Yādavaprakāśa

This life goes back to the years before Iḷaiyāzhvār became an ascetic, to the teacher he studied under and left. At Tiruppuṭkuzhi, near Perumāḷ Kōyil, the Lord's town of Kāñcī, there was an ascetic called Yādavaprakāśa. He carried the single staff, the ekadaṇḍa, and he held the Māyāvāda, the teaching that the world is māyā. He was teaching Vedānta there, the Vedānta that the account calls the pūrvapakṣa, the opponent's side.

Iḷaiyāzhvār had entered the householder's life by then. He heard of this teacher, went to Tiruppuṭkuzhi, and sat down among the listeners as one of them, and studied Vedānta.

Another young man came to that school. He was Govinda, the son of Kamalanayana Bhaṭṭar of Mazhalaimaṅgalam, whom Tirumalai Nambi had named at his birth. He had studied all the śāstras, and when he heard that Iḷaiyāzhvār was studying under Yādavaprakāśa, he came there with great longing and began to study Vedānta too. This Govinda is not the Govinda Jīyar who comes later in this life. He is the man the tradition later calls Embār, and his own life tells his story.

The account kept at Śrīraṅgam about the temple there says only that Iḷaiyāzhvār was pursuing his studies under Yādavaprakāśa at Perumāḷ Kōyil.

One day Yādavaprakāśa came to the text of the Upaniṣad that says, "Brahman is truth, knowledge, the infinite." He gave it a meaning Iḷaiyāzhvār could not accept. He explained it with an image of horns: these three words fit Brahman, he said, only in the way that broken horns, no horns and full horns might all be joined in a single individual. The letter that says what kind of individual cannot be read with certainty, though a cow is what one would expect.

Iḷaiyāzhvār rejected it. "By the word truth," he said, "the text sets aside what lasts only a moment. By the word knowledge it sets aside what is not conscious. By the word infinite it sets aside what is limited. Brahman is other than all that is conscious and all that is not, and it is eternal."

Yādavaprakāśa only said, "Huṃ."

Another day Iḷaiyāzhvār was rubbing oil into his teacher's body. As he worked, Yādavaprakāśa explained another text, the one that says, "His two eyes are like a lotus of kapyāsa." The meaning he gave was an unworthy one. The account does not repeat it.

Iḷaiyāzhvār heard it and grief rose in him. His tears fell on Yādavaprakāśa's thigh, and they burned it as if fire had touched it.

Yādavaprakāśa started. He looked up at his face. "Why has grief come to you?"

Iḷaiyāzhvār gave him the construction. "Kapi is the sun, because it drinks water. Āsa is a seat, from the root that means to sit. So it means: like a lotus whose seat is the sun. When I heard a meaning that is not true, it became grief."

When the story was told later at Śrīraṅgam, Iḷaiyāzhvār's words were remembered this way: that the holy eyes of the Supreme Person are like a lotus that has just opened at the sight of the sun.

Yādavaprakāśa grew angry. "If you will listen as I say, stay and study. Otherwise, leave."

Iḷaiyāzhvār was troubled in his mind, and he kept away from the lessons.

Then Yādavaprakāśa called together, in private, those of his disciples who were of his mind.

"You have all accepted the meaning I gave," he said. "Iḷaiyāzhvāṉ alone stands against me and argues on the other side. Through him our way of non-duality will dwindle. What is the means by which he may die?"

They named many ways it could be done. He turned each one down.

"Every one of those ways brings blame and sin," he said. "For it to come about as we intend without any of that following, what I have in mind is to bring about his death at Maṇikarṇikā."

All of them said it was well thought, and they agreed together. As Duryodhana once plotted against Dharmaputra in the house of lac, so they plotted in secret.

Then they called Iḷaiyāzhvār and spoke him fair. "Without you, something seems wanting to us. Do not be angry. Carry on with the text without a break."

So they drew him back in.

One day they set out on a pilgrimage to the Gaṅgā. On the road, at every halting place, they saw to it that Iḷaiyāzhvār and Govinda Bhaṭṭar were never together.

In the Vindhya country the two of them came to stand together for a moment at the bank of a pool, to touch water for their rites. Govinda Bhaṭṭar saw that there was no one about. He hinted to Iḷaiyāzhvār what the pilgrimage was for, told him to go away, and went on by himself.

What happened to Iḷaiyāzhvār after that belongs to his own story and is told there. He left the road and was lost in the waterless forest, and a bowman and his wife came to him there and led him through the night; and in the morning he found himself at a well in sight of the vimāna of Puṇyakoṭi, the shrine of Pēraruḷāḷar at Kāñcī, and he knew who the two had been.

