The qualifications needed to do self-enquiry

A few days ago I was asked to comment on a dialogue between Bhagavan and a devotee in which he appeared to insist that certain moral qualifications were necessary before one could attempt self-enquiry, or follow it successfully. The conversation originally appeared in The Maharshi, the journal of the Arunachala Ashram, Nova Scotia (see here). I will give the questions and answers first and comment on their origin afterwards:

K.V. next questioned Maharshi: ‘Who is the adhikari, i.e., the person competent to launch on this atma vichara, the Self-quest? Can anyone judge for himself if he has the necessary competency?’

Maharshi: This is an important preliminary question. Before atma vichara is started some antecedent experience, some achievement in the moral field is essential.

People having varied experiences in the world, at one stage develop a disgust or repulsion (vairagya) towards sense attractions or, at any rate, an indifference to such attractions, and feel forcibly the miserable transient nature of this body through which these attractions and enjoyments are had. This may be the result of the practice of devotion or some other upasana in this life, or of such devotion or other good works performed in previous lives. People with minds thus purified and strengthened are the adhikaris, the ones competent to launch on Atma Vichara or enquiry into the Self; and these are the qualifications or signs by which one can determine such competency.

Where does this dialogue come from? In an earlier issue of The Maharshi the following introductory remarks are made:

The following text is from an unpublished manuscript on Sri Ramana Gita that has recently surfaced in Sri Ramanasramam. The manuscript contains typed and handwritten pages by B. V. Narasimhaswami, the author of Self Realization.

While BVN was residing at the Ashram, around the year 1930, he appears to have taken up the project of recasting Sri Ramana Gita in its original conversational form. Some of the answers in this new manuscript appear to be quite lengthy compared to the versified text composed by Ganapati Muni. It is unlikely that BVN had access to any notes taken on the occasion of the questions put to the Maharshi between the years 1913 and 1917, so we can only assume, as he explains in his introduction, that the elucidations further developed by the Maharshi in this new version must have come from subsequent questions for clarification put by BVN himself.

Many years after BVN’s preparation of this manuscript (which includes 36 typed legal-size sheets, reproduced from 25 handwritten pages, and 18 handwritten pages never put into typed format), someone began typing up an edited version of the first and second chapters, five pages in all. For whatever reason, this short-lived project also ceased and the manuscript was stored away. After BVN had typed some of his handwritten chapters, he gave a number of these pages over to Bhagavan to read, correct and fill in the required Sanksrit text, for which he left adequate space.

One such Sanskrit text beautifully written by Bhagavan on these pages is his famous verse describing the means to enter the Heart (reproduced on page 2), which is verse two of Chapter II in Sri Ramana Gita. This verse constitutes the basis for that chapter, titled “The Three Paths”.

We do not know why BVN never completed this project, or how these manuscripts came to be filed away and forgotten, buried in an uncatalogued library cabinet of the ashram. Perhaps someone knows and will come forward with the information.

A historical digression

I can shed a little light on the questions raised in the final paragraph of this introduction. The story is not merely interesting in itself, it also gives some relevant background information to the topic I will discuss later: Bhagavan’s views on who is qualified to undertake self-enquiry.

I first came across Narasimhaswami’s manuscripts when I began to catalogue the ashram’s archives in the late 1970s.

V. Ganesan gave me the key to a couple of cupboards in the ashram office, saying, ‘We are like the “dog in the manger” with these cupboards. We guard them, we bark protectively if anyone goes anywhere near them, but we never do anything with the material inside. We don’t even know what is in there. It’s just a repository for all the old manuscripts that we have collected over the years.’

I went through the contents and found them to be a veritable Aladdin’s cave of archival treasures. There were little notebooks in Bhagavan’s handwriting, proof copies of ashram books personally corrected by Bhagavan, and much, much more besides. One of the items I discovered was a huge folder full of material accumulated by B. V. Narasimhaswami. He had left it all in the ashram when he departed, around 1930, to pursue his spiritual career with Shirdi Sai Baba. The most valuable part of the collection, in my opinion, was the notes he took when he was interviewing Bhagavan for his biography, Self-Realization. Two of these accounts, which related to Bhagavan’s first and second death experiences, were reproduced in The Mountain Path soon after I discovered them. Next in importance were the stories of devotees. Narasimhaswami had written to all the devotees of Bhagavan he knew about, asking them to write accounts of their experiences with Bhagavan. Many of these stories were published in The Mountain Path and in various ashram books. I am personally indebted to Narasimhaswami for persuading Masthan Swami to give a brief account of his association with Bhagavan. This one-and-a-half-page account, in Tamil, is the only first-hand record we have of Masthan’s life with Bhagavan.

Along with his notes and the personal reminiscences of devotees there were a number of pages that belonged to unfinished book projects. From the introductory comments he made it would seem that his intention was to bring out a book of dialogues between Bhagavan and devotees that would communicate the essence of his teachings. The papers that recently appeared in The Maharshi were part of this collection. In addition to the Sri Ramana Gita reconstruction, there were many pages of dialogues that purported to be between Bhagavan and visitors. I found the style and the presentation of these conversations to be highly untypical. I showed them to Viswanatha Swami, who was then the editor of The Mountain Path, and he agreed.

After going through the talks he told me, ‘Bhagavan didn’t deal with devotees in this way. These dialogues creep forward, establishing points one by one, with each new point depending on the arguments that have been presented and concluded in the previous answer. Bhagavan didn’t beat around the bush like this. He always went to the heart of the question with his first reply.’

