Bhiksha in Tiruvannamalai

When the householders in town heard this Sankara song being sung, they would know that the group was Sri Bhagavan’s devotees. They would then come out of their houses and offer clean, fresh food. However, some local sadhus from the town came to hear about this routine. They started singing the same song and began collecting the ashram’s food before Sri Bhagavan’s devotees had even got to town. Only when Sri Bhagavan’s devotees came singing for bhiksha did the householders realise that they had been deceived by the other sadhus.

Palaniswami, Perumal Swami and some others went and told Sri Bhagavan that if he composed some other songs for their use while going for bhiksha, it would put an end to the problem caused by the other sadhus. They also told him that such songs would help those who offered bhiksha to identify the group. Acting on their suggestion and request, Sri Bhagavan composed Aksharamanamalai, a Tamil poem of 108 verses in praise of Arunachala. The devotees then began to sing it regularly when they went into town for bhiksha. (The Power of the Presence, part two, p. 21)

Bhagavan himself once told devotees how the ashram’s begging party would go about its business:

Bhagavan proceeded to describe how Perumalswami and Kandaswami used to blow in concert on the conch and how when Bhagavan was in Virupaksha Cave, Perumalswami, Kandaswami and Palaniswami used to go about begging in the streets for food and bring it up the hill and all there used to share it. Before Perumalswami joined them, Palaniswami and Ayyaswami and Kandaswami would go to a chattram [choultry] and the manigar [manager] would give food for all. But when Perumalswami also joined, the manigar began questioning why an addition was necessary. Thereupon Perumalswami laid down they should no longer go to the chattram or be at the mercy of the manigar, but would go and beg in the town. Accordingly, a party of four or more would leave the cave on this errand. When leaving the cave, they would blow a long blast on their conches. This was an announcement to the town’s people that Bhagavan’s party had left the cave on their begging mission. The party would give another blast when they reached the foot of the hill. A third call would be sounded at the entrance to the street. All the residents of the street would be ready with their offerings and the party would march along the street singing some Sivanamavali and collecting the offerings. The food collected was ample, it seems, for all who gathered near Bhagavan and all the monkeys, etc.

Marital Garland of Letters [Aksharamanamalai] was specially composed for use by the begging party.

Bhagavan humorously added, ‘Marital Garland of Letters fed us for many years’. (Day by Day with Bhagavan, 9th December 1945, morning)

The communal begging expeditions stopped during the Skandashram era when several devotees arranged a different way of supplying the ashram’s food needs. Kunju Swami has described how this came about:

After Bhagavan moved to Skandashram a devotee called K. R. Venkatasubramania Iyer came from Calcutta. He was a prosperous man and he wanted to be of service to the ashram. He consulted Gambhiram Seshayya, who was then responsible for running the ashram’s affairs. Seshayyar mentioned that the ashram was already receiving a few cash donations in addition to the food supplied by Echammal, Mudaliar Patti, Kannamal and a few other devotees. Gambhiram Seshayya told Venkatasubramania Iyer that if the ashram could be sure of receiving an additional Rs 40 per month, it would pay for all their food expenses and eliminate the need of going for bhiksha. Venkatasubramania Iyer agreed to send Rs 60 every month and gave the first installment on the spot. From then onwards, Gambhiram Seshayya, who lived in town, daily sent to Skandashram one day’s supply of provisions such as rice, dhal and oil in a box that came to be known as ‘the post box’. In those days, all the provisions and foodstuffs received during the day would be used immediately. Nothing would be retained for use the next day. It was for this reason that Gambhiram Seshayya only ever sent one day’s supply of food. (The Power of the Presence, part two, pp. 37-8)

Though this arrangement meant that the ashram no longer needed to send out a begging party each day, some devotees continued to beg individually for their food. Kunju Swami has described how his friend Ramakrishna Swami tried to take up this lifestyle:

Sri Bhagavan often used to say that going for bhiksha was good for sadhana, that it would destroy the ego and remove the I-am-the-body idea. During the early days of our stay at Sri Ramanasramam, Ramakrishna Swami wanted to live on bhiksha. After taking Sri Bhagavan’s permission, he stayed at Virupaksha Cave and went each day to town for bhiksha.

