From Adam's Peak to Elephanta

During my stay in Ceylon I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of one of the esoteric teachers of the ancient religious mysteries. These Gurus or Adepts are to be found scattered all over the mainland of India; but they lead a secluded existence, avoiding the currents of Western civilisation—which are obnoxious to them—and rarely come into contact with the English or appear on the surface of ordinary life. They are divided into two great schools, the Himalayan and South Indian—formed probably, even centuries back, by the gradual retirement of the adepts into the mountains and forests of their respective districts before the spread of foreign races and civilisations over the general continent. The Himalayan school has carried on the more democratic and progressive Buddhistic tradition, while the South Indian has kept more to caste, and to the ancient Brahmanical and later Hindu lines. This separation has led to divergencies in philosophy, and there are even (so strong is sectional feeling in all ranges of human activity) slight jealousies between the adherents of the two schools; but the differences are probably after all very superficial; in essence their teaching and their work may I think be said to be the same.

The teacher to whom I allude belongs to the South Indian school, and was only sojourning for a time in Ceylon. When I first made his acquaintance he was staying in the precincts of a Hindu temple. Passing through the garden and the arcade-like porch of the temple with its rude and grotesque frescoes of the gods—Siva astride the bull, Sakti, his consort, seated behind him, etc.—we found ourselves in a side-chamber, where seated on a simple couch, his bed and day-seat in one, was an elderly man (some seventy years of age, though he did not look nearly as much as that) dressed only in a white muslin wrapper wound loosely round his lithe and even active dark brown form: his head and face shaven a day or two past, very gentle and spiritual in expression, like the best type of Roman Catholic priest—a very beautiful full and finely formed mouth, straight nose and well-formed chin, dark eyes, undoubtedly the eyes of a seer, dark-rimmed eyelids, and a powerful, prophetic, and withal childlike manner. He soon lapsed into exposition which he continued for an hour or two with but few interjections from his auditors.

At a later time he moved into a little cottage where for several weeks I saw him nearly every day. Every day the same—generally sitting on his couch, with bare arms and feet, the latter often coiled under him—only requiring a question to launch off into a long discourse—fluent, and even rapt, with ready and vivid illustration and long digressions, but always returning to the point. Though unfortunately my knowledge of Tamil was so slight that I could not follow his conversation and had to take advantage of the services of a friend as interpreter, still it was easy to see what a remarkable vigor and command of language the fellow had, what power of concentration on the subject in hand, and what a wealth of reference—especially citation from ancient authorities—wherewith to illustrate his discourse.

Everything in the East is different from the West, and so are the methods of teaching. Teaching in the East is entirely authoritative and traditional. That is its strong point and also its defect. The pupil is not expected to ask questions of a sceptical nature or expressive of doubt; the teacher does not go about to “prove” his thesis to the pupil, or support it with arguments drawn from the plane of the pupil’s intelligence; he simply re-delivers to the pupil, in a certain order and sequence, the doctrines which were delivered to him in his time, which have been since verified by his own experience, and which he can illustrate by phrases and metaphors and citations drawn from the sacred books. He has of course his own way of presenting the whole, but the body of knowledge which he thus hands down is purely traditional, and may have come along for thousands of years with little or no change. Originality plays no part in the teaching of the Indian Sages. The knowledge which they have to impart is of a kind in which invention is not required. It purports to be a knowledge of the original fact of the universe itself—something behind which no man can go. The West may originate, the West may present new views of the prime fact—the East only seeks to give to a man that fact itself, the supreme consciousness, undifferentiated, the key to all that exists.

The Indian teachers therefore say there are as a rule three conditions of the attainment of Divine knowledge or gñánam:—(1) The study of the sacred books, (2) the help of a Guru, and (3) the verification of the tradition by one’s own experience. Without this last the others are of course of no use; and the chief aid of the Guru is directed to the instruction of the pupil in the methods by which he may attain to personal experience. The sacred books give the philosophy and some of the experiences of the gñáni or illuminated person, but they do not, except in scattered hints, give instruction as to how this illumination is to be obtained. The truth is, it is a question of evolution; and it would neither be right that such instruction should be given to everybody, nor indeed possible, since even in the case of those prepared for it the methods must differ, according to the idiosyncrasy and character of the pupil.

