 |
| Guru Garu and Guruji |
(from "The Goddess and the Guru"):
One Sunday morning, looking to connect with a wider community of spiritual seekers, Guruji took his family to the Yoga Shakti Mission on Napean Sea Road in Bombay. In those days, it was the city’s premier gathering spot for the spiritually minded, offering yoga retreats, puja lessons and meditation classes. In addition, various swamis, yoga masters, mystical poets and religious thinkers would come and deliver “Sunshine Lectures,” as they were called, on a wide variety of educational and inspirational topics. It was at one of these Lectures that Guruji first met an accomplished sadhaka and guru named Sri B.S. Krishnamurthy, who was widely known and respected in Bombay circles as a devout, knowledgeable and deeply orthodox specialist in complex Vedic and Sri Vidya ritual.103
“Krishnamurthy Gurugaru was a short, jovial, almost baby-faced gentleman with twinkling eyes and a smiling countenance all the time,” Guruji’s daughter Radha affectionately recalled. “He loved to perform these really elaborate rituals—a Navavarana Puja104 would go on for five or six hours! He had a deep, impressive, resonating voice, and he sang bhajans and kirtans105 very well. He would take a disciple’s hand in his and give shaktipat with an intense, locking gaze of two or three minutes.”
From their very first meeting, Krishnamurthy took a liking to Guruji—though he quickly understood that this unassuming, soft-spoken scientist was no typical householder seeking edifying lectures and lessons in puja technique. By this time, after all, Guruji was meditating nightly, reciting Gurugaru’s mantras and steadily stoking their power. He also spent countless hours learning and performing pujas—not as a matter of grim personal discipline, but because he found genuine peace and joy in it. He was delving into arcane spiritual texts and exploring unimaginable universes—careening through past, present and future—with a goddess. He had begun to visibly glow with the intensity of his spiritual efforts.
So while Krishnamurthy understood that Guruji would glean very little from any Sunshine Lecture, he felt that this unusual man might be an ideal candidate for delivering one—and his instinct was squarely on the mark. Before long, Guruji’s lectures were drawing large crowds. His clear-minded, unpretentious, often humorous presentations on sadhana, mantra, Sri Yantra, the Lalita Sahasranama, Kundalini Yoga and meditation technique were fresh, personal and original. Moreover, his status as a reality-grounded TIFR scientist—seemingly the polar opposite of a stereotypical starry-eyed mystic, with his casually erudite blending of science and spirituality—lent him a distinct curiosity appeal that differentiated him from other speakers on the Mission’s roster.106 For Guruji himself, it was a time of self-discovery, cultivating the seeds of his public life to come. Here was a man both finding his voice and realizing that he had something vital to say, honing his presentation and delivery style, refining his teaching technique—and growing accustomed to having an audience.
Noting Guruji’s particular interest in the Goddess, Krishnamurthy began inviting him to accompany and assist in the performance of Sri Vidya rituals. “I learned the Navavarana Puja in the Dattatreya tradition, along with the 64 offerings and mudras,107 by keenly watching Sri Krishnamurthy perform those rituals every evening,” Guruji said. “Within a fairly short time, I too became adept at performing these more complex pujas.”
Almost immediately, Guruji also began to display another lifelong spiritual preoccupation: an instinct toward simplification. The pujas and other rituals conducted by Krishnamurthy were rigidly orthodox and extremely elaborate, often lasting for hours (and not infrequently for days) on end. Guruji felt that busy working people—parents, breadwinners and homemakers—who might otherwise be interested in such spiritual pursuits, were undoubtedly being put off by the sheer time investment required.
So by referring to multiple ritual instruction books and scriptures, as well as his own meditational revelations, Guruji sat down and developed procedures for completing a full Goddess puja in between 90 and 120 minutes. Impressed by the thoughtfulness and precision of Guruji’s research and the logic of his revisions, Krishnamurthy agreed to try. Sure enough, Guruji’s approach was extremely well received by participants, and soon Sri Krishnamurthy was conducting their streamlined rituals for growing crowds, not just in Bombay but all over India. Krishnamurthy was both astonished and impressed.
Not long afterward, when he was scheduled to conduct a traditional, four-day yagna at Mookambika Devi Temple in Kollur, Krishnamurthy invited Guruji and Amma to come and assist him. Guruji’s work obligations at TIFR kept him away for most of the event, but he and Amma arrived in time for the purnahuti108 on the final day. Immediately afterward, Krishnamurthy—without any prior warning—announced with great gravity that he had decided to accept Guruji and Amma as his disciples. He gave them both the Maha Shodashi mantra, the highest level of purnadiksha.109
Guruji said he recalled experiencing “no specific sensation” on this occasion “other than that it felt cold, like cool rain sprinkling down on a hot day.” But on a more practical level—in light of his increasingly fruitful guru-disciple relationship with Anakapalle Gurugaru—he found himself in a quandary. “For a time, I was torn between these two gurus,” Guruji said. “I was confused! Which one to accept? Two gurus, and both of them forced it on me! It was not a very comfortable predicament.”
