Yogaswami

In his old age, when people asked about his childhood, Yogaswami usually turned the question away. "I am always as I am now," he would say. "The way I am now, I have always been." He did once say that he was born on a Wednesday, and that was as close as most people got.

The rest was pieced together by his devotees. He was born before dawn on Wednesday, 29 May 1872, under the star Aviṭṭam, in the village of Mavittapuram on the north coast of the Jaffna peninsula, close to the old Kandaswamy temple. His father, Ambalavanar, came from Columbuthurai and traded in tobacco at Maskeliya in the hill country, so far away that he was seldom home. His mother, Sinnachiyammai, raised the boy, and from her he first heard the stories of the gods and the saints. She named him Sadasivan.

Two memories of her stayed with him. Once, after a meal, he threw away his banana leaf with rice still on it, and she scolded him: "You will live by begging." He told this story with real pleasure in later years, and used it to explain Auvaiyar's line "Thaay sollai thattaathae" (Do not disobey your mother). "I have always lived like a beggar," he would say. The other memory was of the last festival she took him to at the Mavittapuram temple. The crowd was huge, and he held tight to her hand as they went round, wearing a veshti and a new silk shawl, which slipped off somewhere and was lost. She died not long afterwards, when he was about ten.

The boy was raised after that in Columbuthurai, near the Jaffna lagoon, by his father's family. His uncle Chinnaiya, who had become a Catholic, saw to his schooling. His aunt Muthupillai, a devout Śaivite, saw to everything else: his food, his clothes, and above all his religion. She gave him Śaiva books and the old epics to read and sent him to Mavittapuram in the holidays, and the family always credited her with keeping him a Śaivite.

He went first to a Tamil school and then to St. Patrick's College in Jaffna, where, as was the custom at the mission schools, he was given a Christian name, John. The name did not last. One day the village headman of Columbuthurai, a stern old man named Muthukumaru, stopped him on the road and asked his name. "John," said the boy. "No," said the headman. "Your name is Yoganathan." It means Lord of Yoga, and it stayed.

He left school at about sixteen. He was at home in both Tamil and English, quiet, often alone, and much at the temple.

Two of the sages of Jaffna crossed his path while he was still a boy. He himself said that he saw Kadai Swami, the wandering ascetic of the Jaffna bazaar, when he was about twelve, and whenever he spoke of him in later life he grew ecstatic. He would say that Kadai Swami had consumed Śivabhōgam, the bliss of Śiva. "Where do we stand compared with him?" And at about the same age, on his way to have an infected cut on his foot dressed, he passed the chariot stand at Nallur and a wild-looking man called out to him, "Come here! What do you want with medicine?" The man looked at the wound, told him to crush a certain leaf and bind it on, and the foot healed. It was Chellappaswami, Kadai Swami's disciple. That was the first time the old man ever set eyes on him.

After he left school his father took him to Maskeliya to learn the trade. It did not work. The young man was too fond of sitting bare-chested on a rock in the cold mountain air, lost in thought, and around 1890 his father sent him back to Columbuthurai. Ambalavanar died at Maskeliya not long afterwards.

Yoganathan found work with the Irrigation Department at Kilinochchi, some seventy kilometres south of Jaffna, where the great Iranamadu tank was being built. He became the storekeeper, issuing tools to the workers in the morning and taking them back in the evening. His employer was an English engineer, Mr. Brown, a hard and short-tempered man, but Yoganathan remembered him as an honest Englishman with a high sense of duty, and the two came to respect each other. Brown called him a God-fearing man. Yoganathan watched how the engineer saw to every small matter himself, down to walking to the river each evening to make sure the working bulls had been properly washed and fed, and he never forgot it. He worked there for some seven or eight years. A mango tree he planted at Kilinochchi still stands; people call it the Swami's tree.

Whatever he earned he spent within the month. He bought books of hymns and scripture as soon as his pay came, gave to temples and to relatives, and helped whoever was in need. He learned the hymns by heart, and once a hymn was learned he hardly looked at the book again: the Tēvāram and the Tiruvācakam, the Tirumantiram, the songs of Aruṇagirinātar, Tāyumānavar and Paṭṭiṉattār, the verses of Auvaiyar. Decades later he would sing them to the people gathered round him, in a voice they remembered as sweet and commanding.

He kept to himself. A colleague remembered that he meditated for long hours while the others slept. His uncle kept trying to arrange a marriage for him, and he kept finding reasons to be elsewhere when his uncle came. Some time in these years he took a vow of celibacy. On his days off he would walk to some distant temple, worship, and walk back singing.

The long hours of meditation began to show in his face. Those who worked with him remembered that his eyes took on a powerful look, and Mr. Brown himself felt it. Something strange happened to him, the engineer said, whenever Yoganathan looked at him, and he went to his chief clerk and asked him to tell the storekeeper not to look at him.

In the last week of January 1897 Swami Vivekananda came to Jaffna. He was on his way home to India from America, where his address at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago had made him famous, and the Hindus of Jaffna gave him a welcome such as the town had seldom seen. Yoganathan came in from Kilinochchi for it. He walked in the procession that brought Vivekananda from the Fort to Hindu College, and he was there for the address that followed.

He never stopped speaking of that day. He used to describe how Vivekananda walked from one end of the platform to the other and back as he spoke, like a lion roaring, as if he could barely hold all that was coming through him, and how his bright, electric eyes held the whole crowd. Above all he remembered the words Vivekananda began with:

"The time is short, and the subject is vast."

Those words never left him. He repeated them to himself and to the people around him, and even in his old age he would bring them out in the middle of a conversation, in a low and very serious voice. The vastness was the subject of God and the Self, and a life, however long, was short for it. That was how those who heard him understood him, and it is how he lived.

The town also kept a story from that visit. As the carriage carrying Vivekananda passed the road junction at Columbuthurai, where an illuppai tree stood, he got down and walked. He said he felt he was treading on holy ground, and he called the place an oasis. There was nothing special there at the time. It was under that same illuppai tree that Yogaswami was later to sit, through sun and rain, for years.

His regard for Vivekananda and for Sri Ramakrishna lasted his whole life. The first publication made under his eye, in 1925, was a Tamil translation of a book of meditations by one of Vivekananda's Western disciples, and in 1955 he had small booklets of the essence of Vivekananda's speeches printed for his devotees. He told his people that any monk of the Ramakrishna order who came to them was to be received with full honour, and when the young scholar Mylvagananar chose to become a monk of that order, he blessed him; the world came to know him as Swami Vipulananda.

The years in Kilinochchi had made Yoganathan sure of one thing: he wanted to leave the world and seek God with nothing in the way, and for that he needed a guru. A few men of Columbuthurai went often to Nallur to sit with Chellappaswami, the man at the chariot stand whom most of the town thought mad. Among them were Thirugnanasambandar, the village official everyone called the Vidhanaiyar, his brother Ramalingam, and Thuraiappah. Not long after Vivekananda's visit, Yoganathan went with them.

It was the day of the chariot festival. They bathed, put on holy ash and walked to Nallur, and on the way Yoganathan told the others about the time, years before, when the old man had called him over and healed his foot. They reached the temple a little before noon, found it packed with the festival crowd, and pushed their way towards the chariot shed.

Chellappaswami stood among the people in a single ragged cloth, talking aloud to no one, and everyone gave him a wide berth. He saw the four of them before they saw him. After a moment he turned on the three householders. "Go and look after your families! You fellows are not fit to become sadhus." Then he turned to Yoganathan, looked at him hard, and challenged him:

"Yaaradaa nee?" (Who are you?)

In Jaffna the words were remembered as three short commands, one after the other: "Yaaradaa nee? Thaedadaa ul! Theeradaa patru!" (Who are you? Search within! Be done with attachment!)

And then the old man's whole manner changed. To the astonishment of the people standing round, he looked at Yoganathan with open joy and told him he had been waiting for him for a long time. "Come, come," he said. "You alone will be crowned by me." He drew him to his side and spoke to him of the path of dharma, and the young man stood there with the hair rising on his body.

Yogaswami put that day into a verse of his own, and it is the plainest account there is of how he received it:

I saw my teacher at Nallur, where those of rare austerity live. He said all the things that are not to be said; I stood there without flinching. "Who are you?" he demanded. That very day I received his grace.

