Ramana Maharshi and his Sadhana of Silence

RAMANA MAHARSHI
AND HIS SADHANA OF SILENCE

I

It is odd that I should have agreed to make a speech on the “Sadhana of Silence”. I am reminded of the paradox of the great Carlyle extolling the virtues of silence in the course of thirty or more formidable volumes of exuberant writing. Speech is silvern, silence is golden; yet speech seems easier than silence. Besides, I was a teacher for 40 years, and my kind of teaching needed speaking and even shouting before hundreds of under­graduate students, not the silence sublime associated with the great southern God, Dakshinamurty. And there was the brief period of my Vice-Chancellorship of Andhra University, when talking, arguing, pleading, lecturing, orating became necessary for my day-to-day functioning and survival. Subsequently, during the last fifteen or more years, I have tried within limits to cultivate silence, but the old habit dies hard. Hence, my present predicament of having to give a talk on “Ramana Maharshi and his Sadhana of Silence.”

Let me begin with a story related by B. R. Rajam Aiyar in Prabuddha Bharata, and later included in his Rambles in Vedanta. Like Sri Aurobindo, Rajam Aiyar was born in 1872 and had a brilliant academic career, taking his B. A. in 1889 and his B. L. in 1892. Now his quest for self-realisation began, and he had the grace of his Guru, Swami Santananda Saraswati, the “Mowni.” Suddenly in 1896, Rajam Aiyar found himself face to face with death, but, he neither faltered nor fretted, and he was wholly unafraid. He edited Prabuddha Bharata from 1896 – meditating, writing, meditating again – till the end. He was sparing of speech, and was indeed a man of “a single speech and a thousand silences.” He died at the age of 26:

Cut was the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burnt was Apollo’s laurel bough.

Rajam Aiyar tells the story of a “Mowni” and a temple trustee. There was a silent sage sitting in a corner of a temple, doing apparently nothing at all. After puja, the temple priest used to offer the sage a small ball of rice daily at noon, and the Mowni found it more than enough. When there was a change in management, the new trustee thought it wrong to encourage idleness and ordered that the supply of the midday ball of rice should be stopped. But the Mowni didn’t seem to care; he received alms at a few houses, and returned to his temple corner as usual. The trustee now decided to tackle the “idler” directly, and harangued the Mowni on the folly of idleness. The sage motioned the trustee to sit down and relapsed into silence again. The trustee’s further attempts to draw the sage into conversation were in vain. There was a total majesty of self-­sufficiency in the silence that enveloped the sage that made the trustee increasingly ill at ease. The devils of cerebration were let loose within, his body writhed in discomfort, he hardly found the courage to face the sage, and it now occurred to him that sitting silent was the most difficult thing in life. He fidgeted and struggled for a while, and managed to rise at last, when the sage opened his eyes for an instant as if to bless the trustee who beat a hasty retreat and directed the Pujari to give two balls of rice instead of one daily to the Mowni. I wonder sometimes whether Rajam Aiyar hadn’t seen in a vision the “Brahmana Swami” in the solitariness and silence of his early weeks and months in Tiruvannamalai; or perhaps somebody had carried the report of the young Swami throned in silence in the thousand-pillared hall–and Rajam Aiyar made this story with a moral in Vyasa’s strain!

II

The few “facts” and “dates” of Venkataraman’s early life do not add up to much. He was born on 29 December 1879 in Tiruchuzhi in Madurai District. Once in his sixth year, when his lawyer-father criticised the boy for his fondness for kite-flying, Venkataraman made himself scarce, and was finally located behind the idol in the local temple. In 1892, after his father’s death, Venkataraman had to shift to his uncle’s house in Madurai, and continue his education at the American Mission School. He came to be known as a good wrestler and swimmer, though he was nothing precocious in his studies. When a visitor-relation told the boy about Arunachala at Tiruvannamalai, he felt invaded by an inexplicable fascination for the place. He read about the lives of the Saiva saints in Periapuranam, and he also moved to the higher Forms in the school, more in a mood of sufferance than with any deep involvement. Kite-flying, wrestling, swimming, Arunachala, Periapuranam, a growing unease, a tense expectancy ­they make an odd mixture but the elements were to mingle and acquire criticality before long.