He was right. The dialogues were incrementally Socratic in style, and quite alien to the way that Bhagavan taught. We both concluded that Narasimhaswami had used his legal skills (he was a lawyer) to assemble the salient points of Bhagavan’s teachings in the form of highly structured but artificially contrived dialogues. The teachings themselves were fairly accurate, but the form they were presented in (a dialogue between Bhagavan and a questioner) was entirely fictitious.

I then showed him the Sri Ramana Gita reconstruction. He went through it with a frown on his face before making the following comments:

‘There is a lot of extraneous material here, comments and extrapolations that are not in the original text. Bhagavan himself went through the original text many times, both in Sanskrit and in some of its translations. We can trust the original version because we know that Bhagavan has gone through it word by word. We have no idea where this extra material came from, and we can have no reason to believe that this is what happened in the original conversations. I don’t think Narasimhaswami ever had any contact with the people who asked these questions, and some of the things that Bhagavan is saying here don’t sound authentic to me.’

As a result of this conversation, the manuscripts containing the dialogues went back into the archives and remained there for decades, whereas the ones containing reminiscences were published in dribs and drabs over the succeeding years.

This explains why, since 1980, ‘these manuscripts came to be filed away and forgotten, buried in an uncatalogued library cabinet of the Ashram’. What about the years before that? Why did no one think about printing any of them prior to 1980? From 1950 onwards I think the main answer would have been financial. In the twenty years that followed Bhagavan’s passing away the ashram was chronically short of funds. I very much doubt that Narasimhaswami’s papers would have been considered for publication in this era, even if they hadn’t been forgotten and buried in a thoroughly neglected archive. One of the items I found in the cupboard was the typed manuscript of At the Feet of Bhagavan. It had sat there, gathering dust, for more than fifteen years. It had been properly edited and it seemed to me to be ready to be sent to the press. There were even instructions for the printer in the margins. It seemed odd to me that, after so much work had been put into it, it had simply been filed away and forgotten about.

Afew years ago I asked Ganesan, who looked after all ashram publications for decades, why it had never been printed.

He laughed and said, ‘The ashram decided to print it in the 1960s. It was made ready for the press, but Koppikar, who looked after the ashram accounts, told us we didn’t have enough money to print it. He lost the argument but won the battle by hiding the only copy of the manuscript so we couldn’t waste money on it by printing it. We had no idea what he had done with it until you rediscovered it.’

Around the same time I had a conversation with Suri Nagamma about her writings on Bhagavan. She told me that in the 1950s D. S. Sastri had offered on many occasions to translate Letters from Sri Ramanasramam into English if the ashram would agree to print it. His offer was persistently rejected on the grounds that Ramanasramam didn’t have the funds for it. When the then president finally relented and agreed to the publication, she said that D. S. Sastri raced through the job as fast as he could because he felt that the offer might be withdrawn at any moment if the president felt that his limited funds were needed elsewhere.

Here again is the question that was posed at the end of the introduction to the Sri Ramana Gita reconstruction:

We do not know why BVN never completed this project, or how these manuscripts came to be filed away and forgotten, buried in an uncatalogued library cabinet of the Ashram.

And here are my answers, which are partially just my own personal opinions:

Narasimhaswami never completed the project because he seemed to lose interest in writing about Bhagavan. When he went to Shirdi, he left behind all his papers, including his unfinished book of dialogues with Bhagavan. He also left behind a huge collection of notes on Seshadri Swami since he also had a plan to bring out a separate book on him. Since the book of conversations with Bhagavan was far from complete, there would have been no reason, during Bhagavan’s lifetime, for anyone to contemplate publishing it. After Bhagavan’s death, for a period of about twenty-five years, the manuscript was lost, and even if it hadn’t been, a lack of funds would have prevented its publication. In the late 1970s, when the manuscript was rediscovered, the ashram decided not to publish it because Viswanatha Swami (and a few others I showed it to) felt that the conversations recorded in it were not authentic.

Back to the topic of who is qualified to practise enquiry

I hope that the previous meandering section was not too off-putting for those who are waiting for some useful material on self-enquiry. I included it primarily to provide evidence for my belief that (a) the original Sanskrit text of Sri Ramana Gita is the authentic one and (b) Narasimhaswami’s version is not. Therefore, if there is new or contentious material that only appears in Narasimhaswami’s version, in my opinion it can be discarded as unreliable. Bearing this in mind, look at the initial words that are attributed to Bhagavan in Narasimhaswami’s version:

Question: Who is the adhikari, i.e., the person competent to launch on this atma vichara, the Self-quest? Can anyone judge for himself if he has the necessary competency?

Maharshi: This is an important preliminary question. Before atma vichara is started some antecedent experience, some achievement in the moral field is essential.

If you compare this with the original text, you can see that the two sentences that Bhagavan begins with are not present. This is how the 1998 Ramanasramam edition of Sri Ramana Gita presents the question and the answer:

Question: Who is considered fit for this enquiry? Can one by oneself know one’s own fitness?

Bhagavan: He whose mind has been purified through upasana [worship] and other means or by merit acquired in past lives, who perceives the imperfections of the body and sense-objects, and feels utter distaste whenever his mind has to function among sense-objects and who realises that the body is impermanent, he is said to be a fit person for self-enquiry.

By these two signs, that is by a sense of the transitoriness of the body and by non-attachment to sense-objects, one’s own fitness for self-enquiry can be known. (Sri Ramana Gita, chapter 7, verses 8, 9, 10, 11)

The notion that ‘some achievement in the moral field is essential’ for those seeking to practise self-enquiry is an interpolation by Narasimhaswami. Some conditions are laid out in Bhagavan’s original reply, but having a strong moral base is not one of them.