In other songs he went further. He told how he heard the words "Oru pollaappum illai" (There is not one wrong thing) and stood bewildered, unable to fathom them; how the old man looked at him kindly, and the confusion that had troubled him simply left; how he pointed above his head in Skanda's forecourt, and Yoganathan lost all sense of his body and stood there in wonder. All his life he marvelled that in that first look every attachment he had to the world had been wiped away. At sunset, still overwhelmed, he walked home alone to his aunt's house.

The first test came soon after. As Yoganathan stood at the chariot stand trying to take in what had happened to him, Chellappaswami seemed already to have forgotten he was there. He was gazing over the rooftops and muttering to himself, and then he walked off. Yoganathan made to follow. "Wait here till I return!" the old man called back over his shoulder. It was three days before he came back, and Yoganathan was still where he had been left. Chellappaswami said nothing and did not stop, but beckoned, led him to his fireplace, gave him tea and a vegetable stew, and sent him away. He had not said to come back, and he had not said to stay away. Yoganathan knew he had been accepted.

The first time he tried to touch his guru's feet, Chellappaswami drew back as if stung. "Don't even think of it!" he shouted. Then, more quietly: "You and I are one. If you see me as separate from you, you will get into trouble." He never allowed it afterwards. He would not let his disciple prostrate to him, serve him, cook for him, or even fold his hands to him behind his back. Yogaswami poured all the reverence he was not allowed to show into songs, years later.

For a while Yoganathan went on at Kilinochchi and walked the whole way to Nallur at the weekends, some seventy kilometres, and back in time for work on Monday. In old age he would recall how hard he used to walk that road, so strong was the pull to be near his guru. Near the end of 1897, at about twenty-five, he decided to leave his post.

He waited until Mr. Brown was in a good mood and told him. Brown tried to talk him out of it and then to put it off for a year, and at last said that if he must go, he should at least find someone like himself to take his place. Yoganathan brought in his young cousin Vaithialingam, trained him in the store, and left only when Brown was satisfied. It was Vaithialingam who later told the family what he had seen in those weeks: nights when he woke to find his cousin sitting upright in the dark, weeping and calling aloud for grace, "O my dear mother! O my dear father!"

Yoganathan went back to Columbuthurai, told his aunt that he meant to renounce the world, and asked to live in the hut on her land. She was taken aback, but when she saw how serious he was she agreed. For the next few years he lived there and walked to Nallur to spend his days with his guru, and sometimes walked all the way back to the woods at Kilinochchi to meditate under the trees. He always remembered that country as his training ground. Passing through it with devotees in his old age, he would point out the place and say, "This place is extremely suitable for meditation."

From the early 1900s he was with Chellappaswami almost every day, and in the last years before 1910 he often slept on the steps of the chariot shed, to be ready when his guru set out, for the old man kept no hours and might start for some distant place before dawn.

Chellappaswami never once told Yoganathan that he was his guru. He hardly spoke to him directly at all. He talked to himself, all day, wherever he was, repeating the same strange phrases for months on end; one year it was "There is no evil in the world," over and over. Most of it sounded like nonsense. Yogaswami described those years himself, in a saying that begins with the danger of drawing followers:

"Attracting people to yourself is another self-deluding activity. Even Kadai Swami seems to have fallen for it. Chellappan was great; he never gave in to such delusions. He merely muttered 'Aar arivaar?' (Who knows?) and 'Eppavoa mudintha kaariyam' (It was all settled long ago), and went about the outer courtyards of the Nallur temple and sat in the dirt, saying that all that dirt would frighten away the people who came to fall at his feet. I don't think anyone ever got from him an answer to a question. I merely stood and waited behind him for the occasional gem that fell out of all the mad talk."

The gems were what he lived on. The old man taught by what he did, and Yogaswami went on telling of it to the end of his days.

They walked enormous distances together, sometimes all day, to some shrine Chellappaswami had in mind, and if the feeling was not right when they got there, on to another. Yogaswami never stopped marvelling that on all those roads his guru walked with his eyes on the clouds and never once stepped on an anthill, though the land was strewn with them, while he himself, watching the ground for them, still trod in them. One hot day Chellappaswami said they would walk to Keerimalai, twenty-one kilometres away, to bathe in the springs by the sea. They walked for hours in the heat, and when they reached the water and Yoganathan was looking forward to the bath, his guru glanced left and right, said "We have bathed," and turned for home.

Another day he took him begging outside the shop of a merchant in the Jaffna bazaar who was known never to give to beggars. They stood there from the cool of the morning through the whole heat of the day while the man ignored them. At closing time a clerk came out and gave them a cent. Chellappaswami held it up as if it were treasure, touched it to his eyes, and said that they had earned well that day, and that their forefathers had always said a man should eat from the earnings of hard work. Then he made Yoganathan spend it on a cup of tea.

He would cook a meal with great care and then, if he caught the least wanting in himself, smash the pot with a stick and throw the food out for the crows. Every year on the first Monday of the month of Panguni they walked to the Paṉṟittalaicci Amman temple at Maduvil, cooked sweet rice there, and ate it as their meal.

Yoganathan's own tapas in those years was fierce. He would rub chilli paste on his body and sit bare-chested in meditation in the midday sun, or roll his body round the temple in the burning sand, as penitents still do; his cousin Vaithialingam said that he rolled in this way the whole three kilometres from Columbuthurai to Nallur, two or three times. Many years later a young man told him that, to purify himself, he had been rubbing chilli powder on his body and sitting in the hot sun. Yogaswami's eyes lit up. "A fine tapas! I, too, have done that!"

Once, at a festival, the god was being carried round the temple under a clear sky, and Yoganathan remarked that no one had brought umbrellas and the god was going to be drenched. From across the courtyard his guru shouted, "Many are the people who have said such things on this Nallur road." Minutes later the rain came down, and Yoganathan was ashamed of his little prophecy. He understood the rebuke: a seeker who began to enjoy such powers would go no further. And sometimes, when his disciples were with him, the old man would dance round them laughing and teasing, "No, you haven't caught me yet!"

It was a hard school, and he never let anyone think otherwise. "If it were you, you would not have lasted one day with Chellappa," he told a devotee once. Long after the old man was gone, someone remarked to him that Chellappaswami had gone away but had given everything to him. He answered at once: "Did I receive it freely? I obtained it by digging up a mountain!"

What Yoganathan caught, in the end, were a few sentences, said again and again through those years. Four of them he carried all his life and called the great sayings of his guru:

Oru pollaappum illai (There is not one wrong thing).

Eppavoa mudintha kaariyam (It was all finished long ago).

Naam ariyoam (We do not know).

Muzhuthum unmai (All is truth).

With them went two more that Chellappaswami was forever saying, "Appadiyae ullathu" (it is exactly as it is), and "Aar arivaar?" (who knows?). Yogaswami's songs come back to these words again and again, sometimes naming the very place: "O you who said, at Nallur, 'Naam ariyoam' (We do not know)"; "O father, who from the temple-car street of glorious Nallur said, 'Aar arivaar?' (Who indeed can know?)" And of one of them he wrote what could be said of them all: this cannot fully be set down in writing.

Chellappaswami had one other disciple who had left the world, a young man named Katiravelu, and he kept the two of them apart. Near the end of their years together he brought them both to a long slab of stone that lay under a tree within call of the Nallur temple, sat them down on it, and told them to meditate. He set Thirugnanasambandar to look after them. Day after day they sat, growing thin and sunburnt, while their guru came and went, bringing them water and sometimes tea, and standing by for hours watching them. It went on for forty days.

At the end of it Chellappaswami made tea and filled their cups, and as they raised them to drink he knocked the cups out of their hands. Then he cooked a meal, served each of them a little, and as they began to eat he kicked the food away. "That is all I have for you!" he shouted. "Go and beg for your food." And then: "Two elephants cannot be tied to one post." He made them get up. "Now run away!"

They walked off fast, facing east. Katiravelu was never seen in Jaffna again; people believed he had gone to India. Yoganathan went back to Columbuthurai to recover from the long fast, and after some days walked to Nallur to see his guru. A neighbour, Thiagar Ponniah, saw what happened there under the vilvam tree by the chariot shed, and remembered the words as long as he lived:

"Look here! Look here! The city of Lanka I have given, I have given. The king's crown I have given, I have given, as long as the world exists, as long as the seas exist."

