many people, and there is a practice, which is kept up twice a year and can be watched.

The place is called a sannidhi, which is the word for where somebody is. It is not called by the other word, the one for where somebody was put. That choice of word is not loose usage and it was not made recently. It is what the shrine has been called since there was a shrine, and the whole of what that community means by the arrangement is inside it.

The doctrine he spent sixty years on is a doctrine about bodies. A self stands to the one whose body it is as a body stands to the self in it: held up by him, directed by him, there for his sake, and therefore actually there, and therefore able to love him. That is what the Śrī Bhāṣya says, and it is what he had once kicked a man for being right about, and had gone back on before the light went that day, and it is what he had got half right.

There are three figures of him and the Tamil names for them are different from one another by almost nothing, and the difference is the whole of what the names say.

The first is at Śrīperumbudūr, in the town where he was born, in the temple of Ādikeśava that stands there among the tanks and the paddy on the road out of Kāñcī. That is the one the sculptor made from life while he sat still for it, and that he went over from the head to the feet and said he was satisfied with, and then put his arms round. It is called tām ugandha tirumēni: the body he himself was pleased with.

The second is at Melkoṭe, up on the hill in the western country, in the temple he raised over an image he dug out of an anthill at the south-west corner of a tank. When he left that place to come east, the fifty-two men he had put in charge of it did not want him to go, and what they asked for was one of these, and he said they should have it. It is called tāmar ugandha tirumēni: the body his own people were pleased with.

The two names are one syllable apart.

The third is at Śrīraṅgam, in the fifth enclosure, at the south-west corner. It is called tān āna tirumēni: the body that is him.

A daily worship was established at the shrine and it has been done every day since, and it is not a memorial service. It is the same sequence that is done to an image of the Lord anywhere: waking, bathing, dressing, the marks, the flowers, the food, the lamps, the closing of the door at night. Men who have never read a line of the Śrī Bhāṣya go round to that corner in the morning on their way through and stand there for as long as it takes to say one thing, and then go on to wherever they were going.

His things were disposed of in the ordinary way and there were not many of them. The three joined staves and the water pot went where such things go. The sandals had been dealt with years before, because Vaḍuga Nambi had got hold of a pair and had been worshipping them daily and nobody was going to take them off him now, and in any case Mudaliāṇḍān had been called the sandals of the king of ascetics for so long that the word had stopped being a word about footwear. Somebody found two cloths and one of them was worn through, and there was a dispute about who should have them which was settled by giving them to nobody and putting them with the things kept at the shrine.

The room in the maṭha was not left empty and was not made into anything. The morning reading went on in the hall, at the same hour, and Embār sat where he had always sat, at the right hand of a place on the mat that nobody took.

Śrīperumbudūr, when the figure went there, was what it had always been: a flat town on a flat road with tanks and paddy and palmyra round it and a temple to Ādikeśava in the middle, the sort of place a traveller goes through without stopping. It has not been that since. The road out of Kāñcī goes through it and everybody who comes down it stops, and the town lives off the stopping, and what they come to see is a piece of metal that a man sat still in front of for several days in the twelfth century and afterwards embraced.

Kandāḍai Āṇḍān, who had asked for the first of them and had been sent for off the road and had got back inside a fortnight and had sat against the wall without saying anything, went north again afterwards and lived a long time, and the anniversary of the day that figure was installed is still kept at Śrīperumbudūr, on its star in its month, and the town fills up for it.

At Śrīraṅgam, twice a year, on the appointed mornings, the men whose work it is go round to that corner of the fifth enclosure before the heat comes up and set out what they have brought, which is sandal paste in one vessel and saffron in another and camphor to be worked into the saffron, and then they take off what was put on six months before, and put on what they have brought, and go out and shut the door.

Embār held it for a few years and then did what he had said in the room that evening he would do. He called Bhaṭṭar in front of witnesses and put the community into his hands and told him to run it from Śrīraṅgam, and then went and sat down at the back.

After Bhaṭṭar, who did not live long, it went to the Vedāntin from the uplands who had been beaten in an argument he had not asked for and had come down the road behind his conqueror and taken a new name. After Nañjīyar it went to Nampiḷḷai, who could hold a crowd of hundreds in a hall at Śrīraṅgam and did it for years. After him it went on, name after name, teacher to pupil, one at a time, each of them known in that community by a Tamil nickname and by the number of units in the commentary he wrote, and it has not stopped since.

The seventy-four seats of teaching went down in families, which is what they had been designed to do. Five of them had been given at the start to the descendants of the five men who taught him, so that the lineages he came out of were inside the structure and not outside it looking in, and a man who held one of those seats had the right to give the five marks and to teach and to pass the seat to his son. The families that hold them are still called by the name of the office, and a man of one of those houses can be placed by his name alone before he has said anything else about himself. They went on holding them through the centuries when nothing else in the south held, and they are the reason that a man in a village three hundred miles from Śrīraṅgam in any later century could find somebody within a day's walk who had the authority to take him on.

