Sadāśiva Brahmendra Sarasvatī

There was a village on the north bank of the Kāverī, in what was then the Tanjore country, called Tiruviśanallūr. It was an agrahāra, a settlement granted to brahmins for the keeping of learning, and in the early years of the eighteenth century it held an unusual concentration of it. The account printed at Srirangam in 1909, which is the earliest continuous life of him that has been found, says that the place was full of scholars, and then does something more useful than praise: it names them.

There was Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita, who wrote the play Jānakī Pariṇaya, the marriage of Jānakī. There was Veṅkaṭeśa, whom the Tamil country came to know as Śrīdhara Ayyāval, author of the Ākhyāṣaṣṭi and the Dayāśataka, a man whose own name still draws pilgrims to Tiruviśanallūr. There was Gopālakṛṣṇa Śāstrī, called Mahābhāṣyam Gopālakṛṣṇa for his command of Patañjali's great commentary, who would later become preceptor to the Toṇḍamāns of Pudukkoṭṭai.

And there was Sadāśiva, whom the 1909 account calls the most gifted of a gifted set.

That is the first thing to hold about him, because everything else in his life reads against it. He did not come to silence from the outside. He came to it from the middle of the most articulate company in the south, as the quickest tongue in a village of formidable tongues.

Of where he was born, the two earliest printed sources say nothing at all. The Srirangam account of 1909 begins with him already a student at Tiruviśanallūr. The Madras District Gazetteer for Trichinopoly, printed in 1907, notices him only at the end of his life, at the shrine that holds him. Madurai is often named as his birthplace in later tellings, and a family and a childhood name are given with it, but neither of the pre-1930 witnesses used for this edition carries them, and this edition will not supply what its sources do not say. What the 1909 account does give is a region and a river: the Kāverī country, and later the town of Karūr, near which, it says, he lived at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The turn of his life, in the telling that has come down, was small and domestic and slightly absurd, which is perhaps why it survived.

He was married, as a boy of that place and time would be. His wife came of age, and the household prepared for the occasion. His mother, wanting the day kept properly, cooked more dishes than usual. The extra dishes took time. Dinner, which should have come at its hour, came an hour late.

He sat with that hour. Married life had barely begun, he reflected, and it had already cost him an hour's fasting. If the beginning took an hour, what would the rest take. The 1909 account, which is sober about most things, lets the thought stand exactly as he is said to have had it, without making it grand: a prelude to the misery of family life to come.

He did not argue it out with anyone. He went looking for a teacher.

He found Paramaśivendra Sarasvatī, and this is the one fact about his life that does not rest on tradition at all. It is printed on his own books.

The title page of the Ātmavidyāvilāsa, as it was set at the Śrī Vāṇī Vilāsa press at Srirangam, names him as śrīmat-paramahaṃsa-parivrājakācārya-śrī-paramaśivendra-sarasvatī-pādābja-sevā-parāyaṇa: devoted to the service of the lotus feet of Śrī Paramaśivendra Sarasvatī. The Brahmasūtra Vṛtti carries the same formula. The Ātmavidyāvilāsa's own closing verse says it again in the poet's voice:

परमशिवेन्द्रश्रीगुरुशिष्येणेत्थं सदाशिवेन्द्रेण ।

रचितेयमात्मविद्याविलासनाम्नी कृतिः पूर्णा ॥

paramaśivēndraśrīguruśiṣyēṇētthaṃ sadāśivēndrēṇa ।

racitēyamātmavidyāvilāsanāmnī kr̥tiḥ pūrṇā ॥

Thus by Sadāśivendra, disciple of the revered guru Paramaśivendra, this work called Ātmavidyāvilāsa was made, and it is complete.

And once more, unexpectedly, at the end of a song. The last line of the eighteenth kīrtana, a piece that is otherwise a sustained declaration of identity with brahman, turns at its close and names him: dhīraparamaśivēndraśrīgurubōdhitō'ham, I am one taught by the steadfast Śrī Guru Paramaśivendra. A man who gave up speech put his teacher's name inside a song.

Under that teacher he took saṃnyāsa, the renunciation that ends a householder's obligations, and received the name by which the south still knows him.

It was in this period, the 1909 account says, that he wrote the works and the songs. Among them was the Ātmavidyāvilāsa, the play of the knowledge of the Self, composed under his master's guidance: sixty-two verses in the āryā metre on the condition of one who is free while still living.

The poem itself agrees about its own length. Its closing verse counts them:

इति गुरुकरुणापाङ्गादार्याभिर्द्व्यधिकषष्टिसंख्याभिः ।

निरवद्याभिरवोचं निगमशिरस्तन्त्रसारभूतार्थम् ॥

iti gurukaruṇāpāṅgādāryābhirdvyadhikaṣaṣṭisaṃkhyābhiḥ ।

niravadyābhiravōcaṃ nigamaśirastantrasārabhūtārtham ॥

So, by the sidelong glance of the guru's compassion, in āryā verses sixty-two in number, faultless, I have spoken the essential meaning of the teaching that stands at the head of the Veda.

What the poem describes, it describes at a distance. It does not say I. Verse after verse it speaks of someone, a certain one, one alone: ko'pi, kaścana, kaścit, ekaḥ. Somebody sleeps on the sand by a river with his arm for a pillow and the sky for a covering. Somebody wanders the corners of the forest looking like a dullard, a deaf man, a blind man. Somebody, having caught the fidgety deer of the mind in the snare of discrimination, lies down at last in his own house. The account of 1909 puts the sequence plainly: he set it forth in the poem, and then went out to realise in himself what he had set forth.

Read alongside what followed, the poem stops looking like description and starts looking like an intention.

He was, by every account, formidable in argument, and for a while he used it. Visitors came to Paramaśivendra; Sadāśiva met them with questions; the questions were better than the answers, and the visitors went away shamed into silence. This happened often enough that people complained to his teacher about it.

Paramaśivendra said one sentence to him. The 1909 account gives it in English, and it has the shape of something remembered rather than composed:

Sadāśiva, when will you learn to keep your mouth shut?

He saw his folly at once. He took a vow of silence, prostrated himself before his teacher, took leave of him, and went out, in that account's words, a homeless, speechless mendicant.

Mauna, the vow of silence, is a recognised discipline, usually kept for a season. He kept it for the rest of his life. The Trichinopoly gazetteer, writing in 1907 for a colonial administrative series with no devotional interest whatever, records the same thing in a single flat clause among the notes on a village: he never spoke throughout his whole life.

Between them, those two sentences are the hinge of the life. The best talker in a village of talkers was told to shut his mouth, and did, and never opened it again.

After that there is no career to follow, because he did not have one. He had rivers.

He moved along the Kāverī and the Amarāvatī, in the country round Karūr, which the 1909 account places in the Coimbatore district of its day. He wore nothing. The 1909 account, reaching for a way to say it, borrows from the tradition's own vocabulary and says that the several directions were his clothes; the word behind that is digambara, sky-clad, space for a garment. He smeared himself with mud and ashes and held the whole world to be worth less than the mud and ashes he was wearing. He cared nothing for food or drink. He went where he liked, and there was nobody to dispute it.

An avadhūta is one who has shaken everything off, and the word fits him more exactly than most of the words that get attached to saints. He was not a teacher with a seat, not the head of a maṭha, not a man with disciples in the ordinary sense. He was a naked silent man walking by water, and people who met him could not always tell what they had met.

The 1909 account is frank about that, and says that many mistook him for an insane person, as all great ones are mistaken.

There is a story from those years that belongs here rather than among the wonders, because nothing wonderful happens in it. He was found lying in a field one day with his head resting on the raised bank at its edge. The labourers working there remarked to each other that here was a man who had renounced the world and still wanted something to put his head on. The next day he lay in the same place with his head on the ground. Seeing that, the same men wondered aloud that one who despised the things of the earth should still be sensitive to what was said about him.

