Arthur Osborne - Early Years

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Early Years

Arudra Darshan, the day of the ‘Sight of Siva’, is

observed with great devotion by Saivites, for it commemorates

the occasion when Siva manifested himself to His devotees as

Nataraja, that is in the cosmic dance of creation and dissolution

of the universe. On this day in 1879 it was still dusk when Siva’s

devotees in the little town of Tiruchuzhi in the Tamil land of

South India left their houses and padded barefoot along the dusty

roads to the temple tank, for tradition demands that they should

bathe at daybreak. The red glow of sunrise fell upon the brown

torsos of the men, clad only in a dhoti, a white cotton cloth wrapped

round the body from the waist down, and flashed in the deep reds

and golds of the women’s saris as they descended the stone steps

of the large square tank and immersed themselves in the water.

There was a nip in the air, for the festival fell in December, but

they are hardy folk. Some few changed under trees or in houses

near the tank but most waited for the rising sun to dry them and

proceeded, dripping as they were, to the little town’s ancient temple,

hymned long ago by Sundaramurthi Swami, one of the sixty-three

Saivite poet-saints of the Tamil land.

 

The image of Siva in the temple was garlanded with flowers

and taken in procession throughout the day and night, with noise

of drum and conch and chanting of sacred song. It was one o’clock

at night when the processions ended, but still Arudra Darshan

because the Hindu day stretches from dawn to dawn, not from

midnight to midnight. The idol of Siva re-entered the temple just

as the child Venkataraman, in whom Siva was to be manifested as

Sri Ramana, entered the world in the house of Sundaram Ayyar

and his wife Alagammal. A Hindu festival varies with the phase of

the moon, like the Western Easter, and in this year Arudra Darshan

fell on December 29th, so that the child was born a little later,

both in time of day and year, than the divine child of Bethlehem

nearly two thousand years before. The same coincidence marked

the end of earthly life also, for Sri Ramana left his body on the

evening of April 14th, a little later in time and date than Good

Friday afternoon. Both times are profoundly appropriate. Midnight

and the winter solstice are the time when the sun is beginning to

bring back light to the world, and at the spring equinox day has

equalled night and is beginning to exceed it.

After starting life as an accountant’s clerk on the salary,

ridiculously small even for those days, of two rupees a month,

Sundaram Ayyar had set up for himself as a petition writer and

then, after some years, obtained permission to practise as an

uncertified pleader, that is a sort of rural lawyer. He had prospered

and had built the house1 in which the child was born, making it

commodious enough for one side to be reserved for guests. It

was not only that he was sociable and hospitable, but also because

he took it on himself to house official visitors and newcomers to

the town — which made him a person of civic importance and

doubtless reacted favourably on his professional work.

Successful as he was, a strange destiny overhung the family.

It is said that a wandering ascetic once stopped to beg food at

the house of one of their forebears and, on being refused, turned

on him and pronounced that thenceforth one out of every

generation of his descendants would wander and beg his food.

Curse or blessing, the pronouncement was fulfilled. One of

Sundaram Ayyar’s paternal uncles had donned the ochre robe

and left home with staff and water-pot; his elder brother had

gone ostensibly to visit a neighbouring place and from there

slipped away as a sanyasin, renouncing the world.

There seemed nothing strange about Sundaram Ayyar’s own

family. Venkataraman grew up a normal, healthy boy. He was

sent for awhile to the local school and then, when he was eleven,

to a school in Dindigul. He had a brother, Nagaswami two years

his senior. Six years after him came a third son, Nagasundaram,

and two years later a daughter, Alamelu. A happy, well-to-do

middle-class family.

When Venkataraman was twelve, Sundaram Ayyar died

and the family was broken up. The children went to live with

their paternal uncle, Subbier, who had a house1 in the nearby

city of Madura. Venkataraman was sent first to Scott’s Middle

School there and then to the American Mission High School.

There was no sign of his ever becoming a scholar. He was the

athletic, out-of-doors type of boy and it was football, wrestling

and swimming, that appealed to him. His one asset, so far as

school goes, was an amazingly retentive memory which covered

up laziness by enabling him to repeat a lesson from hearing it

once read out.