The day was the second Monday of the month of Panguni, in March of 1910, and Yogaswami kept it ever after as the day of his initiation. He called it his coronation, and his devotees kept it as the Tiruvaṭi Pūjai, the worship of the guru's holy feet.

Then he did as he had been told. He told no one where he was going. With nothing but the cloth he wore and a twig to clean his teeth, he walked away east, and kept walking.

He went down the east coast of the island on foot, through Trincomalee, Batticaloa, Tirukkovil and Pottuvil, eating whatever was offered and sleeping wherever the night found him. Many years later he told the story of that road to a schoolteacher named Vallipuram, who wrote it down in his words:

"I was walking towards Kathirgamam, and as I was approaching Mattakalappu, suddenly I got fever. I could not walk any more. I laid my head on a stone and slept underneath a tree. In the morning there was no fever, and there was a twenty-five cent coin on the stone pillow. I took the coin to a store, ate dosai, and continued to walk."

On the way an ascetic of that country came running to embrace him, saying, "Because I saw you, it must rain." Yoganathan told him not yet: let it rain after an hour. It rained an hour later. Further on he came to a river in flood that he could not cross. He scooped a shallow hollow in the sand of the bank and lay there for three days, until some hunters came over on a raft of bamboo, cooked food for him, woke him with the words "O fasting noble one," fed him, and ferried him across.

He met holy men of every kind on that road: Sufis, Buddhist monks, yogis living in the jungle, fakirs who tried to tempt him with their powers. A Muslim mystic in the Batticaloa country feasted him and gave him an amulet to wear for protection, and for a while the Muslims he met treated him with great respect because of it. "One night I removed it and left it in the rest house where I stayed," he said afterwards, "thinking, 'Why do I need this?'"

He reached Kataragama, the shrine of Murugan in the southern jungle, and stayed for some days, spending the nights in meditation on the sacred hill. Then he turned west along the south coast to Colombo, where he begged on the road and slept beside it. There the stout and much-loved ascetic of the city, Anaikutti Swami, put five cents in his hand and blessed him with a play on Gaṇeśa's trunk: "Thumbikkai ithu nambikkai" (this trunk is trust). He begged from Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, who had no small coin and changed one so as to give him ten cents. From Colombo he walked up into the hill country, to Kandy and on to Matale.

At Matale an overseer of public works named Saravanamuthu dreamed that a holy man in rags, worn out and hungry, was coming back on foot from Kataragama, and that he was to look after him. The next day he found Yoganathan by the road, just as in the dream, told him about it, and begged him to come home with him. "If that is the will of God, then I submit," Yoganathan said. He had neither changed his cloth nor bathed in six months. Saravanamuthu gave him a bath, new clothes and food; of the money he pressed on him, Yoganathan took only the price of a train ticket to Jaffna. "Lord Murugan was looking after me well through Saravanamuthu," he said later. A boy in that house who watched him wide-eyed, A. Thillyampalam, became one of his most devoted followers and, forty years on, the builder of his Sivathondan Nilayams.

Meanwhile, in Jaffna, his family had heard nothing for months. At last his uncle went with an old devotee to the chariot stand and asked Chellappaswami where Yoganathan was. The old man went on weaving the palm-leaf fan in his hands. "Oh, Yoganathan," he said. "He's dead." The family went home and wept, and in time performed his funeral rites.

He had been gone the better part of a year when he came home on the train with nothing but the clothes he stood in, walked straight to Nallur, and threw himself at his guru's feet.

When his relatives heard he was back, they went to Chellappaswami in a fury. They had held his funeral and mourned him, and the man was alive. Chellappaswami did not give an inch. "We do not lie," he said. "We told the truth. He is indeed dead." The relatives went off saying the madman should be left alone. In time they came to see what he had meant.

There was no going back to the old life at the chariot stand. Chellappaswami gave him a new command:

"Nee poay iluppai vaeraip pidi" (Go and hold the root of the illuppai tree).

Yoganathan lingered. "Swami, where am I to go?" he said. "I don't have anyone." His guru pointed: there, at the foot of the illuppai tree at the Columbuthurai junction. As he stood there he looked with longing at the clay pot by his guru and thought what a treasure it would be to keep. Chellappaswami roared at him, "So, this is your bondage?" and smashed it on the ground. And as he sent him on his way, the old man said, "Yoga, look there at the hut, too."

So he went to the illuppai tree where Vivekananda had stepped down from his carriage, and sat at its foot, three metres from the road, through the blazing sun and the monsoon rain. For years his practice was to sit there for three days and nights without moving, and on the fourth to get up, eat, walk, and talk a little with friends, and then go back for another three days. Those who passed in those years remembered fierce eyes that frightened people, and a stick that came out if anyone came too close. Most people took the long way round. They began to call him Yogaswami, the king of yogis, or simply the Swami of Columbuthurai.

From 1911 until the end of his guru's life, Chellappaswami would not let him come near. Once Yogaswami went to his guru's hut, and the old man came out shouting and swearing and looking for something to throw. As he retreated, Chellappaswami bellowed after him, "Stand on your own two feet!" Sometimes the old man came to the tree, watched his disciple for a while, and went away. Once, when Yogaswami got up to worship him, he snapped, "What! Are you seeing duality? Try to see unity." Yogaswami sat down again and did not move. He kept to his guru's command in another way too. For many years he said he did not have permission to leave the Jaffna peninsula, and he went no further south than the Murukandi Piḷḷaiyār temple on the road out. Only after 1928 did he begin to travel to Kandy and Colombo. In time he was going out once a month to the hill country, to Colombo, to Trincomalee and to Batticaloa, staying in the homes of devotees there, and his devotees remembered that he kept this up for about twenty years. Then, in 1942, at the age of seventy, he stopped. "There is no more going to outside places," he said. "Those who so desire can come here."

A few steps from the tree stood a tumbledown hut with mud walls and a palm-leaf roof. Long before, a big, simple man named Nanniyar had given Kadai Swami shelter in that very hut, and in Chellappaswami's day he kept it as a tea shop. He was a devotee of Chellappaswami too, and could never get the old man to accept his worship. One day, drunk, Nanniyar dragged Chellappaswami into the yard behind his shop, tied him to a post, shaved his head, bathed him and waved camphor before him, while the old man yelled for help. The neighbours came running and untied him, and Yogaswami was among them. Chellappaswami fled, roaring as he went.

In 1914 the family who owned that land, Tangamma and her husband Thirugnanasambandar, with her uncle Vallipuram and his wife, came to the tree and asked Yogaswami to take the empty hut. "How much longer are you going to sit at this junction, Swamigal?" Tangamma asked. He refused for a time, and then gave in. It was his home for the next fifty years, and her family looked after him all that time. He liked to tell the story of Nanniyar with peals of laughter. It was Nanniyar's camphor, he said, that had bound him to the place. "Nanni's devotion to the guru has captured us here." More than once in later years he announced that he was leaving and not coming back, and was home again in three or four days. "Chellappaswami would not let me leave this place," he said. "He sent me back."

At first he slept on the north side of the hut. One night, he said, something in his mind kept saying "snake, snake." He ignored it, and it went on, so he struck a match and found a snake lying beside him. "All right," he told it. "You sleep here, and I will move over there." He slept on the south side from then on.

Early in 1915 Chellappaswami fell ill with a cold and an inflammation of the joints, and his relatives nursed him with herbal baths. For two weeks Yogaswami did not go. The devotees round the sick man were upset and kept pressing him to go and see his guru while there was time. At last he went, and he told what happened himself:

"Chellappa Swamigal was lying down, as he was ill. Everybody paid a visit to him; I too wanted to see him and went there. Chellappa Swamigal shouted, 'What are you going to see? Stand there. Think about you.' I turned back and never went again."

The words the old man called out as his disciple reached the gate were remembered in Tamil: "Yaaradaa padalaiyil?" (Who is at the gate?) And then: "Veliyil nindru paaradaa" (stand outside and see). Yogaswami heard in the first of them the question that had begun everything, "Yaaradaa nee?" (Who are you?), and he did as he was told. He stood outside, and went home. Ever afterwards he said that the farewell on the outer plane had been the drawing back of a veil inside him.

Chellappaswami died in March 1915, in the month of Panguni, on a Friday night under the star Ashvini, at about seventy-five. That day he had told a disciple that he would show them a play that night. He was found lying with one leg drawn over the other and his thumb at his lips. He had told his people to burn his body rather than bury it in a shrine, and they did. Yogaswami was not at the cremation. He kept his guru's sandals and worshipped them every morning of his life.

