Muruganar day
Many devotees came from far and near to sing Muruganar's songs on Muruganar?s day. We recited 51 titles from Ramana Sannathi Murai chosen for their likeness to Tiruvachakam titles. Of Course Aksharamanamalai was chanted to invoke the Master?s presence while Vedas were chanted inside the shrine during worship of the Samadhi. Born in 1895, Sri C. K. Subrahmanyam grew up in an atmosphere of Tamil learning and became in due course a teacher of Tamil in a High School. His first collection of poems, Swatantra-Gitam, owed much to his ardent admiration of Gandhiji and, like the early work of his elder contemporary, Subrahmanya Bharati, formed a distinct contribution to the national movement. But when he came to Bhagavan and fell under his spell, he renounced all other interests, completely effaced his personality and turned into "a shadow of Bhagavan." And he has lived ever since in a state of stark simplicity, utterly poor and obscure.
In thus losing the world to find Bhagavan, he has found a joy to utter and a voice to utter it which have given him a high and assured place among the immortal singer saints of Tamil Nadu. This sudden and complete change in the poems and in the manner of his utterance, the marvelously sustained and infinitely varied beauty of the enormous bulk of his verse on a single theme, constitutes an undoubted " miracle " wrought by Bhagavan, permanently there for all eyes to behold.
Muruganar was content with composing his poems and having them read by Bhagavan. For him there was no ?wider public" to whose notice they should be brought. Thus it fell to an admirer, Sri Ramana Padananda, to arrange for the printing and publication of six volumes of Muruganar's poems. In practising the Presence of Bhagavan under the terms of Muruganar's images and rhythms, one enters into intensely felt relations with the Guru who figures in various roles of Siva or Subrahmanya, as father. mother or lover, as master, king or commander, as beggar or betrayer. Each of the 850 stanzas in Guru-Vachaka-Kovai1 is a little golden casket wrought with loving care to enshrine and set off a gem fallen from the Master's lips. The stream of Muruganar's inspiration has continued running fresh and strong even after the passing of Bhagavan. If it has lost some of the old briskness and brightness, it has acquired a new serenity. Leaving aside Muruganar's own copious outpourings, his success in evoking so much of the little that Bhagavan himself wrote is something to be grateful for. It is to Muruganar that we owe the existence and poetic pattern of Upadesa Saram, (' Instruction in Thirty Verses ') the living quintessence of advaitic thought and a brief but sufficient summary of Bhagavan's own practical guidance. Muruganar composed a long narrative poem telling how the rishis who trusted too much to their rituals were taught a lesson. At the crucial moment, when Siva had to deliver His teaching, Muruganar left it to Bhagavan to provide the ipsissima verba of divine revelation.
Many of the Forty Verses on Reality owe their final form and the exposition its logical arrangement to Muruganar's efforts. And this game of collaboration reached its climax in the composition of Atma Vidya, wrhich fills a musical mould of Gopalakrishna Bharati with a new, profound meaning. Beginning "Easy is Self-knowledge," it raises only to reject the image of " the berry in the palm of one's hand " ; so evident is this perception that it needs neither perceiver nor thing perceived. Having proceeded thus far, Muruganar had to leave off where the poet qua poet could only say or imply, "The rest is silence ". But Bhagavan, speaking with an authority higher than any poet's, continued the argument, explained the sadhana and the grace and ended with a hint that Annamalai, the Inner Eye, the One Alone, is the author.
