Sri Narayana Guru

Go north from Thiruvananthapuram and the land lifts a little. Paddy in the low ground, coconut and jackfruit on the slopes, water in the ditches and the wells and the air. Somewhere in there is a village called Chempazhanthy, and in the village a house called Vayalvaram, and in that house, in the last century of the princely state of Travancore, a boy was born to Madan Asan and his wife Kuttiyamma.

They called him Narayanan. Everyone called him Nanu.

The year is not agreed, and there is no use pretending otherwise. The Mutt he himself founded gives 28 August 1855. The state of Kerala, in its own public material, gives 28 August 1856. General reference gives 20 August 1856, and 1854 circulates as well. Four dates for one morning. Somebody was there and knew; the knowledge did not survive in a form that agrees with itself.

The family were Ezhavas, and among them were Ayurvedic physicians — people who knew plants and pulses and the inside of the body. His father was a learned man who ran a village school, and was known in the neighbourhood by that: Kudipallikoodam Asan, the schoolhouse teacher. So the boy grew up in a house where texts were ordinary furniture and where children arrived in the morning to be taught.

And he grew up behind walls. In the Travancore of that decade, being an Ezhava was not a fact about ancestry; it was a set of arrangements, and the arrangements were physical. An Ezhava could not enter a temple. On some roads near temples he could not walk at all, and elsewhere he was required to keep a measured distance, so that his approach would not pollute — so that the space his body occupied would not touch the space another body might occupy later. Schooling was closed to most of his community. Government service was closed. None of this was sentiment. It was upkeep, performed daily by people who believed they were maintaining the order of the world.

Hold that in mind, because nothing he did afterwards makes sense without it. He did not spend his life arguing against those walls. He spent it walking through them, slowly, in front of witnesses, and letting everyone watch what happened next — which was nothing. The sky did not fall. That was the argument.

Two things are remembered about the boy, and together they are almost the whole man.

The first is that he loved the temple and he loved to sit still. They gave him a name for it — Nanu Bhaktan, Nanu the devotee — which in a village is not entirely a compliment. It marks a child as odd. He would go to the temple; he would sit; he would come back.

The second is that he would not keep the distance.

His community observed a purification rule: after contact with those ranked below them, one bathed. It was the whole machinery of untouchability in miniature, operated not by Brahmins but by people who were themselves excluded, on people below them again. The boy kept breaking it. He would touch, or eat, or come near, and he would not go and wash, and the household would have to deal with a child who had quietly declined to participate.

Think about what that is. It is not a doctrine. He had no doctrine yet; he was a boy. It is a refusal at the level of the body, arrived at before he had the words for it — and every public act of his life is that same refusal, carried out afterwards with the words, and with witnesses, and on a scale that changed a country.

His mother died when he was about fifteen.

He learned at home first, in his father's school and in the ordinary village way, and then something less ordinary happened: he was sent for Sanskrit.

He went to central Travancore, to study under Raman Pillai Asan — the Vedas, the Upaniṣads, grammar, and the disciplines of argument, which in that tradition are not a side subject but the whole apparatus by which a claim is tested. He read the Tamil devotional poets too, and their cadence stayed with him; you can hear it afterwards in the Malayalam he wrote for singing.

Stop for a moment on how unlikely this was. For a boy of his community to be let near that learning at all was unusual. To take it in and hold it and afterwards turn it on the people who had been guarding it — that was something else again.

He did not acquire it as a grievance. He acquired it as an instrument, and he handled it with enormous care for the rest of his life, which is why his opponents could never dismiss him. He knew their books better than they did. When, decades later, a reformer who wanted images abolished came to argue with him about stone idols, the Guru could answer him out of the deepest end of the tradition and leave him with nothing to say — and did.

Around the age of twenty-one he was married, in the ordinary way, to a woman named Kaliamma.

The marriage did not hold him. He disengaged from it and went, and nothing that remembers the fact remembers what it cost either of them. It is worth not skating over. Somewhere in this story is a young woman in a village whose husband turned out to be a man who could not stay, and she is not a footnote in her own life. The tradition remembers him. It has kept almost nothing of her.

In 1881 he came back, because his father was ill.

And while he was home he did what the house he grew up in had always done: he started a school and taught in it. That is the part most easily passed over, and it should not be, because the name stuck. Asan means teacher. Before he was a guru to anybody, before there was a movement or an organisation or a hill, he was Nanu Asan, a schoolmaster standing in front of children with something to explain.

He never really stopped being that. Decades later, with land and money and a following, what he mostly built was schools.

Then he left properly, and for a long time.

What he did in those years is remembered rather than documented, and the honest word for most of it is remembered. He walked through Kerala and into the Tamil country. There was solitude, and austerity, and the kind of sitting that does not photograph. It is simply not the sort of thing that leaves a receipt.

Two meetings from that time did leave a mark.

He met Chattampi Swamikal — a formidable, independent Malayali teacher and reformer who owed nothing to anybody — and through him Thycaud Ayyavu Swamikal, from whom he learned yoga and meditation.

Neither man made him a disciple in the ordinary sense. They seem rather to have recognised him, and handed him what they had. That is worth noticing about a life so full of teaching: at the start of it, nobody organised him. He was passed along between free men who saw what he was and gave him tools.

Then he went up Maruthvamala, a hill in the far south, and into a cave the tradition calls Pillathadam, and stayed.

Eight years, by the usual account.

There is nothing to narrate. That is the point of it, and it is the part of his life that a hurried telling always skips, because a biographer wants incident and there is none: a man sitting in a cave on a hill for the better part of a decade, in the company of whatever lives on a hill. The accounts of the period are frank about the conditions — forest, snakes, animals, weather. No congregation. No correspondence. No project.

Whatever happened there, he came down changed, and what he came down with is the only thing in this book that cannot be sourced, because it never took the form of an event.

Somewhere in his writing life — we do not know when — he set down five short Sanskrit verses on what it is like when the questions stop. They read like a man describing weather he has been out in:

What, pray, is your country? What your caste? What your calling? How many your years? — the man in whom such disputing has come to rest: his alone is the peace.

Come. Go. Do not go. Enter. Where, then, are you going? — the man in whom such disputing has come to rest: his alone is the peace.

Where will you go? When did you arrive? Where do you come from? Who, after all, are you? — the man in whom such disputing has come to rest: his alone is the peace.

— Nirvṛti Pañcakam, verses 1 to 3

Read that first line again with the walls of his childhood in view. What is your caste? is not, in Travancore in the 1880s, an idle question. It is the question at every gate, and the answer determines which road you may walk on. And here it is, filed in among the other restless questions — where are you going, when did you arrive, who after all are you — as one more piece of noise that comes to rest in a man who has stopped needing an answer.

He is not dodging the question. He has walked out from under the place where it has purchase.

He came back without a following. He came back without a programme, without a platform, and without anything you could put in a newspaper.