After his guru's death Yogaswami threw himself into his practice harder than ever. In 1922 he told a close devotee, Dr. T. Nallanathan, for the first time, how he had come to the knowledge of God. For six months he kept strictly to the round he had begun under the tree: three days and nights immersed in the deepest samādhi, one day free, when he ate a little and talked with friends, and then three days and nights again. At the end of it, he said, that state no longer came and went; it stayed, even in waking life. Then he gave up the regular practice and let that consciousness settle into him of its own accord.

He said little about that state, and what he did say was plain. It could not be reached by thinking about it, he said; it came by itself. "One day, when I was in that state, a bird came and sat on my head." Devotees who sat with him in later years saw something like it for themselves. Once, as he sat motionless in meditation, a crow flew in, rested on his head for a while, and flew away.

He was seen in those years at the illuppai tree, at the chariot stand in Nallur, in a hermitage at Ariyalai, at the cremation ground at Thundi, on the Esplanade and in the lanes of the Grand Bazaar. He sometimes spent whole nights meditating in the Columbuthurai cemetery. He put the spirit of those years into a few words: "Let go the rope! Just go about here and there. See everything. Be a witness. Die before you die!"

From about 1914 he went often to Chunnakam to see Chellachi Ammaiyar, a woman of a farming family there who lived in deep meditation and austerity. Those who saw the two together never forgot it: one, they said, would think a thing and the other would do it. He praised her to his devotees as one who had reached the highest realization without leaving home for the forest or the mountain, and she said she had seen many renunciates in her life but never one so complete as he.

In her last years she grew so frail and so sensitive that she could eat only food that he had prepared. So every morning he cooked a meal at Columbuthurai and carried it some sixteen kilometres to her house at Chunnakam, and when she was too weak to feed herself, he fed her. She died on 27 January 1929. Her family and some of her devotees wanted to bury her and build a shrine over the place, as is often done for a saint. Yogaswami would not hear of it, and said plainly that he would have nothing to do with such a thing. The matter was settled when her son came to him and agreed that she should be cremated, as he wished. She was burned on a pyre of sandalwood, and it was Yogaswami who made the arrangements, with two of his devotees, the lawyer Vaithilingam Duraiswamy and Dr. S. Ramanathan of Chunnakam. After her death many of those who had gone to her for guidance turned to him, and from then on he was, for a great many people in Jaffna, the one refuge they had.

From about 1916 a circle began to gather round him: lawyers, teachers, doctors, officials and scholars of Jaffna, and with them, in time, farm women who could not read, men who drove bullock carts, and everyone in between. Thuraiappah, who had gone with him to Nallur that first day, came every morning and evening to sing the Tēvāram in the hut, and that was the first sign that the hut had become a temple. The young teacher K. Navaratnam met him in 1917, and for some years they were hardly apart. Yogaswami would come to his house at dawn and walk with him to his school, and in the evenings they would sit with friends and read Vivekananda and Aurobindo. In 1927 the two of them sat together in meditation through the whole night of Mahāśivarātri, from six in the evening until five in the morning. When Navaratnam fell ill with malaria, it was Yogaswami and another young devotee, C. Mylvaganam, who nursed him. He brought Navaratnam books to read and pushed him to write, and told him one day to write books on Hinduism for people coming to it from the West; but he forbade him to mention his name, and Navaratnam's books speak of many sages and saints and never of Yogaswami. Years later, at his request, Navaratnam wrote a series of essays on Advaita Vedānta for the journal Sivathondan. When people urged him to found an ashram, he answered, "The four directions are the walls of my ashram, and the sky is the roof."

The Śaiva Siddhānta scholar M. Tiruvilangam met him in 1920 and became one of the dearest of his friends; when Tiruvilangam died in Colombo, Yogaswami ran out of his hut, looked up at the sky, and cried that Tiruvilangam had now merged in the light of Śiva. In 1921 the lawyer and politician Vaithilingam Duraiswamy came on a wet October day, took in nothing of what was said to him, and went home with a lime the Swami had given him; he was a devotee for the next forty-three years. In December 1922 a party of students came at nightfall and found him sitting cross-legged under the kerosene lamp at the junction. When he opened his eyes he sang hymns for two hours, like a storm, they said, and then laughed and asked who they were. They wanted to know about their examinations. "I am not an astrologer to give predictions," he told them. "I tell people whatever appears in my mind at that time." Then he told them they would pass, and sent them home.

In the 1920s and 1930s a group of teachers, lawyers, doctors and businessmen met with him about once a week at one of their houses near the Śiva temple at Vannarpannai. He called them, fondly, "The Most Distinguished and Learned Council of Rogues", and they became the core of what was later the Sivathondan Nilayam. They took turns reading the scriptures aloud, and he would stop them at the places that mattered. He would not let them set him, or the saint whose words they were reading, above themselves. "You must become the speaker of the words you read and hear. You are not who you think you are. You are the One. That is what you must practice." Whenever people read or sang for him, a devotee remembered, he would tell them, or scold them, to read not as if of some time and place far away, but as if they were Śiva or Māṇikkavācakar at that very moment. "That's the only way to understand these words."

The pandit known as Rajayogi, a famous speaker, was once coming home to Jaffna by train to a grand reception when, at a station on the way, he fell silent and sat with his eyes closed. He said he felt a great light in the train. At the stop before Jaffna he felt it leave, and one of his companions, looking out of the window, saw Yogaswami walking away. As soon as he could cut the welcome short, Rajayogi drove to the hut, lay a long time face down before him, and then said, "I have never felt such peace as I do at this moment." Yogaswami answered, "What you feel is within you. I am within you."

Life in the hut settled into a pattern. He rose before dawn, bathed at the well, put flowers before his guru's sandals and waved camphor to them. For years he would not have a lamp lit inside, only camphor. The Sivapurāṇam was chanted there every morning and evening, and it was through him that the habit of learning it by heart spread across the Tamil country of Ceylon; he used to say that nothing in any language helped a seeker the way the Sivapurāṇam did. At the end of an evening he gave out prasādam with the words, "Go and come again. But we do not go and we do not come." When a devotee began telling him the news, he cut him short: "There is no news. Everything is as it should be."

He swept the whole compound himself every morning, the dust in one heap and the cow dung in another. A devotee who came early one day found him at it. He stopped, called out "Who is there? Who has come?", and then said, "You know, all this time I was a lavatory coolie; now I am a swami." He went on: "There should be someone to turn people in the right path. Christ did that, Buddha did that. I am also doing that."

He walked all his life. Before the first visitors arrived he would take his umbrella and set off along the roads of the peninsula, thirty, fifty, sixty kilometres in a day, well into his seventies, stopping unannounced at some devotee's house for a meal and coming home when he thought the crowd had gone. After a great storm in the 1940s or 1950s a devotee drove him round to see the damage, and wherever the road was blocked he directed the car down some lane only the locals knew. "This is my estate," he said. "I have walked every inch of it."

In the years when he still went south, he stayed in his devotees' homes, and they kept the rooms he slept in as shrines. In 1939 a Jaffna teacher who had known him since boyhood, in Colombo on the business of his teachers' association, found him at a house on Rajasinghe Road and stayed two nights with him. The room they were given had two spring beds with mattresses, and in those days he never slept on a bed. "Tonight my position going to be like the fisherwoman who slept under a jasmine-flower bush," he said, and later that night he told the story:

"One night, a fisher woman happened to sleep under a jasmine-flower bush. She could not bear the smell of jasmine flowers and was unable to sleep. Her mind craved for the familiar and usual fish odor as she is a fisherwoman. She kept a fish basket near her but still the jasmine-flower smell was overpowering. Then she sprayed a little water on the fish basket, and the fish odor started to pervade suppressing the jasmine smell. Only then she could fall asleep."

"We should learn good habits at young age," he said; "those habits are hard to change even by Saints." Then the two of them talked over other devotees, their merits and their faults, until he stopped it. "These are all mundane things. Truly, we have no rights to talk about somebody's demerits. Every man is living according to his Karma. We should learn to see Siva in everybody and every body in Siva."