The only unusual thing about him in his boyhood years

was his abnormally deep sleep. Devaraja Mudaliar, a devotee,

relates in his diary how he described it in a conversation at the

Ashram many years later on seeing a relative entering the hall.

“Seeing you reminds me of something that happened

in Dindigul when I was a boy. Your uncle, Periappa

Seshayyar, was then living there. Some function was going

on in the house and everyone attended it and then in the

night went to the temple. I was left alone in the house. I

was sitting reading in the front room, but after a while I

locked the front door and fastened the windows and went

to sleep. When they returned from the temple no amount

of shouting or banging at the door or window would wake

me. At last they managed to open the door with a key

from the house opposite, and then they tried to wake me

up by beating me. All the boys beat me to their heart’s

content, and your uncle did too, but without effect. I

knew nothing about it till they told me in the morning. .

.. . The same sort of thing happened to me in Madura

also. The boys didn’t dare touch me when I was awake

but if they had any grudge against me they would come

when I was asleep and carry me wherever they liked and

beat me as much as they liked and then put me back to

bed and I would know nothing about it till they told me

next morning.”

Sri Bhagavan attributed no significance to this except sound

health. Sometimes also he would lie in a sort of half-sleep at

night. It may be that both states were foreshadowings of the

spiritual awakening: the deep sleep as the ability, albeit still dark

and negative, to abandon the mind and plunge deep beyond

thought, and the half-sleep as the ability to observe oneself

objectively as a witness.

We have no photograph of Sri Bhagavan in his boyhood

years. He has told us in his usual picturesque style, full of laughter,

how a group photograph was taken and he was made to hold a

heavy tome to look studious, but a fly settled on him and just as

the photograph was taken he raised his arm to brush it off.

However, it has not been possible to find a copy of this and

presumably none remains.

The first premonition of dawn was a foreglow from

Arunachala. The schoolboy Venkataraman had read no religious

theory. He knew only that Arunachala was a very sacred place

and it must have been a presentiment of his destiny that shook

him. One day he met an elderly relative whom he had known in

Tiruchuzhi and asked him where he was coming from. The old

man replied, “From Arunachala.” And the sudden realization

that the holy hill was a real, tangible place on earth that men

could visit overwhelmed Venkataraman with awe so that he could

only stammer out: “What! From Arunachala? Where is that?”

The relative, wondering in his turn at the ignorance of

callow youth, explained that Arunachala is Tiruvannamalai.

Sri Bhagavan referred to this later in the first of his Eight

Stanzas to Arunachala.

“Hearken! It stands as an insentient hill. Its action is

mysterious, past human understanding. From the age of

innocence it had shone in my mind that Arunachala was

something of surpassing grandeur, but even when I came to

know through another that it was the same as Tiruvannamalai

I did not realize its meaning. When it drew me up to it,

stilling the mind, and I came close I saw it stand unmoving.”

This took place in November 1895, shortly before his

sixteenth birthday by European computation, his seventeenth

by Hindu. The second premonition came soon after. This time

it was provoked by a book. Again it was a wave of bewildering

joy at perceiving that the Divine can be made manifest on earth.

His uncle had borrowed a copy of the Periapuranam, the life

stories of the sixty-three Tamil Saints. Venkataraman picked it

up and, as he read, was overwhelmed with ecstatic wonder that

such faith, such love, such divine fervour was possible, that there

had been such beauty in human life. The tales of renunciation

leading to Divine Union inspired him with awe and emulation.

Something greater than all dreamlands, greater than all ambition,

was here proclaimed real and possible, and the revelation thrilled

him with blissful gratitude.

From this time on the current of awareness which

Sri Bhagavan and his devotees designate ‘meditation’ began

to awaken in him. Not awareness of anything by any one,

being beyond the duality of subject and object, but a state of

blissful consciousness transcending both the physical and

mental plane and yet compatible with full use of the physical

and mental faculties.

Sri Bhagavan has told with a characteristic simplicity how

this awareness began to awaken in him during his visits to the

Meenakshi Temple at Madura. He said, “At first I thought it

was some kind of fever, but I decided, if so it is a pleasant fever,

so let it stay.”

 

taken from Ramana Maharshi & The Path of Self-Knowledge