There are apparently isolated cases in which individuals attain to Gñánam through their own spontaneous development, and without instruction from a Guru, but these are rare. As a rule every man who is received into the body of Adepts receives his initiation through another Adept who himself received it from a fore-runner, and the whole constitutes a kind of church or brotherhood with genealogical branches so to speak—the line of adepts from which a man descends being imparted to him on his admission into the fraternity. I need not say that this resembles the methods of the ancient mysteries and initiations of classic times; and indeed the Indian teachers claim that the Greek and Egyptian and other Western schools of arcane lore were merely branches, more or less degenerate, of their own.

The course of preparation for Gñánam is called yogam, and the person who is going through this stage is called a yogi—from the root yog, to join—one who is seeking junction with the universal spirit. Yogis are common all over India, and exist among all classes and in various forms. Some emaciate themselves and torture their bodies, others seek only control over their minds, some retire into the jungles and mountains, others frequent the cities and exhibit themselves in the crowded fairs, others again carry on the avocations of daily life with but little change of outward habit. Some are humbugs, led on by vanity or greed of gain (for to give to a holy man is highly meritorious); others are genuine students or philosophers; some are profoundly imbued with the religious sense, others by mere distaste for the world. The majority probably take to a wandering life of the body, some become wandering in mind; a great many attain to phases of clairvoyance and abnormal power of some kind or other, and a very few become adepts of a high order.

Anyhow the matter cannot be understood unless it is realised that this sort of religious retirement is thoroughly accepted and acknowledged all over India, and excites no surprise or special remark. Only some five or six years ago the son of the late Rajah of Tanjore—a man of some forty or fifty years of age, and of course the chief native personage in that part of India—made up his mind to become a devotee. He one day told his friends he was going on a railway journey, sent off his servants and carriages from the palace to the station, saying he would follow, gave them the slip, and has never been heard of since! His friends went to the man who was known to have been acting as his Guru, who simply told them, “You will never find him.” Supposing the G.O.M. or the Prince of Wales were to retire like this—how odd it would seem!

To illustrate this subject I may tell the story of Tilleináthan Swámy, who was the teacher of the Guru whose acquaintance I am referring to in this chapter. Tilleináthan was a wealthy shipowner of high family. In 1850 he devoted himself to religious exercises, till 1855, when he became “emancipated.” After his attainment he felt sick of the world, and so he wound up his affairs, divided all his goods and money among relations and dependents, and went off stark naked into the woods. His mother and sisters were grieved and repeatedly pursued him, offering to surrender all to him if he would only return. At last he simply refused to answer their importunities, and they desisted. He appeared in Tanjore after that in ’57, ’59, ’64 and ’72, but has not been seen since. He is supposed to be living somewhere in the Western Ghauts.

In ’58 or ’59, at the close of the Indian Mutiny, when search was being made for Nana Sahib, it was reported that the Nana was hiding himself under the garb (or no garb) of an “ascetic,” and orders were issued to detain and examine all such people. Tilleináthan was taken and brought before the sub-magistrate at Tanjore, who told him the Government orders, and that he must dress himself properly. At the same time the sub-magistrate, having a friendly feeling for T. and guessing that he would refuse obedience, had brought a wealthy merchant with him, whom he had persuaded to stand bail for Tilleináthan in such emergency. When however the merchant saw Tilleináthan, he expressed his doubts about standing bail for him—whereupon T. said, “Quite right, it is no good your standing bail for me; the English Government itself could not stand bail for one who creates and destroys Governments. I will be bail for myself.” The sub-magistrate then let him go.

