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« on: May 30, 2016, 07:49:11 AM »
Sri Bhagavan's mother attained Self-realization in her dying moments on the evening of 19th May, 1922. The devotees, after some deliberations, decided that her body should be buried, rather than cremated, since that was the accepted procedure for women saints. They realized that it would be necessary to select a burial site at the foot of the hill, rather than on the hill itself, since the Arunachaleswara Temple authorities, who administered the part of the hill on which Skandashram had been built, would not allow any bodies to be buried on the mountain itself. Their logic was that since the mountain itself was a Sivalingam, it would be an act of desecration to inter a dead body on it. There was another temple rule, which was also strictly enforced, that forbade the worship of any images on the hill. This meant that even if the devotees had secretly buried the body on the hill, they would not have been permitted to raise a shrine over it and perform ritual worship there. In the 1930s Bhagavan revealed, in a deposition about the ownership of Arunachala, that the temple authorities had reminded him of one of these rules shortly after his mother had died:
On the hill there was one Saraswati Swami. That swami advertised that he wanted to perform ritual worship before an image of Lord Subramanian on the hill. The temple authorities objected and stopped it. In an official notice they said that the hill itself is Linga swarupa, and that to do ritual worship of another image on it, and to celebrate festivals there, is against the tradition of the sastras. On another occasion, when my mother attained samadhi, they raised a precautionary objection that her samadhi should not be on the hill; they feared that we might build her samadhi on the hill itself. On this occasion also their objection was that the hill is Iswara swarupa.
Bhagavan concurred with this attitude by saying, a little later in his deposition, 'There is an ancient tradition that this hill is Linga swarupa; that is to say, this hill itself is God. This tradition is not to be found anywhere else. That is the cause of the glory of this place.'
Because of these rules and traditions it was decided, on the evening the Mother died, that her body should be buried at the foot of the hill on the southern side of Arunachala. This location was selected because it was a traditional site for the burial of sadhus. It seems that Bhagavan initially wanted the body to be buried secretly and without ostentatious ceremonies. In later years he told T. P. Ramachandra Iyer that he had instructed the devotees to 'take the body in the dark without making any noise and without anyone knowing about it. Make a pit in no-man's land. Bury it quickly and come back before dawn.'
Since it would have been extremely difficult to carry the body down the hill in the middle of the night, the plan was never carried out. Instead, the devotees sat around the body until about 4 a.m., chanting verses from the Tiruvachakam. The burial party eventually left with the body just before dawn, at about 5 a.m.
The site that was initially selected for the samadhi was rather close to the road. Sri Ramakrishna Iyer, a devotee who was also the village munsif, suggested that it be relocated nearer the hill. He pointed out that if the burial site was well away from the road, it would be very convenient to construct a temple over it in later years. His suggestion was accepted and a large samadhi pit was dug according to the rules in the Tirumantiram that had been laid down for the burial of jnanis.
I asked Kunju Swami, who was present at Skandashram when the Mother died, why no one had attempted to carry out Bhagavan's original instructions. He replied:
It wasn't possible to get some of the things done in the middle of the night. Mother died late in the evening. Afterwards, there was a lot of work to do and many things to arrange. We needed to get the permission of the village munsif and also the permission of the Bavaji Math, which owned the land on which the samadhi pit was dug. These people were not available in the middle of the night. I didn't get the feeling that Bhagavan was serious about the hasty burial because he kept most of us at Skandashram and initiated a chanting of the Tiruvachakam that lasted almost the whole night. Mother's body did not leave Skandashram until shortly before dawn.
We wanted to do it properly. There is a tradition that if you bury a jnani's body in ordinary earth, that will be bad for any nearby town. It is equally bad if you burn it. In the Mother's case a special deep pit was made, lined with stones. In Tirumular's Tirumantiram it says that a jnani's body must be buried in a pit lined with stones. We followed this rule, but I don't thing that we followed all the other traditional rules because we were not aware of some of them at the time.