Yādavaprakāśa and his company stood waiting for the two young men to come up.

Govinda Bhaṭṭar came.

"Have you come?" said Yādavaprakāśa. "Where is Iḷaiyāzhvār?"

"I did not see him," said Govinda.

Yādavaprakāśa sent the men near him to look. They searched and could not find him. "Alas!" they all said. "What harm has come to him in the forest!" A word in the account for how they felt cannot be read with certainty, but it says they were stricken.

They went on by stages, came to the bank of the Gaṅgā, and bathed in the Gaṅgā in the month of Māgha.

One day, as Govinda Bhaṭṭar was taking the bath that washes away sin, a liṅga came into his hand. He was astonished, and he showed it to Yādavaprakāśa and asked him what it was.

Yādavaprakāśa was greatly pleased. "Because you know the divine," he said, "just as the fruit of bathing in the Gaṅgā has come into your hand, Gaṅgādhara himself, the one who bears the Gaṅgā, has come into your hand."

From then on he held Govinda in special regard. Everyone took the liṅga as his mark, and they began to call him Uḷḷaṅkaikoṇarnda Nāyaṉār, the master who brought it in his palm.

Yādavaprakāśa bathed in the Gaṅgā and turned for home, and came back by way of Jagannātha and Ahobilam. On the way the Nāyaṉār said, "I will install this liṅga in a fitting place and come."

"Do so," said Yādavaprakāśa, and he let him go, and went on to Perumāḷ Kōyil.

There he saw Iḷaiyāzhvār.

He was astonished, and he was very glad. "When we could not find you in the Vindhya country," he said, "we feared the worst, and we grieved greatly. And now we are granted to see you after all!"

Iḷaiyāzhvār told him the whole of it, in detail: how he had lost the way and gone off where no one could see him, and how he had come home by way of the bowman.

Yādavaprakāśa heard it. "His course has been beyond this world," he thought.

He was well pleased. He took Iḷaiyāzhvār back into his own circle and went on teaching the text.

While Iḷaiyāzhvār was studying under Yādavaprakāśa again, two Śrīvaiṣṇavas went from the shrine of Pēraruḷāḷar to Śrīraṅgam and told Āḷavandār about him: about the text on truth, knowledge and the infinite, about the oil and the tears and the burned thigh. Āḷavandār said that a great soul had come into this world like a lotus flowering in a brazier, and he set out at once for Kāñcī to see him. His own life tells that journey.

At Kāñcī, Āḷavandār was standing with Tirukkacci Nambi in the enclosure of Pēraruḷāḷar when Yādavaprakāśa and his crowd of students, having worshipped, came round on their circuit of the shrine. Āḷavandār asked which of them was Iḷaiyāzhvār. Nambi showed him the one walking in the middle, tall and strong, with arms that reached to his knees. Āḷavandār looked at him again and again and said, "This one is indeed a first one." He prayed to Pēraruḷāḷar that Iḷaiyāzhvār might become the one to carry their darśana, their whole way of seeing, and went back to Śrīraṅgam without having found a moment to speak a good word to him. The account does not say that Yādavaprakāśa knew any of this.

Some time after that, while Yādavaprakāśa was expounding Vedānta to his listeners, a brahmarākṣasa, the ghost of a brahmin fallen into a demon's state, seized the daughter of the king of that country.

The king asked whether there was anyone in those parts who knew mantras and could drive it out.

"Yādavaprakāśa is a great master of mantras," some people said.

"Let him know of this," said the king, and sent men to him.

The king's men came. "A brahmarākṣasa has seized the king's daughter. The king told us to let you know."

"Tell the brahmarākṣasa," said Yādavaprakāśa, "that Yādavaprakāśa has told it to go." And he sent them back.

They went and said it. "Yādavaprakāśa has told you to go."

"Tell him," said the brahmarākṣasa, "that I have told him to go away from there."

The king's men brought that answer back.

Yādavaprakāśa was very angry. He went with his crowd of students to the king's assembly, stood near the brahmarākṣasa chanting a great mantra, and clenched his fist at it.

The spirit stretched out its bent leg.

"Ha! Yādavaprakāśa!" it said. "Do I not know the mantra you are chanting?" And it chanted the same mantra back to him. "Will I go for this mantra, or for you? You do not know your own birth. You do not know mine."

"If that is so," said Yādavaprakāśa, "you must be all-knowing. What is my birth? What is yours?"

