Hari
OM
Story-day is for cultural exploration, puraanas and
parables and finding out about leading lights in spiritual philosophy.
Yesterday,
the rather diminished presence of women among the declared sainthood was
discussed. Previously here, there has been a post on Hildegarde von Bingen. Now
let there be something written on a female saint from the Sanskrit tradition.
Sri
Anandamayi Ma
Anandamayi
Ma was born in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) in 1896. Her father and mother were
well known for their states of bhava or
religious emotion. Her mother is said to have had visions whilst pregnant with
her daughter, and much later in life also took up the life of a renunciate.
Anandamayi
Ma was very sensitive to religious ritual as a child, and the sound of
religious chanting would bring about ecstatic feelings in her. Her education was very limited and her writing
skills were minimal.
She
married at 13 years of age to Ramani Mohan Cakravarti, or Bholanath as he was
known, and spent a few years living in her brother-in-law's house, much of it
apparently in trance. She was a hard worker but sometimes had a difficult time
concentrating on housework. Her relatives assumed that the trances were due to
overwork. Her brother-in-law died and she went to live with her husband at age
18, where she met a young man who was impressed by her quiet way of being. He
called her "mother" (Ma in Bengali) and predicted that one day the
entire world would address her in that way. It
was a celibate marriage though not by her husband's choice. Bholanath thought the situation was temporary but it proved to be
permanent. His relatives said he should remarry but he did not follow their
advice. Later, Bholanath took initiation from her and accepted Anandamayi as
his guru.
While
living in Dacca, others came to recognize her spiritual qualities. At the sound
of religious chanting, she would become stiff and even fall to the ground in a
faint. Her body would occasionally become deformed during these events.
Sometimes it would lengthen. At others, it would shrink or its limbs would
seemingly go into impossible positions as if the skeletal structure had changed
shape beneath her skin. She would hold difficult yogic positions (asanas) for long periods and spontaneously
form complex tantric hand positions (mudras)
and gestures.
Her
husband thought she might be possessed and took her to exorcists. One physician
suggested she was not mad in the conventional sense but instead had a kind of
god intoxication - a divine madness for which there was no secular cure. In 1918
she and her husband moved to Bajitpur where she began to do Shaivite and
Vaisnavite spiritual practices. Inner voices would tell her what actions to
perform and which images to visualize. Her yogic practices (kryias) were spontaneous and she described
them as occurring much like a factory where the various machines all worked
automatically and in perfect sequence to produce a product. Anandamayi would
shed profuse tears, laugh for hours, and talk at tremendous speed in a
Sanskrit-like language. Other unusual actions included rolling in the dust and
dancing for long periods whirling like a leaf in the wind. She would also fast
for long periods and at other times consume enough food for eight or nine
people.
Anandamayi
went on various pilgrimages traveling throughout India stopping in ashrams and
attending religious festivals. She had a temple built for her by disciples in
Dacca but left the day it was completed. She travelled to Dehradun where she
lived in an abandoned Shiva temple for almost a year without money and often in
freezing temperatures without blankets. She was known for her siddhis (yogic powers) where she could
read her devotee's thoughts and emotions at a distance, make her body shrink
and expand, and cure the sick. One disciple claimed that she was saved from
death after a car accident when Anandamayi grasped her "life
substance" and brought it back into her dead body. Anandamayi was
sensitive to environmental influences as was demonstrated when she once passed
a Muslim tomb. She immediately began to recite portions of the Quran, and to
perform the Namaj ritual (Muslim prayers). These and other similar acts showed
Anandamayi to be someone always moving through a wide variety of psychic and
religious states, each one expressing itself through her. She often objectified
her body by describing her actions in phases like "this body did
this" or "this body went there". She believed her chaotic
actions were expressions of the divine will. She sometimes ascribed her actions
to a personal though unnamed god: "I
have no sense of pleasure or pain, and I stay as I have always been. Sometimes
He draws me outside, and sometimes He takes me inside and I am completely
withdrawn. I am nobody, all of my actions are done by him and not by
me."
She
also sometimes described herself as completely empty with no sense of the
"I am" remaining. She was lost in the great void (mahasunya) which was responsible for her
actions. The action that emanated from this void was often chaotic and
incoherent. Her view was that a universal state of chaos arises due to
spontaneous eruptions of the divine will which arise out of this nothingness.
She also talked in theological terms stating that her bhavas or expressions
were the play of the Lord (Bhagavan)
acting through her body.
Anandamayi
considered individual identity to be a kind of spiritual disease. She called
it bhava roga, or the disease of
feeling where every person looks at him or herself as a separate individual.
When some of her disciples complained about the large crowds of people that
would sometimes follow her, she responded, "As you do not feel the weight
of your head, of hands, and of feet ... so do I feel that these persons are all
organic members of THIS BODY; so I don't feel their pressure or find their
worries weighing on me. Their joys and sorrows, problems and their solutions, I
feel to be vitally mine ... I have no ego sense nor conception of
separateness."
She explained that there
were four stages in her spiritual evolution. In the first, the mind was
"dried" of desire and passion so it could catch the fire of spiritual
knowledge easily. Next the body became still and the mind was drawn inward, as
religious emotion flowed in the heart like a stream. Thirdly, her personal
identity was absorbed by an individual deity, but some distinction between form
and formlessness still remained. Lastly, there was a melting away of all
duality. Here the mind was completely free from the movement of thought. There
was also full consciousness even in what is normally characterized as the dream
state. While sometimes speaking of spiritual evolution, she also maintained
that her spiritual identity had not changed since early childhood. She claimed
that all the outer changes in her life were for the benefit of her disciples.
When
Paramahansa Yogananda met Anandamayi Ma and asked her about her life, she
answered: "Father, there is little to tell." She spread her graceful
hands in a deprecatory gesture. "My consciousness has never associated
itself with this temporary body. Before I came on this earth, Father, 'I was
the same.' As a little girl, 'I was the same.' I grew into womanhood, but still
'I was the same.' When the family in which I had been born made arrangements to
have this body married, 'I was the same.' … And, Father, in front of you now,
'I am the same.' Ever afterward, though the dance of creation change[s] around
me in the hall of eternity, 'I shall be the same.'" (from Paramahansa
Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi,
(New York, Philosophical Library in New York City, 1946), Chapter 46.)
Anandamayi
was a holy woman without formal religious training or initiation whose status
was based entirely on her ecstatic states. She did not have an outer guru,
though she did hear voices that told her what religious and meditative
practices to perform. She emphasized the importance of detachment from the
world and religious devotion. She also encouraged her devotees to serve others.
She did much traveling and wandering, at times refusing to stay at the ashrams
her devotees provided for her. While her parents worshiped Krishna, she could
not be placed in any definite tradition. An ecstatic child of ecstatic parents,
she became a famous saint who stood on the
edge of several religious traditions, and in the midst of none. She influenced
the spirituality of thousands of people who came to see her throughout her long
life, and died in 1982.
(With thanks to Sri Anandamayi Ma site and also Om-Guru website.)