Another time the scholar Padmasani Rasenthiram and others came to him in the hill country, wanting to go on pilgrimage to India. "Discard India pilgrimage," he told them. "We will go some place and stay there for ten days." They left with him that same evening for Belihuloya, where an overseer found them lodging in the building of the Village Association and devotees gathered from Colombo, Balangoda and Ratnapura. For ten days they chanted the Sivapurāṇam, the Tēvāram and the Tiruvācakam morning and evening, and spent the rest of the time listening to him.

A stationmaster, S. Vinacithamby, in whose house he sometimes stayed, came to the hut one day and, without thinking, fell at his feet. He did it every time he came after that, though Yogaswami told him, "It is not necessary to worship in front of people. It is not necessary to fall on the ground. It is sufficient if you worship mentally." It was the same man who remembered him saying, "You can see God only through God."

He went, too, to the dying. In May 1939 a devotee whom his family called Sinnathamby lay ill in his new house, after a fall and a fever that would not lift. Late in the evening of the 28th he called his wife and children to him, told them to switch on all the lights and spread a white cloth on the chair by his bed, and asked them to sing, and to prostrate to the one who was coming. They did not understand him. At dusk, with the waxing moon of Vaikāsi rising, Yogaswami opened the garden gate with his umbrella under his arm, called out that name, and walked straight to his room, past the weeping wife at his feet. Sinnathamby tried to rise. Yogaswami took both his hands, held them against his own chest, and sang a song of the bliss that waits for the servants of Śiva. Then he took holy ash from the conch shell on the bedside table, laid it on his forehead, and left, without a word of comfort to anyone in the house. Sinnathamby died on the night of 30 May. His daughter, who was there, wrote that it was not a parting but a promise kept.

Sometimes his comfort came in a handful of words. In about 1952, when M. Prasad was Government Agent in Jaffna, a motor boat bringing people home across the lagoon from a great festival on the far shore took on more than it could carry and sank not far from land, and several lives were lost. Some people said it was his neglect, and he was in great agony of mind. A week later, on a friend's advice, he went to the hut. "Swamiji must have known why I had come to him," he wrote afterwards, "but he said nothing till I was about to leave his ashram after about twenty minutes. Then he said, 'Have no worry. I am your witness.' I cannot describe how consoling and comforting those few words were to me."

He could be terrifying. He scolded in a voice like thunder, chased people off with a stick, and sent away the rich and the poor alike, sometimes after they had come hundreds of miles. When a disciple told him people complained of his temper, he said, "Is not a fire necessary to burn rubbish?" Those he scolded hardest often said afterwards that they had never been afraid of anything again.

He could also be scolded, and he took it gladly. One day at noon, when the sun was at its fiercest, an old woman came into the hut panting, carrying a huge jak fruit, which everyone knew he liked, and set it down before him. "Look here, are you mad?" he said. "Why did you walk all this distance in this hot sun carrying this huge jak?" She waited a moment and answered him: "It is I who carried it all the way for you. It was my pleasure; why do you reprimand me for that? I am not asking for anything in return from you. I wanted to bring it to you, and I have brought it. Now let me rest for awhile and get back home. You keep quiet." "You can have a fine rest and also a life of peace and joy," he told her. He had a cup of coffee brought for her, and said to those around him, "With one sentence she has shut my mouth. It was my fault to have blamed her." Then he gave her an orange and sent her home.

He took a hand in the life of Jaffna too, mostly through his devotees. In 1924 he went every day to the office of the campaign to close the toddy and liquor shops, and for a time every such shop in Jaffna was closed.

Above all he worked for the Śaiva life of the place. He had classes held in Śaiva Siddhānta philosophy, had the Purāṇas read regularly in temples and houses, and insisted that the children, especially those learning music, sing the Tirumuṟai in its own paṇ, the melody it was made for. He listened to those readings with his whole heart. Once a pulavar's discourse on the Periya Purāṇam was carried by loudspeaker to the hut, and Yogaswami admitted afterwards that he had wept as he heard the meeting of Appar and Sambandar described. He held to the old ways of worship, and liked to tell of a Government Agent named Dyke who went to Poonakari in the dry season and asked the villagers how they could farm without irrigation. Someone pointed to the Piḷḷaiyār temple and said that if they prayed to Piḷḷaiyār, the rain would come. The priest bathed, went into the temple and prayed with every rite in its place, and the downpour that followed brought such a flood that Dyke had to wait three days for the water to go down before he could get back to Jaffna. He would not have animals killed for the gods. In Dr. Ramanathan's village a small Aiyanar temple in the paddy fields kept its Pongal festival every year with a great sacrifice of goats and cocks. One day Yogaswami, just back from a journey, looked at Ramanathan and said, "I saw many corpses in your village." The temple's authorities had refused to stop the sacrifice even when the people of the place protested; in time they stopped it of their own accord. And great was his joy when he heard that the doors of the Śiva temple at Vannarpannai had been opened to the harijans.

People came to him as a fortune-teller, and he would have none of it. "At no point in your life have you ever not had what you needed," he told one man who wanted to know whether a new post in Colombo would go well. "All that we need is freely given to us." His devotees told many stories of what happened around him: illnesses that passed, rain that fell when farmers came to him in a drought and he sang, help that came before anyone had asked for it. He would allow no fuss about any of it. "There is nothing amazing in the world," he said. "It all happened long, long ago."

Late in 1934 a devotee, K. K. Nadarasan, opened a small printing press, the Kamalasani, on the Giragama estate at Kaduganawa, in the hills near Kandy; in later years it moved to Peradeniya. A few days after it opened, Yogaswami came to see it. "So you have started a printing press," he said. "Now run it carefully." A week later he came back and said that a press needed a journal to keep it going, and since Nadarasan had learned journalism, he should start one. Asked what to call it, he left without answering, and came back another day to say: "Name the magazine Sivathondan, and run it on a small scale." The first issue came out in the Tamil month of Mārkazhi, in December 1934. The name means both the servant of Śiva and service to Śiva, and he meant both. Its first editorial, at his direction, was titled "Who are we?", and from the second issue a teacher wrote on the great sayings of Chellappaswami.

He tended the journal, his devotees said, as the eyelid guards the eye. He worked closely with the editor and the printer, told learned devotees what to write, and saw to it that no author's name was ever printed. He even watched over the posting of it. "You must paste the wrapper around without concealing the Siva appearing on the cover," he told them. "If the word Siva alone stays in the mind of those who see the journal, it will be a great achievement." In an empty house across the road from the press, a few devotees worked under his eye on a Tamil translation of Sir John Woodroffe's The Serpent Power, the Englishman's book on the Tantras and the yoga of the kuṇḍalinī, and it came out in the pages of Sivathondan.

Out of the circle that gathered round the journal grew the Sivathondan Society. On 4 November 1953 the Sivathondan Nilayam was opened at Vannarpannai in Jaffna, with a hall for readings and singing and, upstairs, a meditation hall kept always in silence, where a pair of sacred sandals was enshrined. He founded the Nilayam and watched over everything done in it, but he did not set foot inside it until 1963. "I move with different types of people," he explained. "If I go in, they too will follow me in. This Nilayam has a holy order to follow. But we have no tradition."

He kept it a place of meditation and worship and nothing else. On the wall of the stair that climbs to the meditation hall he had three sayings put up: sol ellaam maunam (all words are in silence); seyal yaavum maunam (all doing is in silence); ellaam nan mauna niraivae (everything is perfect within silence). Below them went five rules: wash the mouth, hands and feet and put on holy ash before entering; keep to your own duty and do not interfere with others; keep pure in body and within; make no disturbance while the Tirumuṟai and the Purāṇas are being chanted; speak there only of Śaivism and the Natchintanai, never of worldly things. Apart from the worship of the sandals, only two festivals were ever to be kept there: Ārudrā Darśanam in December and Mahāśivarātri. When a member of the board wanted another, he said, "See, man, there is no permission." The singing in the hall below was only a help to the silence above. "Singing and chanting are done because one cannot just be." In 1956 he stopped his car one day outside a school at Navatkuli, called its headmaster, Chellathurai, out to the car, and told him that from that moment he was to live at the Nilayam and be in charge of it. Chellathurai did as he was told, and in time took up the monastic life. Once, as the two of them sat talking, there was a noise from the back, where a man was cleaning the latrine. Yogaswami roared with laughter and called out to him: "O Ramaswamy! Are you doing Sivapuja out there?"

