Swami Ramdas - The Essential Swami Ramdas (Library of Perennial Philosophy)

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The Essential Swami Ramdas appears as one of our selections in the Spiritual Masters: East & West series.

This series presents the writings of great spiritual masters of the past and present from both East and West. Carefully selected essential writings of these sages are combined with biographical information, glossaries of technical terms, historical maps, and pictorial and photographic art in order to communicate a sense of their respective spiritual climates.

Cover: Swami Ramdas

Compiled with an Introduction by Susunaga Weeraperuma

Foreword by

Rebecca Manring

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"Bhakti" is the word Indians use for "devotion." Derived from the Sanskrit verbal root bhaj, "share," the term is very broad and certainly not restricted to the practices and attitudes of any given religious tradition. Those who practice bhakti are called bhaktas. Anyone who is engaged in a personal quest for, or relationship with, the divine, is a bhakta, for such individuals have accepted the possibility that we mortal beings can indeed partake of divinity. Thus one could legitimately include most of the world's mystics (at least those associated with the theistic religious traditions) under the bhakta rubric. However, only in India do we find not only a series of elaborately codified systems of devotionalism, but also the phenomenon of unaffiliated yet widely respected individual bhaktas.

"Papa" Ramdas, as most of his disciples called Swami Ramdas, belonged to this latter group. While he himself acknowledged the inspiration and influence of many others, he was not the product of a sectarian lineage. Nonetheless he possessed the quiet charisma to inspire many devotees in his own lifetime and even today. He also sparked the foundation of the Anandashram near the city of Mangalore in the south Indian state of Karnataka, now a formal organization with one of Ramdas' disciples at its head.

For those accustomed to associating religious expression with sectarian norms, rules, and regulations, the idea of "freelance sainthood" probably makes little sense. In India's historically richly diverse spiritual landscape, however, this is not problematic. In fact some scholars (this writer included) are now beginning to think that even within established paramparas, or formal lineages, what is transmitted from one generation to the next may well be more a matter of the individual guru's personal interests than of a strict adherence to the theology of a particular school. This does not indicate that such a sadhu would necessarily have an "anything goes" attitude towards spirituality. The passages in this book indicate clearly that Swami Ramdas did adhere to a number of guidelines regarding diet, behavior, and the like which he had found, through years of practice, to be helpful to an individ- ual's spiritual progress. In the section on "Spiritual Practice" he makes these explicit.

A basic understanding of the history of Indian bhakti may prove useful to this attempt to situate Swami Ramdas in his own cultural/sociological/religious milieu. What follows is a rather sketchy account of a few of the major Indian devotional movements.

The sages of India's oldest extant literature, the hymns of the Rig Veda, the earliest of which may date from the fifteenth century B.C.E., describe a mechanistic cosmology in which correct ritual action would automatically yield the desired results: pregnancy safely concluded, successful harvest, victory in war, and the like. The emotions-something that would matter tremendously to the medieval bhaktas-of the ritualists were of no consequence. Rather what mattered, what determined the success of the ritual, was the perfect recitation of the mantras involved as a priest perfectly performed the ritual in question. In fact this perfect reproduction of the sounds became so important that understanding what one was saying in the process came to be of little or no concern. Priests focused their attention not on cultivating a relationship with the divine but on perfecting their Vedic recitation, for the desired response from the heavens would then be ensured.

as a dialogue between two important characters, Arjuna and Krishna, we see the development of the notion of a very clearly personal relationship with one particular deity (in this case, Krishna). Throughout the greater epic, the Mahabharata, into which the Gita is a later interpolation, we find numerous stories of human-divine interaction. In fact the five Pandava brothers, the heroes of the epic, are openly acknowledged to be the sons of the gods Dharma (Yudhisthira), Vayu (Bhima), Indra (Arjuna), and the Aswin Brothers (Madri's twin sons Nakula and Sahadeva). This peculiar development beautifully illustrates the perennial kshatriya problem of dynastic succession in the absence of sons, a problem which the authors of the epic resolve in a remarkable way. The five princes are born as the result of serial adultery sanctioned and in fact necessitated by a long-standing curse on their legal father King Pandu, who would (and eventually does) die if he ever approached a woman sexually, and a coincident boon their mother Kunti had long ago received that allowed her to summon any god she wished to father her child (and which she shared with her co-wife Madri). She had tested this boon some time before her marriage when she was still quite young, calling Surya the sun-god to her bedchamber. Surprised to discover that the boon actually worked, she only consented to their union when he promised her that their child would be born immediately, secretly hidden elsewhere, and that he would then restore all physical evidence of her virginity. Overcome by fascination and curiosity, and assured she would have no need to conceal an embarrassing and scandalous pregnancy, Kunti shortly gave birth to the prince who would be known as Karna, whom she sent downriver in a basket to be raised by a humble charioteer and his wife. Karna would spend his life dealing first with the ignominy of being raised in a low-caste family, and later, when he had learned his own history, of being rejected by his mother by birth, and so came to regard his biological brothers as his mortal enemies. He would eventually be slain in battle (under somewhat deceitful circumstances) by his own brother Arjuna.