But on the matter being reported at head-quarters the sub. was reprimanded, and a force, consisting of an inspector and ten men (natives of course), was sent to take Tilleináthan. He at first refused and threatened them, but on the inspector pleading that he would be dismissed if he returned with empty hands T. consented to come “in order to save the inspector.” They came into full court—as it happened—before the collector (Morris), who immediately reprimanded T. for his mad costume! “It is you that are mad,” said the latter, “not to know that this is my right costume,”—and he proceeded to explain the four degrees of Hindu probation and emancipation. (These are, of course, the four stages of student, householder, yogi and gñáni. Every one who becomes a gñáni must pass through the other three stages. Each stage has its appropriate costume and rules; the yogi wears a yellow garment; the gñáni is emancipated from clothing, as well as from all other troubles.)

Finally T. again told the collector that he was a fool, and that he T. would punish him. “What will you do?” said the collector. “If you don’t do justice I will burn you,” was the reply! At this the mass of the people in court trembled, believing no doubt implicitly in T.’s power to fulfil his threat. The collector however told the inspector to read the Lunacy Act to Tilleináthan, but the inspector’s hand shook so that he could hardly see the words—till T. said, “Do not be afraid—I will explain it to you.” He then gave a somewhat detailed account of the Act, pointed out to the collector that it did not apply to his own case, and ended by telling him once more that he was a fool. The collector then let him go!

Afterwards Morris—having been blamed for letting the man go—and Beauchamp (judge), who had been rather impressed already by T.’s personality, went together and with an escort to the house in Tanjore in which Tilleináthan was then staying—with an undefined intention, apparently, of arresting him. T. then asked them if they thought he was under their Government—to which the Englishmen replied that they were not there to argue philosophy but to enforce the law. T. asked how they would enforce it. “We have cannons and men behind us,” said Morris. “And I,” said T., “can also bring cannons and forces greater than yours.” They then left him again, and he was no more troubled.

This story is a little disappointing in that no miracles come off, but I tell it as it was told to me by the Guru, and my friend A. having heard it substantially the same from other and independent witnesses at Tanjore it may be taken as giving a fairly correct idea of the kind of thing that occasionally happens. No doubt the collector would look upon Tilleináthan as a “luny”—and from other stories I have heard of him (his utter obliviousness of ordinary conventionalities and proprieties, that he would lie down to sleep in the middle of the street to the great inconvenience of traffic, that he would sometimes keep on repeating a single vacant phrase over and over again for half a day, etc.), such an opinion might, I should say, fairly be justified. Yet at the same time there is no doubt he was a very remarkable man, and the deep reverence with which our friend the Guru spoke of him was obviously not accorded merely to the abnormal powers which he seems at times to have manifested, but to the profundity and breadth of his teaching and the personal grandeur which prevailed through all his eccentricities.

It was a common and apparently instinctive practice with him to speak of the great operations of Nature, the thunder, the wind, the shining of the sun, etc., in the first person, “I”—the identification with, or non-differentiation from the universe (which is the most important of esoteric doctrines) being in his case complete. So also the democratic character of his teaching surpassed even our Western records. He would take a pariah dog—the most scorned of creatures—and place it round his neck (compare the pictures of Christ with a lamb in the same attitude), or even let it eat out of one plate with himself! One day, in Tanjore, when importuned for instruction by five or six disciples, he rose up and saying, “Follow me,” went through the streets to the edge of a brook which divided the pariah village from the town—a line which no Hindu of caste will ever cross—and stepping over the brook bade them enter the defiled ground. This ordeal however his followers could not endure, and—except one—they all left him.

Tilleináthan’s pupil, the teacher of whom I am presently speaking, is married and has a wife and children. Most of these “ascetics” think nothing of abandoning their families when the call comes to them, and of going to the woods perhaps never to be seen again. He however has not done this, but lives on quietly at home at Tanjore. Thirty or forty years ago he was a kind of confidential friend and adviser to the then reigning prince of Tanjore, and was well up in traditional state-craft and politics; and even only two or three years ago took quite an active interest in the National Indian Congress. His own name was Ramaswámy, but he acquired the name Elúkhanam, “the Grammarian,” on account of his proficiency in Tamil grammar and philosophy, on which subject he was quite an authority, even before his initiation.