Daughter Anantalakshmi noted that the contrast between the two masters could not have been starker. “Krishnamurthy Gurugaru had a gentle, smiling demeanor—an aura of peace around him; basically, being near him was a comfort zone,” she explained. “Whereas being near Anakapalle Gurugaru was more like a discomfort zone. You had to constantly expect the unexpected. One moment he might be friendly and talkative, the next, surly and silent—then he’d dismiss you with a single word or phrase. But what an aura of power he emanated! So perhaps you could say this was a case of two very different sorts of gurus—one to keep you balanced, and the other to shake you up and snap you out of whatever it was that needed snapping!”
The situation came to a head soon afterward when Guruji traveled to Anakapalle and told Gurugaru all that had transpired with Krishnamurthy.
Gurugaru listened to his student’s account patiently, then cackled loudly, scoffing, “Maha Shodashi by itself isn’t even purnadiksha! You need the mahavakyas too!110 But anyway it doesn’t matter, because I am going to give you purnadiksha my way.” He sprinkled some water on Guruji’s head, gave him the Maha Shodashi mantra and the mahavakyas, and removed the diksha name given by Sri Krishnamurthy—whereupon he renamed Guruji “Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati.”111
The “diksha war” simmered for another few months, according to daughter Radha: “When Guruji told Krishnamurthy about Gurugaru’s action, he responded, ‘Who is he to give you Mahavakyas?!’—and he also gave Guruji the mahavakyas. And the competition to become Guruji’s guru was taken to a new level!”
In the end, however, Gurugaru easily won the day. A deeply unconventional sadhaka, siddha and yogic prodigy, utterly dismissive of outward social niceties and expectations, he was in many ways Guruji’s perfect match as friend, guide and guru, giving him free, “do as you will” latitude in developing his own powerful and personal spiritual practice. Krishnamurthy, on the other hand, remained—despite his respect for Guruji’s innovations—a stickler for the strict, ritualistic “methods and methodologies” for which he was justly renowned. Guruji was ultimately too subjective and intuitive a practitioner to be satisfied with that sort of teacher; moreover, his sadhana was advancing prodigiously—arguably outstripping Krishnamurthy’s own.
In the months and years that followed, Guruji and Krishnamurthy gradually grew apart.112 While Krishnamurthy would remain in contact with Guruji, occasionally attending and participating in major events at Devipuram, the guru-disciple relationship was decisively over. “I had found the simpler yogi to be my real guru,” Guruji said.
Their affection was mutual, and it was always clear that Guruji held an honored place in Gurugaru’s esteem. Sometimes, for example, Gurugaru would sit alone in his room, meditating for hours while long queues of supplicants sweltered in the heat outside waiting to offer donations, narrate problems, and seek prayers, advice and blessings. “He wouldn’t see any of them,” Guruji said. “He’d tell them ‘Go away! Get out of here!’ But with me it was always different. He’d say, ‘Ah Sastry, it’s you! Come in! Sit down!’”
Why the special status? Guruji shrugged.
“Maybe he knew I didn’t have any money, so I wouldn’t try to offer him anything,” he replied. “But at the same time he knew I wasn’t going to ask him for anything either. Maybe he knew that I just came to see him because I liked him.”
~
Guruji’s affinity for Gurugaru extended well beyond the realm of personal resonance. Both Gurugaru and Krishnamurthy, he explained, “belonged to the Kaulachara Dattatreya tradition, so either way I belonged to that tradition. Within it, however, there are three bhavas called pashu, veera and divya.113 The pashu knows the shastra but is doubtful about practice of any of the panchamakaras, or Five Ms.114 The veera practices the Five Ms. The divya has no need for an external shakti; his shakti is Kundalini, which is fully internal.” While “Krishnamurthy-ji had a wide knowledge of scriptures, and could recite the Vedas beautifully, he was a Kaula of the veera order,” Guruji said. “I later learned that I had finished my veera sadhana in earlier lives.”
Anakapalle Gurugaru, on the other hand, “was a yogi of the siddha order,” meaning that “he did practice the Five Ms earlier in his life, but after taking the sannyasa order he stopped them. He became what he himself used to call an ‘Upanishad Kaula,’ which meant the same thing as divya bhava—that is, one who has no further need to use the Five Ms.”
In terms of spiritual evolution then, Gurugaru made the most sense as a teacher and guide for Guruji. “He was a siddha, meaning his words always used to come true,” Guruji said. “He never insisted on surrender from his disciples. He never misbehaved with women that I know of. So I veered toward him,” ultimately concluding that “my true guru was Swami Swaprakasananda”—that is, Anakapalle Gurugaru.
No comments:
Post a Comment