He was in his early thirties, he had no position, and his community had no rights. What he had was a conviction, which he would put into a hundred Malayalam verses years later, that whatever is doing the knowing inside a person is not fenced inside them:

Draw the five senses inward, and again and again fall down, bow low and speak the word — to that mould in which the knower, risen higher than knowing itself, blazes both within his own form and outside it.

— Ātmōpadēśa Śatakam, verse 1

Knowing, and the thing known, and the man's own knowing are only one primal radiance. Let the gaps between things fall away; sink into that knowing which is the Great and shines, and be that alone.

— verse 4

Let the gaps between things fall away. Written by a man from a society built entirely out of gaps — gaps between castes, gaps you had to keep on a road, gaps between who might enter a building and who might not.

He did not announce any of this. He went looking for a river.

He found one at Aruvippuram, where the Neyyar runs over rock, and he settled there — in the forest, by the accounts, among animals and reptiles, in a cave near the water. For a while he was simply a hermit by a river whom people had begun to notice.

Then came Shivaratri, the night of Śiva, in 1888.

He went into the river. He brought up a stone. He set it on a raised rock platform, and he consecrated it as a Śiva.

Slow down here, because the simplicity is the point. There was no manifesto. There was a man standing in a river in the dark, lifting a stone out of the water, and a small number of people watching him do it. What made it an earthquake was who was doing it.

Consecration was priestly work. Priestly work was closed to his birth — closed absolutely, as a matter of the order of the world, in the same way and by the same logic that closed the roads. A man like him could not make a god. He had no right to do what he was doing, everybody present understood that immediately, and he did it anyway, unhurriedly, with the correct words, because he happened to be one of the best-trained Sanskritists in the district.

That is the whole of his method, arriving fully formed on the first night. Not a protest against the rule. The performance of the thing the rule forbade, done properly, in public, by someone who could not be told he had done it wrong.

The challenge came, as it had to. What right had he to consecrate a Śiva?

He is remembered to have answered that this one was the Ezhava Śiva.

You can hear several things in that at once, which is why it has lasted well over a century. It is a joke. It is a concession that sounds like a surrender and works like a blade: very well — if God must be sorted by caste, then here is ours, and what will you do about it? And underneath the joke is the flat proposition that the sorting was never real; that a stone out of a river becomes holy by consecration, and not by the pedigree of the hand that lifts it.

He let the joke carry the argument, which is a kind of mercy towards his opponents. He did not humiliate anybody. He simply went on — and he went on consecrating, for the next forty years, in something like forty-five places across Kerala and the Tamil country, until the thing he had done once in the dark had been done so many times, so calmly, in so many towns, that it could no longer be treated as an outrage.

On the shrine at Aruvippuram he had words put up. In Malayalam they run:

ജാതിഭേദം മതദ്വേഷം ഏതുമില്ലാതെ സർവ്വരും സോദരത്വേന വാഴുന്ന മാതൃകാസ്ഥാനമാണിത്

And in English:

Without difference of caste or hatred of creed, all here live in brotherhood: this is a model place.

Seven words of Malayalam, on a small shrine, by a river, in a corner of a princely state. People have been quoting them ever since, usually without knowing where they were first put up, which is about the best thing that can happen to a sentence.

Notice what it does not do. It does not denounce anybody. It does not name an enemy, or a caste, or a reform, or a law that ought to be passed. It makes a description — this is a model place — and lets the description do the work. A model of what? Of somewhere that already exists, evidently, since here it is.

The sentence does not demand a new world. It reports one, and invites you in, and leaves you to notice that you have just walked past a wall.

People began to come, and one of the first was not the kind of man anybody would have predicted.

Sivalingadasa Swami came from an orthodox Nair family — that is, from above the wall — and he found the Guru at Aruvippuram and stayed, and is remembered as his first disciple. That pattern repeats for the rest of the life and it is one of the most striking things about it. The reformer of a wronged community kept attracting people from every side of the grievance: Nairs, Brahmins, Muslims, a European, at least one declared atheist. He was never running a faction. People seem to have worked that out quickly when they were in the room with him.

The shrine needed running, so the devotees at Aruvippuram formed an association to run it — a temple committee: minutes, subscriptions, repairs. (The year is usually given as 1889; it is not corroborated here.) It is the least romantic development in this book and one of the most consequential, because it is the first time his authority is turned into an institution, and everything later — the Yogam, the schools, the mutts, the pilgrimage — is that same move made larger.

He seems to have understood from very early on that a truth with nobody to keep it has a short life.

He went on consecrating for decades — Thrissur, Kannur, Thalassery, Kozhikode, Anchuthengu, Mangalore, and across the water in Sri Lanka, some forty-five places in all — and as the years went on, what he put inside began to change.

In one he set a mirror. Whoever came to look at God looked at himself.

In another, a lamp.

In another, a slab of stone with four words cut into it: truth, duty, compassion, love.

In one, by report, a piece of European sculpture. In one, a Śiva to whom nothing killed was to be offered.

It would be easy to file all this as iconoclasm, and it is not. He was not taking anything away from the people who came, and he never scolded them for coming. These were working temples, with worshippers in them, and he furnished them tenderly. What he was doing was making an argument in the one grammar the whole country read fluently — the grammar of the sanctum, the lamp, the circling of the shrine, the offered flower — and the argument was that the thing they had been kept out of had never been anywhere else.

He had already put it in verse:

The man who gathers the flower of his own mind and makes with it the worship of the Great Lord need do no other work at all; and if he does not do that, but gathers forest flowers, or sits repeating the formula of māyā, the illusion will pass.

— Ātmōpadēśa Śatakam, verse 29

Gather the flower of your own mind. Not instead of coming to the temple — he built the temples. But if you have walked all this way and brought only flowers, you have brought the wrong basket.

A mirror in the sanctum says the same thing to somebody who will never read a verse. It is the kindest possible way to make a hard point, and it is entirely characteristic: he would rather rearrange a room than correct a person.

Not everyone approved from the other direction either.

Vagbhatananda was a reformer who thought idols were the problem and that installing more of them, even in the name of the excluded, was a step backwards. He came to put that to the Guru.

The Guru's answer went, in substance: all stones are Śiva. Śiva means emptiness, the attributeless Absolute. Through a stone, a person should be capable of seeing Śiva — and stones, soil, plants and flowers are all one thing.

Vagbhatananda is remembered to have said: I lay my words at your feet; I have no reply.

It is a small exchange and it settles a great deal. The mirror in the sanctum was never a step away from the stone; it was the same point, made to a different visitor. If everything is one, then a stone will do, and so will a mirror, and so will a lamp, and so will four words on a slab — and the reformer who wants the stones removed has conceded the very premise he came to attack, which is that some objects are closer to God than others.

