UNUSUAL ESSAYS OF AN UNKNOWN "SRI VAISHNAVA"

By M.K. Sudarshan

Author M. K. Sudarshan was inspired by the life and works of Sri Ramanujacharya (1017-1137 AD), a great Vedantic philosopher, Sri Vaishnava theologist and social reformer of Tamil Nadu, India and his long successive lineage of followers and gurus from the 12th century A.D. to the present time.

The Upanishads are the ageless spi

• Language: English
• Publisher: MainSpring Books
• Release date: Dec 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781641336642

Book preview

Who is the Unknown Sri Vaishnava?

(And why are His Essays Unusual?)

Chapter 1

The ‘Unknown’ Sri Vaishnava and His ‘Unusual Essays’

This book is a compendium of essays about ‘Sri Vaishnavism’.

Much of it, the reader will easily perceive, is personal and intense rumination on the wide-ranging cultural traditions of Sri Vaishnavism found in its ancient system of Vedantic philosophy, theology, scriptures, literature, legend, and personalities.

Most of the essays were penned by me sporadically over the last twenty years (1995—2015) and have appeared earlier as blog-postings on various Sri Vaishnava cyber-fora or groups. Many readers of those blogs of mine, within and outside the Sri Vaishnava community, in India and abroad, who had been appreciative of the original blogs then, suggested to me the idea of this compilation.

Hence this book.

*     *     *     *     *

General readers of this book may be of two kinds: those who are either unfamiliar with Sri Vaishnavism or those who are knowledgeable about it and yet curious to know what is so ‘unusual’ about these essays.

Both ought to first understand and appreciate the prime motivations (and here I must crave the reader’s indulgence for being partly autobiographical) that led to my penning these rather discursive and eclectic essays in the original blogs. Such a reader must first in fact start at the very beginning viz. to know who is a ‘Sri Vaishnava’ of the twenty-first century.

As I went about writing my essays, I realised how difficult—virtually impossible—it was to explain in plain English language to a lay or general reader the various themes and aspects of Sri Vaishnava thought and practices without the aid of allusions, references, extracts, and quotations drawn from the ancient, even rather arcane theological or doctrinal literature, which in their original were all written in Sanskrit and Tamil. To overcome such difficulty, I adopted a self-imposed standard of writing: I resolved to present my essays in such a manner as would enable the reader to cope adequately with them. Firstly, I provided transliterated equivalents in English of the Sanskrit and Tamil quotations. Secondly, I provided easy enough English translations of whatever in the narrative I suspected the reader coming across might find rather arcane or possibly unintelligible material. The translations were made carefully with the further hope that the more diligent and interested reader, if he perhaps truly wanted to, would be urged to go the extra mile to unravel or fathom those ideas and passages through the simple expedient of referring to a standard reference aid such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica or merely taking the trouble to ‘Google’ it.

Using that simple yet severe standard of writing, I presumed the reader of this book would first then ask, ‘Who is a Sri Vaishnava?’ before asking, ‘Who is an unknown Sri Vaishnava?’ or, ‘What is unusual about his essays?’; and would thus find, if he looked it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, this simple definition:

‘A member of a sect of Hindus, most numerous in South India, who pay absolute allegiance to their deity Lord Vishnu and follow the teachings of the philosopher, Ramanuja . . . . Sri refers to Vishnu’s consort, also called Lakshmi, to whom Vishnu first taught the doctrine.’

Then, looking it up further, he would find the Britannica says this too about Ramanuja:

‘Sri Ramanuja [AD 1017—1137]: south Indian Brahmin theologian and philosopher, the single most influential thinker of devotional Hinduism; He provided an intellectual basis for the practice of bhakthi [devotional worship] in 3 major commentaries: the Vedartha Samgraha [on the Veda], Sri Bhashyam [on the Brahma Sutras], and the Gita Bhashya [on the Bhagavath Gita].’

As a very young boy, I too came to look upon myself as a Sri Vaishnava in terms of the blandly matter-of-fact, rather simplistic Britannica definition above.

