Swamy Desikan Thirunakshathram- Utthamamaana Purattaasi ThiruvONa nannaaL....!

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SrI:

SrImathE Nigamantha mahadesikaya namah:

 

Dearest srivaishnavas,

 

Today- Purattaasi ThiruvONam- Uttamamaana Purattaasi

ThiruvONa nannaaL… Only Sri Ramanujacharya

[Thiruvaadhirai] and Swamy Desikan [ThiruvONam] have

the thirunakshathram with Thiru… [srI] in their stars

and it is Lord’s sankalpam to have them blessed with

the same. They are Acharya saarvabhoumars.

 

Acharyan is the dispeller of all sins. He removes the

darkness from our minds and removes ignorance. He

gives us new birth (vidya janmam); He is the Father

and the manthram (which He initiates us with) is the

Mother. This birth places us on the path which meads

us to an end to all future births and deaths. He

endows us with divine vision. He has infinite amount

of compassion towards us. He always is interested in

our welfare. On account of all of these, He is always

to be worshipped as the Lord Himself. One should never

harbour any feeling that he is doing a good return for

what Acharya has done by paying few dollars or doing

little kaimkaryam… ahankara mamakaram in kaimkaryam is

like offering milk with an iron dust strand in it

[though unintentional].

It is to be offered only as a token of our gratitude.

[saRRallavO munnam peRRadhaRkE]

 

First let us look briefly at the life of Swamy

Desikan. {reproduced from Sri mani Varadarajan’s

excellent write up on Swamy Desikan’s life- short and

sweet. Today by reading this – let us pay our humble

obeisance to Swamy and place our heads at his lotus

feet..

 

 

SrImAn venkatanAthAryaH kavitArkika kesarI |

vedAntAcArya-varyo me sannidhattAm sadA hRdi ||

 

May the glorious Venkatanatha, the greatest of

teachers of Vedanta, and the lion among poets and

debaters, reside forever in my heart.

 

Fellow bhaktas, as we are well aware, today is the

tirunakshatram of Sri Vedanta Desika, greatest of

philosophers after Ramanuja and the whom we adore as

*the* Vedantacharya. Many of you are already

aware of the details of his saintly life. However,

since it is always a source of inspiration to read how

the great ones lived their lives, especially our

acharyas, I offer a brief biography below.

 

---

 

Sri Vedanta Desika was born in 1268 at Thooppul, a

village near Kanchipuram, to Totaramba and Ananta

Suri. Both parents came from very traditional Sri

Vaishnava backgrounds; Ananta Suri was a Vaidika Sri

Vaishnava belonging to the Yajur Veda, and Totaramba

was the great-granddaughter of Kidambi Accan or

Pranatartiharacharya, Ramanuja's cook and one of his

chief disciples. The day of Sri Desika's birth

happened to be purattaasi SravaNam, the irunakshatram

of Lord Srinivasa, so accordingly his parents gave him

the name " Venkatanatha " . His titles soon eclipsed his

given name, however, and due to his mastery of Vedanta

and his ability to communicate complex topics easily,

he is universally known as Vedantacharya, Vedanta

Desika, or simply Desika -- the teacher.

 

Vedanta Desika's maternal uncle was the renowned

scholar Kidambi Appullaar, also known as Atreya

Ramanuja. It was under him that Desika

studied all the shastras. He writes that Appullaar

taught him with " as much patience as a man would teach

a parrot to speak. " Appullaar in turn had studied

Vedanta under Vatsya Varadacharya (popularly known as

Nadadur " Ammaal " ) along with Sudarsana Suri, the

author of the Sruta-prakASikA, the famed commentary on

Ramanuja's Sribhashya.

 

Tradition records that at the age of five, Desika's

precocious intelligence Attracted the notice of

Varadacharya himself. The latter blessed him and

predicted that he would be a great scholar, eventually

firmly establishing the greatness of Ramanuja's

philosophy. The master's words proved prophetic.

Before the age of twenty, by his own account Desika

had mastered all branches learning current in his day,

both religious and secular. In

particular, he had an uncanny ability to compose

poetry instantaneously that combined philosophy,

emotion, and devotion. This combined with

his expertise at the art of debate earned him the

title " Kavi Tarkika Simha " , or lion among poets and

debaters.

 

One can easily trace Desika's life by looking at the

stotras he has composed. In examining the list of his

Sanskrit and Tamil poems, we find a large number

dedicated to the deities in and around

Tiruvahindrapuram, a temple near the coastal town of

Cuddalore. It appears that shortly after his studies,

Desika moved to Tiruvahindrapuram. Always a devotee

of Hayagriva Perumaal, the fount of all knowledge,

Desika meditated here on this form of the Lord and is

said to have had a profound vision of Him.

