Ramanuja

Deep in the forest belt of the Vindhyas, on a pilgrimage that was meant to end at the holy city on the Ganges, a plot was taking shape around the campfire of a small band of young monks: they had agreed with their own teacher, in whispers, that the road home would go easier without his most brilliant student on it. That student was barely out of his youth, already known across Kanchipuram as a scholar who could out-argue men three times his age, and it was precisely that brilliance his guru had come to resent and fear. Only a warning saved him. His cousin Govinda, sitting close enough to overhear what the others were planning, slipped away in the dark to find him and told him to run before morning came. He ran alone into wilderness he did not know, and somewhere in the black heart of that night a hunter and his wife appeared on the path ahead of him and walked beside him, guiding his steps mile after mile until, impossibly, dawn found him standing at the gates of Kanchipuram, a distance that should have taken days to cover. When he turned to thank the two who had walked with him all night, there was no one there. He came to believe, and generations of devotees after him have believed with him, that he had been led home by Narayana and Lakshmi themselves, wearing the plainest clothes on earth to save a man who did not yet know how much the world was going to need him. That man's name was Ramanuja, and this was one of the smaller wonders of his long life.

He had been born, tradition says, around the year 1017, in the small town of Sriperumbudur not far from Kanchipuram, to a father named Keshava and a mother named Kanthimathi, and was named in infancy Ilaya Perumal, "the young lord." Sri Vaishnavas would come to regard him as a human descent of Adishesha, the great serpent on whom Vishnu reclines, sent to earth to hold up a teaching the way the serpent holds up the worlds. As a boy he showed the kind of mind that could not leave an idea alone until it had been turned over from every side, and it was this restlessness that carried him to Kanchipuram to study under Yadava Prakasha, one of the most respected Vedanta teachers of the age. Yadava taught the monist reading of the Upanishads, that the self and the absolute, Brahman, are ultimately one undivided reality and that every distinction the world shows us is, at bottom, illusion. Ramanuja listened, argued, and slowly could not agree. Where his teacher read the great Upanishadic sentence "that thou art" as flat identity, an equation with nothing left over, Ramanuja began to hear something else: a relationship, the self bound to Brahman the way a body is bound to the soul that animates it, real and distinct, but never, ever separate. Yadava Prakasha, unused to correction from a student not yet thirty, grew first irritated and then afraid of what this young man's mind would do to his school. That fear, tradition holds, is what sent him into the Vindhyas planning a murder that never happened, and it is said that in time Yadava Prakasha himself came back humbled, asking to sit as a disciple at the feet of the student he had once wanted dead.

Before that rupture, and long after it, one of the steadiest lights in Ramanuja's early life was a temple attendant of Kanchipuram named Kanchipurna, a man of humble station whose devotion to the deity Varadaraja was so complete that people of every rank came to him quietly for blessing and counsel. Custom made no room for a young scholar of Ramanuja's standing to bow at the feet of a man like Kanchipurna, but Ramanuja did it anyway, again and again, and would say later that no accident of birth had ever meant anything next to the plain fact of a soul on fire with love of God. When he once put a hard question of philosophy to Kanchipurna and received back, in a single unadorned sentence, more clarity than years of formal study had given him, Ramanuja understood that grace does not wait for anyone's permission. It was Kanchipurna who, years later, would give him the name by which Sri Vaishnavism still knows him best.