SRI VAISHNAVA ANCESTRY

My ancestry is a long lineage of devout Sri Vaishnavas dating back to the times of Ramanuja. Several generations of my family, on both paternal and maternal sides, have lived, prospered, and breathed their last in the lands surrounding the ancient Vishnu temples of Tirupati-Tirumala, Kanchipuram, or those dotted today all across the states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh (now named ‘Seemandhra’) in India.

In the musty old archives of my paternal grandmother’s house in Tirupati, I remember, many years ago I once saw an old withered parchment recording our family-tree sketch. In it I found that grandmother’s lineage could be traced all the way to the tenth century AD, and back to a venerable old Sri Vaishnava Brahmin who had lived all his life in the service of the great hill temple of Tirumala. He was called Sri Tirumala Nambi, and he was none other than the maternal uncle of Sri Ramanuja.

As a young boy, I remember querying my old grandmother not only about her ancestry and the family’s link to Sri Ramanuja, but more importantly, what it meant to be, in the old days of Sri Tirumala Nambi, a true ‘Sri Vaishnava Brahmin’. What she explained to me pretty much corroborated whatever I had read in the Britannica again:

‘Sri Vaishnava Brahmins are much given to scholarly religious pursuits and have earned for themselves the honorary titles of Acharya or in Tamil, as ayyangaars [also spelt iyyangaar].’

It was thus that I understood that my ‘Tamil Ayyangaar’ past and ancestry really belonged to a hoary unbroken lineage of several generations of Sri Vaishnava Brahmins, given to the priestly occupations of scholastic pursuit and enquiry into the great philosophy of Sri Ramanuja, the foremost of Sri Vaishnava preceptors in India.

THE AYYANGAR IDENTITY

The outlines of my hazy past and distant ancestry in Tirupati were made vivid though to me by my grandmother’s family tree. As I grew up to be a young man, it helped me gain and possess a reasonably good sense of identity; I vaguely understood who I was as an ‘Ayyangaar’ and where I had come from too. But it was the present that made far less sense to me, the reason being that I was so acutely aware that by no stretch of imagination could I be said to be devoted in any way to any ‘scholarly pursuit’ nor could I be said to be deserving any honorary title such as ‘Acharya’ or the Tamil equivalent of ‘ayyangaar’.

My childhood and life as a young man had all been spent in the city of Madras (now Chennai) far away from the temple environs or ambience of either Tirupati or Tirumala. My education was not traditional but utterly modern. My schooling was at a Catholic missionary convent. My schoolteachers had been Irishmen of ordained Catholic priesthood. Later I went to study at the Madras University, again at a Jesuit-run graduate school. I was fed on a copious intellectual diet of English classics, European history, and contemporary novels; my literary heroes were Victor Hugo, Graham Greene, and Sartre; my political idols were Gandhi and Mao; my ideological inspirations were Rousseau and Russel; I liked to listen to the Beatles and Pink Floyd; I watched Hollywood movies.

Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s in Madras, with an educational background as utterly Western and liberal as mine, I had little more than mere passing familiarity with Sri Ramanuja. I was utterly unaware too of the copious wealth of Vedantic, philosophical, and scriptural literature to which a galaxy of Sri Vaishnava ‘Acharyas’—i.e., his disciples, who came after c. twelfth century AD in South India—had also contributed in both the Sanskrit and Tamil languages.

The ‘Nominal’ and ‘Real’ Sri Vaishnava

Very early in life, I realised that I was only a nominal not a real ‘Sri Vaishnava Brahmin’.

All through the decades after Indian Independence in 1947, and throughout the decades of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, the Brahmins of Sri Vaishnavism, who had been living hitherto for generations in the villages and temple-towns scattered across South India, left their ancestral homes, and emigrated en masse to the great cities of the country in search of modern secular education and in pursuit of lucrative careers in modern professions, trade, commerce, and government service.