"Your birth," it said, "was as a monitor lizard, living in an anthill on the bank of the lake at Madhurāntakam. When the Śrīvaiṣṇavas of Śrīraṅgam were travelling to Tirumalai, they bathed there and ate there, and you took the prasāda, the food offered to the Lord, and the tīrtha, the holy water, that they spilled where they ate. Because of that you have this birth as a learned man. As for me, I was born a brahmin and I performed a sacrifice. Faults came into it, faults in the mantras and faults in the rites, and because of them I became a brahmarākṣasa."

"Then for whom will you go?"

"Among those who study with you," it said, "there is one who is chief among the nityasūris, the ever-free ones who serve the Lord in his own world. You see him?"

"Who is he?"

"This one," it said, and pointed to Iḷaiyāzhvār, and prostrated itself before him. "If he tells me to go, I will go."

"Then, Iḷaiyāzhvār," said Yādavaprakāśa, "tell it to go."

"You," said Iḷaiyāzhvār, "leave her and go."

"Unless you set your lotus feet on my head," it said, "I will not go."

Iḷaiyāzhvār was pleased, and did so.

The spirit was satisfied. It laughed, made obeisance, rose and said, "I am going."

"Then show us a sign that you are going," said Iḷaiyāzhvār, "and go."

"I live in this pipal tree," it said. "Now I go breaking this pipal tree." And saying that, it broke the tree and went.

Yādavaprakāśa praised Iḷaiyāzhvār greatly. Then he turned back and went into his own maṭha.

Long after, when the tradition counted up the ways Iḷaiyāzhvār's greatness had been made known, it counted this one: that a brahmarākṣasa had pointed him out to Yādavaprakāśa and said that he was the chief of the nityasūris.

At Śrīraṅgam in those days Āḷavandār was grieving that he had found no one to carry the darśana after him. His mind went to Iḷaiyāzhvār, and to how his tie with Yādavaprakāśa might be cut, and he prayed to Pēraruḷāḷar to make his prapatti fruitful, his giving of the matter into the Lord's hands.

One day after that, Yādavaprakāśa was teaching the text again. He came to the sentences "All this indeed is Brahman" and "There is no plurality here whatsoever," and he explained them as teaching non-duality, the oneness of the self and Brahman.

Iḷaiyāzhvār refuted it, and gave the sentences the meaning of viśiṣṭādvaita, the oneness of Brahman with all that it holds within it as its own.

Yādavaprakāśa was furious.

"From today on, do not study with me," he said. "Go wherever is fitting for your intellect and hear the texts there."

So he sent him away.

Iḷaiyāzhvār went home with great joy and told his mother. "Come, child," she said. "What you have studied up to now is enough." She sent him to Tirukkacci Nambi, and from then on he carried water from the Sālai well each day for Pēraruḷāḷar's worship.

Two Śrīvaiṣṇavas carried the news to Śrīraṅgam. "Iḷaiyāzhvār has grown angry with Yādavaprakāśa," they told Āḷavandār. "He has given him up, and now he stands devoted to Pēraruḷāḷar." Āḷavandār rejoiced. "Pēraruḷāḷar has made our prapatti fruitful," he said, and he sent Mahāpūrṇa, Periya Nambi, to Kāñcī to bring Iḷaiyāzhvār to him. A shorter account of the line says that when Āḷavandār heard Iḷaiyāzhvār had left Yādava, he made prapatti once more, that Iḷaiyāzhvār might become the one to uphold the teaching. A letter there is unclear, but it seems to say he made it at the feet of Periya Perumāḷ.

After that the account says nothing of Yādavaprakāśa until Iḷaiyāzhvār had become an ascetic.

In time Iḷaiyāzhvār took the ascetic's order at Kāñcī. He took Pēraruḷāḷar himself as his ācārya, his teacher, and asked him for the triple staff and the ochre cloth, and the Lord gave them to him through the mouth of his archaka, the priest who serves the image, and named him Irāmānuja Muni. From then on the account calls him Rāmānuja.

Yādavaprakāśa's mother had for a long time been going to the service of Pēraruḷāḷar. Tirukkacci Nambi had looked on her, and she had talked lovingly with Rāmānuja. Out of these, the account says, a firmness in our darśana was born in her too.

"If only our Yādava would come down into this darśana!" she thought.

She was climbing the steps of the Vaiyamāḷigai, the Lord's shrine, with that in her mind, when a word of good omen was heard: "Good, good!"

She heard it, and went to her son full of joy and told him what had happened.

"You too," she said, "take up the triple staff as Rāmānuja did, giving up the tuft and the sacred thread."