The other figure who shaped Ramanuja's life, and whom he never once managed to meet while the man was alive, was Yamunacharya, aged head of the Vaishnava community at Srirangam and heir to a line of teaching that ran back through Nathamuni to the Tamil poet-saints called the Alvars. Having heard of the young philosopher making a name for himself in Kanchipuram, Yamunacharya sent word asking him to come to Srirangam, hoping to groom him as his successor. Ramanuja set out at once, but by the time he arrived, the old teacher had already died. He was taken to view the body, and there he noticed something strange: three of Yamunacharya's fingers were curled inward, bent in a way that had happened only at the moment of death and that grieving disciples said would not straighten no matter what they tried. Ramanuja asked whether their master had died with any wish unfulfilled, and they told him there were three. He had wanted someone to write a commentary on the Brahma Sutras that would put the teaching of a personal, qualified Brahman on unshakeable philosophical ground against the monists. He had wanted someone to kindle in the world a burning love for the songs of Nammalvar, the Alvar whose Tamil verses of surrender to Narayana he held to be scripture in their own right, and to write commentary honoring them. And he had wanted the great sage-authors Vyasa and Parashara remembered and thanked by name for everything their writings had given the world. Standing over a teacher he had traveled so far to meet and missed by mere days, Ramanuja spoke a vow out loud to fulfill all three wishes himself. As he spoke, those present said, the three curled fingers of Yamunacharya's hand slowly loosened and lay flat.

Formal initiation into the Sri Vaishnava fold came to Ramanuja from Periya Nambi, also called Mahapurna, a devoted disciple of Yamunacharya and a priest of the Srirangam temple who would remain one of Ramanuja's most loyal companions for the rest of his own life. These were also the years of Ramanuja's marriage, to a woman tradition remembers as devoted and exacting to a fault in matters of ritual purity. She once refused water she believed had been touched by someone she judged beneath her, not realizing the person was connected to Kanchipurna's own household, and when Ramanuja learned of the insult done to a man he revered above his own family, something in him closed a door for good. He sent his wife back to her people and turned, without much hesitation, toward the life of a renunciate. Kanchipurna, moved by what he saw growing in the man who had once bowed at his feet, told him he was fit to be called Yatiraja, "king among ascetics," a name Sri Vaishnava memory holds was confirmed by Lord Varadaraja himself in a vision. From that day Ramanuja wore the ochre cloth and carried the triple staff of a sannyasi, and whatever household life might have quietly claimed a lesser man was behind him for good.

The story Sri Vaishnavas tell most often about him, the one children hear first, belongs to a small town called Thirukkottiyur and an elderly teacher, Nambi, who held the most sacred of all Vaishnava mantras, the eight-syllabled Ashtakshara, Om Namo Narayanaya. Ramanuja asked to receive it and was turned away, tradition says, seventeen times, until whatever pride still clung to his asking had worn all the way through, and Nambi finally relented, teaching him the mantra with one iron condition: he must never repeat it to another living soul, on pain of falling into hell. Ramanuja walked straight out of that room, climbed the steps of the temple's tall gopuram, and from the top of it called the mantra out at the top of his voice to the whole town gathered below. When word of what his student had done reached Nambi, he sent for him in fury and reminded him of the warning and the damnation he had now called down on his own head. Ramanuja's answer has been repeated in Sri Vaishnava households for nine centuries since: if one man's fall into hell could buy the salvation of every person now carrying that mantra in his own heart, then that was a bargain worth making, every single time, without a moment's regret. Nambi's anger did not survive that answer. He embraced his student and gave him a title Sri Vaishnavas still use in place of his given name: Emperumanar, one held, in his own teacher's reckoning, above ordinary reverence. To this day the tradition addresses him by that name more often than by "Ramanuja" itself.

As head of the Vaishnava community at Srirangam, Emperumanar did not confine himself to philosophy. He reorganized the daily worship of the great Ranganatha temple according to the Pancharatra tradition, set out clear duties for every kind of temple service, and, most controversially for his age, opened paths of devotion and service to people of every background, insisting that the god in the sanctum belonged to everyone who loved him and not only to those born into privileged households. This won him the fierce loyalty of ordinary worshippers and just as fierce resentment from those who had held exclusive claims on temple honor before he arrived. That resentment found a patron on the throne itself.

