The authenticity of Bhagavan’s recorded teachings

When my comments about the provenance of Talks were first posted online, I received an email from Ajay Kumar that pointed out that Major Chadwick had given its accuracy a much higher rating in his introduction to the book:

The completed notes were often shown to questioners for verification, but the whole had the seal of approval of Sri Bhagavan himself, as the records were always shown him for his approval or the necessary alteration after they had been entered in the notebook. Thus we may be sure that here we have the exact teaching of the Master.

Most of what follows is the reply that I sent him:

When one is attempting to evaluate the accuracy of a particular text that was in existence in Bhagavan’s lifetime, it is important to recognise a distinction between something Bhagavan read and something Bhagavan actually corrected and revised. I am sure that huge portions of the Talks manuscript would have been quite acceptable to Bhagavan had he taken the trouble to edit it for publication, but the fact remains that he didn’t.

Parts of the Talks manuscript did appear in Maharshi’s Gospel, which came out in 1939. The second half of Maharshi’s Gospel contains dialogues that do not appear anywhere else. I strongly believe that they were dialogues that Maurice Frydman, the editor of the book, had with Bhagavan but I can’t prove this conclusively because he covered his tracks very well. The first half of Maharshi’s Gospel, though, comprises conversations that were lifted verbatim from the Talks manuscript. Judging by the small number of alterations that were made to the Maharshi’s Gospel proof copy by Bhagavan, one can infer that he was reasonably happy with the text in the manuscript.

Chadwick stresses that ‘we may be sure that here [in Talks] we have the exact teaching of the Master’. I am not so convinced, and the reason I say this is that there is one excellent bench mark against which the accuracy of Talks can be measured. In 1936 Bhagavan gave a deposition in a court case. This took place in the hall, and devotees were allowed to attend. The court stenographer made a verbatim transcript of everything Bhagavan said, while Munagala Venkataramiah made notes that he later included in Talks. The full dialogue can be found in the article I wrote entitled Bhagavan the Atiasrami. I will just give a couple of extracts from it to illustrate the point I am trying to make. They are from 5th December, 1936:

Munagala Venkataramiah’s version:

Question: Who is your Guru?

Bhagavan: The Self.

Question: For whom?

Bhagavan: For myself. The Guru may be internal or external. He may reveal himself internally or externally.

The only reply recorded by the court stenographer on this topic was:

Bhagavan: For me Atma itself is the Guru. My Atma is Guru for my Atma.

Munagala Venkataramiah again:

Question: You spoke of atiasrama the other day. Is there authority for it? Is it mentioned anywhere?

Bhagavan: Yes, in the Upanishads, the Suta Samhita [Skanda Purana], Bhagavata, Bharata and other works.

This is the court record of Bhagavan’s reply to this question:

Bhagavan: Details about atiasrama are contained in the Suta Samhita.

If you compare the two sets of questions and answers, you will see that some of Munagala Venkataramiah’s transcriptions are decidedly off the mark. Not only does he fail to record the answer to the key question ‘Who is your Guru?’ correctly, he also pads it out with additional comments that Bhagavan did not make. The additional comments are remarks that Bhagavan did make on this subject on other occasions, but on this particular day he restricted himself to what the stenographer recorded. This habit of padding out the answers can also be seen when Bhagavan gives a scriptural citation for atiasrama (the Suta Samhita). Munagala Venkataramiah added the Upanishads, the Bhagavata and the Mahabharata to the list. These works may contain material on this subject, but they were not cited by Bhagavan during this deposition.

These two examples should be enough to demonstrate the point I am trying to make. I have spoken to many devotees who were present in the hall in the 1930s when Munagala Venkataramiah was the principal translator. Most of them told me that he regularly added his own comments to what Bhagavan said. When he wrote down the conversations later, many of these additional comments found their way into his record. The additional comments were usually remarks that Bhagavan had made on the same subject on different occasions, so they were not entirely inappropriate, but I feel there was no justification for padding out Bhagavan’s comments in this way. Bhagavan, who had a good grasp of English, must have known what was going on, but he didn’t interfere unless his own words had been mistranslated in some way. I have been told that when Devaraja Mudaliar translated for the first time in the early 1940s, Bhagavan beamed with pleasure and said words to the effect, ‘Finally, someone who translates exactly what I say’. I have heard three different versions of this comment from devotees who were with Bhagavan in the 1940s, and this is a summary of the gist of all three of them.