My grandfather and father were both lawyers. On my maternal side, most family members went into professions like law, engineering, and accountancy. Some went into business. Even the women folk went in for modern education. To add to the demographic change that was wrought then upon the community—by a silent wave of social upheaval, as it were—very significant numbers of Ayyangaars, all highly professionally qualified, began to emigrate too to the Americas, Western Europe, the Arabian Gulf countries, and Australia, all in search of secular fortunes. Population census of those decades estimated that the Sri Vaishnava population had rapidly dwindled to between half to three-quarter of a million in Tamil Nadu and perhaps a few hundred thousand in the world diaspora.

At home and within the community in which I lived and grew up, the occupations and lifestyles of relatively well-off Ayyangaar families too underwent dramatic change. My kinsmen no longer bore any resemblance to the ethos of the past and, quite certainly, could no longer be accurately characterised as ‘Sri Vaishnavas given to scholarly pursuits’.

The sort of Sri Vaishnavism that families like mine actually practiced in that increasingly ‘secularised’ environment suggested ‘token Sri Vaishnavism’, i.e., you could still find idols and icons of Lord Vishnu in our little incense-lit shrines at home; you could find us still making perfunctory weekly visits to the neighbourhood Vishnu temple to make, again, only ‘token’ offerings of devotion and worship; we undertook annual pious and perfunctory ‘pilgrimages’ to Tirupati and Sri Rangam or some other famous Vishnu temple in the country; and you could see us proudly claiming membership in any one or more of the exclusive sectarian, denominational Sri Vaishnava ‘mathams’ (monastic orders) presided over by tutelary Sri Vaishnava pontiffs. But it was all only ‘token’, not real Sri Vaishnavism that we really practiced.

As a young man of the ’70s/’80s, I soon grew impatient, even rather weary of this hollow ‘token Sri Vaishnavism’. Nowhere in it did I sense kinship or connection with my age-old ancestors of Ayyangaars, the Sri Vaishnava Acharyas of Ramanuja’s times. Inside me, I felt a widening rift in awareness between identity and self.

The Stunted Sri Vaishnava

Mere ‘tokenism’ indeed was really all the Sri Vaishnava heritage that I, as a young Ayyangaar, could really lay claim to.

I could read and write a bit of Sanskrit and Tamil, the language of my ancestors, but could hardly comprehend any of it as found in the works of Sri Vaishnava Acharyas; even though my mother tongue was Tamil, and it was spoken at home, I could read and write classical Tamil only with great difficulty. Thanks to my modern, secular education, English had effectively killed any motivation I might have had in wanting to gain fluency in these native languages. Apart from second-hand knowledge, acquired through English commentaries, on the great Indian epics, Mahabharatha and Ramayana, I had little acquaintance with the original works of Sri Ramanuja’s philosophy; I could appreciate precious little about Sri Vaishnava history and traditions and much less about scripture, commentaries, literature, legends, temples, personalities; again, and again, I realised myself that I was nothing indeed but a ‘phony Sri Vaishnava’.

But then I also realised, not without some sense of consolation, that I was not alone: I was one amongst many thousands like me who too were youthful, secular, proudly modern Ayyangaars, successful in secular careers, upwardly mobile in society, getting ahead in the brave new world, but were utter ignoramuses and philistines with respect to their cultural roots, ancestry, and heritage. Like me, they too were Ayyangaars all adrift in a netherworld of either benign atheism or else insouciant agnosticism.

To describe myself, to characterise my generation of Ayyangaars and its deep-rooted crisis of self-identity, I coined a rather special expression. I began to see myself as a rather ‘stunted Sri Vaishnava’. I saw myself and my generation as one caught in the middle of tumultuous modern history that would witness the gradual descent of Sri Vaishnavism into cultural oblivion in India. After us, in say about a few hundred years, nothing extant within our community would even remotely resemble Sri Vaishnava culture or ethos as it had survived thus far. To me it seemed, in a truly sociological sense, that the tribe of Ayyangaars could well become extinct in a few decades. I seriously obsessed about a whole generation of Sri Vaishnavas simply passing away into the haze of history, i.e., becoming unknown and unrecognisable. As I continued to dwell on the idea in grim, brooding reflection, I began calling myself an ‘unknown Sri Vaishnava’. My own native heritage could neither reach out and claim nor embrace me as one of its own; I didn’t speak its tongue; I was not firmly rooted in it; I was incapable of partaking, in any meaningful sort of way, in its unique world-view and ways of life.

