The Goddess and the Guru: A Spiritual Biography of Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati - Softcover

Bowden, Michael M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0997946601 ISBN 13: 9780997946604

Publisher: 45th Parallel Press, 2017

Synopsis

Nearly four decades ago, an intense series of spiritual visions led one of India’s top nuclear physicists, until then a religious skeptic and man of science, to walk away from his prestigious post at the heart of the country’s missile-defense complex. Retreating into the remote jungles of eastern India, he discovered the remains of a centuries-old Tantric Mother Goddess shrine and embarked on a life-altering quest to revive and expand it – eventually attracting tens of thousands of followers from across India and around the globe. Part biography and part spiritual guidebook, this book chronicles the astonishing, inspiring – and yet deeply human – life of Dr. Nishtala Prahlada Sastry (later best known as Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati, or simply “Guruji”); his triumphs and disappointments, public successes, and personal crises. In addition to Amritananda’s life story, the book also offers a generous selection from his writings, lectures, ritual guides and poetry – a treasure trove for those who wish to significantly deepen their spiritual practice while remaining fully engaged with the world.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Bowden is an attorney and the director of communications for Roger Williams University School of Law. He is a former reporter for The New York Times and has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the ABA Journal to India Today. He is also the recipient of the Ross Award for his legal journalism. He lives in Warwick, Rhode Island. Sri Chaitanayananda is the founder of the Sri Rajarajeswari Temple and has dedicated his life to preserving and spreading the knowledge of Devi worship. He lives in Rush, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Goddess and the Guru

A Spiritual Biography of Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati

By Michael M. Bowden

45th Parallel Press

Copyright © 2017 Michael M. Bowden
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-9979466-0-4

Contents

Maps, 
A Note from Guruji, 
Foreword, 
THE GODDESS AND THE GURU, 
Introduction, 
Prologue: A Grand Consecration, 
1 The Man-Lion's Son, 
2 Do As You Will, 
3 The Yogi, the Nazis and the Cyclotron, 
4 The Cradle of Cutting-Edge Science, 
5 An Absentminded Professor?, 
6 On Turning-Point Hill, 
7 A Dormant Volcano Awakens, 
8 The Wisest of Madmen, 
9 Setting the Stage, 
10 Into the Heart of Africa, 
11 A Path Fraught with Danger, 
12 It Wasn't Meant for Them, 
13 The Cinema Goddess, 
14 The Jingling of Anklets, 
15 Temples Raised by Woman Power, 
16 The Chorus of a Thousand Voices, 
17 You're Asking for Trouble, 
18 Stringing a Garland of Swords, 
19 The Backbone of Devipuram, 
20 Points of Connectivity, 
21 A Goddess in Upstate New York, 
22 An Impossible Dream Comes True, 
23 Beyond Temple Walls, 
24 The Powerhouse of Devipuram, 
25 I'm Not the Chosen One, 
26 Precisely What I Wanted, 
27 Coming of Age, 
28 It's Her Worry Now, 
29 The Goddess and the Guru, 
Epilogue, 
Insert, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
List of Illustrations, 

CHAPTER 1

The Man-Lion's Son

"Father! Father! Prahlada is born!"

The clock was nearing 10:30 on the warm, autumn Wednesday night of September 26, 1934, but four-year-old Suryalakshmi was still wide awake, keeping vigil on her father's lap when the midwife finally emerged from the birthing room with happy tidings of a newborn son.

"Father, come on! Let's go see Prahlada!"

Even in the excitement of the moment, Nishtala Narasimha Rao paused at his daughter's exclamations. Prahlada? That was the name of a legendary boy-saint, for whom the great god Vishnu manifested as Narasimha, the ManLion, to defeat a demonic king.

"While we were sitting and waiting, my father was reading me the story of Prahlada," Suryalakshmi explained. "Just as he got to the line 'He is here, He is there; it is certain, He is everywhere!' the midwife arrived with news that my brother had been born. When I saw him, they said, I kept repeating the name Prahlada."

Taking their daughter's enthusiastic exclamations as a divine suggestion, Narasimha Rao (who himself shared theMan-Lion's name) and his wife Lakshmi Narasayamma named their first son accordingly.

So it was that Nishtala Prahlada Sastry, the man who would later become known to thousands as Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati, or simply "Guruji," was named by his big sister.

* * *

The young Smarta Brahmin family resided close to the center of Visakhapatnam, a bustling port city in what was then the Madras Presidency of British India, and now lies in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Picturesquely situated on India's eastern coastal plain, where the dramatic, angular hills of the Eastern Ghats tumble into the vast blue expanse of the Bay of Bengal, the city is sometimes called "The Jewel of the East Coast."