Having said all this, I have to say that Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi is one of my favourite books of Bhagavan’s teaching. One can feel the power of Bhagavan’s words and teachings on every page. It may not be exactly what Bhagavan said, but his teachings are simple and clear enough to withstand the occasional embellishment.

I will revert now to my discussion of which collections of his verbal teachings Bhagavan read and checked.

Most of the text of Day by Day with Bhagavan was not checked by Bhagavan. Devaraja Mudaliar showed the first few pages to Bhagavan when he started compiling his record, but dropped the habit soon afterwards, except when he was unsure of what he had recorded. Devaraja Mudaliar operated under the same constraints that the compiler of Talks did, so the same qualifications must also apply. One plus in favour of this work is that Bhagavan publicly pronounced himself to be highly satisfied with Devaraja Mudaliar’s skill and accuracy as an interpreter.

The letters that comprise Letters from Sri Ramanasramam were published in a Telugu journal during Bhagavan’s lifetime, but there is no evidence that Bhagavan ever checked the material before it went to the press. Also, Suri Nagamma’s Tamil occasionally was not up to the task of understanding everything that Bhagavan said. Kunju Swami once told me that Suri Nagamma often came up to him at the end of a session in the hall to ask what Bhagavan had said during a talk or conversation, and he would relate his memory of it. Some of her stories, such as the ones that narrate the lives of saints, do not match up with the original Tamil printed versions. I think we can assume that Bhagavan knew these stories and narrated them accurately. The mistakes crept in through Suri Nagamma’s inability to understand fully what Bhagavan was saying, and possibly from later reconstructions that were given to her by Kunju Swami.

In the 1980s Balaram Reddy told me that there had been a rivalry between the various 1940s recorders (Krishna Bhikshu, Devaraja Mudaliar and Suri Nagamma) with each accusing the other of transcribing irrelevant or inaccurate material. Bhagavan, following his usual habit of non-interference, refused to take sides or intervene in this. Balaram Reddy also told me that these devotees would give the writings of the other two to Bhagavan to be checked in the hope that he would publicly announce that there was some mistake in them. It was all a bit petty, but it did have the serendipitous result of Bhagavan going through a lot of material that he might not otherwise have checked.

This leads me onto another factor that has to be considered. Bhagavan would often read material that devotees had submitted and return it without making any corrections, even if the material was wildly inaccurate. The most famous instance of this was a Malayalam biography that was written while Bhagavan was still at Skandashram. It was a complete fantasy, compiled by a railway clerk who had had several children. In the book Bhagavan was portrayed as an ex-railway clerk with several children who had miraculous powers that he frequently exhibited. Bhagavan patiently went through the manuscript, correcting a few spelling and grammatical mistakes along the way, and then handed it back to the author. None of the devotees in the ashram at that time knew Malayalam. Kunju Swami, a Malayali, was off on a trip, so no one knew what had been written in the manuscript.

When Kunju Swami returned the other devotees told him about the manuscript and asked him to translate it for them. Kunju Swami read it and was horrified to discover how badly Bhagavan had been misrepresented.

He approached Bhagavan and enquired, ‘Is any of this true?’

Bhagavan apparently replied, ‘It’s as true as all this,’ waving at the world around him.

So, knowing that Bhagavan read something, made a few minor revisions and then returned it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is accurate. However, I should also point out that if Bhagavan did take an interest in something that was shown to him, he could be a fiercely uncompromising editor. Lakshmana Sarma had to recast his Sanskrit translations of Bhagavan’s Tamil verses many, many times before Bhagavan pronounced himself satisfied. Muruganar’s first draft of Guru Vachaka Kovai was extensively reworked by Bhagavan before it went to the press. Translations or presentations of his teachings by close devotees always received special attention. G. V. Subbaramayya’s book, Sri Ramana Reminiscences, records many incidents that show just how seriously Bhagavan took his editing responsibilities.