As he walked along the street, he would shout ‘Bhiksha! Bhiksha!’ Because his call was strident, like the shouts of a hawker, some of the local boys made fun of him by asking, ‘How many bhikshas for a paisa?’

Following Sri Bhagavan’s advice that he should go to a different street every day, he begged in several different streets on two or three successive days.

On the fourth day he went down a new street and shouted ‘Bhiksha! Bhiksha!’ in the usual way. A devotee called Lakshmi Amma, who lived in that street, recognised him as an ashramite and insisted on his having bhiksha in her house. She took him inside, washed his feet, put down a leaf-plate and served food on it. She then asked him to recite the Siva Puranam [the introductory portion of the Tiruvachakam]. As he did not know that particular work, he just sat there without saying anything. When Lakshmi Amma realised that he didn’t know what to do, she herself repeated the Siva Puranam and also a song from the Periyapuranam. She waved lighted camphor before him, prostrated to him and requested him to eat. Ramakrishna Swami felt ashamed and regretted his ignorance of what appeared to be a traditional ceremony for begging sadhus. Feeling that his attempts at going for bhiksha were not enough, he returned to the ashram.

When Sri Bhagavan came to hear this story he laughed and said, ‘What to do? If one goes for bhiksha because of poverty one will have to go grovelling and with some hesitation. But what is he [Ramakrishna Swami]? Does he not have money of his own? Does he not have enough to buy food? After all, he only went for bhiksha for the sake of following a tradition. That is why he shouted “Bhiksha!” in such a majestic and dignified manner. At the time when I went out for bhiksha, I too would go in a dignified manner, and with indifference. It is something that comes naturally to one.’

Then he added, ‘Those who are begging sadhus should know the Siva Puranam and songs from the Periyapuranam. When one goes for bhiksha, or when one goes to eat in a math, one should recite both of these works before taking food. In North India the works are different. There, before eating, one must recite the fifteenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita and the Siva Mahimna Stotra, but here in the South it is not necessary for everyone to know them.’

After hearing Sri Bhagavan say this, I learned the Siva Puranam, some songs from Periyapuranam, some verses from the Bhagavad Gita and a few other songs. If there was any function in any math or ashram, Sri Bhagavan would ask me to go and attend as the ashram’s representative. With a confidence born out of knowing the tradition, I would happily go. (The Power of the Presence, part two, pp. 58-59)

I first read this account in the 1980s. When I went to see Kunju Swami a few days later, I asked him to talk about his days as a begging sadhu. He surprised me by saying that he had never gone out begging himself since he had always been given funds to support himself.

Another devotee who enjoyed begging for food was Mastan. He had become a begging sadhu even before he came to Bhagavan.

I [Mastan] came under the spell of bhakti before the age of twenty. During the Muharram festival I would put on the garb of a pandaram [a Saiva monk], smear vibhuti on myself, carry a begging bowl and roam around. (The Power of the Presence, part three, p. 22)

He stuck to this lifestyle after he came under Bhagavan’s influence. This is how Akhilandamma described his activities:

Mastan and I would come to Arunachala from our village to have the pleasure of serving Bhagavan. Mastan, a weaver, belonged to our village, but he did not stick to his craft. A man of whims, he would suddenly suspend his weaving and go to live with Bhagavan for months on end. During this time he would keep his body and soul together on alms that he begged. (The Power of the Presence, part three, pp. 26-7)

Viswanatha Swami also spoke about Mastan’s begging lifestyle, and the joy he seemed to derive from it:

In those days [the 1920s] some of Bhagavan’s devotees used to travel on foot to nearby towns such as Polur and Desur. We used to undertake these trips to visit devotees who lived in those areas. Bhagavan always gave us his permission before we undertook any of these trips. The members of the group would vary from trip to trip but we could usually count on devotees such as Ramaswami Pillai, ‘Nondi’ Srinivasa Iyer, Ramanatha Brahmachari and Ranga Rao to be enthusiastic about these adventures. I also went on many of these trips. Some of our expeditions would be to Cuddalore or Vellore, but most of them would be to locations in the Polur and Chengam areas.