While the samadhi pit was being dug, the Mother's body was seated under a big peepul tree on the bank of the Pali Tirtham. So many devotees came from town to pay their last respects that a large area of cactus and shrub had to be cleared to accommodate them. After abhishekam had been done to the body, it was taken to the place of burial. Kunju Swami has described what happened next:
Sacred ash and sacred grasses were put inside the samadhi and the Mother's body was lowered into it. Sri Bhagavan and others each put in a handful of vibhuti and camphor. It was then covered with a stone slab on the top of which was placed a Siva lingam. The lingam was then worshipped in the traditional manner. At twelve noon all of us left for Palakottu. Bhagavan walked very slowly while the nadaswaram played on his instrument with great enthusiasm. The distance from the samadhi to Palakottu is not much more than a hundred yards, but it took the procession an hour to cover the distance. It was a beautiful scene as the musician played on his instrument with great gusto, looking to Bhagavan who was setting the slow pace at the head of the procession and slightly swaying in time to the rhythm on the music.(1)
From that day on, puja was performed daily at the shrine. On the tenth day after the Mother's liberation a special puja was done, about a thousand people were fed, and the moksha deepam, the light of liberation, was lit at the shrine. Thereafter, Bhagavan's brother, Chinnaswami, undertook the job of maintaining the samadhi and doing daily puja there.
Bhagavan continued to live at Skandashram but Chinnaswami and Dandapani Swami decided that they would live full-time near the Mother'ssamadhi. They erected a coconut-leaf hut over the shrine and built another hut nearby that they used as a kitchen. Rice, dhal and other provisions were brought down daily from Skandashram. These were converted into meals for the sadhus and into food offerings for the daily puja. Sometimes, when no food was available, Chinnaswami had to go begging in town to acquire the provisions for the daily puja.
At this stage of the ashram's development, food was often in short supply. The items of food that devotees contributed were stored in Vasudeva Sastry's house in Tiruvannamalai. Each day he would send enough provisions to Skandashram for a meal to be cooked there. As some of these provisions were taken to the Mother's samadhi, the sadhus who lived at Skandashram occasionally did not have enough food to eat. Vasudeva Sastry felt that there were insufficient resources to maintain two establishments, one at Skandashram and the other at the Mother's samadhi. Since some of the other devotees felt the same way, he sent a note to Ramanatha Brahmachari, who was living at Skandashram, which read, 'Devotees give not to Vasudeva but to Vaasudeva'. Since Vasudeva was the parent of Vaasudeva, the note implied that the devotees wanted their donations to go to Bhagavan and not to the institution that was beginning to grow up around the Mother's samadhi.
When Ramanatha Brahmachari showed the note to Bhagavan, Bhagavan expressed his approval of the activities that were going on at the Mother'ssamadhi by saying, 'How could there be Vaasudeva without Vasudeva?'
When this remark was conveyed to Vasudeva Sastry, he abandoned his opposition to the diversion
of food. Shortly afterwards, Bhagavan left Skandashram for good and went to live in the hut that had been built over the Mother's samadhi. In later years he would say that it had been the 'divine will' that had prompted him to move down the hill and take up residence in his mother's shrine.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was the divine will that prevented him from leaving the shrine to go back to Skandashram, for he once told Devaraja Mudaliar, 'After Mother's death I used to come down now and then to the samadhi and return to Skandashram. One day, about six months after Mother's death, I went there on one such visit and after sitting there for some time, wanted to get up and go back. However, something told me that I should not go back but stay on there. It was as if my legs refused to get up. And I stayed on. That is how the asramam began. Who knew then that all this would grow up?'(2)
Bhagavan added further sanctity to the Mother's samadhi by living in the small building that had been erected over it for a period of 5(?) years. He only moved out of it in 1928 when the devotees constructed the old hall on an adjacent piece of land.
In the mid-1920s Bhagavan himself decided that a more substantial building was needed to house the Mother's samadhi. He decided to utilise some badly baked bricks that had been abandoned by some brick makers who had set up a temporary kiln near the ashram. Some devotees in town were called in to help move the bricks. One night they formed a human chain, with Bhagavan as one of the links, and transferred all the bricks one by one to the ashram. The following day a mud-and-brick wall was constructed around the samadhi. Bhagavan himself did all the work on the inside of the wall while a professional mason worked on the outside. The 'temple' was completed by erecting a thatched roof on top of the wall. This construction, the forerunner of the temple that now stands on the same site, remained unchanged for more than ten years.
Chaganlal Yogi felt that the proposal was unacceptable. But because he was a newcomer and was feeling rather shy, he felt that he had no alternative but to accept. Chinnaswami made all the arrangements for his luggage but before we could depart we had first to cross the hurdle of telling Bhagavan about our mission.
Chinnaswami never came before Bhagavan to speak; he always used to send a messenger if information had to be passed on to Bhagavan. On this occasion he selected me and asked me to tell Bhagavan about our journey.
'How can I tell Bhagavan such a thing?' I asked. 'You come with me.'