Visakhapatnam — also known as Vizag (from an older transliteration, "Vizagapatnam") — is a small city by Indian standards, but more than two million people call it home. The city's rich street life is on full display along the broad waterfront boulevard of Beach Road, with its vendors, street performers, playgrounds, aquarium, zoo, military memorials — all under the watchful gaze of a monumental white sculpture of Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati at Tenneti Park. Vizag also hosts the Eastern Command of the Indian Navy, and supports both a massive state-ownedshipyard and a vast steel refinery, yet its leafy, intimate neighborhoods still nurture a friendly, small-town feel that recalls the fishing community it was for thousands of years. The area also retains much of its natural beauty, including miles of sandy beaches, craggy cliffs and hilltop parks overlooking the sea.

In Visakhapatnam's immediate environs, one can explore the extraordinary limestone formations of the Borra Caves, or hike the breathtaking forested hills of the Araku Valley, known for its gardens, valleys, waterfalls and streams (and, more recently, for Araku Emerald, a fair-trade organic coffee produced by a local indigenous tribe). The area is bursting with temples and shrines, none more formidable than the stately, thousand-year-old Simhachalam complex, located on a hilltop just north of town — and dedicated, of course, to Lord Narasimha (the Man-Lion association would surface repeatedly throughout Guruji's life).

In an early photograph of the family on an outing to Simhachalam in 1939, Prahlada, age four, is held in one arm by his bare-chested father. His mother holds brother Prasad Rao, two years younger, while sister Suryalakshmi, age eight, stands between her parents. Towering behind them is the temple's massive bas-relief sculpture of Varaha, Lord Vishnu's boar avatar.

Like many Hindu temples, Simhachalam is considered a tirtha — literally a ford, or crossing point — a place where the borders between the mundane and the transcendent, the human and the divine, are permeable and ever-shifting. It was a touchstone in a world that the child observed with penetrating curiosity and intelligence.

"I first began becoming aware of myself around that time," Guruji said. Even in early childhood, he remembers analyzing the world in "a highly logical manner; I was always able to arrange things in neat compartments in my mind."

"He had tremendous concentration, even then," sister Suryalakshmi agreed. She recalled Prahlada's Akshara Abhyasa ceremony, a ritual to Saraswati, Hindu goddess of knowledge, the arts and education, in which children are formally taught their first letters. At the age of five, the boy took the pen and — saying, "Here comes Aim! Aim is coming!" — proceeded to write the syllable, which is the bija, or seed mantra, of the goddess Saraswati. ("This from a child who had no previous knowledge of letters," Suryalakshmi noted.) The presiding priest then guided him in writing Om Namah Shivaya — the primary mantra of the god Shiva — as his first full sentence.

His innate intelligence served Prahlada well as he began formally attending school, where he quickly distinguished himself as an outstanding student — despite occasionally significant financial restraints. "My father could not afford to buy us textbooks, so I used to borrow my schoolmates' books and copy them neatly into my notebook," Guruji said. "It was around this time that I discovered I could look at any page, and then close my eyes and see every letter, every paragraph, from beginning to end, exactly as if I were viewing a photograph. So exams were easy for me. Since the questions mainly depended on testing memory, all I had to do was to close my eyes, read the book and then write down the answers. As you might have guessed, I was getting good grades."

* * *

His intellectual curiosity extended beyond academic subjects. Even as a young child, Prahlada displayed a prodigious interest in matters spiritual, habitually posing such imponderable questions as: Why did God create the world? Was it just for fun? Is he here with us, having fun too? Why is there religion? Why do we worship God? What happens if we don't? Sometimes an adult, charmed by the boy's innocent curiosity, would attempt to indulge him — but one question invariably led to another until his interlocutor finally gave up in exasperation.

In his leisure time, Prahlada immersed himself in Hinduism's great religious epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Beginning at about age eight, he undertook to read each of the 18 Maha Puranas — massive cultural repositories of religious stories and teachings — in turn, gradually absorbing the elemental storehouses of Hindu lore. These pastimes gave him "immense happiness," and the stories sprang vividly to life in his mind's eye, blending seamlessly with the features of his everyday world.