The real life of a spiritual personality like Ramana Maharshi was not lived on the outside to permit of any matter-of-fact recordation. It was lived within, and it is a closed book to us. Besides, when your subject is Infinity, where do you begin, and how do you take its measure? Nevertheless, in our all-too-blunder­ing human way, we needs must “dissect” and analyse, and try to draw our pedestrian conclusions. Ramana’s life, then, can thus be divided into three broad spans:

I. Childhood and Boyhood: 29 December 1879 to 16 July 1896, 16½ years.

II. From Venkataraman to Bhagawan Ramana Maharshi: 16 July 1896 to end of 1922: 26½ years.

III. In silence and serenity: Maharshi’s world-wide ministry: 1923 to 14 April 1950; 27½ years.

The cardinal event in Venkataraman’s life was the mystical tremendum of the definitive movement or leap in consciousness that took the Kingdom of Heaven by violence as it were; and this took place on 16 July 1896 on the first floor of his uncle’s house in Madurai. What did happen during that brief spell­–that moment of timeless time insolated from Time’s flow, that moment of time scooped out of eternity–is not easy to describe, and indeed even to understand experientially. A sudden shudder sensing the spectre of extinction, of Death the Destroyer: a wrestling with the spectre and getting the better of it: and a firm and final plunging into the Infinite, and swimming in the plenitude of that Ocean Awareness! And there was to be no more Time, for mortal man had beyonded mortality and won the taste of immorta­lity. The incandescent experience meant the annihilation of “I” or of its total immersion and dissolution in the Self. In later years, he described his experience as the Sadhana of self-inquiry, as the offensive of mouna vichara leading to the Discovery of the Self, the whole process starting with the query “Who am I or what am I?”, then tearing and casting aside veil after veil, shadow upon shadow, and attaining at last the real “I” – the Illimitable Permanent, the One without a Second. Whatever happened on 16 July 1896 occurred in the sovereignty of silence, and probably the whole Sadhana and Siddhi were accomplished in a few minutes.

An analogous here comes to my mind. In his Sarter Resartus, Carlyle describes the three stages of his hero Herr Teufelsdrekh’s spiritual journey: “the Everlasting Nay”, “the Centre of Indiffe­rence” and “the Everlasting Yea.” But Venkataraman had evidently no such three-step ascent or three-stage anabasis to accomplish. With him it was a near-instantaneous sequence of insights and liberations: “Ah, what art thou afraid of? Death? But what is this bogey, Death? Look, there can be no extinction of the real ‘I’, the glassy elusive Essence, the immortal ‘I’, the illimit­able Self. The fear of death is dead, and there can be no more dying now!” After such a heady quantum canter of conscious­ness, how was one to measure out the trivialities of everyday life? As compared with the life everlasting that was the prero­gative of the real “I”, of what importance was the fever and fret of the life lived on the outside?

It is now understood that Ramana’s dialectic of “What am I?”, his Sadhana of self-inquiry, is something that–when one persists in the inquiry, digging deeper and deeper into oneself–­ends in being lost in the Self, Atman, the deceptive egotistical “I” and its clinging veils of Unknowing being swallowed up by the Self. The Sadhana is thus a discipline of self-exploration self-direction and self-finding in terms of self-transcendence. There is the death of the ego, the rise of the Self, the extinction of the seeming life and the rise of the New Life eternal. Be the intestine inner struggle-the wrestling within, the breasting the billows–­long or short, self-inquiry is the way of silence, the sovereign Atman silencing the pretender-egs with its claims of separativity. From surface silence to the silence sublime, from the outer to the deeper inward silence: such is the Sadhana in silence, Sadhana of silence.

It may be added, however, that the strategy of Atma-vichara “Who am I?” – “Where have I come from, and where am I going?”–that ends in the annihilation of the ego and the affirmation of the reality of the Atman or Higher Self doesn’t find ready favour with all. The individualistic exploration of one’s past, the Freudian preoccupation with the unconscious, the Gandhian recapitulation of his “Experiments with Truth”, the Nehruistic self-conscious exercise in memory, the self-probings of writers like John Cowper Powys and Mulk Raj Anand, all trying in their several ways to come to terms with themselves, their divers “I”, “I,” “I”–such seasons or sessions or orgies of self-introspection can hardly climax in the explosive affirmation of the Illimitable Permanent. Poking the peevish gutter of one’s surface–or just below the surface–con­sciousness may be no more than digging up old dress orgarbage, but to go still deeper would be to reach at long last the nectarean Well of living Waters.