Markandu Swami, a surveyor whom he had visited in the hill country since 1931, came to the monastic life another way. In the middle of his career he wanted to renounce the world, and Yogaswami told him to go on with his work. When he retired at sixty, Yogaswami had a hut of woven palm leaves built for him in a coconut grove at Kaithadi, near Jaffna, and settled him there, and in the years that followed he went often to Kaithadi. It is told both ways: that he would eat the food Markandu Swami had cooked, and that he would cook a meal himself and carry it there to serve him with his own hands. One Mahāśivarātri evening he arrived at the hut unannounced. "We shall observe this Mahasivaratri vrata with meditation only," he said, and that night there was no worship and no chanting, only silence.

In 1960 he said he wished for a second Nilayam at Chenkaladi, in the Batticaloa country, near the town where he had rested for three days on his way to Kataragama in 1910. He wanted it to be a place of service, where young men would work the fields and grow food for pilgrims on the long road to Kataragama. On the third Sunday of August 1962, sitting in his car under the drumstick tree at Markandu Swami's hermitage, he stretched out his hands as if to take in the whole world and called out:

"Go, go out in all directions and plough the fields. Work in partnership with Mother Earth and Father Sun and distribute fairly the fruits of the Earth. Begin right now to till the soil. Begin at Sittandy. While you irrigate the fields, I shall plough your hearts and sow the seeds of love therein."

Land for the Nilayam at Chenkaladi was given in his lifetime, but it was founded only in 1965, the year after his death.

He never sat down to write books. His songs came out of him wherever he happened to be: at a devotee's house, in the quiet corner of the Vannarpannai temple before the goddess Taiyalnāyaki, where he said he had heard her anklets as she walked, or as a verse handed to a family for their own guidance. Whoever was present wrote them down. Many were first printed in Sivathondan, and the devotees who had kept them in their notebooks gathered them together as the Natchintanai, the good thoughts. Markandu Swami knew every one of them by heart.

Yogaswami himself was uneasy about all of it. He did not want his life written. When a devotee was writing about Chellachi Ammaiyar, Yogaswami came to his house twice to tell him to leave him out of it. He gave permission for his songs to be printed and then tried to stop it. Great truths, he said, are desecrated when they come out of a human mouth. "How can you talk about that which you are unable to talk about?"

Nor would he be photographed. In 1951, while he was staying with a family he had known for many years, the mother told her son, a young man of nineteen, to take a picture of him at his morning meditation, from outside the room. Later, sitting with him, she owned up. "Swami, we have made a big blunder." "You couldn't have made a mistake," he said; he had known her since she was a little girl. When she told him what they had done he was silent for a while, and then he burst out laughing. The young man asked if he might take another. "You have already taken one; there is no need to take another," Yogaswami said, and a minute later, "All right, you have taken one, no harm in taking another." He sat for it in a chair on the porch. Those two pictures, the one in meditation and the one in the chair, are the ones his devotees worship today.

The book of his songs came slowly, against that unease. For years he would not let them be gathered into one. When the devotees raised it again after the Śivarātri fast of February 1955, his only answer was to sing a hymn of Tāyumāṉavar about the knower of God who has put away every distinction. In 1957 a devoted couple came up from Colombo and pleaded once more. He answered them: "Cast ye pearls by the wayside? Who can assimilate what is beyond assimilation? Indigestion will lead to putrefaction. Aar arivaar? (Who knows?) Naam ariyoam (We do not know)." Then, in December 1957, while the wife was away in India, word reached her that he had consented after all, on one condition: the book was to carry no foreword and no preface. It was printed in Madras, and on Tiruvātirai, the day of Ārudrā Darśanam, in December 1958 the finished book was laid at his feet. He had her sing the songs through, from the first page to the eighty-fifth, and ordered that it be given out to the devotees in the week of Śivarātri, in February 1959. A second, larger edition followed in 1962.

The songs themselves are plain and direct, and made to be sung. Many of them praise his guru. Many are spoken straight to the listener:

Conduct is worth more than life. The one who has conduct has everything.

Rise up, wake yourself; nothing can ever defeat you now.

And one sets out the whole of his path in a few lines, and closes with his guru's four sayings:

We are Śiva's devotees; we are Śiva's devotees; we are Śiva's devotees; we are Śiva's devotees. This is caryā; this is kriyā; this is yoga; this is jñāna; this is mantra; this is tantra; this is the very medicine.

Three times Yogaswami crossed to India: in 1934, in 1940 and in 1946. Each time he took a few devotees with him on the round of the six great shrines of Murugan and to the temples of Madurai and Chidambaram, and each time, after two or three weeks, he sent them home and went on alone. In 1940 he travelled with Rasiah, the station master of Nuwara Eliya, to Madras, Calcutta, Bombay and Benares. From Kāśī, on 3 November 1940, he wrote home:

Having wandered and searched, I came to Kāśī and saw Viśvanātha himself, within me. There is no need to wander about in weary longing. There is already a worn, old saying: what you sought lies right under your own feet. Even in this place, all the people are exactly like us; there is not one new reason to be found anywhere on this earth. For all the people of Jaffna, past, present, and to come, every needful rite has already been performed, in full. From now on, may you all live in this world according to what has been given to you, in love, and dwell seated beneath the Lord's own feet.

When he came home he taught that Kāśī and Chidambaram were within oneself.

On one of these journeys he went to Tiruvannamalai, to the ashram of Ramana Maharshi at the foot of Aruṇācala. The two sat together in Ramana's room for about an hour. Nothing was said when they met, nothing while they sat, and nothing when they parted. Back in Jaffna people were eager to know what had passed between them. Yogaswami told them:

"We said all there is to say."

Later he told it more fully:

"We did not go with any desire. Summaa we went. We stayed for about an hour. He did not speak at all. He is a great hero."

The word he used for Ramana was mahāvīraṉ, a great hero. Summaa means simply being still, and for Yogaswami that stillness was the highest of all teaching. In this he and Ramana were alike, and both loved to quote the psalm, "Be still, and know that I am God." Everything that needed to be said between them was said in the silence.

In his later years people came to him from far outside Jaffna: Sinhalese Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and seekers from Europe, America and Australia. A Sinhalese Buddhist from Colombo came to the gate at sunrise one morning, when Yogaswami was about eighty-three, and found him at his morning sweeping, a long broom in his hands. The old man came over and opened the gate himself. "I am doing a coolie's job," he said. "Why have you come to see a coolie?" Inside the hut, the visitor sat with him, turning over in his mind how one comes to inner silence, and before he could ask, Yogaswami said, "There is silence when you realise that there is nothing to gain and nothing to lose." When a devotee came in during that visit, prostrated and kissed his feet, he shouted at the man: "Bloody fool! This is not an altar! Are you worshipping me or are you worshipping yourself?" Then he pressed his trembling hands to his own heart and cried, "Look! It is here! God is here! It is here!"

Scholars and heads of monasteries came across from India. In 1955 three professors from Tamil Nadu, T. M. P. Mahadevan, T. P. Meenakshisundaram and A. S. Gnanasambandan, were in Jaffna for a college anniversary and went to see him, and he told them to come again the next day. They meant to bring him a meal from the house where they were staying, but the cook fell ill and nothing else could be arranged, and they arrived empty-handed and a little downcast. "Why do you want to bring food from Mr. Nadesapillai?" he asked them. "Do you think we cannot give you food?" He fed all three. As they ate, Mahadevan was wishing he might be served from the Swami's own hand, and Yogaswami mixed the food on his own leaf and put a portion of it on Mahadevan's. When the grapes came round, Gnanasambandan was thinking how nice it would be if they were peeled, and Yogaswami peeled one and handed it to him. Mahadevan came again in 1963 and found him bedridden at the Sivathondan Nilayam; Yogaswami sat a long while in meditation with him there, and then let him go. A. Lakshmanaswami Mudaliar, the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Madras, came in 1955, and said afterwards that even in India he had never met a saint of his calibre, a treasure, he called him, for humanity. Kundrakudi Adigalar, the young head of a great Śaiva monastery in Tamil Nadu, was brought to the hut in the late 1950s and went away with a copy of the Natchintanai as a gift; he read it from cover to cover, and from then on, in every lecture he gave, he praised the songs as the cream of Śaiva Siddhānta.