The country did not go on calling him Rāmānuja. It calls him Emperumānār, which is the name Goṣṭhīpūrṇa gave him on the ground at Tirukkōṣṭiyūr on the morning after he broke his oath, and which means one greater than my Lord; and the school does not call itself by a doctrinal term either. It calls itself the school of Emperumānār, and the people in it are described in that temple as the ones who belong to him. A man who wants to say what he is says a man's name.

In the temples the hymns are in Tamil.

In the daily worship at Śrīraṅgam the four thousand verses of the twelve poets stand beside the Veda with the same standing as the Veda, and the community has a term for the arrangement which treats the two as one revelation in two languages. And every year in Mārgazhi, when the mornings are cold off the river, the festival runs for twenty-one days, ten of them by day and ten of them by night with the hinge between, and in the course of it the whole four thousand is recited through from the beginning to the end in front of the Lord.

The poets themselves stand in those temples in metal, and the reason they do is an accident. One year the image of Nammāzhvār could not be got to Śrīraṅgam in time for the festival, for reasons nobody wrote down, and the thing was going to fail. Rāmānuja had another one made at speed and installed it, and while the work was being done he had the rest of them made too, all the Āzhvārs, and Nāthamuni as well. They have been made that way ever since because that is how they were made then.

The canon that got this treatment was written by a man of the cultivating community, and by a man who would not walk on the ground in front of that temple and sang to it from the far bank of the river, and by a girl of Śrīvilliputtūr who would not marry anybody else.

Inside the walls now there are people who used to be outside them.

Not all of them, and not all the way in, and it is better to say exactly what it was. The Tirukkulattār, whom he named for Śrī's own family, go in on set days at named temples, and they go as far as the flagstaff and no further, and that was the arrangement he made and it was not general entry. The threadless, the Sāttādavar, are a recognised body in that community with a name of their own and have been from his time. Three hundred women lived under his rule as ascetics. And when the Tamil is closed at a festival, the verse that closes it was made by a wrestler from Uṟaiyūr who kept the money of the establishment and had come into it because he was told that there were better eyes than his wife's.

The washerman of Śrīraṅgam still brings the Lord's clothes. They come in off his line and are carried in and put on the Lord without being washed again. No brahmin of that town would put them on in that state. The Lord wears them at every service on every day of the year, and the men who dress him take them from that man's hands without a word about it, and have done since the afternoon Rāmānuja brought him in and spoke about his work and had it accepted. It was never made into a rule about anything else. It was made into a practice, and then it was done, morning after morning, for centuries, by people who had stopped asking where it came from.

The boundary is visible too, and it was visible then. That wrestler holds no seat among the seventy-four. Neither does Amudanār, who wrote a hundred and eight verses in Tamil about Rāmānuja which the Lord of the temple ordered recited in the streets and which Rāmānuja heard the whole of before he would let them into the liturgy, because he wanted to be sure they did not overstate the case.

And there is a commentary.

The school that Nāthamuni founded and Āḷavandār inherited had held, against the greatest commentary in the field, that the difference between a self and God is not a thing that dissolves on inspection; that it is exactly as real as the two of them are; and that a man who is told the difference is unreal has been told, in polite language, that there is nothing there to love and nobody to do the loving. It had held this as the plain sense of the Upaniṣads and the plain sense of everything the poets had sung, and it had held it for four generations without a commentary of its own to set beside the other one. There had been one once, by Bodhāyana. Nobody in the south had seen a copy in living memory.

In his own lifetime, in that temple, the daily round of recitation included the Vedānta Sūtras and the Śrī Bhāṣya of Rāmānuja, one after the other, in the same list, read out by men standing in the same hall. Copies of it and of everything else were going out from Śrīraṅgam in bundles wrapped against the rain, to the seats and to the maṭhas, because he had let the copyists sit in the room and be a nuisance while the thing was still being argued over. Nothing in that establishment existed in one copy.

And because he would not write on the Tamil poem himself, on the ground that if he wrote on it people would think there was that much in it and no more, and that nobody afterwards would dare go past him, Piḷḷān wrote the first commentary on the Tiruvāymozhi at six thousand units, the length of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa; and Nañjīyar wrote one at nine thousand; and Nampiḷḷai lectured on it until the lectures came to thirty-six thousand and had to be written down by somebody else. The school that had no commentary of its own ended with more commentary than it could conveniently store, growing out of itself, each one longer than the last, none of them final because the first man had refused to make his final.

Āḷavandār's unfinished book was never finished.

Nobody went back and completed the sentence. It is still in the libraries in the state he left it, and it still stops where it stops, and anybody who reads it comes to the place where the sentence breaks off, and then puts it down and picks up the other one.

At Melkoṭe, at the north-west corner of the tank, there is white clay in the ground. He found it with the end of his staff, having gone up into that country in the first place because he had run out of the stuff and a man of that community does not go out of his door in the morning without the mark on his forehead. Men still go down and dig it. They crush it and stir it into water and let the grit settle and the mica come up, and pour off what is between, and dry it into balls; and the balls go out on carts and in boxes, north and east, and have been carried as far as Benares. It goes on wet, with two fingers, in two lines up from the root of the hair, and it dries pale, and by the middle of the morning a man wearing it can be told from the other side of a street.