Rasik Murari

The letter reached Rasik Murari in the middle of a meal: come at once, in whatever state you are. He set down the rice still in his hand, did not even pause for the ritual sip of water that properly closes an unfinished meal, and walked out with his hands unwashed. When he came into his guru's presence he did not plant himself in front of him the way an equal might; he circled around and approached from behind, the posture of a man too conscious of his own smallness to look his teacher in the eye. Shyamananda Prabhu, watching this, wept.

The trouble was this. The guru's ashram village, granted years before so its harvest could feed the wandering sadhus who gathered there, had just been seized by a king newly come to power in that territory. Shyamananda sent his most trusted disciple to plead the case in the king's own court. The officials who ran that court happened already to be Rasik Murari's disciples, and they begged him not to confront their master directly; he had a temper, they warned, and no patience for holy men, so better to let them settle it quietly from the inside. For three days Rasik Murari simply sat with them and said nothing to the king. On the third day the king noticed his officers had vanished from their duties and demanded to know where they had spent three days. "Our guru has come," they finally told him. "Bring him here," the king said. "Let us see this miracle everyone talks about."

What arrived to greet him instead of a miracle, in the telling most often repeated, was a war elephant driven wild and pointed at the guest with orders to trample him where he stood. Rasik Murari's own companions grabbed at his arms, begging him to run. He would not. "This body has already died more times than I can count, across more births than I can count, and dying never once freed it from being born again," he told them, or something close to it. "If it is finally spent doing something of use, in my guru's service, then let it be spent." He walked forward chanting Shyamananda's name and did not flinch when the animal closed the distance. He spoke to it directly, the way a teacher speaks to a slow but beloved student, telling it to set down its dark, heavy nature and take up the name of Krishna instead. Something in the beast broke open. It knelt. It wept, the way elephants are sometimes said to weep when something old in them is finally touched. Some versions of the story remember two maddened elephants sent that morning; only the one who knelt is remembered afterward.

Rasik Murari draped a tulsi necklace over its neck and gave it initiation as plainly as he would have given it to any soul come seeking shelter, naming it Gopaldas, servant of Gopal. The king who had sent it to kill him rushed forward instead and fell at his feet, returned the seized village, added several more to it as a gift, and gave him the elephant besides. It is one thing to read that a saint tamed an elephant. It is another to sit with what the story is actually saying: that violence sent to finish him became, in his hands, one more devotee brought into the fold.

Gopaldas spent the rest of his life as a servant of the Vaishnavas in the plainest sense of that phrase. He knelt before every wandering sadhu he met to receive the water that had washed their feet, and would not eat until he had it. He gathered grain and goods from merchants for the sadhu community, and when Rasik Murari learned the animal was simply taking what he wanted rather than paying for it, he corrected him and taught him to wait for what was freely offered. Word of an elephant who bowed to holy men eventually reached a distant ruler, and a man dressed as a wandering ascetic, exploiting the very reverence for sadhus that Gopaldas had been raised on, lured him away to be shown off at court like a curiosity. Cut off there from the company of saints and the blessed food he had lived on, the animal weakened, and when he was finally led down to the Ganga he seems to have understood exactly where he stood. He walked into the river remembering his guru's name and did not come out again. Even his death is remembered as one more act of devotion completing itself.

To understand how a man could stop a maddened elephant with nothing but a sentence, the story has to go back to its beginning: a riverside village called Rohini on the banks of the Suvarnarekha, a river some in that country still say washes sin from whoever bathes in it, near the border of Odisha and Bengal. He was born there around the year 1590, to a landholder of some local standing, called in different tellings a raja, a zamindar, or simply the village's leading man, remembered by the name Achyuta, and his wife Bhavani. At his naming, the family's astrologers are said to have watched the infant reach past every toy laid in front of him for a copy of the Bhagavata Purana, and to have told his parents that whatever name they chose, a great soul had come into their house. They called him Rasik. His father wanted Murari worked into it as well, an old name of Krishna as the one who slew the demon Mura, and the two fused into the single name the Bhaktamal would use for him ever after.

Even as a small child he could not be near a wandering sadhu without wanting to give something away, and he grew into a young man restless in a way that had nothing to do with ambition; already married, already settled, he simply did not have a guru and could not rest until he did. He went into retreat at a place called Ghantashila and sat with that longing until, by his own account, a voice with no visible source told him not to be afraid, that a teacher named Shyamananda was waiting for him and that he would see him soon. He spent that whole night repeating the name in japa that would not stop, tears running the entire time. Shyamananda came to him in a dream that same night and promised him darshan by morning, and at dawn, so the story goes, the guru actually appeared, walking toward him surrounded by chanting disciples, his presence so full it seemed to fill the road. Rasik Murari fell flat on the ground at his feet.

Shyamananda gave him diksha that day into the mantra of Radha and Krishna, and initiated his wife alongside him, giving her the name Shyama Dasi. He gave his new disciple the name Rasikananda, though the Bhaktamal and the memory of Braj would keep calling him Rasik Murari, and set him to the direct care of the deity of Govinda at a place called Kashipur, which Shyamananda renamed Gopiballabhpur in the deity's honor. Before long this disciple had become, by every account that survives of him, the dearest of all Shyamananda's students, the one who would go on carrying the mission forward once the guru's own teacher, and eventually Shyamananda himself, had left the world.