After that definitive event, that plenary experience, of 16 July 1896, when the obtrusive zero – I was once for all dissolved in the Infinite, what next? As though hardly anything had happened, Venkataraman went about his routine – school-going, reading, writing – besides paying visits to the Minakshi temple. But how long can the mere memory of the Salt Doll that has lost its identity in the sea sustain its apparent separative existence? Six weeks after, Venkataraman could stand it no more. He walked out of his uncle’s house on 29 August without taking leave of even his mother, boarded a train, and like a piece of iron drawn irresistibly towards a mighty magnet, he overcame the transient obstructions and reached Tiruvannamalai on 1 September. And there, having cast aside his marginal “belongings”, and wearing no more than a loin-cloth, he stood bare and nude before God. This was the physical projection of the spiritual identity forged already in Madurai six weeks earlier.

III

If the most significant moment during the first 16½ years of his life was the finality of self-transcendence that took place on 16 July 1896, another decisive turning-point in Venkataraman’s life was the seminal second meeting between the “Brahmana Swami” (as Venkataraman came to be called in Arunachala’s environs) and the formidable Sanskrit savant and master of many languages and knowledges, Sri Kavyakantha Vasishta Ganapati Muni on 18 November 1907.

But first, how about the 11-year interim? Having spent a few weeks in the thousand-pillared hall, Venkataraman had moved to the Patala Ganga vault, and so down among the rats, ants, mosquitoes and the accumulating dirt of the place: then, in 1897, at the Gurumurtham mutt, a little away from the temple and people could hardly help noticing this phantom of self-deprivation, this unkempt, unwashed boy with an unmistakable effulgence in his eyes and on his face. In the latter half of 1898, he was at Arunagirinathar shrine for a while living upon alms, then for some months at Pavalakkunru. In December 1898, his mother Alagammal visited his nook and saw him seated on a rock. He had gone through months and months of silence, and wouldn’t talk to his mother either; and so she had to return to Madurai in disappointment, although vaguely assured by the written message; “What must happen must happen; all’s for the best.” How Venkataraman sustained his bodily functions without any ostensible effort is a question that cannot be answered. But people noticed this seeming idler who was obviously a creature apart. One Palaniswamy took it upon himself to serve this living God, the “Brahmana Swami”; and this was to go on for twenty years. Another ministrant was to be Echchammal.

After the liberation of 16 July 1896, why was it needful for Venkataraman to expose himself to such, terrible deprivations during the first 30 months in Tiruvannamalai? He seems to have cared neither for food nor for clothing, nor for the manner of his life. The inner Light was everything; the outer circumstances were of insect insignificance. To a lesser extent, this was to go on for some more years. It was not so much any deliberately contrived asceticism of an extreme kind (like resting on a bed of thorns, forexample); rather was it a near-total ignoration of the body physical and its needs and claims. Was it to normalise and stabilise the stupendous realisation of 16 July 1896 even under the most forbidding conditions? Or was it only to harden himself to the utmost possible extent so that normal relations with the outside world would be easy and natural?

Early in 1899, the “Brahmana Swami” shifted to Virupaksha Cave, having already spent nearly 2½ years in Tiruvannamalai, and he was to remain in the cave for seventeen years. It had been silence and Sadhana, the Sadhana of silence and minimal speech began with Palaniswamy and continued fitfully if also governed by a deeper purpose. There was now witnessed the very slow, the very gradual and even imperceptible movement from total self-absorption in silence to the first feeble signs of outer normality. He was a new person, sheer Sattwik quintessence, and also merging with the place – with the triune universes of God, Nature and Man. One way or another, he was now led to read books like Adhyatma Ramayana, Yoga Vasishta, Kaivalya Navaneetam and Viveka Chudamani. Venkataraman, now grown anonymous, was living apparently without any volition: no speech at all, for weeks and months together: or no morethan the briefest verbal responses to Palaniswamy or other elected denizens of the place. In our mundane view, it was hardly like living; it was more akin to Samadhi than the fever and fret of oureveryday life.

Then, on 18 November 1907, when the “Brahmana Swami” had spent more than 11 years already in Tiruvannamalai (mainly in the temple environs), Ganapati Muni – who had seen the boy Swami earlier in 1903 – now finding himself at the end of his spiritual tether, sought out the Swami again and fell prostrate before him: “I have read and meditated on all that is customary, and I have tried all kinds of askesis as prescribed, yet the goal eludes me still, and I desperately ask for new Light out of the Dark tunnel.” Something to this effect! And out of the impassive Swami’s depths of compassion suddenly surged forth the seminal word:

Track the ‘I’ to its last vanishing stance,
that’s the way of askesis;
and in Japa, track the Rune to its source,
such trailing leads to the Self.