Veṅkaṭeśa, his old fellow student, is said to have heard of it and answered with a verse:

तृणतुलिताखिलजगतां करतलकलिताखिलरहस्यानाम् ।

श्लाघावारवधूटीघटदासत्वं सुदुर्निरसम् ॥

tr̥ṇatulitākhilajagatāṃ karatalakalitākhilarahasyānām ।

ślāghāvāravadhūṭīghaṭadāsatvaṃ sudurnirasam ॥

For those who weigh the whole world as a blade of grass, who hold every secret in the palm of the hand, even servitude to that courtesan Praise is very hard to be rid of.

His own teacher, hearing that his disciple went about like a madman, is said to have answered in the same manner, and the verse preserved from him is not a rebuke but an envy: that such madness had not overtaken himself.

For most of his life the record is tradition, and this edition says so wherever that is the case. In one place it is not.

In the years before 1738 he wandered into the forests near Tiruvaraṅgulam, a few miles from Pudukkoṭṭai. There he was seen by the ruler of that state, Vijaya Raghunātha Toṇḍamān, whose reign ran from 1730 to 1769 and who was known locally as Śivajñānapuram Dorai. The Toṇḍamān was a religious man who spent much of his time in the forests beside a lake that still carries his name. He attached himself to the silent man and would not be shaken off, and kept at it, the 1909 account says, for about eight years.

At the end of it Sadāśiva wrote on the sand. What he wrote, the two sources disagree about, and this edition keeps both rather than choosing. The Srirangam account of 1909 says he wrote religious instructions, and directed the Toṇḍamān for anything further to his old fellow student Gopālakṛṣṇa Śāstrī, then living at Bhikṣāṇḍārkōil in the Trichinopoly district. The gazetteer of 1907 says he wrote an assurance that the Toṇḍamān's line would endure as long as his descendants remained virtuous and truthful.

Both agree on what happened next, and it is the part that can be checked. Gopālakṛṣṇa Śāstrī was invited to the court. Grants of land were made to him and to the brahmins who came with him, by a copperplate śāsana dated 1738, which the 1909 account says still existed when it was written. The Dasara celebrations of the state, and the worship of Dakṣiṇāmūrti in the palace temple, were instituted on lines he had laid down. And the sand he had written on was gathered up, carried to the palace shrine, and kept there.

Both sources, writing independently, say it was still being worshipped in their own day.

So among all the wonders there is one thing about him that is dated and documented: a plate of copper, a year, a named king, and a handful of sand that a state took the trouble to keep.

He came at last to Nerur, on the Kāverī near Karūr, and that is where he stayed and where he is.

The gazetteer gives the village its old name and its story: Agnipuri, the city of Agni, because the fire god found a self-arisen liṅga in the forest there and worshipped it. The Śiva temple of that village, the gazetteer says, contains the samādhi of the great sage Sadāśiva Brahmam.

One day, the tradition of Nerur recounts, he told the brahmins of the village that on a particular day, Jyeṣṭha Śuddha Daśamī in the month of Mithuna, he intended to enter final union. If they were prepared for it, he said, a brahmin would come from Benares on that day carrying a bāṇaliṅga, which should be consecrated in a temple beside his samādhi.

They waited for the day. To their surprise, a brahmin arrived from Benares with the bāṇaliṅga.

A pit was dug. He went down into it of his own accord. The people assembled performed what was to be performed, raised the temple beside the samādhi, and set the stone from Benares in it.

The 1909 account adds one thing more, and then immediately qualifies it, and both halves belong in the record. It is stated, it says, that this jīvanmukta attained samādhi simultaneously in three different places; and it quotes a verse of the Sadāśivendra Stuti to that effect, composed at Nerur by the Jagadguru of Sringeri. But the samādhi at Nerur, it goes on, is the only one well known in Southern India.

Two claims, not reconciled. This edition does not reconcile them either.

No year is given for his death in either of the two sources used here, and the years that circulate elsewhere do not agree. The gazetteer of 1907 says he is supposed to have lived two hundred years before, which would put him near 1707. Other accounts place his death about 1755, and later writers have argued for dates a good deal earlier and a good deal later. There is no document of the kind that settled the Pudukkoṭṭai grant, and so there is no date here of the kind that can be held.

What can be held is that the Toṇḍamāns of Pudukkoṭṭai made extensive grants of land for the services at the shrine, and that the state was still paying for the annual anniversary in 1907 and in 1909, when two separate books, one official and one devotional, recorded the fact without either of them knowing what the other was going to say. The gazetteer notes that the Raja came every year at Navarātri to worship at the tomb.

A man who owned nothing, said nothing, and wrote his last instructions in sand was buried in a village named after fire, and a kingdom kept his anniversary.

There is no diary, no letter, no recorded conversation. He gave up speech in his twenties or thereabouts and kept the vow until he died. For most saints that would end the matter, and the inner life would have to be guessed at from what onlookers thought they saw.

But he wrote the Ātmavidyāvilāsa before the silence closed, and the poem is not about doctrine in the abstract. It is sixty-two short verses on what happens to a person, in order: how he is bound, how he is woken, what he does with his mind, what is left of him afterwards. The 1909 account says he composed it under his master's guidance and then went out to realise in himself what he had set out in it.

So the poem can be read as the account he did not live to give in prose. That is how this chapter reads it. Every step below is his own, in his own words, in the order he put them.

One thing about the poem's grammar matters before anything else. It never says I. Verse after verse the subject is ko'pi, kaścana, kaścit, ekaḥ: someone, a certain one, one alone. Whatever this is, he would not claim it in the first person. The English below keeps that indefiniteness, because it is not a stylistic tic. It is the most personal thing in the book.

He begins where everybody is.

स्वाविद्यैकनिबद्धः कुर्वन्कर्माणि मुह्यमानः सन् ।

दैवाद्विधूतबन्धः स्वात्मज्ञानान्मुनिर्जयति ॥ ५ ॥

svāvidyaikanibaddhaḥ kurvankarmāṇi muhyamānaḥ san ।

daivādvidhūtabandhaḥ svātmajñānānmunirjayati ॥

Bound by his own ignorance and by nothing else, doing his works and losing himself in them; then, the bond shaken loose by the working of destiny, the muni comes through, by the knowledge of his own Self.

That single verse is the whole arc, stated early and then unpacked for fifty more. Note what is doing the binding. Not the world, not fate, not other people. Svāvidyā, his own not-knowing, and the poem says eka, only that.

Then the image he returns to:

मायावशेन सुप्तो मध्ये पश्यन्सहस्रशः स्वप्नान् ।

देशिकवचःप्रबुद्धो दीव्यत्यानन्दवारिधौ कोऽपि ॥ ६ ॥

māyāvaśēna suptō madhyē paśyansahasraśaḥ svapnān ।

dēśikavacaḥprabuddhō dīvyatyānandavāridhau kō'pi ॥

Asleep under the sway of māyā, and in the middle of that sleep seeing dreams by the thousand, someone, woken by his teacher's word, plays in an ocean of joy.

Māyā here is not illusion in the loose modern sense of something that is not there. It is the power under whose sway the sleep happens, and the dreams are real dreams. The man is not accused of stupidity. He is described as asleep.

What ends the sleep, in his account, is never an effort. It is a sentence from a teacher.

श्रीगुरुकृपया सचित्सुखनिजरूपे निमग्नधीर्मौनी ।

विहरति कश्चन विबुधः शान्ताहन्तो नितान्तमुदितान्तः ॥ ८ ॥

śrīgurukr̥payā sacitsukhanijarūpē nimagnadhīrmaunī ।

viharati kaścana vibudhaḥ śāntāhantō nitāntamuditāntaḥ ॥

By the grace of the revered guru his mind is sunk in his own true nature, which is being and knowing and joy; silent, some wise one goes about, his I-making quieted, glad through and through within.

