Saint Thayumanavar Source: antheakamalnath.wordpress.com Home: Anthea Jay Kamalnath
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Bhagavan and Thayumanavar - 4
(by Robert Butler, T.V. Venkatasubramanian and David Godman)
(Cont. from: -3)
The Master appears to dispel Maya illusion
As Bhagavan remarked in an earlier quotation, it is necessary for almost all people to make some conscious effort to control the mind. Mauna Guru, Thayumanavar’s Guru, accepted that this was the case with Thayumanavar and he consequently gave him detailed instructions on how he should pursue his sadhana (*). Thayumanavar recorded many of these instructions in his verses, some of which were selected by Bhagavan and included in the Tamil parayana at Ramanashram.
During Bhagavan’s lifetime Tamil poetic works were chanted in his presence every day. Initially, at Skandashram, only Aksharamanamalai (mp3) was chanted, but as the years went by, more and more works were added. By the 1940s there was a prescribed list of poems, all selected by Bhagavan himself, that took fifteen days to complete at the rate of about one hour per day.
These are some of the verses from Thayumanavar that Bhagavan selected. The first three (herein contained) describe the suffering inherent in samsara (*), while the remainder contain Mauna Guru’s prescriptions for transcending it:
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In all people, as soon as the ego-sense known as ‘I’ arises to afflict them, the world-illusion, manifesting as multiplicity, follows along behind. Who might have the power to describe the vastness of the ocean of misery that grows out of this: as flesh; as the body; as the intellectual faculties; as the inner and the outer; as the all-pervasive space; as earth, water, fire, and air; as mountains and forests;
as the multitudinous and mountainous visible scenes; as that which is invisible, such as remembering and forgetting; as the joys and sorrows that crash upon us, wave upon wave, in maya’s ocean; as the deeds that give rise to these; as the religions of manifold origin that [try to] put an end to them; as their gods, as their spiritual aspirants, and as the methods described in many a treatise that bear witness to their practices; and as the doctrinal wrangling amongst them? It is like trying to count the fine grains of sand on the seashore.
In order to teach me to discern the truth of how all these woes, impossible to measure – which spontaneously accumulate, multiplying bundle by bundle – were insubstantial, like the spectacle of a mountain of camphor that disappears entirely at the touch of a flame, he associated with food, sleep, joy, misery, name-and-place, and wearing a bodily form similar to my own, he came as the grace-bestowing Mauna Guru to free me from defilement, in just the same way that a deer is employed to lure another deer. [1]
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The idea that God takes on a human form to catch other beings who have this same form is one that appears in many spiritual texts. Bhagavan explained this particular reference in the following reply:
The Master appears to dispel ... ignorance.
As Thayumanavar puts it, he appears as a man to dispel the ignorance of a man, just as a deer is used as a decoy to capture the wild deer. He has to appear with a body in order to eradicate our ignorant ‘I am the body’ idea. [2]
[1] ‘Akarabuvanam-Chidambara Rahasyam’, vv. 15-16-17. [2] Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talk 398.
Source: http://davidgodman.org/rteach/Thayumanavar.pdf
(*) Sadhana: spiritual practice (*) Samsara: the repeating cycle of birth, life and death (reincarnation) (*) Maya: concept of illusion that constitute the nature of the universe