Tamil is a very remarkable, and indeed complex language—rivaling the Sanskrit in the latter respect. It belongs to the Dravidian group, and has few Aryan roots in it except what have been borrowed from Sanskrit. It contains however an extraordinary number of philosophical terms, of which some are Sanskrit in their origin, but many are entirely its own; and like the people it forms a strange blend of practical qualities with the most inveterate occultism. “Tamil,” says the author of an article in the Theosophist for November, ’90, “is one of the oldest languages of India, if not of the world. Its birth and infancy are enveloped in mythology. As in the case of Sanskrit, we cannot say when Tamil became a literary language. The oldest Tamil works extant belong to a time, about 2,000 years ago, of high and cultured refinement in Tamil poetic literature. All the religious and philosophical poetry of Sanskrit has become fused into Tamil, which language contains a larger number of popular treatises in Occultism, Alchemy, etc., than even Sanskrit; and it is now the only spoken language of India that abounds in occult treatises on various subjects.” Going on to speak of the Tamil Adepts, the author of this article says: “The popular belief is that there were eighteen brotherhoods of Adepts scattered here and there, in the mountains and forests of the Tamil country, and presided over by eighteen Sadhoos; and that there was a grand secret brotherhood composed of the eighteen Sadhoos, holding its meetings in the hills of the Agasthya Kútam in the Tinnevelly district. Since the advent of the English and their mountaineering and deforestation, these occultists have retired far into the interior of the thick jungles on the mountains; and a large number have, it is believed, altogether left these parts for more congenial places in the Himalayan ranges. It is owing to their influence that the Tamil language has been inundated, as it were, with a vast number of works on esoteric philosophy. The works of Agasthya Muni alone3 would fill a whole library. The chief and only object of these brotherhoods has been to popularise esoteric truths and bring them home to the masses. So great and so extensive is their influence that the Tamil literature is permeated with esoteric truths in all its ramifications.” In fact the object of this article is to point out the vast number of proverbs and popular songs, circulating among the Tamils to-day, which conceal under frivolous guise the most profound mystic truths. The grammar too—as I suppose was the case in Sanskrit—is linked to the occult philosophy of the people.

To return to the Teacher, besides state-craft and grammar he is well versed in matters of law, and not unfrequently tackles a question of this kind for the help of his friends; and has some practical knowledge of medicine, as well as of cookery, which he considers important in its relation to health (the divine health, Sukham). It will thus be seen that he is a man of good practical ability and acquaintance with the world, and not a mere dreamer, as is too often assumed by Western critics to be the case with all those who seek the hidden knowledge of the East. In fact it is one of the remarkable points of the Hindu philosophy that practical knowledge of life is expressly inculcated as a preliminary stage to initiation. A man must be a householder before he becomes a yogi; and familiarity with sexual experience instead of being reprobated, is rather encouraged, in order that having experienced one may in time pass beyond it. Indeed it is not unfrequently maintained that the early marriage of the Hindus is advantageous in this respect, since a couple married at the age of fifteen or sixteen have by the time they are forty a grown-up family launched in life, and having circled worldly experience are then free to dedicate themselves to the work of “emancipation.”

During his yoga period, which lasted about three years, his wife was very good to him and assisted him all she could. He was enjoined by his own teacher to refrain from speech and did so for about a year and a half, passing most of his time in fixed attitudes of meditation, and only clapping his hands when he wanted food, etc. Hardly anything shows more strongly the hold which these religious ideas have upon the people than the common willingness of the women to help their husbands in works of this kind, which beside the sore inconvenience of them, often deprive the family of its very means of subsistence and leave it dependent on the help of relations and others. But so it is. It is difficult for a Westerner even to begin to realise the conditions and inspirations of life in the East.