Yādavaprakāśa agreed. The account sets down his reasons, one after another. He had gone on expounding meanings out of pride in his own doctrine, but in truth a distaste for what he held had been growing in him. The meanings Iḷaiyāzhvār had spoken against him in those days kept wounding his heart. The brahmarākṣasa had spoken of Iḷaiyāzhvār's greatness. On the Gaṅgā journey Iḷaiyāzhvār had met Rāma himself, come in the form of a hunter. And his mother had spoken.

But there was a difficulty, and he told her.

"When I take up the triple staff, I give up the tuft and the sacred thread. As expiation for it I would have to go round the whole earth. That cannot be done by me, an old man. Now what can I do, without the strength for it?"

He said that, and he lay down, disheartened.

That night Pēraruḷāḷar came to him in a dream.

"Go round our Rāmānuja once," he said, "and take the triple staff and the ochre and the rest from his hand, and become an ascetic."

Yādavaprakāśa did not trust the dream. He went to Tirukkacci Nambi.

"I am holding a certain thought," he said. "Put it before Pēraruḷāḷar, and tell me what his holy will is."

That night, as Nambi finished his service and was taking leave of the Lord, he said, "Yādavaprakāśa says he is holding a certain thought."

"His mother told him, 'You too become an ascetic of the triple staff, like Rāmānuja,'" said Pēraruḷāḷar. "He lay down disheartened, because he thought he would have to go round the earth. We told him, 'Go round our Rāmānuja once, and become an ascetic.' He does not trust the word we spoke to him by way of a dream, and he has sent you to ask. That is all."

At daybreak Nambi told Yādavaprakāśa.

Then he believed. He came to Rāmānuja and fell full length at his feet.

"Please have me take up the triple staff," he said.

Rāmānuja saw his remorse, and that it was fitting. "To do that," he said, "an expiation is needed."

Yādavaprakāśa told him what the Lord had said. Then he walked round Rāmānuja himself, once, and stood before him with humility.

Kūrattāzhvāṉ and Mudaliyāṇḍāṉ were there. They had lately come to Kāñcī and taken refuge with Rāmānuja. They were astonished.

"How the Lord's favour and this man's own wish have come together!" they said.

They called to mind the words "Caidya and the others, through hatred." "The very hatred he bore Your Honour," they said to Rāmānuja, "has become the cause of his salvation." And they said to him in Sanskrit, "Let him be equal to us."

Rāmānuja was greatly pleased.

He had the expiation performed as the śāstra lays it down. With it he had the rites of the tuft and of the sacred thread performed again, and the others that go with them. He gave him the triple staff and the ochre and the rest. And he gave him a holy name: Govinda Jīyar, a jīyar being an ascetic of the tradition.

Rāmānuja made him one who bore the pañcasaṃskāra, the five marks of a Śrīvaiṣṇava. He gave him the meaning of the Mantraratna, the jewel among mantras, and with it the line of teachers through whom it had come.

Then he gave him a work to do.

"So that the statements of the śāstras do not seem to contradict one another," he said, "compose a work called the Yatidharmasamuccaya," the gathering together of the dharma of ascetics.

Govinda Jīyar composed it. The plan of the work is given in a Sanskrit verse:

விதி:கர்த்ருதஶாலிங்கம் ப்ரயோமோ

முக்யகர்மச - அஹோராத்ரக்ரியாஉஉசாரோ லிங்கதர்மோமதிஸ்திதி:-ப்ராயஶ்

சித்தாநிஸம்ஸ்கார இத்யேகாதஶபர்வக:

vitiḥkartrutaśāliṅkam prayōmō

mukyakarmaca - ahōrātrakriyāuucārō liṅkatarmōmatistitiḥ-prāyaś

cittānisamskāra ityēkātaśaparvakaḥ

The injunction, the state of the one who takes it up, the emblem he bears, the manner of the rite, and the chief rite; the duties of day and night, conduct, the dharma of the emblem, steadiness of mind; the expiations, and the sacraments: such is this work in eleven sections.

He laid it before Rāmānuja and prostrated.

Rāmānuja read it through from beginning to end, and he was pleased.

Govinda Jīyar lived on for some time, depending wholly on his ācārya. Soon after, he reached Paramapada, the Lord's own world.

The account does not say where he lived those last days, or how long they were, or who was with him at the end. It gives him no birth-star and no taṉiyaṉ, no verse of praise of his own.

But the tradition did not forget the dream. When it later told over the ways in which each Lord had made Rāmānuja's greatness known, it said that Pēraruḷāḷar had made it known in this way too: by telling Yādavaprakāśa in a dream, "Go once round our Irāmānucaṉ, and become an ascetic of the triple staff."