Tracing the “I” to its source, tearing through the successive separatist walls, was indeed the true home-coming. Tracing the mantra to its source was home-coming again. What one would become as a result of the process of Atma-vichara was – by going within –   becoming what one was before Time. Thus, Man moves from Time to the Timeless, from Here to Eternity.

Even as these words slowly sank into the deeper levels of his consciousness, on learning that the Swami’s original name was Venkataraman, Ganapati Muni hailed him at once “Bhagawan Ramana Maharshi”, a visible manifestation of Skandaa Lord Subramania. The Muni’s lightning leap of divination uttered Being or Bhagawan; though incandescent poetising named the Holy, Skanda, Subramania, and raised his prayer of thanks-giving. What had been on 16 July 1896 a luminous, an almost instantaneous, flash of Sadhana in silence had continued under subdued lights for eleven years in Arunachala as the Sadhana of silence; and now the silent presence of the “Brahmana Swami” was equated with the silent Dakshinamurty who teaches in silence the Sadhana of silence to all that aspire for enlightenment and liberation.

After Ganapati Muni’s verbal installation of the “Brahmana Swami” as Ramana Maharshi, more and more pilgrim-visitors of all classes and kinds felt drawn to the silent presence of the Bhagawan and received solace and strength by the power of the charged silence itself. In 1911, having had his Darshan of the Maharshi F. H. Humphreys recorded:

“For half an hour I looked into the Maharshi’s eyes, which never changed their expression of deep contemplation. I began to realise somewhat that the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost...”

The body can be viewed as the Castle of the King, the supreme Self, while the ego is but the Viceroy of caretaker in complete subordination to the Master, And so the seekers–the few self-conscious intellectuals as well as the unsophisticated many – basked in the sunshine of the Maharshi’s ambrosial silence and found the needed solace or the pertinent and precise answers to their gnawing questions.

After the meeting with Ganapati Muni, Ramana stayed on in Virupaksha Cave for some more years till his mother Alaga­mmal’s second coming in 1916 (eighteen years after the first towards the end of 1898), along with her younger son, Nagasundaram (later, Niranjanananda). The mother now stood in relation to her son, the Bhagawan, as Devahuti of hoary antiquity did to her Avatar-son, Kapila. Presently they shifted in 1916-’17 to Skandashram built by a devotee, Kandaswami, and all seekers and aspirants had ready access to the Bhagawan whose silent presence was “upadesa” and initiation enough. It was during his stay at Skaudashram that Sree Narayana Guru of Kerala met Ramana, and the two Mahapurushas had silent communion and Narayana Guru composed “Nivritti Panchakam.” On 19 May 1922, Alagammal expired, and she was buried at a spot on the southern slope of Arunachala and a Samadhi was raised there and later a Matribhuteswara Temple as well.

IV

Towards the end of 1922, Ramana preferred to stay near his mother’s Samadhi, and so the Ramanashram came into existence as part of the Samadhi- Temple complex. For the next 27 years and more, the Bhagawan by the power and grace of his silence radiated his ministry of self-inquiry and sovereign self-realisation. And the two Ashrams – Sri Aurobindo’s at Pondicherry and Ramanashram at Tiruvannamalai – came to be lauded universally as the twin foci of the persisting human aspiration towards Light, Freedom, God, Immortality.

Ramanashram was to attract, especially since the ’Thirties, more and more seekers from all over the country and even abroad. Paul Brunton had this to record about his darshanof the Maharshi:

“I cannot turn my gaze away from him...it is not till the second hour of the uncommon scene that I became aware of a silent, resistless change which is taking place within my mind. One by one, the questions which I prepared in the train with such meticulous accuracy drop away...a steady river of quietness seems to be flowing near me ... a great peace is penetrating the inner reaches of my being.”

In his widely read book, A Search for Secret India, Brunton gave a vivid account of the effect of the Bhagawan’s silent presence on him, and this brought other Western seekers (Somerset Maugham, for instance) to the Maharshi, and some of them at least experienced the alchemising power of the Sadhana of silence.

The stream of visitors (mostly seekers) from the ends of India – intellectuals no less than the “common” people nevertheless rich in the integrity and intensity of their yearning – soon became a steady flood, and the Maharshi’s Grace was unfailing. Thus, for example, says Prof. K. Subramanian, a teacher of English literature:

“My mind was stilled before it could even feebly affirm its existence. In its place was Bhagawan’s silence-awareness with only peace for its content.”