Thereafter, he literally burst forth in poetry. Works

such as the Hayagriva Stotram, Raghu Vira Gadyam,

Gopala Vimsati (all in Sanskrit), Achyuta Satakam (in

Prakrit), Mummanikkovai and Navamani Maalai (in Tamil)

are among his hymns in praise of the deities enshrined

here. These works are remarkable

for their poetic and linguistic range, as well as for

their deeply emotional turns. In his Tamil love poems

to Lord Devanatha, for example, the influence of the

Alvars is transparent, as is his mastery of the Sangam

Tamil conventions. The rhythmic beauty

of the Raghu Vira Gadyam's prose and his touching

descriptions of the Krishna-lilas in the Gopala

Vimsati are among the high points of the entire gamut

of India's religious literature.

 

[interested readers are invited to peruse these

stotras at

http://www.ramanuja.org/sv/acharyas/desika/stotras ]

 

At some point, Desika returned to Kanchipuram to

continue his teaching and writing. He regularly

visited the many Divya Desams of this town, composing

poems on nearly all of them. One of them, the

Vairagya Panchakam or " Five Verses on Dispassion " ,

gives us a rare autobiographical insight into his

personality. Nominally addressed to Lord Varadaraja,

the Vairagya Panchakam is held to be a reply to a

friend, who, upon seeing Desika's abject poverty,

invited him to join the court of the king where he

could lead a more comfortable life. Desika's verses

here display a stern independence of spirit and utter

disregard for material wealth, particularly when it

distracts from the greater wealth of the company of

God. Tradition remembers Desika and his wife as having

led an " unccha-vRtti " life, where he would daily go

about begging for alms. This is evidenced by his

declaration at the conclusion of the Vairagya

Panchakam that neither he nor his father had any

wealth worth speaking of, save the continuous presence

of the Lord of the Elephant Hill, i.e., Lord

Varadaraja.

 

Near the end of the 13th century, it is recorded that

several Advaitins came to Srirangam and challenged the

Sri Vaishnavas to a debate. Being advanced in age,

Sudarsana Suri did not feel up to the task, so the Sri

Vaishnavas of Srirangam invited Desika to take the

challenge. He accepted the challenge and is

said to have vanquished his opponents, and thereafter

took the opportunity to settle down in Srirangam.

Then, as now, Srirangam was the center of Vaishnava

culture, with very active participation in religious

dialogue and temple festivals. Desika no doubt

enjoyed his time in Srirangam very much. In the

Bhagavad Dhyana Sopanam, a contemplative poem on Lord

Ranganatha, he describes Srirangam as a place where

" great connoisseurs live contentedly, their minds full

of delight " .

 

At this point Desika was in his thirties, and his

scholarly achievements in the service of God were

coming at an increasing pace. He summarized his

objections to Advaita in the polemic work Satadusani;

he clarified many aspects of Sri Vaishnava ritual

and practice; he constantly elucidated and clarified

the philosophical teachings of his predecessors. He

himself writes that he taught the entire Sribhashya at

least thirty times; the bulk of these must have

occurred during his long stay in Srirangam. It is

also during this period that he wrote many of his

" rahasya granthas " , or expositions of the more

esoteric doctrines of the tradition, including the

nature of self-surrender (prapatti), the meaning of

sacred mantras, etc.

 

Many of these works are clearly a product of long

discussions with senior scholars living in Srirangam

at the time, such as Pillai Lokacharya, Alagiya

Manavaala Perumaal Naayanaar, and Naayanaar Accan

Pillai. Many of the thoughts of these other

acharyas are indirectly recorded in Desika's works,

even when they occasionally disagree with his

conclusions. In this respect, he was very much a

scientist, carefully mentioning and arguing

all sides of an issue, before finally coming to what

he saw was the most logical conclusion. In examining

these works as well as his exhaustive commentaries on

Ramanuja's and Alavandar's compositions, one is struck

by Desika's thoroughness, and by his desire to discuss

all possible meanings and nuances of an

interpretation, both in the course of anubhavam as

well as argument. Without Desika's careful noting of

the variety of interpretations, many important

meanings would have been lost to posterity. It is no

wonder that the title of " Vedanta Desika " was

conferred on him, as he himself attests to, by Lord

Ranganatha Himself.

 

It is also in Srirangam that Desika composed the

Paduka Sahasram, 1008 verses on the sandals of the

Lord. It is said that Desika composed the entire lot

in a single night in response to challenge from

another pandit. In the course of the 32 paddhatis or

chapters, Desika makes countless allusions to the

Alvars, to Sri Ramayanam from which the idea of the

greatness of the sandals nominally comes, as well as

other aspects of philosophy. The Paduka Sahasram has

been dealt with in detail by Sri Sadagopan so I will

not delve into this great topic further.