When we travelled we would never stay in houses. When night came we would shelter in mantapams or caves. Sometimes we would just sleep under trees. We would beg for our food on the way. Sometimes people would give us provisions for a meal. If that happened we would stop and cook. If we received cooked food in our bowls, we would share it out equally among all the members of our group. Although we had a lot of fun, we were also aware that we were sadhus on a pilgrimage. As we walked we would chant scriptural works or meditate in silence.

On some of these trips Mastan would somehow find out in advance where we were going. We would arrive at a town, Polur for example, and find him waiting for us. Once he had discovered our whereabouts, he would make us sit while he went out begging for us. We didn’t want to be served in this way, but Mastan was very insistent. He told us on these occasions that he was the ‘devotee of devotees’, a role and a title that he took on himself.

He would say, ‘I want to serve the devotees of Bhagavan. You must stay here while I find food for you.’

Mastan would generally return with a huge amount of food, far more than we could possibly eat. After we had eaten as much as we could, we would share the leftovers with any local people who lived nearby. If we were living in caves or other out-of-the-way places, we would give the leftovers to monkeys.

As he fed us Mastan would make one persistent request: ‘Please tell me some stories about the glory of our Master. Tell me everything he has said during the time I was not with him. To me, every word Bhagavan speaks is holy. The words that come out of his holy mouth are so powerful, merely listening to them can give liberation to ripe souls.’ (The Power of the Presence, part three, pp. 34-5)

Ramanatha Brahmachari also begged independently in his early years with Bhagavan. This is Annamalai Swami’s description of an event that took place in the first decade of the last century:

Ramanatha Brahmachari first came to Bhagavan in the days when Bhagavan was living in Virupaksha Cave. He had a very distinctive appearance because he was very short, wore thick glasses, and always covered his body with a large amount of vibhuti. In the Virupaksha days he used to go for bhiksha in town. He would bring whatever food he had managed to beg to Virupaksha Cave, serve it to Bhagavan, and then afterwards eat whatever remained.

One day, as he was bringing some food to Bhagavan, he met his father on the hill. He was sitting outside Guhai Namasivaya Temple, which is about halfway between the town and Virupaksha Cave. His father said that he was very hungry and asked for some of the food which his son had begged.

Ramanatha Brahmachari, thinking that it would be improper and disrespectful to feed anyone, even his own father, before Bhagavan had received his share, told his father, ‘Come with me to Bhagavan. We can share the food there.’

His father, who had no interest in Bhagavan, refused to come. He asked his son to give him some food and then leave, but Ramanatha Brahmachari refused.

Bhagavan had been observing all this from Virupaksha Cave. When Ramanatha Brahmachari finally arrived there, Bhagavan told him, ‘I will not take any of your food unless you first serve your father’.

Ramanatha Brahmachari went back to Guhai Namasivaya Temple, but instead of following Bhagavan’s instructions he again asked his father to come and eat with Bhagavan at Virupaksha Cave. When his father, for the second time, refused to come, Ramanatha Brahmachari went back to Virupaksha Cave without giving him any food.

Bhagavan again told him, this time more firmly, ‘I will only eat if you feed your father first. Go and feed him.’

