The Sage of Kanchi | Maha Periyava
Maha Periyavaa was born as Swaminathan, on the twentieth of May 1894, in the small town of Villupuram in the South Arcot district of the Madras Presidency, under the star Anusham. His father, Subramanya Sastri, was a schoolteacher who later became a District Education Officer. His mother, Mahalakshmi Ammal, came from Eachangudi, a village on the Kaveri near Tiruvaiyaru. He was their second son, and he was named after the family deity, Lord Swaminatha of Swamimalai.
In February of 1907, when he was twelve, a message came from the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham. The sixty-sixth Acharya, gravely ill, had chosen this boy to succeed him, and had attained Siddhi before the boy arrived. On Wednesday, 13 February 1907, Swaminathan, aged thirteen, was installed as the sixty-eighth head of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham and given the sannyasa name Chandrasekharendra Saraswati. He would hold that seat for eighty-seven years — one of the longest tenures of any religious office in recorded history.
In March 1919 he set out from Kumbakonam on his great Vijaya Yatra, and returned twenty-one years later, in 1939, having crossed the length and breadth of Bharat on foot and by bullock cart. And then, at the age of eighty-four, he did it again: a padayatra of about 3,860 kilometres across four states, over roughly a thousand days, returning to Kanchipuram a month short of ninety.
From the day he ascended the Peetham he gave up salt, tamarind and chillies in every form, for eighty-seven years. He slept some three hours a day, lived in a hut, and would not touch money at all — once declining several crores of rupees offered by one of India's greatest industrialists. His life's work was the Vedas: he counted precisely what had been lost of the ancient recensions, and raised a civilisation's worth of them back from the edge of extinction by asking devotees for one rupee a month.
He attained Maha Samadhi at the Sankara Matham, Kanchipuram, on Saturday 8 January 1994, at 2.58 in the afternoon, in his hundredth year. The queue of mourners ran three miles and included Hindus, Muslims and Christians alike. Tamils called him Nadamadum Deivam — the walking God.
This is only the briefest sketch. Periyavaa's full life — his years of learning, the great yatras, his work for the Vedas and the poor, his regard for every faith, and the mission that continues today — is told in detail on the pages below.