His central philosophical work is a hundred Malayalam verses called the Ātmōpadēśa Śatakam — a hundred verses of counsel to the Self, or counsel to oneself; the Malayalam allows both and means both. It is commonly dated to 1897, though that dating has not been checked here against a first edition.

It is not a treatise. Nothing is proved in a straight line, and if you read it looking for an argument in nine steps you will come away thinking it repeats itself. It does repeat itself — the way a man walking round a large object repeats himself. A hundred verses, a hundred approaches, one thing.

It opens with an instruction and a posture, which we have already heard, and then takes its subject apart with real patience. The senses, the body, the worlds we know by touching them: all of it, he says, is the holy form of one sun risen in open space (verse 2). He watches the waking state and the sleeping state hand each other back and forth, and asks, reasonably, who is present for both:

I must wake; now I must sleep; I must eat my food; I must embrace — since it is in this manner that the many notions come crowding in, who is it that wakes? What is that one changeless form?

— verse 6

He has jokes, though they are dry. Two men in the dark: one says who is it that sits there? Speak! and the other, wanting to know exactly the same thing, says and who are you? To both of these, he notes, the answer is one (verse 10). He has a marvellous flat refusal of a certain kind of gloom — the 'I' is not darkness, he says; if it were darkness we should be blind and could not sit here saying I, I; since we plainly do know it, say so, and say it to everyone, so that they may know (verse 18).

And after a hundred verses of turning the one object over, he puts the book down like this:

Not that, not this, not any real thing: 'I am being, consciousness, deathlessness' — grow clear in that and be steady; let the holding of 'real' and 'unreal' fall away; and as sat–oṃ, softly, softly, sink down and rest.

— verse 100

Softly, softly. A hundred verses of the hardest thinking he could do, and the last direction is to stop pushing.

In the middle of that hundred there is a run of verses that changes everything, and it is where his philosophy and his life turn out to be the same object seen from two sides.

He has been arguing that what we love is not many things but one thing wearing many faces. Then:

What is dear is of one kind only; yet 'this is my dear, that yours, that another's' — so, made many, the whirl of delusion comes upon whatever is loved. Know that one's own dearness is the other's dearness.

— verse 21

And then he does something a great many contemplatives never do. He converts it into a rule you could act on tomorrow morning:

What is dear to another is my own dear; one's own dearness is the other's dearness — so it stands. By that rule, the act that gives a man his good must come to be the cause of another's joy.

— verse 22

Read it slowly, because it is not the usual exhortation. He is not saying be kind. He is saying that, given what dearness actually is, an act which secures my good while damaging yours has made a mistake about the world — a factual mistake, like a sum that does not come out. And he is unsparing about the other side of it:

A work that joins good for one man to grief for another is an enemy of the Self — consider that. Those who deal out great anguish to another fall into a burning sea of hell, and there they burn.

— verse 25

An enemy of the Self. Not a sin against a commandment. Not bad manners. An act at war with what you are.

He also knows what the mean life looks like from inside, and draws it in one unkind image:

For another's sake, day and night, the merciful man puts out his effort, having left all meanness behind; the mean man lies face down and does the work of his own defeat, and for himself alone.

— verse 23

This is the hinge of the whole life. A man who believes this about the structure of reality cannot then look at a road an Ezhava may not walk on and call it somebody else's business. The temples, the schools, the Yogam, the labour union, Vaikom, the hall at Aluva — all of it is verse 22 carried out of the book and into Travancore.

The youngest of the disciples in whom he took a close personal interest was Dr Palpu's second son. The Guru himself had given the boy his name when he was born: Natarajan. He grew up to be Nataraja Guru, a philosopher in his own right and the founder of a gurukula, and the one who did most to carry the teaching into English.

Before Natarajan took sannyāsa, there was a conversation. It is four lines long and it is the best short account of his teaching that exists.

Have you seen water?

Yes.

Do you know that a wave is also water?

I know.

Then there is nothing new to know. Vedanta is so.

That is all of it. Not a system to be mastered; a single noticing, available to anybody who has stood next to the sea. And it is exactly what he had been writing for years:

Abiding in the open space one sees the turning here; and if one considers the five powers that begin with space, one must come to be undivided from it — as the line of waves that rises in the ocean is undivided from the sea.

— Ātmōpadēśa Śatakam, verse 3

In one substance there are many, and in many substances one meaning — by such an understanding all this, being undivided, subsides into knowing; and not everyone knows it, for it lies deeply hidden.

— verse 73

Dust is countless in one earth, and one earth is held within that dust; between them there is no difference of being …

— verse 74

And in the verse where he gathers the whole image up:

Nature is the water, the body the foam, the Self the sea; and what tosses about crying 'I, I' is the net of waves. All the knowing borne in the flower of the heart is the pearl; and what he himself drinks here is surely the deathless.

— verse 75

The wave is not a smaller thing than the sea, and it is not a different substance from the sea, and it does not have to become the sea, and it cannot be kept out of the sea by anybody. Put that beside a rule about which men may use which road, and the rule simply stops making sense.

He made the same argument in Malayalam twice more, in two short works that belong side by side. One is called the Advaita Dīpikā, the lamp of non-duality. The other is called simply Arivu — Knowing.

The Advaita Dīpikā is nineteen verses, and it works almost entirely by things a villager could hold in his hand. It starts by conceding everything to the world, and then quietly removes the floor:

A thousand names; a thousand appearings; and in among them a thousand objects of sense, which make up this world. Consider it: all this is true only until the dream wakes; and the moment a man wakes, it is he himself, the waker, entire.

— Advaita Dīpikā, verse 1

Then he takes an ordinary piece of cloth apart:

The cloth is the thread; the thread is the cotton; and the cotton is a gathering of the first elements. Consider it and it runs this way throughout: it shines out from awareness, like water on a desert floor; awareness is the last limit of it, and nothing more.

— verse 3

And he takes the whole world apart in the same way, and is frankly delighted by what happens:

Separate the parts, each one of them, take the whole apart and set them aside, and the world is not there. It is a wonder! And these parts that were set aside, if you go through them in the same way, then the whole of it is not: there is only his own awareness.

— verse 13

It is a wonder. That is not the sentence of a man grinding out a doctrine. That is somebody who has just looked at something astonishing and said so.

The poem also holds the image the whole tradition runs on, and holds it plainly:

'It is' and 'it is not' — the unreal and the real change places, and the two of them are appearances, and the nature of both is a beginningless dark. Search the two of them out and the unreal is not there; there is no snake in the piece of rope; what is there is rope and nothing else.

— verse 6

And he ends it, after all that, on the most modest possible note — the eye, which cannot do anything at all by itself:

The eye sees here when it is opened; close it and the man is blind — and this because the knowing that dwells within does not come out here. Knowledge does not come out by itself: the eye is needed for it to come, as brightness is needed for the eye.