"So when I was reading the story of Prahlada, I thought it was my own story," he explained. "I began to see divine figures such as Krishna, Ganesh, Hanuman and Saraswati — my favorite goddess — in the patterns of the leaves in the trees. I used to talk with them and play with them." Sister Suryalakshmi remembers him climbing a parijat (coral jasmine) tree near their home, holding a stick to his lips and telling her, "Isn't this how Lord Krishna plays the flute? This is what I can see! This is what I hear!" At first, he thought everyone else could perceive the divinities as well, and would sometimes call out to his friends, "Look, Lord Krishna is sitting up in that tree! See?"

His companions would turn, mouths agape, to wherever he was pointing — and, of course, see nothing at all. Laughing at their friend's overactive imagination, they would return to their games, leaving him alone with his visions. "Immersed in such pastimes, and being pretty much an introvert by nature at any rate," he recalled, "I was aptly nicknamed 'the absentminded professor.'"

Young Prahlada could often be found staring off into space, lost in thought, listening intently to sounds that no one else could hear — sometimes a veena, sometimes a flute, sometimes ankle bells or temple bells. At that age, he had no idea why he was hearing these sounds or where they came from; he only knew that they made him happy. "As a youngster, I used to get the feeling that if I ever stopped hearing those sounds, I would die," he said. "I don't know why that feeling was there, but it was."

* * *

Of course, life was not all dreamy reflection. Prahlada was an ordinary boy in many respects, who enjoyed, for example, playing football (soccer) with his friends after school. "We used to play on the slopes of a steep sand hill — isaka konda in Telugu — near King George Hospital in Visakhapatnam," he said. "Our feet would get stuck in the sand; scaling the hill was pretty tough going. We would arrive at the Hanuman Temple — opposite the Prabhat Talkies Theater — utterly exhausted, just in time for prasadam and then go home giggling."

But the sporting life was not his forte. "One day while playing football, I broke my right arm in half at a 90-degreebend — after that, I was asked not to play these rough games." It was not so much that Prahlada was fragile; he was built sturdily enough. It was more an issue of his innate gentleness, a quality his younger brother vividly remembers.

"He was called 'Samka,' the kind and soft-natured; I was 'Dhumka,' the rough and aggressive!" said Prasad Rao. "One fine day when we were quite young, Annayya (big brother) and I had an argument and in a fit of anger I gave him a couple of punches and he started crying." Their father stepped in, demanding that Prasad Rao apologize and promise never to repeat the offense — but "Dhumka" refused and was locked in an anteroom without food until he relented.

"Well, it seems I never complied!" Prasad Rao recalled with a laugh. "But after a couple of hours, Annayya could no longer bear my plight. He started crying and pleading with Amma to release me. When that didn't work, he too refused to eat until food was given to me. Finally, she had no option but to release me and give us both something to eat!"

Prahlada's sensitivity also had its creative aspects, one of which was a distinct gift for drawing and painting. Studying under a professional artist friend of the family, Mr. P.J. John, he produced excellent likenesses of family members, including his grandparents from photographs, and even one of Mahatma Gandhi; unfortunately, none of these early works have survived into the present. As an adult, however, Guruji would frequently call upon these skills to illustrate his visions, ideas and teachings. (According to one early disciple, "When I commented to Guruji once about his artistic talent, he told me that when he settled down to draw, at times Saraswati would hold his hand and sketch intricate images for him.")

It wasn't long before he began displaying more mystical talents as well.

"In 1941, when I was about seven, I discovered that I had a very long tongue, the tip of which I could extend halfway up my long nose!" he said. "I could roll my tongue back, up behind the uvula and into the cavity above the palate, for no apparent reason. I found I could touch the septum dividing my right and left nostrils; when I did, I would experience a sharp pleasure, bordering on pain."

He would sometimes press his tongue further into the nasal cavity until he experienced "a sweet liquid falling from somewhere up above; whenever this used to happen, I had the experience of not being hungry for days on end. When my mother would try to force me to eat, I would get very upset and protest that I was full and couldn't eat anymore!"

* * *

It was around the age of 11, however, that Guruji had what he calls his first true spiritual experience. He was playing in his home's open courtyard, when suddenly "bright sparks appeared in the sky" and the world began spinning around him, faster and faster, as if everything was being sucked into a vast vortex, with himself at its center.

The sparks resolved into "gray, misty globes of light floating in front of me, then collapsing into my eyes and entering my body. I felt myself growing larger, flying high; I could see the city of Visakhapatnam, the streets and houses and temples, the seashore. They all began collapsing into me. Then entire countries were collapsing into me, then the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars; space itself — the whole cosmic vision. And then I lost consciousness."