There is one other category of Bhagavan literature that I must discuss: biographies.

The first major biography of Bhagavan, Self Realization, was written by B. V. Narasimhaswami and published in 1930. Narasimha Swami did extensive research on Bhagavan’s life and we all owe him a great debt of gratitude for all the work he put in. He wrote to all the devotees he could find the addresses of, asking for information about Bhagavan and for stories about the devotee’s connection with Bhagavan. He interviewed many people in the ashram, including Bhagavan himself, and travelled extensively all over Tamil Nadu, looking for information and collecting photographs. Somewhat surprisingly, he did not show his manuscript to Bhagavan before it was published. I referred earlier to a court deposition that Bhagavan gave in the hall. A former devotee was suing the ashram, claiming to be its true owner. This man’s lawyer produced a copy of Self Realization and asked Bhagavan if he had read it prior to its publication, and whether the incidents depicted in it were true. Bhagavan replied that he had not been shown it in advance, and that there were some mistakes in it. He did not, unfortunately, elaborate on what they were.

However, having read the book, I believe that the mistakes were only minor. B. V. Narasimhaswami left Ramanasramam shortly afterwards and never updated his book. The portion that deals with Bhagavan’s life after 1930 was added by S. S. Cohen many years later.

The material in Self Realization was extensively used by the early Tamil and Telugu biographers: Suddhananda Bharati used it to write Sri Ramana Vijayam in Tamil, while Krishna Bhikshu brought out Ramana Leela in Telugu. Initially, Ramana Leela was just a translation of Self Realization, but in the years that followed it was updated several times. Sri Ramana Vijayam remained the same. By the 1940s some devotees were noticing that stories were being told differently in these three books, and one of them asked Bhagavan why this was so. Bhagavan replied that the authors of Self Realization and Sri Ramana Vijayam had left shortly after completing their works, whereas Krishna Bhikshu had stayed and updated his book from time to time. I would take this to imply that Bhagavan thought that Ramana Leela was more accurate than the others because the author had taken the trouble to check the revisions with Bhagavan himself.

For several decades Ramana Leela was only available in Telugu, but a few years ago Ramanasramam brought out the first English edition of this key work.

I should now like to distil everything I have said into a few key, and possibly oversimplified, statements:

(a) The material composed by Bhagavan himself that contain his own teachings and experiences, rather than summaries or translations of other people’s, are the most reliable and authentic.

(b) The works that Bhagavan took the trouble to edit, correct or supervise himself can all be regarded as reliable sources. These include Maharshi’s Gospel, Spiritual Instruction, Revelation, Guru Vachaka Kovai in Tamil, and Sri Ramana Leela.  This category would also include translations of ashram texts, such as Sri Ramana Gita, which Bhagavan supervised and edited.

(c) The remaining sources of the teachings may be reliable, but they were not checked and personally revised by Bhagavan. They may also contain errors that resulted from the transcribing conditions prevailing in the ashram.

I have only dealt with titles that were published during Bhagavan’s lifetime, or which were based on material that was recorded by devotees prior to Bhagavan’s passing away. In subsequent years many devotees wrote their own accounts, many of which contained their experiences with Bhagavan, the stories he told and the teachings he gave out. These can only be as reliable as the memories of the people concerned. However, some of these books contain records that were written down on the day that the events were witnessed or the talks heard. S. S. Cohen (Guru Ramana), G. V. Subbaramayya (Sri Ramana Reminiscences), and Annamalai Swami (Living By The Words Of Bhagavan) all kept diaries that recorded Bhagavan’s teachings and the events that were going on in his presence. I think it is fair to assume that the material which was written down on the day it happened is intrinsically more accurate than memories transcribed several decades later.