— verse 19

Arivu is the other one, and it is stranger. Fifteen short verses that circle a single Malayalam word — aṟivu, knowing — and will not let go of it. The word opens half the lines in the poem: the first and the third of every verse, thirty times over. Read aloud it sounds like someone turning an object over and over in the light, and it is closer to mathematics than to a hymn:

This that is known is not something apart: search it out, and it turns into knowing. Because in this, knowing is the one thing, there is nowhere anything else at all that is without knowing.

— Arivu, verse 1

Staying within knowing, it does not perish. If it is knowing, where is it to climb down to? One does not know knowing; at the very moment of knowing, the two have become one.

— verse 5

Knowing has no measure. Whatever can be known, and the knowing itself, shine out together. Just as the dream that rises in knowing is here made of knowing — in the very same way, everything over there.

— verse 3

This is the man who put a mirror in a temple, doing the same thing with words.

It should be said plainly, because the reformer in him tends to eclipse the philosopher: he was a formidable philosopher, and he could work in Sanskrit at full strength.

The Brahmavidyā Pañcakam is five dense Sanskrit verses in the oldest shape there is — a pupil asks, a teacher answers. The first verse gets the pupil ready and then lets him speak, and the question he asks is the only one worth the trouble:

By discriminating the eternal from the passing, having come wholly to detachment, let the true and learned one here — adorned with the six, calm and the rest — become in this world a seeker of liberation; and then let him ask the best of the knowers of Brahman, a teacher made gracious by prostration and service and the like: 'Who am I? Whence is this world? Speak, my master, O Lord!'

— verse 1

The answer begins in the second verse, and it begins by clearing the table:

You indeed are Brahman: not the senses, not the mind, not the intellect, not the thinking faculty, not the body, the breath, the I-making — nor anything else unreal that ignorance has fashioned upon your own Self. This whole world, being a thing seen, is inert; it is nothing beyond you, it is not born of another, it does not shine of itself. Look closely: it has the look of a mirage.

— verse 2

And it ends by sending the pupil away, unburdened, with the work done:

'Pure knowing; I am Brahman; that thou art; this Self is Brahman' — singing so, with a mind utterly stilled, go your way, O brāhmaṇa, from the dawn of the knowledge of Brahman. Where then is your karma already begun, where the stored, where the coming? Karma too is unreal, laid over you; and you are being and consciousness only, one, all-pervading.

— verse 5

Go your way. The teaching finishes by releasing the student, which is not how most institutions behave.

He could also argue like a logician when he chose to, and there are three short Sanskrit verses — the Ślōkatrayī — in which he does exactly that, taking apart the claim that we ever perceive a thing over and above its properties. They are as dry as a seminar and as sharp as one:

Since there is no contact with it, there is no perceiving of property and property-bearer; and since their going together was never established, whence can any inference of the property-bearer come?

— verse 3

The same man wrote softly, softly, sink down and rest. It is the range that is remarkable.

His largest philosophical work is in Sanskrit, and it is built like a building.

The Darśanamālā — a garland of visions, or of ways of seeing — is a hundred verses in ten sets of ten, and each ten is a darśana, a whole way of looking. They run in order: the laying-on, the taking-back, unreality, māyā, the shining, work, knowledge, devotion, yoga, and extinction. You can feel the architecture as you read: the first ten build the world up with great generosity, the second ten take it apart, and the remaining eight walk through everything a person actually does with a life.

The first verse builds:

In the beginning this world was the unreal only, and like a dream; and then the Supreme Lord brought the whole of it forth by an act of will and nothing besides.

— Darśanamālā, first darśana, verse 1

and the tenth verse of that first ten refuses, beautifully, to let the Lord belong to anybody:

He out of whom this world came forth, as the banyan comes out of its seed — he is Brahmā, he is Śiva, he is Viṣṇu; he is the supreme; and every one of them is he.

— first darśana, verse 10

Then the second darśana takes it all back, and closes with the old Upaniṣadic warning:

For all of this is being, consciousness, bliss; here there is not any manifoldness at all. Whoever sees it here as though it were many goes from death to death.

— second darśana, verse 10

And at the close of the third darśana, among verses on how the unreal shines out as though it were true, comes a line that ought to stop any reader who knows where this life began:

One thing is true, and there is no second; the untrue shines out as though it were true. The stone itself is the Śiva-liṅga; the thing the craftsman made is not a second thing.

— third darśana, verse 10

He waded into the Neyyar in the dark and lifted a stone out of the water and consecrated it, and men with the right to ask demanded to know where he got the authority. He is not writing about Aruvippuram here — the verse is doing philosophical work of its own, about the real and the apparent — but read it with that night in mind and it is very hard to unhear. The stone itself is the Śiva-liṅga. There was never a second thing there for a craftsman to make or a priest to license. On that reading, the defence of what he did in the river is not a legal argument about caste at all. It is a metaphysics.

The sixth darśana, on work, contains one of the most companionable things he ever wrote — a verse that simply watches the world going about its business:

Fire burns, wind blows, the cloud rains down; being the self of earth it bears, and being one it carries — the river.

— sixth darśana, verse 6

And the hundredth verse, at the end of everything, is four lines long and asks for nothing:

'Brahman is one only, without a second; there is nothing else; there is no doubt of it.' Knowing this, let a man turn back; and he does not turn back to twoness again.

— tenth darśana, verse 10

Then, under it, the two syllables the tradition puts at the close of a finished work: Oṃ tat sat.

The eighth of the ten visions is the one that settles the question this book keeps circling: whether the philosopher and the devotee in him were two people.

They were not, and he says so in a single line.

Devotion is the continuous seeking out of the Self, for the Self is solid bliss. The knower of the Self seeks out the Self, always, with the Self.

— Darśanamālā, eighth darśana, verse 1

That is a definition, and it is doing something unusual. Devotion is not being redefined as philosophy, and philosophy is not being softened into devotion. He is saying that the two describe one act. To seek out the Self continuously is devotion; and since the Self is solid bliss, the seeking is not a discipline endured but a thing anyone would want to do.

He keeps going:

Every one of them meditates upon bliss alone; not one meditates upon sorrow. Meditation that has bliss for its highest object is what is taught here as devotion.

— eighth darśana, verse 3

'Bliss, the Self, Brahman' — all these names are spread out for this one thing alone. He whose understanding is settled in that is renowned as a devotee.

— verse 5

And then, in the middle of a Sanskrit work of Advaita, he says something about married people:

The wife worships her husband, and the husband his wife — and not only they: every one of them worships his own bliss, standing there in the object.

— verse 7

It could be read coldly, as though love were only self-interest in disguise. Read it the other way — the way the rest of the work insists — and it is the opposite. What you love in the person in front of you is not a separate thing from what you are. The bliss you are reaching for in them is the bliss you already are. That is not a reduction of love. It is the reason love is possible at all.