His mother called for Prahlada's father, who immediately scooped him up and carried him inside. A doctor was called. "I was nearly in a state of semicoma, half aware," Guruji said. "I would ask my parents and elder sister, 'Who are you? Why are you here? How am I related to you?'" With a fierce fever sometimes reaching as high as 107°F, "I was wrongly diagnosed as having cerebral malaria, and treated with heavy doses of quinine."

But the treatments eventually broke the fever, and after a few days Prahlada began returning to himself. His sister Suryalakshmi, by then 15, sat by his bedside and asked him exactly what had happened. He told her he wasn't sure. "I didn't hear anything, but I saw different worlds," he said. "I wandered in the skies. It was great!" Guruji began excitedly speculating to his sister about the meaning of life and the nature of God, but she stopped him abruptly, warning him not to share such thoughts with his elders and peers — no one would believe or understand him.

"I was all right in a week, but by then I had become nearly deaf," he said, though his hearing slowly returned over time. The most unfortunate outcome of the illness? "I lost the photographic memory that I'd had up until that time. The drugs killed all that. If I had to guess, I'd say my intelligence came down by roughly a factor of a hundred. There were so many things I couldn't remember anymore." In retrospect, Guruji added, "I think it could have been a spiritual experience of jada samadhi, wherein bodily consciousness is absent and any sense of 'I and mine' is lost, even when awake."

Nonetheless he continued to excel at school and his intellectual life remained rich. "I was pretty good at math, but I hated chemistry — I could never figure out why the colors in the beakers had to change!" he said, with a laugh. "I also learned a little Sanskrit and passed an entrance test for proficiency in Telugu," his native tongue.

In fact, Prahlada knew more than "a little" Sanskrit, his brother recalled. "I still remember the plight of our Sanskrit teacher, when I insisted that I too wanted to learn," he said. "I could hardly pronounce the Sabda Manjari," an introductory primer, "while my brother progressed to the Kalidasa Kavyas," a collection of verses by Kalidasa, the Shakespeare of Sanskrit literature.

CHAPTER 2

Do As You Will

Though the Nishtala household was never wealthy, the family always had enough to cover its basic needs, and generously showered hospitality on visiting relatives and friends. "To my parents, wealth and poverty were not important concepts," Suryalakshmi said. "Whatever they had, they shared."

Prahlada's father, Narasimha Rao, was educated up to the tenth standard, but never progressed any further in school "though he made several attempts," Guruji said. He was a large, imposing, even burly man who had been a skilled football player in his younger days — with a strong jaw and intense dark eyes that flashed fierce independence, stubborn self-confidence and perhaps a hint of sly humor. Though scrupulously honest and ethical by all accounts, Narasimha Rao had no particular interest in formal religion or ritual.

"He was deeply religious inside, but rarely exhibited any outward signs of it," Guruji explained. The elder Nishtala was, however, a staunch admirer of Mahatma Gandhi who tried to follow the great man's precepts, leading a frugal life and working hard. "My father was a highly principled man, a true Gandhian who cared deeply for his Motherland, which was at that time still under the yoke of the British Empire," Guruji noted.

Narasimha Rao had, in turn, imbibed much of his outlook from his own father, Nishtala Somayajulu, a highly regarded and "very handsome" Vizag lawyer "who used to drive around the city in a horse and buggy," Guruji said. "He had received orders to be a high court judge, but passed away before he could assume office." Narasimha Rao was one of Somayajulu's six children — who included two daughters and three more sons. "My father's eldest brother Nishtala Bhagawanulu was an auditor. Next came Nannalu, who learned French but never held any job, and then Venkatarao, who was a public prosecutor and lawyer in the city."

Narasimha Rao was the artistic idealist of the clan, earning his living as a professional photographer (younger relatives knew him as Photo Tatayya — "Photo-Grandpa"). He worked out of an old stable behind the house, which he'd converted into a studio called Roopa Rekha Kanti Grahakam: roughly, the "Beauty and Glow Picture Studio." On the side, he offered lessons. "Most of the photographers in Visakhapatnam had been apprentices under him at one time or another," Guruji said. "In fact, he was the first to start a photography business in the city. I remember that he was a strong believer in Kodak products as superior to all other brands. Though Agfa and Gevaert were also around at the time, he used to only stock the Kodak items — 'All Kodak Supplies' was his motto."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Goddess and the Guru by Michael M. Bowden. Copyright © 2017 Michael M. Bowden. Excerpted by permission of 45th Parallel Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: 45th Parallel Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0997946601
• ISBN 13: 9780997946604
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 416