A note on that line, because the transliteration beside it will look wrong to anyone who knows the phrase. The line is printed with saci- at the end of one line and tsukha at the start of the next, a single ca where sac-cit-sukha, being and awareness and happiness, has two, and the transliteration keeps it as printed. Three verses earlier the same compound stands as saccidānanda, and the metre wants the second c. The English follows the sense.

The word maunī, silent, arrives in the eighth verse and does not leave. It is worth pausing on where it sits in the sentence. The silence is not listed among his practices. It is put in apposition to his condition, alongside the mind being sunk and the I-making being quiet, as though it were the same fact looked at from outside.

Elsewhere he uses the stronger form, mahāmaunī, the greatly silent one, of a man eating from his cupped palm and walking down a street looking like a dull and senseless thing. A man who would end his life speechless wrote the word into his poem before he stopped speaking.

The teacher's part is put in the smallest possible compass. In verse seven it is gurukaruṇāpāṅgāt, from the sidelong glance of the guru's compassion. Not instruction, not initiation, not years of study. A look from the side.

Everything after the waking is described as work, and it is severe.

चपलं मनःकुरङ्गं चारु गृहीत्वा विमर्शवागुरया ।

निगमारण्यविहारश्रान्तः शेते स्वधाम्नि कोऽप्येकः ॥ २३ ॥

capalaṃ manaḥkuraṅgaṃ cāru gr̥hītvā vimarśavāgurayā ।

nigamāraṇyavihāraśrāntaḥ śētē svadhāmni kō'pyēkaḥ ॥

Having caught the fidgety deer of the mind, and caught it cleanly, in the snare of discrimination, someone, worn out with ranging the forest of scripture, lies down at last in his own house.

The forest is the Veda and the mind is the deer and the snare is vimarśa, the act of turning a thing over until you see what it is. What is striking is the tiredness. He does not say the scriptures are wrong. He says a man can walk about in them until he is exhausted, and that lying down at home is what ends it.

The next verse is harsher, and the harshness is deliberate.

दारुणचित्तव्याघ्रं धीरमनःखड्गधारया हत्वा ।

अभयारण्ये कोऽपि स्वैरविहारी जयत्येकः ॥ २४ ॥

dāruṇacittavyāghraṃ dhīramanaḥkhaḍgadhārayā hatvā ।

abhayāraṇyē kō'pi svairavihārī jayatyēkaḥ ॥

Having killed the cruel tiger of the mind with the blade of a steadfast mind, someone walks where he pleases in the forest where there is nothing to fear, and he comes through, and he is alone.

Mind against mind: the citta is the tiger, the dhīra manas is the sword. He does not propose that the mind be soothed. He proposes that one part of it kill another, and then names what is on the far side, abhayāraṇya, the forest without fear, which is a good joke about forests and is not only a joke.

There is a colder method too, set out in verse eleven: taking the five elements apart in the reverse of the order in which they arose, dissolving each into its cause, and then simply looking at what has not been dissolved.

जनिविपरीतक्रमतो बुद्ध्या प्रविलाप्य पञ्चभूतानि ।

परिशिष्टमात्मतत्त्वं पश्यन्नास्ते मुनिः शान्तः ॥ ११ ॥

janiviparītakramatō buddhyā pravilāpya pañcabhūtāni ।

pariśiṣṭamātmatattvaṃ paśyannāstē muniḥ śāntaḥ ॥

Having dissolved the five elements by the intellect, taking them in the order opposite to their coming to be, the muni sits at peace, looking at the reality of the Self, which is what is left over.

Pariśiṣṭa, left over, is the key word and it returns near the end of the poem. His whole method is subtraction. Nothing is added to a person to make him free.

The poem is unusually interested in how this condition appears from outside, and the answer it gives is: badly.

जात्यभिमानविहीनो जन्तुषु सर्वत्र पूर्णतां पश्यन् ।

गूढं चरति यतीन्द्रो मूढवदखिलागमार्थतत्त्वज्ञः ॥ ४५ ॥

jātyabhimānavihīnō jantuṣu sarvatra pūrṇatāṃ paśyan ।

gūḍhaṃ carati yatīndrō mūḍhavadakhilāgamārthatattvajñaḥ ॥

Without pride of birth, seeing fullness everywhere in every living thing, the lord of ascetics moves about hidden, like a fool, he who knows the truth and meaning of every scripture.

The two halves of that verse are set against each other on purpose. Mūḍhavat, like a fool, sits in the same line as akhilāgamārthatattvajña, knower of the reality and meaning of all the scriptures. The hiddenness is not an accident of other people's dullness; the word is gūḍham, hidden, and it is what he does.

Verse fifteen gives the same man the word that became his own title:

अवधूतकर्मजालो जडबधिरान्धोपमः कोऽपि ।

आत्मारामो यतिराडटवीकोणेष्वटन्नास्ते ॥ १५ ॥

avadhūtakarmajālō jaḍabadhirāndhōpamaḥ kō'pi ।

ātmārāmō yatirāḍaṭavīkōṇēṣvaṭannāstē ॥

The net of works shaken off, like a man dull and deaf and blind, someone who takes his delight in the Self, a king among ascetics, goes on wandering in the corners of the forest.

Avadhūta means shaken off, and here it is the net of karma that has been shaken. The 1909 account records that many who met him took him for an insane person. He had written the misunderstanding into the poem in advance.

He is precise about the externals, and the precision is affectionate rather than austere.

आशावसनो मौनी नैराश्यालंकृतः शान्तः ।

करतलभिक्षापात्रस्तरुतलनिलयो मुनिर्जयति ॥ ३५ ॥

āśāvasanō maunī nairāśyālaṃkr̥taḥ śāntaḥ ।

karatalabhikṣāpātrastarutalanilayō munirjayati ॥

The quarters of the sky for his clothing, silent, adorned with wanting nothing, at peace, the palm of his hand for a begging bowl, the foot of a tree for a house: the muni comes through.

Four possessions, each of which is the absence of the thing it replaces. And there is a pun holding the first two together: āśā is both the quarters of the sky and desire, so the man whose garment is āśā is also the man whose ornament is nairāśya, the having of no desire. He is dressed in space and decorated with not wanting.

Elsewhere the bed is a riverbank, the pillow is his own arm, the covering is the sky, and the fan is a cool wind. The 1909 account, describing the same thing without knowing it was quoting, says that the several directions were his clothes.

The end of the poem is the subtraction completed.

वर्णाश्रमव्यवस्थामुत्तीर्य विधूय विध्यादीन् ।

परिशिष्यते यतीन्द्रः परिपूर्णानन्दबोधमात्रेण ॥ ५७ ॥

varṇāśramavyavasthāmuttīrya vidhūya vidhyādīn ।

pariśiṣyatē yatīndraḥ paripūrṇānandabōdhamātrēṇa ॥

Having crossed beyond the ordering of varṇa and āśrama, having shaken off injunctions and all the rest, the lord of ascetics is left over as nothing but full and perfect joy and knowing.

Pariśiṣyate, he is left over, is the passive of the same verb that gave pariśiṣṭa in verse eleven. What was true of the Self after the elements were dissolved is now true of the man himself. He is what remains when everything removable has been removed, including the categories that told him who he was.

क्षयमुपनीय समस्तं कर्म प्रारब्धमुपभुज्य ।

प्रविगलितदेहबन्धः प्राज्ञो ब्रह्मैव केवलं भवति ॥ ५८ ॥

kṣayamupanīya samastaṃ karma prārabdhamupabhujya ।

pravigalitadēhabandhaḥ prājñō brahmaiva kēvalaṃ bhavati ॥

Having brought every work to its ending and used up what had already begun, his bond to the body having melted away, the wise one becomes brahman only, and nothing besides.