And having gone that far, he brings the whole darśana down to earth in its last two verses, and tells you exactly where devotion is to be found:

In the father of the world; in one's own teacher, father and mother; in him who has established what is true, and who walks by that very road —

— verse 9

in the restrainer of what is forbidden; in the doer of good to all — the love that is there is devotion; and it is the highest, set upon the Supreme Self.

— verse 10

The highest devotion, at the end of his most formal work, turns out to be love directed at people. At a teacher. At a mother and father. At someone who has established what is true and then actually walked that road. At someone who does good to everyone.

It is worth noticing that this is a list of the things he himself spent forty years doing, written by a man who was the object of more devotion than he can possibly have wanted — and who, in everything of his that has come down, never once wrote a verse asking for any.

Of everything he wrote, the works on compassion are the ones that most often stop a reader in the middle of the page — partly because they are beautiful, and partly because they refuse to be comfortable.

The Jīvakāruṇya Pañcakam, five verses on kindness to living things, opens by putting the argument and the accusation in the same breath:

Ought we not to say, if we would but consider it, that all are brothers born of one Self? Then what is this killing of living creatures — and the eating of them, with not a trace of pity left?

— verse 1

Then he raises it, and keeps raising it:

The vow of not killing is the highest, and higher by far than that is the vow of not eating. Considered rightly, is this not the marrow of every religion, and what we ought to say, O lovers of the right?

— verse 2

The marrow of every religion. And he blocks the obvious escape route before you reach it:

There would be no killer at all if there were none to eat; so the eating itself is the firm root of it. To eat is to have another kill for you, and from that the guilt grows heavier than from the killing.

— verse 4

You cannot outsource it. The man who pays is not cleaner than the man who cuts; he is further from the act and no further from the deed. This is the same mind that consecrated a Śiva to whom nothing killed would be offered — the argument and the building are one gesture.

The Anukampā Daśakam, ten verses on compassion, comes at it from the side of prayer. It begins by asking for something very small and very difficult:

That not one hurt be brought even upon an ant — give me that compassion always, O source of mercy; and give me, within, a thought that never moves away from your holy form.

— verse 1

And then it says the thing that ought to be carved somewhere:

Grace, love, compassion — for these three the substance is one, and it is this that carries life across. 'He who has grace is the living one' — say this over and over; it is the nine-syllabled word.

— verse 3

He who has grace is the living one. Which makes the reverse a description of a corpse, and he does not flinch from writing it:

Where grace is absent he is bone and skin and sinew only, a body that gives off a stench; he is water running in a desert, a man who is a fragrant flower bearing no fruit.

— verse 4

Then the poem turns, and does something extraordinary. It begins asking who this compassionate one actually is, and it will not settle on one tradition:

Is he the living truth who spoke the highest word and drove the chariot? Is he the sea of pity and forbearance toward every creature? Is he the teacher who made the plain commentary on non-duality — this man who has taken compassion upon himself?

Is he God who put on the shape of a man? Is he dharma wearing a form at once human and divine? Is he the holy son of the Supreme Lord? Is he the merciful Prophet, that pearl among jewels?

— verses 6 and 7

He does not give the names, and he does not have to. The one who spoke the highest word and drove the chariot. The sea of pity towards every creature. The teacher of the plain commentary on non-duality. The holy son of the Supreme Lord. The merciful Prophet. Whatever names a reader supplies, they arrive in a single stretch of Malayalam verse, one after another, and every one of them answers to the same description: this man who has taken compassion upon himself.

And a line he set down outside the ten:

The meaning the precious revelation utters, and the meaning the teacher utters and the sage utters, is of one kind and one only; considered closely, it is the substance of every sacred tradition.

— Anukampā Daśakam, the verse retained separately

Hold on to that. He is going to put it on a wall.

The work of his that most people in Kerala actually know is none of the philosophy. It is ten short verses called the Daiva Daśakam — learned by children, sung in schools and at gatherings, said at the end of the day.

It is a prayer, and the first thing to notice is who it is addressed to. For most of its length: nobody in particular. No Kṛṣṇa, no Devī, no temple, no lineage, no epithet that belongs to one camp and locks the others out. There is only you — and the word does all the work.

O God, hold us in your keeping there, and here do not let us go. You are the helmsman; and for this ocean of becoming your feet are a great steam-borne boat.

— verse 1

A steamship. He wrote that in a country of country boats, and gave God the newest and most powerful thing on the water.

As ocean and wave and wind and depth are one, so let us too, and māyā, and your greatness, and you yourself, come to be within my heart.

— verse 4

There is the wave and the sea again — the whole of what he said to Natarajan, handed to a child to recite before bed.

Giving food and clothing and all the rest without fail, protecting us and making us blessed — you, and you alone, are Lord for us.

— verse 3

You alone are the creating and the creator, and the whole web of things created; you alone, O God, are the very stuff out of which creation is made.

— verse 5

You are the real, the knowledge, the bliss; you yourself are the present, and past and future are nothing apart from you; and the word that is spoken, and speech itself — consider it, and these too are you.

— verse 7

That is his entire non-dualism, folded up small enough for a child to carry.

Near the end, names do arrive, and it is worth seeing which ones:

Hail, Mahādeva; hail, you whose whole care is the rescue of the afflicted; hail, consciousness and bliss; ocean of compassion, hail.

— verse 9

Mahādeva — great god — is a Śaiva name, and Śiva is the deity of his first consecration and of a whole section of his hymns; he is not pretending otherwise, and the verse before this one calls out to Bhagavan. But look at the company he puts the name in. Great god; and the one whose whole business is rescuing the afflicted; and consciousness and bliss; and an ocean of compassion — four hails, and only the first of them belongs to a sect. The rest belong to anybody. He does not empty the tradition he came from. He opens it.

And then the last verse:

In that ever-deepening ocean which is your radiance, let all of us sink; let us dwell there for ever, dwell and dwell in happiness.

— verse 10

Let all of us sink. Not let me. It is how the prayer opened — hold us in your keeping — and it is how he closes it. In all ten verses the singular appears exactly once, in the fourth, and even there it is a request to be let in rather than a claim staked. In a country organised around who may stand where and beside whom, he wrote a prayer in the plural.

On 15 May 1903, at Aruvippuram, the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam was established, with him as its founder-president.

The organising drive behind it was Dr Padmanabhan Palpu's. Palpu was a physician who had been refused government service in Travancore on grounds of caste, and who had taken that refusal and made a life's brief out of it — a man of documents, deputations and long patience. He understood that the Guru's name and the Guru's authority could accomplish what no petition could, and he was right.

The poet Kumaran Asan, the Guru's disciple, is remembered as its first general secretary. He is one of the great Malayalam poets of the century, and it tells you something about the movement that its paperwork was in the hands of a poet.

The watchwords were plain enough to paint on a wall: freedom through education, strength through organisation. Later, prosperity through industry was added to them.

The Yogam did unglamorous, durable things. It built schools. It managed temples. It pressed petitions and filed cases. It put money into trades and pushed people towards enterprise and out of hereditary occupation.

