Lucy Cornelssen - The Setting (1)

[Guest guest]

 

HUNTING THE ‘I’

according to

Sri Ramana Maharshi

LUCY CORNELSSEN

 

THE SETTING

 

The map shows India as a triangular peninsula in the south

of Asia. Jutting into the sea, south of the vast Ganges plains, is

the Deccan plateau. With thousands of kilometers of railways

and thousands of kilometers of metal-roads, carrying bullock

carts as well as the most modern motor-traffic-vehicles, there

seems to be little difference between this Indian Deccan and

any other civilized part of the world.

 

The content of this book will soon reveal, however, that

‘India’ means still unknown areas, hidden depths beneath the

surface of our everyday world, and, strange to say, these begin

very near the soil under one’s feet.

 

There is a certain mountain, belonging to the Eastern

Ghats, about 200 km south-west of Madras, named Arunachala,

meaning ‘Hill of Fire’ or ‘Hill of Dawn’. The Puranas claim

that it is the most ancient mountain on earth. Folklore, legend,

fairy-tale? Well, geological research has confirmed the ‘fairytale’.

It is generally agreed nowadays that originally the Deccan

was not part of the main body of Asia, but represents the

remnant of a continent now lost in the depths of the ocean

stretching out over Malaysia to Sumatra, Borneo, Java, Celebes

and the Philippines. The Himalayas are said to have arisen only

in a later period, and the connection by the great plains between

the gigantic geological formation and the Deccan to have been

created by the sediments of the huge rivers coming down from

those mountains.

 

Thus the feet of the Hindus, children of this country, and

those of the foreign travelers do not touch merely rocks and

sands and mud, but their minds are given to a long and awe

inspiring history of civilization over many centuries, and their

very hearts feel here the touch of a deeper mystery, though

wrapped up for ever in the silence of an inscrutable past.

 

Nevertheless this unfathomable silence is not dead. Time

and again this living mystery gives birth to great souls, who

know something – if not of the secret of this lost continent, yet

of the secret of its Spirit, which is the secret of Man.

 

Here in this region appeared once the great Sankara. It is

generally held he lived between A.D. 788 and 820, but tradition

has it that he flourished already about 200 B.C. was born at

Kaladi, on the west coast in Malabar.

 

An equally famous religious teacher was Ramanuja.

Whereas Sankara was the great logician, Ramanuja was the great

intuitionalist, who stressed the theistic aspect of the Upanishads.

He was born in 1027 A.D. a few miles west of Madras.

While the great work of Sankara was to draw out of the

rich religious tradition and compose the philosophy of Advaita-

Vedanta, the ‘One without a Second’, Ramanuja put against it

Visishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism.

 

The opposite interpretation to Sankara was set forth by

the Kanarese Brahmin Madhva. He was born in 1199 A.D.

some 60 miles north of Mangalore and stood firm for an

unqualified dualism.

 

Why, only three poor philosophers within a period of

400 years, long ago ... what is there extraordinary in it? Well,

there were many more of them, in each century. What we

want to point at is that philosophy means in India not only

theoretical and logical thought of scholars, but living religion,

the life of the soul. It is the teaching of these famous Three

which represents the living spirit of the man in the street and

in the office, the woman before her small house shrine, up to

the present day. It is not in their brains only, but in their

blood and their life, because it is the secret of the Deccan, the

land, lost in the sea.

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