 

When Desika was in his forties, a son was born to him

and his wife. Reflecting his love for his household

icon Lord Varadaraja Desika named the boy Varada, and

tradition remembers him as Nainacharya or Kumara

Varadacharya. Kumara Varadacharya also became a

scholar of some repute, and we are indebted to him for

recording some biographical details of his father in

his Desika Mangalam, Pillai Antaadi, and

Desika Dinacharyai.

 

In 1327, during this fertile period of Sri Vaishnava

scholarship and growth, Malik Kafur invaded Srirangam

from the north, with tragic consequences of which many

of us are aware. In the ensuing melee, hundreds if

not thousands of Sri Vaishnavas are said to have died,

and the very existence of Lord Ranganatha was

threatened. Led by Pillai Lokacharya, the seniormost

acharya at the time, a group of Sri Vaishnavas

hurriedly left Srirangam with Namperumaal, the

Ranganatha utsava-mUrti, and headed to Jyotishkudi.

There, an exhausted Pillai Lokacharya breathed his

last, unable to take the stress of the invasion and

journey. Meanwhile, the mUla-vigraham of Ranganayaki

Thaayaar was buried in the courtyard in front of Her

sannidhi, and Desika is said to have supervised the

building of a wall in front of the Ranganatha's

sannidhi to hide the mUlavar. The aged Sudarsana Suri

was also among those who died during the invasion.

Before his death, he entrusted his two young sons and

the only manuscript of the Sruta-prakASikA to Desika's

care. Desika, the boys, and others hid themselves

among the dead bodies to escape slaughter.

 

With the invasion of the temple came the need for

Desika himself to leave Srirangam, so he took his

family and the sons of Sudarsana Suri and headed

northwest, settling down first in Satyamangalam, in

present day Karnataka. He then made his way to

Melkote, where he attracted a bright pupil, later

known as Brahmatantra Svatantra Jiyar, the first

Swami of Sri Parakala Matham. From Melkote, Desika

proceeded to Tirupati/Tirumalai, where Namperumaal had

eventually gone, and then to a tour of North Indian

divya desams, including Mathura, Brindavana, Ayodhya,

and Kashi. In the course of this long exile from

Srirangam, seeing the devastating destruction caused

to the holiest of temples, Srirangam, he

composed the Abhiti Stava, or Prayer for Freedom From

Fear. The Abhiti Stava is a poetic request for

protection from all unholy forces, particularly

those opposed to the Vaidika lifestyle involving

service of the Lord which Desika practiced. Desika was

perhaps 60 or so during the composition of

this stotram, as he mentions that his hair has greyed

by this time.

 

In 1360 [**], Gopanna Udaiyar defeated the Muslims,

and Sri Vaishnavas could once again return to

Srirangam. Namperumaal was brought back

from Tirupati, and temple servants who had survived

the 30+ long temple closure were invited back. Sri

Desika, as the senior surviving acharya, was among

those who returned, and a verse of his composition

is inscribed in the temple, recording his presence at

the reopening of Koyil. With the restoration of

Srirangam, Desika now returned to his service of Lord

Ranganatha. Tradition records that he composed

Sri Rahasya Traya Saaram, an exhaustive work on the

essence of Sri Vaishnava philosophy, lifestyle, and

the meaning of the esoteric mantras, in these last few

years of his life.

 

[**] Inscriptions indicate that the date was 1371

( " bandhupriya " ). However, this has to be reconciled

with the recorded date of Desika's passing, 1369. Some

historians believe the inscription is in error and it

should be " bahupriya " , meaning 1360. This is still a

matter of research and debate.

 

In 1369, with his head resting in the lap of Kumara

Varadacharya and his feet with Brahmatantra Svatantra

Jiyar, Desika left his earthly body and ascended to

Parama Padam. He had lived the full Vedic lifespan

of 100 years in an exemplary and humble manner,

tirelessly engaged in the service of the Lord and Sri

Ramanuja's sampradAya. Even given such a long life,

one can hardly imagine how someone can have

contributed so much with so much consistency, and yet

have lived such a simple life of complete poverty.

For these reasons, Sri Desika forever won the

admiration and reverence of all who where spiritually

inclined, and is rightfully recognized as one of the

foremost scholars and thinkers ever alive.

 

kavi-tArkika-simhAya kalyANa-guNa-SAline |

Srimate venkateSAya vedAntagurave namaH ||

 

Salutations to Sri Venkatesa, in whom all perfections

reside,who is the teacher of Vedanta and the lion

among poets and debaters!

 

---

 

[ Note: For brevity's sake, there are many more

details of Desika's life and works which have not been

mentioned. Many volumes can be written on the subject.

]

 

Thanks to Sri Mani for granting his permission to post

the same today.

Swamy Desikan ThiruvaDigaLE SaraNam

Regards

Namo narayanan

dAsan