This time Ramanatha obeyed the order, fed his father and returned to Virupaksha Cave with the remaining food. I mention this story only because it shows how great his devotion to Bhagavan was and how little he cared about anything else, including his own family. (Living by the Words of Bhagavan, 2nd ed. p. 106)

So far as I am aware, only one foreign devotee, Maurice Frydman, went out for bhiksha. In the mid-30s he asked Bhagavan to initiate him into sannyasa, and Bhagavan, as usual, refused. Frydman obtained the initiation elsewhere and adopted the name ‘Bharatananda’, ‘the bliss of India’. At the time he was running a large electrical factory in Bangalore on behalf of the Maharaja of Mysore. Instead of renouncing his worldly responsibilities, he continued with his job, turning up each day in orange robes. Each evening, though, he would go out to beg for his food, often from the houses of the workers he was supervising during the day. He refused to touch his large salary, even though the maharaja continued to pay it into his account. When he finally left the job to reorganise the princely state of Aundh with the raja’s son, Apa Pant – a project that was sponsored by Mahatma Gandhi – he closed the account and divided the money equally between all the workers in the factory.

Neither the maharaja nor the dewan (the chief minister) was happy with the way that Frydman was conducting himself. He had been headhunted in Paris to spearhead a modernisation programme in Mysore State. Having their factory manager turn up for work in orange robes seemed to them to present a regressive rather than a progressive image of the state. When Frydman refused to give up begging, the dewan negotiated a compromise because he valued Frydman’s engineering and organisational skills. Under the new arrangement Frydman could continue to beg, but not from the houses of his own workers. The dewan believed, probably rightly, that being dependent on his own workers for food would diminish his capacity to maintain discipline in the factory. The other concession that the dewan extracted was on the matter of dress.

He told Frydman, ‘We hired you to be the modern face of our regeneration programme. We send important visitors to your factory with the idea of impressing them with what a modern and forward-looking state we are. And what do they find? A man in orange robes running the place. This is not the image we want to present. Since you are representing us to the outside world, if we send an important visitor to see you, you will have to represent our interests and aims by wearing a suit for the occasion. What you wear on other occasions is your own business.’

Frydman accepted the logic of this and agreed to dress more appropriately when visitors came.

During my ongoing research on Frydman I found an interview in Polish in which he said that his urge to adopt sannyasa came from an old samskara. He said that he had been a Buddhist monk in a previous incarnation, and that he had had an irresistible urge to wear orange and beg in his current life. He said that Bhagavan had opposed his decision to take sannyasa, and that he had been right in doing so. Frydman eventually gave up wearing orange, since he felt that it had become a hindrance rather than a help to his activities and sadhana.

As I mentioned earlier, although Bhagavan approved a begging lifestyle for some of his devotees, he never gave permission for any of them to be formally initiated into sannyasa. Kunju Swami, Sadhu Natanananda and Papaji all asked Bhagavan to initiate them, and all were refused. Kunju Swami went to Rishikesh, took initiation there and came back with a new name.

When he announced it to Bhagavan, Bhagavan laughed and said, ‘I will carry on calling you Kunju Swami’. The new name was never used.

Sadhu Natanananda tried to get Bhagavan to bless his orange robes when he decided to take sannyasa, but Bhagavan refused to touch them when they were placed before him. Sadhu Natanananda ignored this hint, took sannyasa somewhere else, but later regretted it. Some time later he returned to Ramanasramam, offered his orange robes to Bhagavan and reverted to his former lifestyle. Papaji merely went back to work in Chennai and dropped the whole idea. Maurice Frydman delayed giving up his orange robes for many years since he felt that giving them up would attract unfavourable comments in some quarters, but in the end, he too bowed to the inevitable.

I will conclude this post on bhiksha in Tiruvannamalai with a story that came to my attention a few months ago. A sadhu in the Arunachaleswara Temple who was begging for money there, rather than for food, passed away last year. Before he died, he went to a lawyer and put all the proceeds from his begging, which had accumulated over the years, into a trust fund which was to be utilised to provide food for the remaining beggars in the temple. I am not sure that Bhagavan would approve of sadhus hoarding large amounts of cash from their begging activities, but I am sure he would give a wry smile if he heard what the money was now being used for. Does anyone know about this? I do hope it’s a true story and not just a rumour.