Prārabdha is the part of one's karma that has already started running and cannot be stopped, only spent. He does not claim it can be escaped. It is used up, and then the body-bond does not break, it pravigalita, melts away.

The last four verses stop describing a person at all and describe what he has become, entirely by negation: unaging, unborn, without taste or scent or form, without rajas, without sattva, without tamas, beyond compare and beyond fear. The final verse says that this something spreads out for ever, and even there the poem will not name it. It says tat kimapi, that certain something.

It would be a cold book if it ended in negations, and it does not. Scattered all through the sober verses are others where the freedom simply breaks out.

Somewhere he meditates, somewhere he sings, somewhere he dances just as he pleases. Free of you and I, he goes about like a child, sunk in a sea of clean joy. He neither blames anything nor praises anything; his heart is cool as sandal; he sits there thickening with joy. He is a swan on a lake, a cuckoo singing in the cool garden of the Upaniṣads, an elephant in rut with his body cooled by the water of the mind, a sun moving spotless through the sky of awareness.

And then he did what almost no one who writes such verses does. He stopped writing, stopped speaking, put on the sky, and went to live by the river he had been describing.

The songs come from the same man and they say the same thing more quickly. Mānasa sañcara re, move about in brahman, O my mind. Sarvaṃ brahmamayam: what is there to say, what not to say, what to do, what not to do, what to learn, what to worship, what to know, what to enjoy. Cintā nāsti kila: they have no anxiety at all, those whose minds are at the feet of the paramahaṃsa guru, who are drunk on the nectar that is the joy of brahman.

The poem is the map. The songs are what the country sounds like once you are living in it.

It is easy to remember him as the naked singer by the river, and the songs make that easy, because they are short and they are lovely and they go straight in. But the man who wrote pibare rāmarasam also wrote a line-by-line commentary on the Brahmasūtras and another on the Yogasūtras of Patañjali, and those are not lovely. They are tight, technical, professional work, in which objections are stated properly before they are answered and no sentence is spent on beauty.

He should be read with both hands. What follows takes the works one at a time, in their own words.

The Brahmasūtra Vṛtti, which bears the second title Brahmatattvaprakāśikā, the light thrown on the reality of brahman, opens with five verses of salutation. The last of them is the most useful sentence he ever wrote about himself.

श्रीमद्देशिकपादाब्जपरिचर्याबलादहम् ।

भाष्यानुगां ब्रह्मसूत्रवृत्तिं कुर्वे यथामति ॥ ५ ॥

śrīmaddēśikapādābjaparicaryābalādaham ।

bhāṣyānugāṃ brahmasūtravr̥ttiṃ kurvē yathāmati ॥

By the strength of service at the lotus feet of my revered teacher, I make, as far as my understanding reaches, a vṛtti on the Brahmasūtras that follows the Bhāṣya.

Two words in that verse settle what kind of writer he is. Bhāṣyānugām, following the Bhāṣya: he is walking behind Śaṅkara's commentary, not beside it and not past it. And yathāmati, as far as my understanding reaches, which is a formula, but a formula he could have left out and did not.

He is not claiming a new teaching. He is claiming to have made Śaṅkara's teaching shorter and clearer. The 1909 editor, who had read a good deal of this literature, thought he had succeeded, and put his finger on exactly how: the clear statement of the pūrvapakṣa and the siddhānta in each sūtra, the concise presentation of the difference they make, the introduction to each sūtra showing its connection with the one before, the exposition of how each pāda and each adhyāya joins to the next. Which is to say: the book's virtue is its joinery.

The salutations before it place him in a line. He bows to the light that is the Self, established by the end of the Veda alone, free of beginning and middle and end, a mass of joy, entirely full. He bows to Vyāsa as a lion at ease in the forest of Vedānta who scatters the rutting elephants of the disputants. He bows to Śaṅkara, whom he calls bhavarogabhiṣagvara, the best of physicians for the disease of becoming, and a sun to the massed darkness of delusion. Then he bows to his own teachers, by the jewel-light of whose speech, he says, the long darkness of my delusion was destroyed.

That is a conventional sequence. What is not conventional is that the man who wrote it then stopped talking for the rest of his life.

The Ātmavidyāvilāsa is a poem, but it is not a vague one, and it can be read as a compressed course in the Vedānta he was commenting on.

The bondage is ignorance and nothing else. Verse five says svāvidyā-eka-nibaddhaḥ, bound by his own not-knowing, and by that alone. Not by matter, not by action as such, not by a hostile power. The remedy therefore has to be knowledge, and he says so in the same verse: svātmajñānāt, from the knowledge of his own Self.

The method is subtraction, not addition. Verse eleven has him dissolving the five elements by the intellect, taking them in the order opposite to their coming to be, and then looking at pariśiṣṭam ātmatattvam, the reality of the Self that is left over. This is the classical procedure, and the word pariśiṣṭa is the technical one. Nothing is acquired. Something is subtracted until what cannot be subtracted stands there.

Māyā touches the Self not at all. Verse thirteen is as flat a statement of the position as could be made:

नात्मनि किंचिन्माया तत्कार्यं वास्ति वस्तुतो विमले ।

इति निश्चयवानन्तर्हृष्यत्यानन्दनिर्भरो योगी ॥ १३ ॥

nātmani kiṃcinmāyā tatkāryaṃ vāsti vastutō vimalē ।

iti niścayavānantarhr̥ṣyatyānandanirbharō yōgī ॥

In the Self, which is spotless, there is in truth nothing of māyā nor anything māyā does; having settled on that, the yogin rejoices inwardly, filled full with joy.

Note vastutaḥ, in truth, doing the work. He is not saying the world is not experienced. He is saying that in fact, at the level of what is the case, nothing of it has touched the Self. And note that the result of the settled conviction is not calm but hṛṣyati, he rejoices. The doctrine is not presented as cold.

Liberation is not an event after death. Verse fifty-eight is careful about the mechanism:

क्षयमुपनीय समस्तं कर्म प्रारब्धमुपभुज्य ।

प्रविगलितदेहबन्धः प्राज्ञो ब्रह्मैव केवलं भवति ॥ ५८ ॥

kṣayamupanīya samastaṃ karma prārabdhamupabhujya ।

pravigalitadēhabandhaḥ prājñō brahmaiva kēvalaṃ bhavati ॥

Having brought every work to its ending and used up what had already begun, his bond to the body having melted away, the wise one becomes brahman only, and nothing besides.

Prārabdha, the portion of karma already in motion, is upabhukta, used up by being undergone. He does not offer a shortcut round it. The body-bond does not snap; it pravigalita, dissolves. And the result is put in the strongest available form: brahmaiva kevalam, brahman only.

The categories go too. Verse fifty-seven has him crossing beyond the ordering of varṇa and āśrama and shaking off vidhi, injunction. This is where his Vedānta and his life meet. The man in that verse has no duties left because there is no one left to have them, and the man who wrote it walked out of every visible obligation a brahmin of his time had.

The kīrtanas look simpler than they are. Several of them are technical, and one of them is a lecture.

Tadvajjīvatvam runs through the standard list of superimpositions in four lines: the doubled moon seen in water, the face reflected in a mirror, the man seen in a post at dusk, water seen in a sunbeam, silver seen in mother-of-pearl, a snake's body seen in a rope. Each is introduced by yadvat, just as, and answered by tadvat, just so. Just so, it says, is the state of being a jīva, in brahman.