And there is an obvious tension in it, which he felt. Here was a body organised around one community, headed by a man whose entire teaching was that the community had no ultimate standing whatever. He never resolved that tension by pretending it was not there. He worked through the instrument that existed, in the country that existed, for the people who were actually in front of him — and he went on saying, publicly and to anyone who asked, that he belonged to no particular caste and no particular religion.

He let both things stand at once: the organisation a wronged community needed, and the flat statement that the category it was organised around did not finally hold. That is not inconsistency. It is what verse 22 looks like when it has to be carried out by committee.

In 1905 he had an exhibition organised at Kollam — of industry and agriculture.

It is one of the least mystical things any holy man has ever done, and if you want to understand him it may be more useful than a hundred pages of commentary. His people were locked out of school and locked into hereditary trades. So: a fair. Machines, crops, methods, produce, the things that make a living better. Come and look at what can be done.

The motto of the enterprise, and of much that followed, ran: enlightenment through education, strength through organisation, prosperity through industry.

He is often described, correctly, as a mystic and a philosopher of non-duality. He was also a man who would put on a trade fair, and who thought a better plough was a spiritual matter, because a hungry man kept ignorant is a wave being told it is not the sea.

He settled at Sivagiri, near Varkala, in 1904: a hill a little back from the sea, with the coast below it. It became the centre of everything for the rest of his life. It is where he died, and where people still walk up in their thousands.

Almost at once he opened a school there for the children of the excluded castes, and taught them free, whoever they were.

Then, in 1912, he consecrated the Sarada Mutt on the hill — a temple to Śāradā, the goddess of learning. It had taken seven years to build.

Think about what that does. He had spent twenty-four years consecrating shrines in defiance of the rule that a man of his birth could not consecrate anything. He could have put anything at all in this one. He put learning. And he did it for a community that had been kept out of schools within living memory, in a country where literacy and caste had been carefully braided together — so that anyone who had ever been turned back at a school gate could work out the meaning without being told a word of it.

Two things then stood on the same hill: a temple to learning, and a school. He seems never to have regarded them as two kinds of activity. A temple and a school were the same piece of work, done twice, and if you had asked him which of the two was the religious one he might not have understood the question.

Three days after the goddess of learning was installed, he accepted a sannyāsa disciple who had first seen him at a temple consecration in Thalassery, bowed at his feet on the spot, and never really left. He took the name Bodhananda.

On 28 August 1921, by his own Mutt's record, he declared the sentence he is most quoted for.

One caste, one religion, one God for man.

And in the fuller form in which it is remembered, with the instruction attached: do not ask, do not say, do not think of caste.

It reads easily as a pious generality. It is not one. Read the second half again — it is not an aspiration, it is a rule of conduct with three clauses, and the third is the hard one. Do not ask a person's caste; that is manners. Do not state it; that is discipline. Do not think it: that is the whole of the Ātmōpadēśa Śatakam compressed into four words, because a man who has actually stopped seeing gaps between things has nothing left to think it with.

He meant the first half as a statement of fact about human beings — one species, one kind, one origin — and he followed it where it led. Asked what caste he was, he said publicly that he belonged to no particular caste and no particular religion. Not as modesty. As a description, offered by a man who had stopped needing an answer to the question at the gate.

Among the disciples was a young rationalist called Ayyappan, who came to be known as Sahodaran — brother — for what he did about eating.

In Kerala, who ate with whom was a load-bearing wall of the whole structure. Sharing a meal across caste lines was not a gesture; it was a breach, and it was punished socially. Ayyappan organised such a meal, and was reviled for it, and went on doing it.

He also did something else. He took the Guru's sentence and sharpened it past where the Guru had left it:

No caste, no religion, no God for man.

Not one. None. It is a rationalist's version, and it goes somewhere the Guru had not gone, and people ran to him with it, expecting him to be wounded or at least to correct the record.

He said: Ayyappan is right.

Three words, and they tell you almost everything about what kind of teacher he was. He did not defend his own formula. He did not explain that he had meant something subtler. He looked at what a younger man had done with his sentence, saw that it went in the same direction and further, and said so — about a version of his own teaching that had taken the God out of it.

A man who can say Ayyappan is right is not running a doctrine. He is pointing at something, and he does not mind who else points at it, or with what hand.

The company that gathered round him is the best evidence of what he was, because you could not have assembled it on purpose.

Sivalingadasa Swami came from an orthodox Nair family and was the first of the renunciates.

Bodhananda saw him at Thalassery and bowed and stayed.

Nataraja Guru was Dr Palpu's son, named by the Guru at birth, and became the philosopher of the line.

Kumaran Asan was one of the great poets in the language. T. K. Madhavan took the fight for temple entry into the Travancore assembly as early as 1918. Muloor S. Padmanabha Panicker wrote verse against the road bans. C. Krishnan, C. V. Kunhiraman, Moorkoth Kumaran, C. Kesavan — editors, lawyers, agitators, men who ran newspapers and movements.

And then the ones nobody would have predicted.

Abdul Khader was a Muslim from near Kannur who came, by the account, wanting to see God, and was shown something; he went on to become a Sufi mystic remembered as Icha Mastan, and wrote devotional poems of his own.

Another Khader, met on a visit to Sri Lanka, was told plainly by the Guru that he did not need to change his religion. When the man later turned up dressed as a Hindu ascetic, the Guru told him again: being a Muslim was perfectly all right.

Ernest Kirk was a European. He was ordained — and instead of the ochre robe, the Guru had him given a coat, trousers, shoes and a tie, and let him keep his own name, and told him to remain inside his own culture while he did the work. Think about how unusual that is. The traffic of that century went almost entirely the other way: the foreigner arrives, and is renamed, and re-robed, and absorbed. Here the direction reverses. Keep your name. Keep your clothes. Keep your culture. Do the work. He simply declined to collect anybody.

Anantha Shenoy was a Brahmin and a Gandhian, and became Swami Ananda Theerthan, remembered as the last disciple he initiated.

And Raman Muthalali was an atheist. He had been at a temple consecration, and he asked the Guru for a prayer that a man who did not believe in a god could say.

So the Guru wrote him one. Among his works there is a prose prayer that answers exactly to the description — it is short, and there is not a single deity in it anywhere — and whether or not it is the very piece composed that day, it is what he was prepared to hand a man who did not believe. It opens like a proposition:

Everything that is seen has these three forms — the gross, the subtle and the causal — and it comes into being out of the Supreme Self and dissolves back into that same Self. Therefore there is nothing whatever other than the Supreme Self. Whichever form of that Supreme Self — the Self that puts an end to every wrong, that burns it away — will shine clear in my understanding and carry me along the good road: that divine form of the Supreme Self, the form that is to be meditated upon, I meditate upon.