In 1953 a young swami from South India, Satchidananda, who had come to Kandy to teach the postures of haṭha yoga and was drawing crowds there, came to the hut for his blessing. "I entered the hut and prostrated," he remembered. "Immediately Yogaswami asked me, 'How many people do you have standing on their heads today, Swami?'"

Others came from further still. Gauribala was a German, Peter Schoenfeldt, who had come to Ceylon in 1936 and put on the robe of a Buddhist monk at the Island Hermitage at Dodanduwa, where he was known as Ñāṇakhetto. When the war came he was interned in India with other Germans. He escaped, and it was in India, from a swami who initiated him, that he received the name Gauribala. After the war he came back to Ceylon, and to Jaffna. His first meeting with Yogaswami is told two ways. In one, he was looking along the shelf of spiritual books in a bookshop on the KKS Road in Jaffna when a wild-looking old man with white hair snatched the book out of his hands: "You bloody fool, it's not found in books! Nee summaa iru!" (Be still!) In the other, a seeker from abroad in an ochre cloth, worn out by years in the monasteries of Tibet and the ashrams of India, was waiting at Jaffna station for the train home when a stranger told him he must see Yogaswami before he went: "He is the greatest 'humbug' of them all!" He went to the hut, a voice bellowed from inside to ask who was there, and when he gave his name it shouted in English, "Get out! Find out who you are first before you come here!" Both tellings agree that he was sent away many times before he was allowed in to sit before him.

Yogaswami told him, "Gauribala, summaa iru" (be still), and Gauribala took the words as his mantra and had them tattooed on his arm. Long afterwards, an old man himself, he would hold out the arm to show visitors, and tell them how hard he had found it. "I could not reach that thoughtless state my guru pointed to; I could not subdue the mental movements. I put this tattoo on my arm to remind myself everyday of my guru's teachings, of my sadhana. Imagine the power of a master who can give you two words to follow, and you spend the rest of your life working to fulfill them. That was Yogaswami." When his own devotees told him he was gruff, he said, "Ha! I'm gruff? You couldn't stand for thirty seconds in front of my guru."

The Englishman James Ramsbotham, son of Lord Soulbury, the Governor-General, had come to Ceylon while his father held that office, and shocked him by choosing to live with Gauribala at Kataragama rather than at Queen's House. He became Yogaswami's disciple, and Yogaswami initiated him and gave him the name Santhaswami. "Sometimes I will speak in a contradicting manner," he told him. "The reason is to create confusion in your mind and make it clear." And: "Do not lament that you should learn Sanskrit and Tamil; your English is also a divine language."

Yogaswami often put a question to the people around him: "If you are told you must not speak the truth, you must tell a lie, then what should you do?" One day, when Santhaswami was there, he asked it of him. Santhaswami put his finger to his lips and said nothing. Afterwards Yogaswami told the others, "He is a great man. So many people in Jaffna gave me all sorts of explanations; he just showed it in silence." Another day, when a devotee brought him tea, Yogaswami held out his own cup to Santhaswami, and the devotee offered to fetch another. "Mind your own business; I know what to do," said Yogaswami, and gave him the tea. What Yogaswami said to Santhaswami was said in English, and Santhaswami wrote it down word for word; with the sayings kept by three other disciples, among them Markandu Swami and Chellathurai, it was printed after his master's death. After that death he ran the paddy fields of the new Nilayam at Chenkaladi for twelve years, driving the tractor through them himself, to fulfil what his guru had wished.

Another Sinhalese Buddhist, Sam Wickramasinghe, came to know Gauribala at Kataragama in the 1950s, and through him found his way to the hut. On his first visit he sat cross-legged on the floor and began, "Swami, I am a Sinhalese, Buddhist by conviction," and got no further. "Rubbish," Yogaswami thundered. "No Singhalese, no Tamil, no Muslim! They are all one from the same seed. They feel the same hunger, the same anger and pain, make love the same way, have the same noses," and he pinched his own nose and eyes. "The same gossiping tongues. All in one, one in all!" Then, after a pause: "No Buddhist, no Christian, no Hindu. Deeply religious people have no religion." Theirs, he said, "is the religion of the heart!" Sam protested that he had heard all that before, and wanted something to live by. "Please tell me how to live better!" "Don't do anything to live. Live! Go learn from the book of life and work. By work you will rise. Get up!" His hand came up and the interview was over. "Go, be like a lion! Don't be afraid!" Another time he told him: "Learn from the book of Life. Watch yourselves and your reactions to externals. Don't suppress anything," and went on, "go into every situation that strikes your path and watch mindfully, in joy or in sorrow, in anger or in love ... then one day, quite suddenly, unexpectedly, the 'Watcher' who is watching all this and getting involved in All this will be SEEN!"

Sam was one of a handful of young seekers, from Ceylon and from abroad, who gathered round Yogaswami in the 1950s, with Gauribala, the eldest of them, and Santhaswami. Each was called by the name of a young animal: Gauribala was Naikutti, the puppy; Sam, Pulikutti, the tiger cub; Santhaswami, Yanaikutti, the elephant calf; and an Australian, Barry Windsor, Narikutti, the young fox. The names were not Yogaswami's. Most remember them as given by Haro Hara Amma, an old woman devoted to Murugan who lived on a tea estate in the hills, though it is told other ways too, and the little band came to be called the kutti kuttam, the council of cubs. Together they danced the kavadi at Kataragama, and at the Nallur festival Yogaswami could be found sitting with them in the chariot shed where his own guru had lived. Sam remembered what their meetings with him were full of: "Get out", "Nothing here for you", "Find out for yourselves", "Go into the open", "Die to yourselves and live".

The Canadian High Commissioner, James George, was his pupil for the nearly four years he served in Ceylon in the early 1960s. On his first visit he knocked quietly at the door of the hut, and a voice roared from inside, "Is that the Canadian High Commissioner?" George opened the door. "Well, Swami," he began, "that is just what I do, not what I am." "Then come and sit with me," said Yogaswami, laughing uproariously. He scolded George for running round the country from one official function to the next instead of sitting in meditation, and once, when he came back from home leave, sat him down firmly beside him. "You are all the time running about, doing something, instead of sitting still and just being. Why don't you sit at home and confront yourself as you are, asking yourself, not me, 'Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?'" With each repetition his voice rose, until he was shouting the question with all his force. Then, all at once, he fell silent, and the silence filled the room. When George brought his three children, Yogaswami asked each of them how old they were, and to each in turn, nine, eleven and thirteen, he replied solemnly, "I am the same age as you." The children protested that he could not be three ages at once; he only laughed and winked at their parents. Another day George came with his questions carefully prepared, sat down on the mat, and began, "Swami, I think..." "Already wrong!" Yogaswami thundered.

An American woman, Hilda Charlton, used to travel all night on an old train to Jaffna to see him. To her he was "so simple, sweet, childlike", and his message was "that everyone is pure and perfect, only they don't know it." He accepted nothing. He said, "I take nothing and I give nothing." "But of course," she wrote, "he gives a great deal."

In May 1949 a young American, Robert Hansen, was brought to the hut one moonlit evening. He had come to Ceylon two years before to study meditation, had lately spent a time of fasting and meditation in the caves at Jailani, and had been brought north to Jaffna by Kandiah Chettiar, a Tamil friend who had taken him into the temples of Colombo. Before the cart had stopped, Yogaswami called out from inside, "Come, come, come. I am waiting for you." He asked the young man whether he had seen him anywhere. "Yes, at the Nallur temple," the young man said. He had seen him there during the evening worship, on the way. "You are in me," said Yogaswami. "You are in me," said the young man. "I am in you." "I am in you." The devotees were astonished; no one spoke to the Swami like that. When the young man moved to prostrate, Yogaswami stopped him: "You and I are one." He questioned him on Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras, the one book he kept on his shelf, and was pleased with the answers. He gave him the name Subramuniya.

At the end of a later visit, as he saw him to the gate, he gave him a slap on the back so hard it nearly knocked him over, and told him he would go back to America and roar. "Whenever you want me, I will be with you." The last time the young man came, he found Yogaswami sitting alone in deep meditation. As he reached the doorway Yogaswami opened his eyes and roared, "I'm not at home." The young man turned to go, not quickly enough, and the old man said it again, louder: "I am not at home!" He did not go back. He sailed home at the end of that year and, as Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, spent his life teaching in America as Yogaswami's disciple. In 1956, when he had a great inner experience in America, Yogaswami said to Vinayagamoorthy, a devotee's son in Jaffna, "Hansen is dead. Hansen is dead." Those who heard it were saddened, until a letter came from America to say that he had begun to teach. Then they understood: it was what Chellappaswami had said of Yoganathan when he went to Kataragama. Years later, when a lady asked whether he was going to name a successor, Yogaswami said, "Not a Jaffna man. I have a man in America."