That is the doctrine of adhyāsa, superimposition, which is where Śaṅkara begins his own commentary, set to rāga Navarōj in ādi tāḷa so that people could sing it. The last line closes the circle and names where the teaching came from:

परमहंसगुरुणाद्वयविद्या भणिता धिक्कृतमायाविद्या ॥

paramahaṃsaguruṇādvayavidyā bhaṇitā dhikkr̥tamāyāvidyā ॥

By the paramahaṃsa guru the knowledge that there are not two was spoken, and that other knowledge, the one that is māyā, was sent packing.

Sarvaṃ brahmamayam is the most radical of them and the most easily misread. Its four caraṇas are eight rhetorical questions in pairs:

<!-- literal-rendering: flat and repetitive on purpose, so the eight gerundives beat in English as they do in Sanskrit; the reading version is in Appendix A -->

किं वचनीयं किमवचनीयं किं रचनीयं किमरचनीयम्

किं पठनीयं किमपठनीयं किं भजनीयं किमभजनीयम्

किं बोद्धव्यं किमबोद्धव्यं किं भोक्तव्यं किमभोक्तव्यम्

kiṃ vacanīyaṃ kimavacanīyaṃ kiṃ racanīyaṃ kimaracanīyam

kiṃ paṭhanīyaṃ kimapaṭhanīyaṃ kiṃ bhajanīyaṃ kimabhajanīyam

kiṃ bōddhavyaṃ kimabōddhavyaṃ kiṃ bhōktavyaṃ kimabhōktavyam

What is to be said, what is not to be said; what is to be made, what is not to be made.

What is to be recited, what is not to be recited; what is to be worshipped, what is not to be worshipped.

What is to be known, what is not to be known; what is to be enjoyed, what is not to be enjoyed.

Every one of those words is a gerundive, the form that carries obligation. He is not asking what things are nice. He is asking what remains to be done, and the answer given by the refrain is that everything is brahman, so nothing does.

And then, having dismantled every obligation, the last line puts one back:

<!-- literal-rendering: kartavyam is kept as the bare 'is to be done' so that it matches the gerundives above word for word, which is the point being made -->

सर्वत्र सदा हंसध्यानं कर्तव्यं भो मुक्तिनिदानम्

sarvatra sadā haṃsadhyānaṃ kartavyaṃ bhō muktinidānam

Everywhere, always, the haṃsa meditation is to be done. It is the cause of release.

Kartavyam, to be done: the same grammatical form he has just spent three stanzas emptying out. One duty survives the abolition of duty. That is not sloppiness. It is the position: for the one who has not yet seen, the practice remains, and haṃsadhyāna, dwelling on the haṃsaḥ so'ham in the breath, is the practice he names.

Khelati piṇḍāṇḍe is the same teaching from the other end, and it is the most systematic thing in the song corpus. It begins with the formula itself, haṃsaḥ so'haṃ haṃsaḥ so'haṃ, then walks down through the levels at which the Lord is said to play: in the skin, eye, ear, tongue and nose; in the fivefold prāṇa; in sound, touch, taste and the rest; in sattva, rajas and tamas; in buddhi, manas, citta and ahaṃkāra; in earth, water, fire, space and wind. And then the last line turns it over: in the form of the paramahaṃsa he is the one who wanders, and he is the one who makes Brahmā and Viṣṇu and Rudra.

That is not a devotional list. It is the Sāṅkhya inventory of the person, recited in order, and then collapsed.

There is a way of reading him that makes him into a general-purpose mystic who loved God and did not care for doctrine. The songs can be quarried for it. The commentaries make it impossible.

He is a specific kind of Advaitin. He follows the Bhāṣya and says so. He holds that brahman is without attributes, and nirguṇa appears in his songs as flatly as in his commentary. He holds that the world's appearance is superimposition and runs the classical analogies to prove it. He holds that prārabdha must be exhausted and cannot be waived. He holds that liberation is by knowledge, and that devotion and the haṃsa meditation are the means by which a mind is made fit for it, not substitutes for it.

He also, at the same time, wrote bhaja re gopālam, worship Gopāla, O my mind, and filled four lines with the names of a cowherd boy. Nothing in his Vedānta made that awkward for him, and the songs say why: in khelati mama hṛdaye the Rāma who plays in his heart is satyajñānānandaśarīrī, having truth and knowing and joy for a body, which is the Upaniṣadic definition of brahman attached to a name and a form. The saguṇa and the nirguṇa are not two teachings in him. They are the same teaching at two temperatures.

The commentary on Patañjali is the least read of his works and the hardest to characterise from the outside, and this edition has not yet transcribed it. What can be said from the witness in hand is what its publisher said in 1911, and it is worth recording because it is the estimate of a man who had just spent his own money on it: a commentary on the Yogasūtras by the greatest rāja yogin, in his words, that Southern India had ever produced.

It is also worth noticing that he wrote it at all. A man who holds that liberation is by knowledge alone is not obliged to take Patañjali seriously. He took him seriously enough to go through him sūtra by sūtra. The 1909 sketch says his mind was ever and anon concentrated on the Self, and the tradition remembers him in samādhi under the sand at Kodumudi for three months. Whatever his Vedānta said about the sufficiency of knowledge, the discipline of yoga was not something he had only read about.

A full treatment of that work waits on its transcription, and this edition says so rather than filling the gap with generalities.

The Kāverī at Kodumudi runs wide and shallow for most of the year, and a man who sleeps on its bed has a great deal of sand to sleep on. The Srirangam account of 1909 says that Sadāśiva was lying there when the river came down in sudden flood. The water took him and buried him, and as far as anybody at Kodumudi knew, that was the end of him.

Three months later the village officers came down to the riverbed to raise the korambu, the seasonal bank of sand that is thrown up each year to turn the water where it is wanted. A spade went in and struck something that was not sand. The man working it drew the blade out and found a few drops of blood on it.

They stopped, and put the spades aside, and dug the sand away by hand, and they found him. He was deep. His limbs were lying in different directions, as limbs lie when a river has arranged them and not their owner. He was in samādhi, the absorption in which the senses have no further business, and he had been in it, under the bed of the Kāverī, since the flood.

They got him out. The 1909 account gives no words at all to what the diggers felt, and one clause to what he did. He looked about him as though he had just risen from deep sleep, and went his way.

Nobody asked him where he had been for three months. Nobody could have. He was years into his mauna by then, the vow of silence he had taken from his teacher and never once set aside, and there was no question anyone could put to him that would come back with an answer in it. The village officers went back to their embankment. The river went on down to the sea.

Near Karūr, the same account says, a cultivator brought in his paddy and heaped it on the threshing floor, and set eight of his servants to watch it through the night. It was worth watching. A season stood in that heap.

About midnight a naked man came out of the dark, stumbled against the heap, and lay down full length on the top of it with his hands stretched out.

To the eight, this was the thing they had been posted there to stop. They took up their sticks and raised them.

And there the night stopped. Their arms stayed where they had put them, straight up, and would not come down. The sticks stayed up too. Eight men stood round a heap of paddy in that position from midnight until the morning, when their master came back and found them so.

Then the sage got up off the paddy and walked away, and their arms came down, and they were eight tired men again with their sticks at their sides.

The account does not tell us what the master said. It tells us only what his servants had to say to him, standing as they were, with the heap behind them untouched and the night gone.

Another day, in the same country, the talaiyāris of a village were out gathering fuel for an officer's camp. They came on him walking, saw a pair of shoulders with nothing on them, put a spare bundle of wood on his head, and dragged him along with the rest of their load.

He carried it. He did not put it down and he did not object, having no way of objecting and, by every account of those years, no interest in the difference between carrying wood and not carrying wood.

At the camp the bundles were stacked one on another, and his went on last.

The whole heap caught fire.

