Madhwa's Teachings-Sri.Satyadhyana Teertha Our Saviour-second Instalment.

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Dear Reader,

Please find reproduced herebelow the second instalment of the

article,Sri Satyadhyana Teertha- Our Saviour by Vidvan

M.R.Gopalacharya.

With best regards,

Ramchandra.Tammannacharya.Gutti.

 

 

 

 

Sri. Satyadhyana Teertha-Our Saviour.

 

By

 

Vidvan M.R. Gopalacharya.

 

(Second instalment)

 

 

08-09-08

 

 

His intellectual honesty and sincerity were unparalleled. He never

fell a prey to prejudices, which shut out truth and lead to ruinous

errors and egregious lapses. Never did he blindly adopt, thoughtlessly

prefer and willfully recommend any idea, theory or principle, which he

did not subject to close investigation. He guarded himself against all

prejudices that steal into the mind very easily and go out most

slowly. He mercilessly drove out if some of them somehow crept in and

never shed 'any unseemly tear at their funerals.' It is well known

that man can peel off his skin but cannot pull out his prejudices. A

bias is a mist which dims our intellectual vision, warps our judgment

and rushes us on to slur over truth.

 

His Holiness pitied ignorance in all its forms. He considered it to be

the root cause of all misery. To him it was the greatest privation and

the worst curse of God. He, therefore, encouraged inquiry and

investigation into the truth of things. He welcomed honest doubts as

they are the price that must be paid for higher knowledge and advanced

intelligence. Only baseless doubts are considered traitors and

irrational indulgence in them costs us enlightenment.

 

His Holiness could easily distinguish between pedants and profound

scholars. He had not much sympathy for pedantry and exhibitionism,

which cram the head with learned lumber. He could help his finger on a

well-read fool, the most pestilent of block-heads. He was of opinion

that learning, which stuffs the memory, leaves the conscience and

understanding void. He had no end of love for those who pursued

knowledge for its own sake, having renounced pleasure as a shadow and

power as a pageant. According to him, learning without enlightenment

to guide it is like an untrained horse, which throws down the rider.

Learning dwells in heads stuffed with the thoughts of others;

knowledge in heads vibrating with their own ideas. Learning has got to

be smoothed, squared, excised and expurgated before it is sublimated

and assimilated as knowledge. One enriches and another encumbers.

Heterogeneous concepts, therefore, have to be hewn with tremendous

efforts into a harmonious whole: he also placed wise seers far above

profound scholars. Purity, simplicity, sincerity were part and parcel

of his being. These enabled him to maintain equanimity. He was never

impetuous in his thinking, judgment and decision. His blood never

boiled and brought his thinking process to a standstill. He was quite

free from the feverish tide of passions and the high surge of feelings

that carry the unwary off their feet. His spirit of quest never

recoded any rise or fall. Like the North Star he never moved away from

his fixed point. He tried to enthrone knowledge rather than entomb it.

 

He always shunned cant and affection. He was not a blazing fire or the

mid-day sun which scorches all that go near. He never thundered in

philosophical dissertations and spiritual discourses. His magnetic

personality and the spiritual nimbus that invested his person

exercised a magic influence upon those who want to hear him. It

usually dispelled the cloud that obscured the mind and left it pure

and elevated. Thus did the minds that crouched under the load of care,

being readily released of it breathe a sight of relief.

 

His Holiness maintained his vast and various gifts in perfect poise.

He was assertive but not dogmatic, piquant but not mordant, didactic,

yet not pedagogic, idealistic yet not utopian, ambitious, yet not

visionary, unique yet not overbearing, humorous, yet never coarse,

abstruse, yet never arid, critical, yet not captious, kind, yet not

blind to blemishes and bold yet not blatant.

 

 

 

 

(To be continued _)