What made him extraordinary was not learning; none of his biographers claim he outshone the other disciples in scholarship. He had simply taken his guru's answer to one question and built an entire life on top of it. He had once asked Shyamananda how a person actually pleases Hari, expecting perhaps a discourse on scripture, and had been told instead: by serving His devotees. Rasik Murari organized his whole household around that one sentence. He kept full vessels of charanamrit, the water that had washed visiting sadhus' feet, standing on a raised platform in his own home the way another man might keep an altar, and bowed to them and drank from them daily as an act of worship in its own right. Once a year, on the day he held a festival in his guru's honor, he fed every single person who came to his door for twelve unbroken days, and the crowd of visiting saints that gathered was remembered as something close to a small town that assembled for a fortnight and then quietly dispersed.

His devotion to that one practice produced the story his tradition tells most tenderly. At one of his feasts, wanting to test the depth of a young attendant's own heart, he sent him to gather charanamrit from every sadhu seated for the meal and bring it to drink. When he tasted it, he stopped. Something was missing; it did not carry its usual sweetness. He pressed the young man until he admitted the truth: there had been a sadhu near the gate, his body marked by leprosy, and out of squeamishness the attendant had walked past him without asking for his blessing. Rasik Murari did not scold him. He rose at once, went and found the man seated under a tree at the edge of the grounds, and threw himself down flat in front of him. "Forgive your servant," he said, to a man the world had spent years learning to keep its distance from. He drank that sadhu's charanamrit himself, weeping, and only then did he consider the feast complete.

A gentler version of the same instinct shows up in a smaller story from his own garden. Passing through a gathering of sadhus there one day, he noticed one of them hurriedly hide a hookah out of embarrassment at being caught smoking in front of him. Rather than let the man sit in that shame, Rasik Murari clutched his stomach and announced, loudly enough for the whole gathering to hear, that he was in terrible pain and that only tobacco smoke would settle it; someone should find a hookah at once. The relieved sadhu, glad to be of use rather than caught out, produced his own without a second thought. Rasik Murari made a show of smoking it and declared himself instantly cured, and only much later, gently and in private, mentioned that scripture did not really recommend the habit. The man gave it up entirely on his own, having never once been shamed for it in front of anyone.

Not every encounter with a stranger's temper resolved so sweetly, and the tradition keeps at least one where he simply absorbed the blow. At a large public feast, a disguised sadhu demanded a second plate of prasad, insisting it belonged by rights to the walking stick he carried, since that very stick was used to grind the bhang the sadhus drank. When the stewards, unmoved by the logic of a stick's appetite, refused him, the man flew into a rage, flung his own plate of food over Rasik Murari's head, and cursed him in front of an assembly that included visiting kings and holy men. He did not curse back. "Look," he is remembered saying mildly to those around him, "what a trick has just been played," and he let the food that had struck him land where it would, some of it reaching his own mouth, and ate it as prasad regardless of how it had arrived. The person he held to account afterward was not the sadhu who had thrown it but his own steward, removed from that duty for having measured out welcome where nothing should ever have been measured at all.

Word of this kind of man travels, and landholders and kings across that stretch of Odisha and Bengal, men who held far more worldly power than he ever sought, are remembered coming to sit at his feet, among them the ruling house of Mayurbhanj. Tradition also holds that men who had spent their lives outside the law laid that life down at his word, and that even wild tigers in the forests he crossed on foot for decades gave up their hunting instinct in his presence. One year, deep in those forest villages on his guru's business, he realized with a jolt that he had lost track of the calendar and would miss the Ratha-yatra of Jagannath at Puri. He set out at a run. What he found on arriving became one of the best-loved stories about him: the great chariot, fully loaded and ready to move, had simply stopped in the road and would not budge, no matter how many elephants the ruling king brought to shove it forward, because, it is said, the Lord riding inside it was waiting for this one devotee by name. The moment Rasik Murari reached the rope and pulled, the cart rolled on as easily, the old telling says, as a cloud crossing the sky. The astonished king pressed land on him afterward, where he raised a small math, remembered today as Kunja Math, and installed a deity of Krishna there for worship.

He is said to have had three sons, and their descendants are remembered continuing the seva at Gopiballabhpur for generations after him. He left behind a handful of Sanskrit hymns, among them one in praise of his own guru, that are still sung in that lineage. Near the end of his life, on the first day of the bright half of the month of Phalguna, around the year 1652, he set out toward Remuna, the town where Chaitanya Mahaprabhu himself was said to have once had his sweetest meeting with the deity Gopinath. He kept kirtan the whole way there with seven companions who had stayed at his side for years. At the temple of Kshira-chora Gopinath he touched the deity's feet and, in the language his tradition uses for a saint's final hour, entered into that shelter and did not return. Grief alone is said to have taken his seven companions that same night. Flower-covered samadhis for all eight still stand at Remuna, and every year in the month of Magha a festival gathers there for twelve days, the same span of days he once kept his own door open in his guru's honor, now kept open in his.

Some within his own tradition, unable to believe an ordinary birth could account for him, later said he must have been Aniruddha, Krishna's own grandson in the old stories, walking the earth again inside a human life. That claim can be left where it stands, one strand among several, neither provable nor necessary. What the record shows plainly enough needs no such embellishment: a young husband once told that God is reached through the door of His devotees, who spent the rest of his life refusing to let that door close, not on a leper, not on an elephant, not on a sadhu caught with a hookah, not even on a servant with no love left in his hands that day. It is not a complicated teaching. It may be the hardest one there is to actually live.