Sri Vaishnava memory holds that a Chola king devoted to Shiva, remembered in tradition as Kulothunga, though historians still argue over exactly which ruler of that name and era deserves the story, summoned the heads of the Srirangam temple and demanded they sign a declaration accepting Shiva as supreme over every other god, Ramanuja among them. Warned in time, Ramanuja fled the city in disguise while two of his most devoted followers, Periya Nambi and a brilliant scholar named Kuratalvan, went to the royal court in his place and refused, on his behalf, to sign. The king's fury fell on them instead. Periya Nambi did not survive what followed. Kuratalvan lived, but blinded, and made his way back to Srirangam reciting the names of Vishnu the whole distance rather than cursing the men who had taken his sight. Later, at Ramanuja's own urging, he stood in a street of Kanchipuram and asked Lord Varadaraja directly for his eyes back, and tradition holds that the prayer was answered. For his own safety, Ramanuja did not return to Srirangam for more than three decades, spending those years far to the west in the hill country of what is now Karnataka.

Those years away from home became, by almost any measure, among the most fruitful of his life. At a hill later called Thirunarayanapuram, near modern Melkote, he is said to have recovered from the earth an ancient buried image of Vishnu and consecrated it as Cheluvanarayana, "the beautiful Narayana," a deity still worshipped there today. He won over the Hoysala ruler of the region, a man raised as a Jain named Bittideva, to Vaishnava devotion; the king took the name Vishnuvardhana and became one of the great temple-building patrons of South Indian history, funding the very shrine his new teacher had founded. A later and far more fantastical strand of local legend, impossible to verify and almost certainly attached to the story long after Ramanuja's own lifetime, holds that a second image sacred to the Melkote temple had once been carried off and ended up in a distant Muslim court, where the ruler's young daughter grew so attached to the small deity, playing with it as a child plays with a beloved doll, that when Ramanuja finally negotiated its return she followed it all the way back to Karnataka out of pure love and was given, in tradition's telling, the name Bibi Nachiyar. Whatever history hides underneath that legend, the devotion it describes, a heart crossing every boundary of birth and belief to stay near what it loves, is very much the spirit Ramanuja spent his whole life trying to teach.

When word reached him in Karnataka that the hostile king had died, Ramanuja returned at last to Srirangam, an old man now by any reckoning, and spent his final years finishing the work Yamunacharya had asked of him at a deathbed he had once arrived at too late. He wrote the Sri Bhashya, his commentary on the Brahma Sutras, setting out with total rigor the philosophy that came to be called Vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism: that Brahman is not a featureless, impersonal absolute but the supreme and utterly personal Narayana, infinite in auspicious qualities, and that every individual soul and the whole material world exist as his body, bound to him inseparably yet never simply identical with him, the way a body is bound to the self that animates it without ever being that self. Alongside it he wrote the Vedartha Sangraha, a sweeping summary of Vedantic doctrine, the Gita Bhashya, his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, and shorter works of pure surrender, teaching that prapatti, total self-surrender to Narayana, stood open to every seeking soul regardless of learning, birth, wealth, or gender, a conviction that had already cost his community dearly and would go on shaping devotional life across South India for a thousand years. Near the end of his life he chose seventy-four senior disciples, men of proven learning and character, and set each one at the head of a teaching seat with authority to initiate and instruct in his name, so that the living tradition would never again depend on the lifespan of a single teacher.

Sri Vaishnava tradition holds that Ramanuja lived to be a hundred and twenty years old, dying at Srirangam in the year 1137, though the far edges of his dates have never stopped being debated by historians. What is not in dispute is what his own disciples did in his final days. Begging him to leave them some form they could go on worshipping after he was gone, they had an image made in his own likeness while he still breathed, and Ramanuja is said to have poured into it everything of himself he had left to give. That image, seated in meditation with one hand raised in the gesture of teaching, still sits today in a shrine in the fifth enclosure of the great Ranganatha temple, still receives its offering of camphor and sandal paste, and is still approached by pilgrims not as a statue but as Thaanaana Thirumeni, "the very body itself." Nine hundred years after his death, in a city he once fled in disguise and returned to only after burying a friend and healing another's blinded eyes, worshippers still kneel before what they believe is Ramanuja himself, present and listening, exactly the way he once knelt before a humble temple attendant and decided that no accident of birth would ever again be allowed to stand between a human soul and its God.