— Gadyaprārthana

Then it turns and speaks:

O Supreme Self! Let your grace be upon me, so that I may meditate upon you in this way without a break, and so that your supreme bliss may be mine.

And then it goes somewhere no ordinary prayer goes, and tells the man who does not believe exactly what he already suspects about the world — and does not stop there:

O God! Nothing the eye sees is lasting. The body too has no standing, like a bubble on water. Of any of it there is nothing to be said except that it is the same as a dream. We are not the body; we are knowing. And if all of this should go, we shall still be here, shining out exactly so. Birth, death, poverty, illness, fear — not one of them touches us. […] Let your grace be upon me, so that my stay in this world may pass without hardship, and so that at the end I may come to your supreme station.

We are not the body; we are knowing. That is the whole of the Ātmōpadēśa Śatakam, handed to an unbeliever as a consolation.

He was asked for a prayer without a god in it, by a man who did not believe, and he sat down and wrote one. Nobody was excommunicated. Nobody was argued with. A man had a genuine difficulty and was given something usable — and what he was given was not a watered-down version of the teaching. It was the teaching, with the names left off.

At Aluva, on the Periyar, he founded the Advaita Ashram, and he meant the name literally. Not an ashram of his community. Not an ashram of a god. An establishment organised around non-duality itself — around the proposition that there is not finally more than one of anything — and therefore around no caste and no creed in particular. (The year is usually given as 1913; that has not been corroborated here, so it is offered as the usual report rather than as a fact.)

Then, there, he did the thing that ought to be more famous than it is. He convened a conference of all religions — the first of its kind in India — and scholars of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam came and sat together in one hall. (It met in March 1924, at Śivarātri.)

He had its purpose written up where everyone coming in would read it:

We meet here not to argue and win, but to know and to let know.

That is the whole conference in one line, and it is not mildness. It is a technical instruction, and he had spent thirty-five years earning the right to give it. Four verses from the hundred:

Without pausing to see that the essence of many faiths is one, the ignorant of the world — like the blind men around the elephant — bring out reasons of every kind and toss about. Look at that, and instead of tossing, settle down.

— Ātmōpadēśa Śatakam, verse 44

One faith is contemptible to another; the mould that one sets out falls short by the other's reckoning. On this earth the secret of them is one alone — and know too that the measure of what we know is itself a whirl.

— verse 45

To win by fighting is not possible; no one faith ever ends its quarrel with another. Let there be this understanding: the man who disputes another's faith, never considering this, fights to no purpose and perishes.

— verse 46

Whatever everyone says is said so that it may become one faith; but not one of the disputants considers it. The learned who have left off disputing other men's faiths — they know the whole secret of it here.

— verse 47

Fights to no purpose and perishes. He is not saying that religious difference does not matter, and he is not saying that the doctrines are secretly identical; he was far too good a philosopher for anything so loose. He is saying that the quarrel cannot be won, that everyone inside it is reaching for the same thing, and that the learning consists precisely in putting the quarrel down.

Then he built a hall and got them to do it.

A man who had been kept out of temples by an argument about purity spent his old age convening the people who ran the arguments, and asking them to come and not argue. And the sentence he had written years earlier in the Anukampā Daśakam — that the meaning uttered by the revelation and by the teacher and by the sage is of one kind and one only — is, in effect, what he had painted over the door.

On 31 March 1922, on temple ground at Alappuzha, the first organised labour union in Kerala was founded: the Travancore Labour Association.

The workers were in the coir factories and they were being used badly. One of his sannyāsa disciples, Satyavratan, was there at his instruction, and the instruction itself is remembered:

Form a union. Let your strength come from unity and freedom.

He was in his middle sixties, a Vedāntin, the author of a hundred verses on the unreality of the manifold — and he told coir workers to organise.

It is the same sentence as the exhibition at Kollam and the school at Sivagiri, only in industrial dress. If the wave is the sea, then a wave being worked to death in a coir yard is a theological problem. He does not seem to have felt any distance between the two ends of that thought, and the fact that we tend to feel one says more about us than about him.

In 1924 the roads came back.

At Vaikom, the roads around the great temple were closed to men and women of the lower castes. Not the temple — the roads. You could be barred from a public street because of the house you were born in, and the bar was enforced, and everyone had grown up with it.

By the account that is told, the matter was personal. He had himself been stopped on the road to the Vaikom temple by an upper-caste man who had the right to stop him. Two of his disciples, Kumaran Asan and Muloor, wrote poems about it. T. K. Madhavan had already taken temple entry into the assembly. And then the satyagraha opened the question in the most direct way available, which was by walking: people who were forbidden to be on a road went and stood on it, and kept standing on it, and let the country look.

It ran for months. It drew in the whole Indian social-reform movement and became one of its defining episodes. He stood with it. At the end of it three of the roads around the temple were open to everybody; the temple itself would wait another eleven years.

The line from the very beginning runs all the way here. A boy grows up in a country where the ground itself is graded, and refuses, without a word of theory, to bathe after touching the wrong person. A lifetime later, old, revered, at the head of a movement, he is stopped on a road — and there is nothing complicated left to work out.

By his sixties he was no longer a hermit anybody could overlook, and people came up the hill.

Ramana Maharshi received him in 1916, at Tiruvannamalai, as he was returning from Kanchipuram. Two of the most silent men in India in one room, and no record of what was said, which is entirely appropriate.

Among his Sanskrit works there are five verses called the Municaryā Pañcakam, on how a sage actually lives, and the tradition attaches them to that visit. Whether it does so rightly is not settled here; what is certain is that the verses describe a life very like the one he had led in the forest at Aruvippuram, and very like Ramana's on his own hill:

Will the arm not do for a pillow? Will the earth not do for a bed — the earth that carries wrongdoing away, the earth that lies under his own feet? What has the sage to do with any further wealth, once longing has let go of him? By coming through to that thou art, this man enjoys past everything that can be enjoyed.

— Municaryā Pañcakam, verse 1

Sometimes the best of those who speak; sometimes a man holding his tongue. Learned, and going about as though witless. Sometimes settled in one place, and even then risen and gone. Having come by a body that is restless and cut through by time, he keeps without ceasing to the Self's own station, the supreme, undivided awareness.

— verse 2

In his own house, or in the forest, or on the sand along a river, or out in open country — let him live where he will: the mind of the yogin lives in Brahman. Looking upon the whole of this with the Self's own eye, and seeing it for a mirage in a desert, the sage takes his delight in the supreme Brahman, which has no like.

— verse 5

Let him live where he will. By 1916 he had a hill, a mutt, an organisation, a following and a great deal of correspondence, and he wrote that. Whoever those five verses were written for, the man who wrote them had done the eight years in the cave and had not mistaken the difference between the two conditions for a difference in himself.

Rabindranath Tagore came to Sivagiri in November 1922. He was by then the most celebrated writer in Asia, and he had travelled a long way to sit with a Malayali teacher on a hill. Afterwards he said this:

I have never come across one who is spiritually greater than Swami Narayana Guru, or a person who is at par with him in spiritual attainment.