Chinnaswami did not even have the courage for that so we had to collect some other people. We all went to Bhagavan while he was having a rest alone in the afternoon. We stood before him for some time but he didn't even look at us. His gaze was fixed elsewhere.
Each of us wanted one of the others to speak. Finally, Mouniswami told him what we wanted. For a long time Bhagavan made no response, but eventually he spoke: 'I have told you not to beg in my name. Now I am telling you again. Be satisfied with what you have. What is to happen will happen.
'If you now go and ask for money, will not the donors ask you whether you have my agreement or not, and whether I gave you permission for this? What do you intend to tell them if they ask questions like this?'
Chaganlal Yogi had got the excuse he was looking for. He told Bhagavan, 'Unless we tell them that you consented to this, none of them will given even a paisa.'
What more could they do? They slipped out one by one, and Chinnaswami's journey was cancelled.
After this incident Bhagavan remarked, 'Did the construction of all these buildings occur because of my begging? It all happened in the way it was destined to happen. Nothing happens purely as a result of anyone's own efforts.'
Bhagavan's attitude to the construction work, and to the financing of it, is also brought out in the following stories which were narrated to me by Annamalai Swami:
Because all the stone masons who were working on the temple were paid on a daily basis, I was asked to supervise some of them to ensure that the ashram got value for money. Although I knew nothing about temple construction, I had had enough experience of supervising workers to see that the stone-masons were deliberately working very slowly. Since they were classified as skilled workers, they were getting a very high daily wage for doing very little. It seemed to me that they were deliberately taking about three days to do one day's work. I told them that they were cheating the Asramam, and I tried to persuade them to work more honestly, but they refused to change their ways.
One of them told me, 'All you people are eating and sleeping here for nothing. Why are you troubling us about work? It is no loss to you if we work slowly.'
After a few unsuccessful attempts to get them to work, I reported the matter to Bhagavan.
I told him, 'The temple workers are working very slowly. In the evening Chinnaswami pays them whatever I have written on the wages list. I don't like to waste the ashram's money on dishonest workers, but I have no authority to dismiss them. If I write each day that they must be paid for work that they have not done, am I not also cheating the Ashamam?'
Bhagavan replied, 'Don't worry about this matter. If they cheat like this and get money that they have not earned out of the Asramam, this money will not stay with them. Ultimately they will find that their only possessions are their hammers and chisels. The wages that they have received dishonestly will go to waste. They cannot cheat Bhagavan, they can only cheat themselves.'
Then, after pausing for a while, he added, 'We should not worry about the financial aspect of the work because God will supply all the money that we need.'
As usual, Bhagavan's faith was justified. The temple put a severe strain on the Asramam's finances but we always managed to keep the work going. On some days the ashram had to depend on donations received during the day to pay the wages in the evening. At the start of the day we would hire workers, even though we knew that we had no money to pay them. During the day donations would arrive in various ways and by evening there would always be enough to pay the workers.'
Bhagavan made daily visits to the temple to watch the progress of the construction and to inspect the quality of the workmanship. If any of the work was not up to standard, he would call attention to it and request that the necessary improvements be made. On one visit, for example, he pointed out that there was too much space between the flagstones around the garbhagraha (the inner shrine), and on another occasion he requested that some cracks in the wall be property pointed with cement. Bhagavan occasionally initiated jobs himself. For example, when the walls of the garbhagraha had been completed, Bhagavan decided that the name of the temple should be inscribed on the front wall. Annamalai Swami, who was asked to help with this work, told me how it was done:
If one looks over the entrance to the garbhagraha one can see two elephants carved out of stone. Under their feet is a carved stone scroll. The full name of the temple, 'Mathrubuteswaralayam', meaning 'the temple of God in the form of the Mother', is carved in stone on this scroll. Bhagavan himself wrote out this name for me in big Sanksrit letters. His idea was that I should make a stencil and then paint the letters on the scroll. Later, one of the sthapatis would carve out the name by chiselling out the area covered by the painted letters.
I sat in Bhagavan's presence in the hall, carefully cutting out the name. I kept all my attention on the work because I knew that I would not be able to get away with even the smallest of mistakes. Bhagavan was watching me all the time I was working. At about 3 p.m. Bhagavan used to go out of the hall to urinate. At that time, on that day, he stood up and started to move towards the door. Everyone in the hall, except for me, stood up. I was in the middle of cutting out a letter; but I didn't want to risk spoiling it by taking my scissors away from the paper.
(David Godman)
Arunachala Siva.
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