Arthur Osborne, again, who came to reside in the Ramanashram, has recorded his own experience of this Sadhana of silence:

“Bhagawan was reclining in his couch and I was sitting in the front row, and his narrowed eyes pierced into me penetrating, intimate, with an intensity I cannot describe. And then quietness, a depth of peace, an indescribable lightness and happiness...It was the initiation by look.”

And Prof. K. Swaminathan, generalising as it were, thus brings out the true nature of Ramana’s Sadhana of silence in silence, the Sadhana that unerringly awakens the deeper listening of the soul:

“In the sage’s presence one has the feeling of sharing with him the knowledge that the spectators no less than the participants are a part of, and not apart from, the picture, that the dream is in the dreamer, not the dreamer in the dream.”

What is effected is a reversing of the sensory functions, for they now turn inward instead of dissipating themselves outside. Silence itself becomes a powerful reactor capable of harnessing the energies of one’s aspiration and guiding them towards the still centre within, to merge in it forever.

Like a contemporaneous Dakshinamurty splendorously alive even to our purblind and prosaic perceptions, Bhagawan Ramana insinuated the efficacy of the sustained askesis of “Mouna Vichara”, Sadhana of silence. In Prof. K. Seshadri’s words:

“Bhagawan Sri Ramana taught in silence...and continues to teach from the shrine of his Mahasamadhi. His teachings find an echo in the hearts of all those that turn to him.”

For those who never had darshanof the Maharshi, or who had never had occasion to approach his Mahasamadhi at Tiruvanna­malai with reverence and surrender, for these too a portrait of the Maharshi or a deep-felt inner call can be charged with the same silent power for generating the process of decisive inner change, the movement towards transformation.

It is no doubt true that we have now records of the Bhagawan’s replies to several of his disciples’ anxious queries. These replies, comments and elucidations, the clarifications and enunciations, have been put into verse form in Tamil as “Ulladu Naarpadu” (Forty Verses on Reality) and in Sanskrit as Ramana Gita. And there are commentaries on these Ramana scriptures, as also serious presentations of his insights, teachings and illuminations. But for the large mass of mankind that feels generally weighed down by the pressures of the present, the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, and its untold aberrations and discontents, Ramana is a Guru to be approached in love and veneration. The razor-edged path of Atma-vichara is not easy for all; but to approach Ramana as a continuing Divine Presence and petition for his Grace abounding comes naturally to most. It is far easier to see the Divine in Ramana and seek his Grace than to sleuth after the Divine Self within oneself past the stratified adhesions of our phenomenal world. Not eloquence, not dialectics, nor learning, but love and surrender call the tune; and it is the experience of many that when the agonised and puzzled soul calls in silence, the guerdon of inner peace is also vouchsafed in silence. The soul calls and the Grace answers, and silence is thus doubly blessed.

For the more sophisticated seekers, of course, as distinct from the general run of humanity who are driven to the Divine or the Guru or the Bhagawan with a “Save us or we sink” silent cry of near-despair, and feel somehow retrieved from the brink: for the intellectuals, the Sadhana of silence appears a scientifically valid way of askesis and sure liberation. If science gives us knowledge of phenomena, the life of a mystic or Maharshi like Ramana seems an open book where one may read the science or knowledge of the Self, of Reality. The Maharshi when he was with us in physical body, his Mahasamadhi, his serene portrait: it is all the same now. And as one is exposed to that all ­sufficing Presence, the steady light shows up our many inadequacies. Positively, a royal road to the threshold of Reality seems to be thrown open before us. And one is made aware also of an infallible method of tearing through the veils of stubborn unknowing and attaining the Real. We are assured that encountering silence is encountering one’s self the invigorating spray of his Presence – the radiant Grace of his power – initiates the process of self-discovery through the rejection of all that is false and the ultimate location of the true, Silence is superlative power too, and silence is Grace. Somehow personal effort and, Divine Grace team together. “There’s soul below, and Grace above, that’s all you know of earth and all you need to know”, said Sri Aurobindo once to a disciple. And Ramana too has said: “Grace draws you within; you have to attempt to get in from without.” We are then in the clasp of “a power of silence in the depths of God”, and felicity fills our whole being. The Sadhana has its start in silence; has its consummation in silence; and the rest is silence, too.

(Lecture delivered on 11-1-1986 during the Ramana Jayanti Celebrations at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mylapore, Madras.)