Refraint from speech is not a necessary condition of initiation, but it is enjoined in some cases. (There might be a good many cases among the Westerners where it would be very desirable—with or without initiation!) “Many practising,” said the Guru one day, “have not spoken for twelve years—so that when freed they had lost the power of speech—babbled like babies—and took some time to recover it. But for two or three years you experience no disability.” “During my initiation,” he added, “I often wandered about the woods all night, and many times saw wild beasts, but they never harmed me—as indeed they cannot harm the initiated.”

At the present time he lives (when at home) a secluded life, mostly absorbed in trance conditions—his chief external interest no doubt being the teaching of such people as are led to him, or he is led to instruct. When however he takes up any practical work he throws himself into it with that power and concentration which is peculiar to a “Master,” and which is the natural corollary of the power, of abstraction when healthily used.

Among their own people these Gurus often have small circles of disciples, who receive the instruction of their master and in return are ever ready to attend upon his wants. Sometimes such little parties sit up all night alternately reading the sacred books and absorbing themselves in meditation. It appears that Elukhanam’s mother became his pupil and practised according to instructions, making good progress. One day however she told her son that she should die that night. “What, are you ill?” he said. “No,” she replied, “but I feel that I shall die.” Then he asked her what she desired to be done with her body. “Oh, tie a rope to it and throw it out into the street,” was her reply—meaning that it did not matter—a very strong expression, considering caste regulations on the subject. Nothing more was said, but that night at 3 a.m. as they and some friends were sitting up (cross-legged on the floor as usual) reading one of the sacred books, one of those present said, “But your mother does not move,”—and she was dead.

When in Ceylon our friend was only staying temporarily in a cottage, with a servant to look after him, and though exceedingly animated and vigorous as I have described, when once embarked in exposition—capable of maintaining his discourse for hours with unflagging concentration—yet the moment such external call upon his faculties was at an end, the interest that it had excited seemed to be entirely wiped from his mind; and the latter returned to that state of interior meditation and absorption in the contemplation of the world disclosed to the inner sense, which had apparently become his normal condition.

I was in fact struck, and perhaps a little shocked, by the want of interest in things and persons around him displayed by the great man—not that, as I have said, he was not very helpful and considerate in special cases—but evidently that part of his nature which held him to the actual world was thinning out; and the personalities of attendants and of those he might have casual dealings with, or even the scenes and changes of external nature, excited in him only the faintest response.

As I have said he seemed to spend the greater part of the twenty-four hours wrapt in contemplation, and this not in the woods, but in the interior of his own apartment. As a rule he only took a brief half-hour’s walk mornings and evenings, just along the road and back again, and this was the only time he passed out of doors. Certainly this utter independence of external conditions—the very small amount of food and exercise and even of sleep that he took, combined with the great vigor that he was capable of putting forth on occasion both bodily and mentally, and the perfect control he had over his faculties—all seemed to suggest the idea of his having access to some interior source of strength and nourishment. And indeed the general doctrine that the gñáni can thus attain to independence and maintain his body from interior sources alone (eat of the “hidden manna”) is one much cherished by the Hindus, and which our friend was never tired of insisting on.

Finally, his face, while showing the attributes of the seer, the externally penetrating quick eye, and the expression of illumination—the deep mystic light within—showed also the prevailing sentiment of happiness behind it. Sandósiam, Sandósiam eppótham—“Joy, always joy”—was his own expression, oft repeated.

Perhaps I have now said enough to show—what of course was sufficiently evident to me—that, however it may be disguised under trivial or even in some cases repellent coverings, there is some reality beneath all these—some body of real experience, of no little value and importance, which has been attained in India by a portion at any rate of those who have claimed it, and which has been handed down now through a vast number of centuries among the Hindu peoples as their most cherished and precious possession.