A Life of Utter Simplicity, and the Vedas

A Life of Utter Simplicity

Much of what follows is recorded not by devotees but by visitors who came as sceptics, journalists and scientists. That is what makes it worth reading.

HIS food. According to a senior functionary of the Math, Maha Periyavaa gave up salt, tamarind and chillies in every form from the day HE ascended the Peetham — that is, from the age of thirteen, for eighty-seven years. HIS food was a morsel of fried paddy — nel pori — with some fruit if available, and milk at times. “At night HE will never take food. I have found HIM living for a month in Calcutta only on Vilva-fruit, which will be very sour and most untasteful but medically recommended.” And then a sentence one does not forget: “HE will never sweat, as HE never takes salt.”

An independent magazine wrote of HIM in 1994: “HE was an exemplary sannyasin, a renunciate monk, who owned nothing and for the past few decades ate but one meal each day of simple grain with fruit juice or milk.”

The jurist Nani Palkhivala, a Parsi and India's Ambassador to the United States, put it as a lawyer would: “HE eats food which contains nothing comparable to the calories which are supposed to be essential for a man's life and health.”

HIS sleep. The writer Arthur Koestler came looking for HIM in 1959, and found this:

The head of one of the great institutions of Sanatana Dharma slept curled inside a palanquin parked in a passageway.

HIS silence. From 11 June 1939 HE observed mauna for more than six months. In Navaratri of 1932 HE fasted and kept silence on all nine days. Single days of silence are recorded by named witnesses across HIS whole life, into HIS late eighties.

Where HE lived. Palkhivala again: “I went to HIS little hut at Kanchi where HE resides — a hut that would not be occupied perhaps by any labourer who is a member of a trade union.” Dr Raja Ramanna, the nuclear physicist and former Director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, called it “no more than a glorified hut.”

And this, which devotees have loved for generations. A devotee, finding rats in the room where Maha Periyavaa was staying, brought a mason to block up their holes. Maha Periyavaa stopped him:

Two corrections in a single breath. The rats hold the prior claim. And the mason must still be paid.

What HE refused

Wealth. At the Belgaum Chaturmasya of 1979, G. D. Birla — among the greatest industrialists in India — came for darshan and offered the Math several crores of rupees. The chronicle records: “HIS Holiness coolly declined the offer.”

HIS reasoning was HIS own:

HE would not touch money at all. Offerings were placed on a small table before HIM.

At Gulbarga in 1982 a first-hand exchange survives, and it shows both HIS indifference to money and HIS concern for the man in front of HIM:

Praise. At Puri in 1936 HE said the honour shown to HIM belonged to Adi Shankara. In 1962 HE told a reception committee: “This is not a reception to me individually. It is really an honour for the cause I represent.”

And then there is an incident recorded by HIS own biographer that has few parallels anywhere. A journal published an article that praised HIS work while criticising the Shankaracharya of Sringeri. HIS instruction was that the passage praising HIM be deleted, and the criticism of Sringeri published — and HE then ordered a seven-page article in praise of Sringeri's Navaratri worship.

Miracles. A police officer who observed HIM for years wrote: “The Acharya is ever on the alert to discourage attempts to weave stories of magic and miracle around HIMSELF.” The editor A. S. Raman, interviewing HIM for The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1963, wrote bluntly: “HE is not a magician, you see. For example, ashes in HIS hands do not turn into gold.”

That same profile contains the sentence which perhaps captures HIM best of all:

And Palkhivala's verdict, arrived at by way of Kipling:

The Vedas: The Work of HIS Life

If one thing must be named as the labour of HIS ninety-nine years, it is this. Maha Periyavaa found the Vedic tradition of Bharat dying, counted exactly how much of it remained, and refused to let the remainder go.

HE knew precisely what had been lost

This was not lament. It was an audit, delivered in a discourse and published in full:

And then the sentence that became, in effect, the mission of HIS life:

What HE did about it

The Atharva Veda once had fifty recensions, and it was believed that none had survived. The discourse continues:

One man, in one town in Gujarat. Students despatched from Tamil Nadu across the whole of India to sit at his feet. That is what rescuing a Veda actually looks like — because a Veda is not a book. It is an unbroken chain of trained human voices, and when a single link is lost it cannot be reconstructed from print.

A second rescue is recorded by one who benefited from it. On yatra at Puri in 1937, Maha Periyavaa learned that the Atharva Paippalada recension of Odisha and the Jharkhand region was passing out of existence, and resolved to revive it. In 1973–74 the Kanchi Kamakoti Atharva Patasala was inaugurated at Swargadwar, Puri. HIS charge to one of its first students was characteristic in both its ambition and its arithmetic:

The one-rupee tax

HIS method of raising funds was almost disarming in its modesty, and the tone of it is the whole point:

The purpose, in HIS words: “the schools that teach the Vedas — the pathasalas — which are gasping for breath… must be given new life. For this purpose both teachers and taught must be given monetary help.”

And HIS reason, put with a bluntness that ought to be inscribed on the wall of every institution that bears HIS name:

The institutions HE raised for the Vedas

Look again at that 1983 trust. HE was eighty-nine years old and still founding institutions — and what HE founded was a pension fund for aged Vedic reciters, the least visible constituency in the whole of India.

The Veda Sammelans

Eight Veda Sammelanams were held under the 1942 scheme in barely two years, with some Rs 7,000 disbursed in honoraria — a very great sum then, paid out directly to reciters:

Kumbakonam 7–9 March 1946 · Mudikondan 10–14 December 1946 · Kumbakonam 24 February – 5 March 1947 · Mannargudi 24–26 March 1947 · Thanjavur 11–13 September 1947 · Kuttalam 1–3 December 1947 · Nagapattinam 18–20 January 1948 · Kumbakonam 29 March – 7 April 1948.

The Sabha's secretary noted in his 1948 report a detail that matters greatly: “persons of the three religious affiliations, viz. Smarthas, Vaishnavas and Maadhvas participate with interest.” From the very beginning, HIS Vedic work was never confined to HIS own sampradaya.

Larger gatherings followed:

HIS method, and HIS standard

HE set out the whole programme as a sequence of four stages: adhīti — learning it; bodha — understanding and teaching its meaning; ācaraṇa — living by it; and pracāra — passing it on. Recitation without meaning, meaning without practice, or practice without transmission were, to HIM, all failures.

And the standard HE set explains why the tradition survived at all. In the Yajur Veda examination HE devised — kal-vaitta vaaram — children pick the Kanda, Prashna and Anuvaka numbers at random, and the candidate must then chant exactly 250 padas. “If he stops at 249 or overshoots beyond 250, he is deemed to have failed.”

In December 1988, at ninety-four, HE named eleven Siva temples with four gopurams — singling out Vedaranyam and Tiruvanaikovil as temples that “have a connection with the Veda” — and directed that Krishna Yajurveda Jatha-parayanam be performed at all eleven during their Brahmotsavams, an undertaking needing four master pandits and thirteen days apiece. And from 1988 until March 1990 HE spent hours of every day at the Math simply listening to the recitation.

That is how the last working years of a ninety-five-year-old were spent: seated, listening to men chant the Vedas, to make certain that they still could.