They had taken him for a man who could be made to carry things, which is no stranger than what the labourers at the field had taken him for, lying with his head on the embankment and then, the next day, lying without it, in the story told in the first chapter. He was very often taken for something. The 1909 account, going over these years, says plainly that many mistook him for an insane person, as all great ones are mistaken.

The children of those villages called him Father.

On the day of the Vṛṣabhavāhana festival at Madurai, when Maheśa goes out in procession on the bull, they came round him and asked, in frolicsome derision, which is the 1909 account's own phrase for it, to be taken along to see the god go by. Madurai was a long way from where they were standing, and they knew it. That was the whole of the joke.

He did not take it as one. He made a sign to them to climb up, on his head, on his back, on his shoulders, as many as could hold on, and another sign to shut their eyes.

A man who had not spoken in years, standing in a village lane with children hanging off him.

They shut them where they were. They opened them at Madurai, in front of the god in procession.

Sweetmeats and nuts, the account says, were supplied to them in profusion. Then home again by the same means, and they were back before dawn.

The next morning every child told its parents where it had been the night before, and had what was left of the sweets in its hands to show for it. That is how the 1909 account says the thing became known at all: not from him, who said nothing about it or about anything, and not from the children's word alone, but from a handful of sweets that had come from Madurai overnight and had not been finished.

There were days when he was in more than one country at once.

On Mahāśivarātri, on Gokulāṣṭamī, on festivals of that order, the people near him watched him through the day and could say where he had been and for how long. And there were visitors coming through from Benares, from Muttra, from Rameswaram, who positively averred, the 1909 account says, that they had seen him at those places on those very days.

The account sets the two down beside each other and leaves them there.

The Trichinopoly gazetteer of 1907, which was written for the revenue service and has no devotional interest in him whatever, puts the same thing in the flattest clause it can manage, in a paragraph of notes on the village of Nerur:

He never spoke throughout his whole life, and could see things which were happening in distant places.

There was a brahmacārin who followed him everywhere, a young man under vows of study, who could not read a line.

What this young man wanted was to see Ranganātha at Srirangam. He asked. He was told to close his eyes.

He closed them, and opened them in the presence of Ranganātha, standing beside the sage, at the hour of the nīrājana, the waving of the lamps before the deity at the close of the worship. He watched it through, the lamps going round, the god in the light of them. When he looked again for his companion, the sage was not there.

So he made his way back to Nerur on his own feet, and came in and found the sage sitting in deep meditation, where he had been.

He told the village what had happened to him. The village would not believe a word of it, and had what looked like good grounds. The Yogi, the people of Nerur said, had not left their presence throughout those days. They had seen him. They could account for him. There was nothing wrong with the young man's story except that a whole village had watched the other end of it and knew better.

Years afterwards, the 1909 account goes on, the sage blessed that brahmacārin with mantras, and the man who could not read a line became a renowned expounder of the Purāṇas. Land was granted to him at Nerur for it. The 1909 account adds, in the present tense of its own year, that his descendants were still enjoying those lands.

The gazetteer of 1907 carries a gift of the same kind, given at another hour and in another form, and it is not the same story:

When on the point of death he wrote some words on the tongue of a disciple; and it is averred that the latter and his descendants for the next three generations became, without any study, perfect scholars in Sanskrit.

The two do not fit together, and this edition will not make them fit. In the Srirangam telling the gift is mantras, given years before the end, and what comes of it is the Purāṇas expounded by a man who had no letters. In the gazetteer's the gift is a few words traced with a finger on a disciple's tongue by a man with an hour or two to live, and what comes of it is Sanskrit, and not for one man but for four generations of one house. Both were in print before 1930. Both are given here as they were printed.

He walked into a camp where he had no business to be.

The 1909 account says that the chief of that camp was a Muhammadan chief, and that he was resting there with the ladies of his household, who were all of course in gosha, kept from the sight of any man outside the family. Into the middle of that walked a naked avadhūta, one who has shaken everything off, who did not knock, did not speak, did not stop.

The chief drew his sword and cut off one of the sage's arms.

The sage went on his way without noticing.

It was the not noticing that undid the chief. He was struck, the account says, by such indifference, and he repented, and he followed the man he had maimed like his own shadow, day after day, through whatever country the man walked through.

Some days later the sage turned round and questioned him.

The chief begged pardon for having cut off his arm. And only then, the 1909 account says, did Sadāśiva find out that an arm of his was gone. He passed his other arm over the maimed one, and it became whole.

The Sadāśivendra Stuti, which the Jagadguru of Sringeri composed at the Nerur samādhi and which the Srirangam account quotes, makes two separate salutations out of this one afternoon: to the man in whom no change arose when the arm was cut and fell, who did not know that the arm had been his; and to the man who, when the hand that had cut him was laid at his feet, was so far overcome with compassion that he raised the one who had done it to a state from which there is no falling away.

One thing has to be said about the shape of this story. The 1909 account, which is the earliest continuous life of him that has been found, tells the entering of the camp and the cutting of the arm as a single episode, in one breath: a man walks in where he should not be, a sword comes out, an arm falls, and nobody stops walking. Tellings current in the south often separate the two, and give the trespass and the sword their own separate occasions. This edition records that its earliest witness has them as one, and does not take the matter further.

At the temples he came to, the same account says, he made archana: the worship in which the names of the deity are uttered one after another, with a flower laid down at each name.

For every name he uttered, a flower fell of its own accord on the head of the deity.

The account says uttered. It does not stop to say what uttering was in a man who had given up speech for life, and the Sringeri verse that salutes him for the flowers does not stop over it either. It salutes him as the best of siddhas, the perfected, in whom such things are at home.

The gazetteer has one story that the Srirangam account does not, and gives it in one sentence, between an etymology and a note on land grants:

He is also said (like Simon Stylites and the latter-day saint of Kottacheruvu in Anantapur) to have replaced the maggots that fell from a festering wound in his body, bidding them to eat what God had given them.

There was a wound in his body and it had gone bad, and there were maggots in it, and when they fell out of it he picked them up and put them back where they had been feeding, and told them to eat what God had given them.

The comparison inside the brackets is the gazetteer's own. A district handbook, having to put a naked silent Tamil ascetic into English for the revenue service, reached for the nearest thing on its own shelf, a pillar saint of the Syrian desert. The comparison stays where its author left it. This edition does not carry it any further than he did.

There are more of these than any one book has ever held. Kodumudi and Karūr and Nerur and the villages strung along the Amarāvatī each keep their own, and the ones set down above are simply the ones that two printers happened to catch, one at Srirangam in 1909 and one in a government press at Madras in 1907.

The Srirangam account knew that about itself. Having told most of what is written above, it stops and says:

It may be hard to believe all these anecdotes whose number is legion, but they persist in living.

That sentence does two things at once and does not choose between them. It declines to vouch for anything. And it reports, as a plain matter of fact about the Tamil country, something that was not in dispute in 1909 and is not in dispute now: that the stories were alive, and being told, and getting themselves repeated by people who had them from people who had them from somewhere else.

They are still being told. A heap of paddy with eight sticks held up over it all night. A spade coming out of the riverbed with blood on it. A man looking round him as if he had slept well. And a child at dawn, back from Madurai, with what was left of the sweets still in its hand.

He owned nothing, founded nothing, and left no order behind him. What he left was eighteen songs, or nineteen, or twenty-three, depending on which printing you hold, and they are still sung.

That is a stranger fact than it looks. A man kept silence for the whole of his adult life, and the part of him that outlasted everything else is the part that is sung aloud. Singers who have never read a line of the Brahmasūtra Vṛtti know pibare rāmarasam by heart. The songs went where he could not, and they went by voice.

This chapter presents them. The Sanskrit is given as it stands in the witness, the transliteration beside it, and an English rendering made from that Sanskrit and from nothing else.

They are built in a way that becomes obvious once you have read three of them and is worth naming.

