Thayumanavar spent about two months in Chidambaram, mostly immersed in a deep samadhi state. He then embarked on a pilgrimage that took him to several of the sacred places in Tamil Nadu, including Tiruvannamalai, Kanchipuram, Tiruvarur, Madurai and Tiruvotriyur. His final destination was Rameswaram at the southern tip of India. Shortly after his arrival there he made a very public appeal in the temple for God to intervene and end a drought that had severely afflicted that part of the country. An immediate and torrential downpour filled all the tanks and wells. Thayumanavar, who generally shunned publicity as much as possible, found himself being carried in triumph through the streets of Ramanathapuram on a palanquin. He was feted by the local king, the Raja of Ramnad, and even offered a new job as a royal advisor.
Thayumanavar rejected all the royal honours and spent the remainder of his brief life in a small hut, meditating and composing the songs that were to make him famous. His two principal disciples, Arulayya and Kodikkarai Jnani, wrote down the poems and began to sing them in public. They were immediately popular and spread widely even during Thayumanavar’s lifetime.
In January 1742 he withdrew into his hut and left the following message pinned to the outside of the door:
Dear friends,
Withdraw the mind from the senses and fix it in meditation. Control the thought-current. Find out the thought-centre and fix yourself there. Then you will be conscious of the divine Self; you will see it dancing in ecstasy. Live in that delight. That delight-consciousness is the God in you. He is in every heart. You need not go anywhere to find Him. Find your own core and feel Him there. Peace, bliss, felicity, health – everything is in you. Trust in the divine in you. Entrust yourself to His Grace. Be as you are. Off with past impressions! He who lives from within an ingathered soul is a real sage, even though he may be a householder. He who allows his mind to wander with the senses is an ignoramus, though he is learned. See as a witness, without the burden of seeing. See the world just as you see a drama. See without attachment. Look within. Look at the inner light unshaken by mental impressions. Then, floods of conscious bliss shall come pouring in and around you from all directions. This is the supreme Knowledge; realise! Aum! Aum! (The Silent Sage, by Dr B. Natarajan, published by The Himalayan Academy, 1978)
This was his final message. When Arulayya went in he found that Thayumanavar had left his body. He was given a royal funeral in Ramanathapuram by the local raja, and his songs were sung as his body was interred.
The remainder of this article is divided into several topics, each of which explores some aspect of Thayumanavar’s teachings that Bhagavan referred to while he was responding to questions from visitors.
The state of the Self
This first section begins with a discussion that centred on experiences that Tennyson, the famous 19th century English poet, induced in himself:
In continuation of yesterday’s conversation about Tennyson, the relevant passage was found in a footnote to the English translation of Upadesa Saram. It was not in a poem but in a letter to B. P. Blood. Bhagavan asked me to read it out, so I did: ‘…a kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself, silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being: and this is not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was a laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life.’
Bhagavan said: ‘That state is called abidance in the Self. It is described in a number of songs.’
He took up Thayumanavar and it opened at the very page he was looking for… (Day by Day with Bhagavan, 17th June, 1946)
Mauna Guru, you who declared:
‘The state in which there is neither merging nor separation,
no pairs of opposites, no expansion or contraction,
no qualities, no coming or going,
that leaves no lasting trace;
that is free of the three defilements;
that cannot be conceived
in terms of having a top, bottom or sides;
that in which there is neither bindu nor natham,
and in which the five elements,
variously constituted, do not exist;
that in which the knower and his knowledge are not;
that which is without decay;
that which, moreover, it is not one and not two,
and is without voice and without mind;
that which is free, even, of the ecstatic seeking,
wherein [the devotee] tastes with his lips,
and drinks from the ocean of bliss
that is the eternally enduring
supreme and all-pervading reality –
that is the enduring state.’Siddhanta Mukti’s Primal Lord!
Dakshinamurti, enthroned in glory upon the lofty Siragiri!
Guru, you who are pure consciousness’s form! (‘Chinmayanandaguru’, verse 8)
The last three lines, detached from the main verse, are the refrain. Siragiri is the hill at Tiruchirapalli. Bindu and natham, which are mentioned in the middle of the verse, are Saiva Siddhanta terms that denote the place or point from where the universe emerges and evolves.
Bhagavan quoted two other Thayumanavar verses on this occasion, but they are not really expressions of what the Self is like. They are, instead, pleas from a disciple who wants to attain this state. Bhagavan mentioned them because he said that they both contained references or allusions to the sahaja nishta, the natural state of abidance in the Self. (Day by Day with Bhagavan, 17th June, 1946)
Reality, pervading everywhere!
Like a supplicant who seeks the favour of a benefactor
begging him, in a manner free of all reproach,
to show compassion and grant his petition
[I apply to You]. Hear my plea! O Transcendent Supreme!
Listen to the petition of one
whose heart is of wood and show pity.
[My plea is] to dwell in mauna
in the fullness of your ethereal grace,
the state of sahaja nishta. ( ‘Asaienum’, verse 2)…Well indeed does your divine mind know
how my heart melted in tender love,
how I languished,
hoping that I might clearly apprehend this state.
If I try to abide in this state for a while,
then my ignorance, a foe posing as a friend, comes and makes my mind its home.
Shall defiling maya and karma return again?
Shall births, in unbroken succession, assault me? These thoughts fill my mind.
Lend me the sword of true steadfastness [sraddha],
give me the strength of true jnana so that my bondage is abolished;
guard me, and grant me your grace!Consummate perfection of bliss, whose abundant fullness reigns,
without exception, everywhere I look! (‘Paripurnanandam’, verse 5)
Maya and karma, mentioned in the middle of the verse, are, according to Saiva Siddhanta, two of the three impurities of the individual self.]
In the next dialogue Bhagavan is questioned about turiya, the underlying substratum of the Self in which the three states of waking, dreaming and sleeping appear and disappear. He answered the query about these states and concluded with a brief quotation from Thayumanavar:
Question: How are the three states of consciousness inferior in degree of reality to the fourth? What is the actual relation between these three and the fourth?
Bhagavan: There is only one state, that of consciousness or awareness or existence. The three states of waking, dream and sleep cannot be real. They simply come and go. The real will always exist. The ‘I’ or existence that alone persists in all the three states is real. The other three are not real and so it is not possible to say that they have such and such a degree of reality. We may roughly put it like this. Existence or consciousness is the only reality. Consciousness plus waking we call waking. Consciousness plus sleep we call sleep. Consciousness plus dream, we call dream. Consciousness is the screen on which all the pictures come and go. The screen is real, the pictures are mere shadows on it. Because by long habit we have been regarding these three states as real, we call the state of mere awareness or consciousness as the fourth. There is, however, no fourth state, but only one state.
In this connection Bhagavan quoted verse 386 of ‘Paraparakkanni’ of Thayumanavar and said that this so-called fourth state is described as waking sleep or sleep in waking – meaning asleep to the world and awake in the Self. (Day by Day with Bhagavan, 11th January, 1946)
O Supreme of Supremes!
To remain,
free of sleep,
beyond thoughts’ corruption, is this the pure state of grace?
Pray, speak! ( ‘Paraparakkanni’, verse 386)