Mahatma Gandhi came on 12 March 1925, in the thick of the Vaikom struggle. They talked, by report, about whether the soul in all beings is one or many. They talked about caste, and about religious freedom, and the Guru pressed the case for education and for wealth as the instruments of deliverance — not for inter-dining and mixed marriage first, but for schools and a living. And Gandhi was shown the children of the lowest castes at Sivagiri reciting prayers and the Upaniṣads, which is an argument that requires no words at all and is very hard to answer.

Vinoba Bhave came that same year.

Consider that conversation with Gandhi for a moment. Two men, one of them the most famous person in India and the other an old teacher on a hill in Travancore, sitting down in the middle of a political campaign about a road — and what they discuss is the arithmetic of the soul. Because for one of them, at least, that was the same subject.

If the soul in all beings is one, the road follows.

Two small stories, because a life told only in milestones misses the man.

A photographer was sent to him. They wanted a likeness for a statue at Thalassery, and the man arrived with his apparatus and set it up.

The Guru asked him: do you know how to take photographs?

And then, having let that sit: can you also capture the rasam of the mango in the photograph? — the taste of it, the essence, the thing that is actually the mango.

It is a joke and it is the Ślōkatrayī in one sentence. You can photograph the properties. You cannot photograph the property-bearer. A camera gets the surfaces and misses the thing, which is precisely his argument against ever supposing we perceive a substance over and above its qualities — and he made it to a nervous man with a tripod, kindly, and then sat for the picture exactly as the photographer had hoped.

The other story is less gentle and just as characteristic. A judge asked him the correct religious method of disposing of the dead.

Crush them in an oil-press, he said. They will make good manure. And then: why? Will it hurt?

He was not being flippant. He burned no bridges with the practice of cremation — he thought it sensible for reasons of cleanliness, and said so. What he would not do was agree that the body left behind is the person, or that a rule about its handling is a holy thing. The dry question at the end — will it hurt? — is the entire teaching delivered as a needle. Will it hurt whom? There is nobody left in there to hurt. You have mistaken the wave for the water.

There is one more in this vein, from a temple consecration at Thalassery. He wanted the lower castes admitted; the managers asked him to wait a varsham, which in Malayalam means both a year and a rain. While they were talking, a rainstorm came down.

A varsham is over, he said. Let us allow all into our temple.

Everybody laughed, and the doors opened. It is the Ezhava Śiva all over again: a man who could always find the joke that was also the argument, and who preferred to win by making a room laugh rather than by making anyone lose.

In 1928, a few months before he died, three disciples came to him with an idea — Vallabhasseri Govindan Vaidyar, Kittan Writer, and Muloor. They wanted a pilgrimage to Sivagiri.

He approved it, and then he told them what it was to be about.

Education. Cleanliness. Devotion. Organisation. Agriculture. Trade. Handicraft. Technical training.

Eight subjects. Look at that list again and notice what it is. It is a development programme. There is one item on it that any other holy man would have put first, and he put it third, between washing and administration. Agriculture is on a pilgrimage. Handicraft is on a pilgrimage. Technical training is on a pilgrimage.

It is entirely of a piece with the rest of him — the village schoolmaster he had once been, the man who put learning in a sanctum, the man who organised a trade fair and told coir workers to form a union. If people were going to walk up a hill in his name, he wanted the walk to be about the things that would actually change a life at the bottom of it.

The accounts differ on when the first one went. His own Mutt records it on 25 December 1933, with five devotees. Another account places it in 1932, setting out from Elavumthitta. Either way the number is the thing worth keeping: a handful of people, walking, a few years after his death — and now a hill covered in pilgrims every year. He approved a pilgrimage with eight subjects on its syllabus and no guarantee that anybody would come.

He had a body, and by his early seventies it was failing.

He was ill through 1927 and 1928, and he was moved about for treatment — Aluva, Thrissur, Palakkad, Madras. They tried everything and everyone: Ayurvedic physicians, allopaths, a course of naturopathy on the banks of the Ashtamudi backwater. Dr Palpu himself — the physician whose refused appointment had built the Yogam — was among the doctors who attended him. So was a European physician. It was, in the end, a bowel complaint and an inflamed prostate, and there was not going to be a good answer.

He kept working. In 1927 he went to Pallathuruthy for the Yogam's anniversary — his last public function. That same year a statue of him was put up at Thalassery while he was still alive, which he cannot have enjoyed and evidently tolerated.

And on 11 January 1928 he founded the Sree Narayana Dharma Sanghom — the order of his sannyāsa disciples, the vessel for the teaching rather than for the community. It was one of the last things he did, and it reads like a man putting his house in order: the Yogam for his people, the Sanghom for the teaching, and the two kept deliberately separate.

He died at Sivagiri on 20 September 1928, at the Sarada Mutt — the temple of the goddess of learning that he had built. He was in his early seventies. His own Mutt's record puts the hour at three in the afternoon, and the accounts say he went in meditation, with those who loved him in the room.

He was laid to rest on the hill.

There is not much to add. He had said what he had to say, at length, in three languages. He had done the things as well as saying them. He had spent the last of his strength on schools and shrines and the stubborn business of getting people to sit in one room.

He left institutions, and institutions have the histories institutions have — some of it fine, some of it a long way from verse 22. That is what happens to a teaching when it is given an office and a bank account.

He left a body of writing in Malayalam, Sanskrit and Tamil — hymns, ethical verses, philosophical poems, translations and prose.

He left a hill in Kerala that people walk up every year, and a prayer that children recite, and a sentence about caste that a state has never quite managed to live up to and has never been able to unsay.

And he left an argument, made in about as many ways as one life allows: in a refusal, as a boy, to go and wash; on a stone in a river at Aruvippuram; in a mirror set where an image should have been; in a school beside a temple; in a trade fair; in a union; in a prayer written for a man who did not believe in God; in a coat and tie given to a European who was told to stay himself; in three words about a young rationalist who had gone further than he had; in a hall at Aluva where people had been asked not to win; and in a hundred verses that end by asking you to let go of this and that and settle, softly, into what is.

The sentence he had cut into the shrine and the first line of the Jīvakāruṇya Pañcakam are the same sentence said twice:

Without difference of caste or hatred of creed, all here live in brotherhood: this is a model place.

Ought we not to say, if we would but consider it, that all are brothers born of one Self? …

We are of one kind. We might live as though we knew it.

Have you seen water? Do you know that a wave is also water? Then there is nothing new to know.

Not that, not this, not any real thing: 'I am being, consciousness, deathlessness' — grow clear in that and be steady; let the holding of 'real' and 'unreal' fall away; and as sat–oṃ, softly, softly, sink down and rest.

— Ātmōpadēśa Śatakam, verse 100