A pallavi states an imperative and an addressee. Almost always the addressee is not a god and not a congregation. It is the singer's own mind, mānasa, or his own tongue, rasane, or his own heart, cetaḥ. He is giving himself instructions in public. Move about in brahman, O my mind. Say Mukunda, O my tongue. The devotion in these songs is not addressed outward; it is overheard.

Then the caraṇas pile up epithets, mostly in the accusative, mostly as long compounds, each one a picture. This is the ordinary technique of the form, and he is very good at it, but he does something with it that most composers do not. He uses the last caraṇa for a turn.

Look for paramahaṃsa in the final stanza. It is there in song after song: the parrot in the cage of the paramahaṃsa's heart, the garland of the flowers that are the paramahaṃsas, the lamp in the paramahaṃsa's heart, the empire of the paramahaṃsas, the yoga of the paramahaṃsas, the paramahaṃsa guru. The word means the highest grade of renunciate, and it also means a supreme swan, and both senses are usually live at once. It is the nearest thing he has to a signature, and it arrives, almost every time, at the end.

Twice the turn goes further than a signature. Tadvajjīvatvam ends by naming where its teaching came from: by the paramahaṃsa guru the knowledge that there are not two was spoken. And the last line of the last song names the man:

निरवधिसत्त्वघनोऽहं धीरपरमशिवेन्द्रश्रीगुरुबोधितोऽहम्

niravadhisattvaghanō'haṃ dhīraparamaśivēndraśrīgurubōdhitō'ham

I am unbounded being, and dense with it. I am one who was taught by the steadfast Śrī Guru Paramaśivendra.

A silent man signed his teacher's name into a song. It is the strongest piece of attribution evidence in the whole corpus, and it is sung.

Nerur lies on the Kāverī near Karūr, and it had a name before it had that one.

The gazetteer of 1907, working through the villages of the Karur taluk in the flat order of an official series, stops at Nerur long enough to give the older name and the reason the village gives for it. Agnipuri, the city of Agni, worn down in Tamil to Nerur, because Śiva stood there in the forest as a liṅga that had arisen of itself, and Agni, the fire, came upon it and worshipped it. A liṅga is the upright stone in which Śiva is worshipped; one that is self-arisen is not set up by anyone, but found. The etymology is the village's own and the gazetteer records it as the village's own, which is how this edition carries it: a story told in a place about how the place got its name, and not evidence about the derivation of a word.

Then, on the same page and in the same register it uses for populations and rest houses, the gazetteer says what the village holds now:

The Siva temple contains the samadi or tomb of the great sage Sadasiva Brahmam.

Samādhi carries two things at once. It is the state of absorption in which a man is gathered wholly into what he is, and it is the place where such a man is laid, who is held not to have died but to have settled there. Both senses belong to this life, and both will be wanted in this chapter. Except where the other is marked, the word here means the resting place.

The manner of it, as Nerur tells it and as the 1909 account sets it down, was arranged beforehand. He told the brahmins of the village the day he intended: Jyeṣṭha Śuddha Daśamī, in the month of Mithuna. If they were ready for it, he said, a brahmin would come from Benares on that day carrying a bāṇaliṅga, a liṅga of the kind that is not carved but comes already formed out of a river, and it should be consecrated in a temple beside his samādhi. The day came and the brahmin came with it. A pit was dug; he went down into it himself; and the temple was raised beside the samādhi with the stone from Benares set in it. That temple and that stone are the reason the village holds two things and not one, the tomb and the liṅga that was carried the length of the country to stand next to it.

What happened afterwards at Nerur is the part of his story that leaves the ordinary kind of record, because it involved a treasury. The Toṇḍamāns of Pudukkoṭṭai made extensive grants of land for the services at the shrine. The tomb, says the gazetteer, is considered the tutelary shrine of the Pudukkoṭṭai Raja. Every year during the Navarātri, in September or October, the Raja came to Nerur to worship at the tomb; brahmins were fed and largesse distributed; and the state defrayed the cost of the annual anniversary. That is the position as of 1907 in the official volume and as of 1909 in the devotional one, two books with nothing in common but their subject, each reporting a state still paying, in its own present tense, for the keeping of a silent man's day.

The gazetteer sets down one thing more, and it needs to be handled for what it is. Alongside the annual visit it records a local explanation of why the Raja comes: that the visit expiates the sin of an ancestor

in betraying Umaivan, the famous Tinnevelly poligar who was imprisoned in the old fort still standing in Tirumayam and hanged by the British in 1801.

This is a thing said in that neighbourhood, written down by a British officer in 1907, about the motives of a dynasty. It is not a fact about Sadāśiva. Nothing in either source connects him with Umaivan, with Tirumayam or with anything that happened in 1801, and the grants and the observance are older than the event the story explains. It belongs here only because a chapter about the places that hold him should be honest about what else those places are said to hold, and because the difference between what a source attests and what it records other people saying is the whole discipline of the thing.

One further hold on Nerur is worth keeping. The 1909 account, telling of the illiterate brahmacārin who followed the sage, says that after the man was blessed with mantras and became a renowned expounder of the Purāṇas, land was granted to him at Nerur, and that his descendants were still enjoying that land when the account was printed. So the village carried, in 1909, a tomb, a temple, a stone from Benares, an anniversary paid for by another state, and a family living on ground given for what he was understood to have done for their ancestor.

The country he wandered is given by the 1909 account in two strokes. It says he lived near the modern town of Karūr at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and that his later years were spent on the banks of the Amarāvatī and the Kāverī, in what it calls the Coimbatore district.

The gazetteer of 1907, describing what is very nearly the same ground, puts Nerur in the Karur taluk of Trichinopoly. Two books printed two years apart, and the district is not the same district. Neither is wrong. Administrative boundaries in the south were redrawn before those books and have been redrawn several times since, and the names in both of them are the names their own compilers used. This edition keeps each source's district as that source's, and does not translate either into a present-day address. The rivers are what hold still. The Amarāvatī comes down to meet the Kāverī near Karūr, and it is that confluence country, rather than any district, that the sources are pointing at.

It is farming land, and the episodes set there say so without being asked to. A ryot near Karūr heaps his harvested paddy and sets eight servants to guard it overnight. A man lies down in a field with his head on the raised bank at its edge, and the labourers working there have opinions about him. Village watchmen out collecting fuel for an officer's camp put a spare bundle on his head and drag him along with them. These are the furniture of that country in that century, and they are the only scenery the sources give. Nothing else should be supplied.

Kodumudi, also on the Kāverī, is where the river took him.

The 1909 account tells it plainly. A sudden flood carried him off and buried him. Three months later the village officers, erecting the Korambu, the seasonal work on the river that the account names without stopping to explain, struck an obstruction with a spade and saw a few drops of blood on the tool. They dug a pit and found him buried deep, his limbs lying in different directions, lost in samādhi. Here the word has its other sense, the absorbed state and not the resting place, though the two lie very close together in this particular hole in the sand. They dug him out. He looked about him as though just risen from a deep sleep, and went his way.

The account gives no month, no year and no further word about the village. What Kodumudi holds is a stretch of riverbed and a spade, and three months.

Before the rivers there was a village on the north bank of the Kāverī, in what was then the Tanjore country, called Tiruviśanallūr. It was an agrahāra, a settlement granted to brahmins for the keeping of learning, and the 1909 account places his student days there.

The account does not describe the place. It names the people in it, which for an agrahāra amounts to the same thing: Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita who wrote the Jānakī Pariṇaya; Gopālakṛṣṇa Śāstrī, called Mahābhāṣyam for his command of Patañjali; Veṅkaṭeśa, whom the country came to know as Śrīdhara Ayyāval, author of the Ākhyāṣaṣṭi and the Dayāśataka; and Sadāśiva, whom the account calls the most gifted of a gifted set.