In his last years he sent some of his own people the other way. In 1962 he made known his plan for a pilgrimage to the West and to Malaysia by a few close devotees, and on 29 April 1963 the five he had chosen sailed on the SS Chusan for the United Kingdom and Malaysia, to meet what he called his friends there. He gave them no lectures to deliver. They were to greet those they met in friendship and accept no gifts, to live in the light of Śaivism, and to let them feel the presence of Śiva more through silence and the spoken word than through learned talk.

All of his teaching came back, in the end, to knowing who you are. He gave it in a thousand forms, in songs, in scoldings, in a word on the road, and the devotees who wrote down his sayings kept many of them:

"Know thyself by thyself."

"You are Śiva. I am Śiva. All are Śiva. Remaining summaa is also Śiva."

"Remaining summaa is the best exercise."

"Use the body like a sandal."

"All men are beautiful walking flowers."

"You must live in the world like the copra and the tamarind within their shells."

The tamarind was a favourite. As the fruit ripens it dries and shrinks away from its shell, until it touches it at only one point; so, he said, should one live in the world. To his devotees he would say, again and again, "You are not your body. You are not your mind. You are not your emotions. You are the Ātmā. That only is. Be that, and be a witness!" To a group of boys worried about their futures he described how a person should stand in life: "There is no one above us or superior to us. Good and evil cannot touch us. For us there is no beginning or end. We don't like or dislike. We don't desire material things. The play of the mind doesn't trouble us. Nor are we limited by place or time or karma. We simply watch that which goes on around us."

He held that Vedānta and Siddhānta, so often set against each other, were one, and he respected every faith. He quoted the Buddha's sermons to Buddhists, the Bible to Christians, and Auvaiyar to everyone. "Everybody worships God in his own way," he said. He told once of a visit from abroad: "Two European ladies came to me. They had been in India to see Mahatma Gandhi. They wanted a message from me. I asked them what Gandhi had told them. The Mahatma had said, 'One God, one world.' I told them I could not think of a better message." But under all of it lay the four sentences he had carried away from the chariot stand at Nallur: oru pollaappum illai (there is not one wrong thing); eppavoa mudintha kaariyam (it was all finished long ago); naam ariyoam (we do not know); muzhuthum unmai (all is truth).

Age came on him slowly. In his last years, away from the hut, he went mostly to Vannarpannai and Kaithadi, and he would look back on what his body had once borne. "At one time I used to sleep in the cold, as on one occasion in Maruthanamadam, I was soaked in rain all night. Later I used to sleep on the roots of the Eluppai tree." And once, joking: "Last time my feet used to prick the pebbles but now the pebbles prick my feet."

On 21 February 1961, at the age of eighty-eight, he went to the cow shed behind his hut, where his cow Valli was tethered. Two days earlier the daughter of the house had warned him to keep away from her, as she had been restless. The cow threw her head and knocked him to the ground, and he could not get up. His hip was broken.

He was carried to Jaffna Hospital. The next day devotees flew in from Colombo, among them the surgeon who operated on him that evening. He would never walk again. The hospital room became a temple; devotees gathered there from four in the morning to sing and chant. Every morning at six an English nun came to see to his care. One day he asked her when she found time to pray. "My work is my prayer. What I do with my hands, Father, is my prayer." "We are also like that," he answered. "That way we stay pure so that God within us can work through us." When he spoke of God within, she put her hands over her ears. He laughed. "Oh, that's all right. Some day you will understand."

He would let no one blame the cow. "We put ourselves in Valli's way," he said. "It was not she who did what was settled in the beginning." To those who grieved over him he said that the sickness was a boon, and that karma must without fail be gone through. "When the body came, it brought all those connected with it, and one of them is the sickness. We need not think deeply about this sickness. Eppavoa mudintha kaariyam (It was all finished long ago)." And when they fretted: "Do you think you can forestall my karma?" A devotee who came to see him found him clasping a doctor's hand. "Rajah, you think that I am very ill, don't you? There is nothing wrong with me. The body which did the bad deed is paying the penalty." Years before, when someone asked him why he took no medicine for his ailments, he had said, "I could die now if I wanted to, just close my eyes and in a short time be dead." But he had a few more things to do, he said, and he still needed to overcome anger a little; when he went, he wanted to go for good and not come back.

In June 1961, after three months in hospital, he came home to a new room his devotees had built beside the old hut, with a proper bed, which he had never used before, and a wheelchair. He could no longer escape on his long walks, and the people came in greater numbers than ever. He was, he said, captured. Many who had been afraid of him all their lives now came, and found him gentle. In the evenings he was driven to the sea for the breeze, and to Nallur, where he sat in the car before the chariot shed and sang the Sivapurāṇam. In 1963 he stayed for about three weeks at the Sivathondan Nilayam, and so at last went inside it; the bed he used is still kept there.

In these last years he would talk of Chellappaswami, and he called constantly on the goddess Taiyalnāyaki of Vannarpannai, and had the people round him sing four lines in her praise for hours together. "His will prevails, within and without," he told everyone. "Abide in His will." In his last months he seemed to live in two worlds at once, talking with beings the others could not see. Coming back to the room after one long silence, he asked whether they had been with him. "Everything is golden," he said. "There is a soft and self-luminous light beyond anything you can imagine."

From December 1963 he would say, now and then, that he saw the time coming when he would leave his body, and devotees came from Colombo and the east to be with him. When a large crowd had gathered, sad-faced, he only looked at them and laughed and laughed, and sent them away. A month before the end a devotee sang before him Māṇikkavācakar's pilgrim song, the Yātrai Pattu, on the soul's going up to Śiva's city. At the close of the refrain Yogaswami answered: "Shed all your pollution and come unto me. I shall lead you to the City of Sivanagar. But when will you loosen the adamantine chains?" "When Swami wills it," the singer replied.

He prepared them for his going. "I have done everything that I have to do for more than fifty years," he said. "I have said everything that I have to say. I have no regrets." And: "I have not left any one of my loved ones by the wayside. I prepare to go, having done what could be done, to each according to his needs." For some weeks he kept asking the time. "Is it three o'clock? When it is three o'clock I must get out, so tell me when it is three."

On 20 March 1964 he took to his bed and would eat and drink nothing. For three days devotees came in a steady stream. Late on the night of the 23rd, a doctor who came to him every day asked how he felt. "Ellaam sari" (All is well), he answered in a full voice. They were the last words most of them heard from him. By half past eleven only five men were left in the room. He asked them, softly, to sing, and they sang "Engaḷ Gurunātaṉ", his own song for his guru, and Māṇikkavācakar's "Namaccivāya vāzhka".

He left his body at 3.18 in the morning of 24 March 1964, at the age of ninety-one. By the Tamil reckoning, in which the day begins at sunrise, it was still Monday night, and that Monday was the second Monday of Panguni: the day he had kept for fifty-four years as the day of his initiation, the day of the worship of his guru's feet. The news went out on the radio, and people came from all over the island.

All that day his body lay in the hut at Columbuthurai while devotees, schoolchildren and townspeople came to pay their respects and sang the Tirumuṟai and his own songs. Early on the morning of Wednesday the 25th it was bathed and anointed, wrapped in white and garlanded, and carried along Columbuthurai Road to the cremation ground at Thundi. The houses along the way set out lamps and pots of water. Thousands sat in silence while a pandit recited from the Tiruvācakam, and then the pyre, with a quarter of a ton of sandalwood in it, was lit, and everyone cried out "Arōharā". Sinhalese, Muslims and Christians stood with the Hindus to see him go.

His ashes were laid in a crypt where the old hut had stood, and a shrine was built over them. His guru's sandals are kept there, and worship is offered every day in the place where he sat, meditated and slept. Long before, he had said what was to be done with the body. "Just throw it away when I have left it." He had never thought it was the guru. "You must not think of this person as the guru," he used to say, pointing to himself. "The guru is vastly different from this."