Tiruviśanallūr is therefore a place with two memories in it, and it is not chiefly his. Ayyāval is remembered there in his own right, and his name draws people to the village on its own account. The one sure thing the sources give about Sadāśiva and Tiruviśanallūr is that he learned there and that these were the men he learned among. No house is pointed out in either source, no school, no seat under a tree, and this edition does not point one out either.

Of all the places in this chapter, Pudukkoṭṭai is the one that can be dated.

In the years before 1738 he wandered into the forests adjoining Tiruvaraṅgulam, a few miles from Pudukkoṭṭai, and was seen there by Vijaya Raghunātha Toṇḍamān, who ruled that state from 1730 to 1769 and was known locally as Śivajñānapuram Dorai. The Toṇḍamān was a religious man who spent much of his time in those forests, beside a lake that still carried his name when the 1909 account was written. He attached himself to the silent man and stayed attached, the account says, for about eight years.

At the end of the eight years came the writing on the sand, and here the two sources part company about the words while agreeing about the sand. The 1909 account says he wrote religious instructions, and directed the Toṇḍamān for anything further to Gopālakṛṣṇa Śāstrī, his old fellow student from Tiruviśanallūr, then living at Bhikṣāṇḍārkōil in the Trichinopoly district. The gazetteer of 1907 says he wrote an assurance that the Toṇḍamān's line would endure as long as his descendants remained virtuous and truthful. Both readings are pre-1930 and printed, and this edition sets them side by side rather than choosing between them.

What followed is on copper. Gopālakṛṣṇa Śāstrī was called to the court; grants of land were made to him and to the brahmins who came with him by a śāsana dated 1738, which the 1909 account says was still in existence when it wrote. The Dasara observance of the state and the worship of Dakṣiṇāmūrti in the palace temple were instituted on lines he had laid down. Dakṣiṇāmūrti is Śiva as the teacher facing south, who teaches in silence, and a state that had spent eight years following a man who would not speak put that form of the god in its palace temple.

And the sand was picked up. It was gathered from the ground where he had written, carried to the palace shrine, and kept. The 1909 account says it was still preserved and worshipped there. The gazetteer, in its own words, says

it is said that the identical sand is kept and worshipped in Pudukkottai to this day.

Two books, one official and one devotional, neither knowing what the other would print, each reporting that the sand was still there. It is the strangest of the holdings in this chapter and the best attested. A kingdom kept a handful of riverbank because a man who owned nothing had moved his finger through it.

A mile and a half south of Karūr there is a small hill with a temple on it, and the gazetteer's entry for the village reads:

Lies 1.5 miles south of Karur; population 2,002. It contains several chattrams and, on a small hill, an old and well-sculptured Vishnu temple which is supposed to have been founded by Sadasiva, the famous saint of Nerur above referred to. The image of the deity is cut out of a portion of the solid rock.

Everything in that sentence is worth reading slowly. Several chattrams, which are rest houses. A small hill. A Viṣṇu temple, old and well sculptured, the image cut from the solid rock rather than set up in it. And then the hinge: supposed to have been founded by Sadasiva.

The hedge is the gazetteer's own, and this edition does not remove it. What the source attests is that in 1907 the temple at Tandoni was attributed locally to Sadāśiva of Nerur. It does not attest that he founded it. The 1909 account, which is a devotional life and had every reason to claim a second foundation for him if it knew of one, does not mention Tandoni at all. Nor is there anything else in either source about him founding temples; he is not, in those pages, a builder. A man who owned nothing and stayed nowhere is an odd person to credit with the sculpture of a rock-cut image.

Tandoni is therefore the plainest specimen in this chapter of the difference between a place attested to hold him and a place that came to be identified with him. Both kinds of place are real, and both belong in a chapter about where he is remembered. They are not the same kind of fact, and this edition will not let them become one by being written in the same tone.

Srirangam enters his story once, and not as a place he lived.

The 1909 account tells of an illiterate brahmacārin who followed him everywhere and who wished to see Raṅganātha at Srirangam. He was told to close his eyes, and found himself standing with the sage before Raṅganātha at the Nīrājana. The sage vanished. The man made his own way back to Nerur and found him there in deep meditation, and the people of Nerur would not believe a word of it, saying the yogi had not left their presence throughout those days.

Srirangam in that story is where he was reported to be, which is a different thing from where he was. The same is true of the other towns that come into the accounts by the same road. On Mahāśivarātri and Gokulāṣṭamī, the 1909 account says, people at home watched him while visitors from Benares, Muttra and Rāmeśvaram positively averred that they had seen him in those places on those very days. Neither source says he resided in any of them. They are places named in reports of him, and this chapter keeps them in that column.

Srirangam has one other and quite different connection with him, and it is documentary. The earliest continuous life of him yet found was printed there, at the Śrī Vāṇī Vilāsa Press, in 1909, in front of his own Brahmasūtra Vṛtti. That is the town's firmest claim on him: not that he walked in it, but that it put him into type.

Madurai enters on the same terms.

Children in the village used to call him Father, and on the day of the Vṛṣabhavāhana festival at Madurai they asked him, in frolicsome derision, to take them to see Maheśa going in procession on the Bull. He signed to them to climb on his head and back and shoulders and to shut their eyes. They opened them at Madurai, before the god in procession. Sweetmeats and nuts were supplied in profusion, and they were home again by dawn by the same means, each child telling its parents the next morning and showing the sweets it had not eaten.

That is the whole of Madurai in the two witnesses used here. Later tellings make it more than that and give it as his birthplace, with a family and a childhood name attached. Neither pre-1930 witness says anything of the kind. The 1909 account opens with him already a student at Tiruviśanallūr and never looks behind that; the gazetteer notices him only at the end, at the shrine. Where the sources are silent this edition stays silent, and it does not supply a birthplace that its witnesses do not give.

There is one more place in the sources, and it is a long way outside the map.

Both witnesses say he travelled as far as Turkey, and both hedge it in the same breath. The 1909 account says he is supposed to have travelled even as far as Turkey in Europe. The gazetteer, going over the same ground for a different kind of reader, says he is supposed to have lived two hundred years before and to have travelled as far as Turkey in Europe.

It is worth pausing on the fact that they agree. These two books had nothing to do with each other. One was got up by a devotional press at Srirangam, the other by the Government Press at Madras for the revenue service, and on most things they carry different material. Here they carry the same sentence, in almost the same words, and neither will stand behind it. Supposed to have is doing all the work in both.

So this is at once one of the best attested things said about him and one of the least vouched for, and those are not the same measure. What two independent printings attest is that the claim was in circulation before 1907. What neither attests is the journey. No route is given, no occasion, no year, nobody who saw him there, and nothing in either book connects it to anything else in his life.

A man who was said to be in Benares and Rāmeśvaram on the same afternoon could be said to have been in Turkey, and this chapter has already set out the column those reports belong in. Turkey goes in the same column, at the far end of it. It is printed here because it is in both sources and because a source note that mentions it should not be the first place a reader meets it.

Set out together, the places make a small and coherent country. Two rivers, the Kāverī along its whole length of his life and the Amarāvatī coming down to meet it. An agrahāra in the Tanjore country at one end and a village near Karūr at the other. A stretch of riverbed at Kodumudi. A forest and a lake near Tiruvaraṅgulam, and a palace shrine some miles from them with sand in it. A hill south of Karūr that people came to associate with him. And towns at the edges, Srirangam and Madurai and Benares and Rāmeśvaram, which are in the story because he was said to have been seen in them, not because he ever settled.

He is an avadhūta, one who has shaken everything off, and men of that kind are usually difficult to locate. This one is not. He stayed by water, and the places that hold him are the places the water runs through.