The Expatriate Sri Vaishnava:

Self, Identity, and Chosen destiny

Soon after the first war in the Arabian Gulf ended in 1990 with the liberation of the state of Kuwait, there was a big upsurge in demand amongst corporate employers in the Gulf countries for professional expatriate talent and experience from the Indian sub-continent. As a chartered accountant specialised in corporate and project finance, I received several lucrative offers of very gainful employment in the Arabian Gulf. I then left the shores of India in 1993 to launch my international career that later spanned the ensuing twenty-four years.

As a young expatriate manager, I lived and worked with my family for several years in Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. In the course of my official assignments on many projects worldwide, I travelled too to all parts of the globe from Japan, China, and Taiwan in the east, through all of Middle Eastern, North African, and Levant countries, much of Western Europe, and the United Kingdom, and all parts of the USA as well. After so many years spent working for so long abroad in my career, one could say my outlook in life gradually turned global. Living and working abroad in multinational or multicultural environments, especially in the land of Islam, brought me time and again to face—in deeply spiritual self-encounters—the fundamental questions of self, identity, and chosen destiny.

Watching the sun go down during the month of Ramadan in a city like Riyadh, Kuwait City, or Cairo, and hearing every day the strident calls for the Islamic ‘Maghreb’ prayer as it emanated from the muezzin towers of some nondescript downtown mosque; listening to the prayer-calls piercing the air across silent streets with strangely mesmerising melody mingling and wafting with the sound of the evening wind blowing through the ancient minarets and quarters of Giza or the famous Azhwar; wandering about as a curious tourist in the by-lanes of Khan Khalilee in Cairo to strains of soulful Arabic music . . .They were all strange experiences in foreign lands that made me realise, in some intuitive but inexplicable way, how deeply religious-minded much of the world seemed even in modern times. Similarly, while walking silently across the cool marble floors under the vaulting stone roofs of Notre Dame or the Basilica of Sacre Coeur in Paris made a deep impression on me. More than ever before, I began to realise how deeply influenced is Christian Europe by its long religious past and heritage.

Then throughout my international career, I had also made innumerable friends and colleagues in the Islamic, Christian, and Buddhist world. In every one of them I saw how strongly rooted and identified they were in their own respective religious past and ethos. The Muslim friend I knew in Aswan could recite his Quran flawlessly, and unfailingly too every day in the fasting month of Ramadan; the deeply Catholic friend I had met in Blois, France, was an acknowledged master in the history of the Crusades; the Japanese colleague I worked with on a project in Oita, Japan, could over dinner explain to me with impressive authority the differences between Shinto and Buddhist practices in his country.

Thus, the experience of twenty-five years working as an international expatriate manager made me more acutely aware of the shortcomings and incompleteness of my own understanding and appreciation of my own past and heritage as a Sri Vaishnava. Having lived and worked for so very long amidst some of the largest societies of believers in the world, having witnessed how strongly anchored they all were in their respective religious identities, and how devotion and worship was for them a natural way of life, all of that made me suddenly discover, in a moment of impactful truth, that to be human is really all about dealing with spiritual hunger and aspiration. Was I truly human?

As the years rolled on, the central questions of my stunted, rather retarded identity as a Sri Vaishnava, it began to also loom ever larger in my mind:

‘Am I doomed to be an unknown Sri Vaishnava, a perennial stranger to my own native roots?’ I asked myself.

‘Like the hero of Albert Camus’s famous novel L’Etranger, am I condemned all my life to remain the constant outsider who cannot let himself into any faith?’

‘Should I remain an alien within my own country, within my community?’

‘How am I to break the barriers between me and the resolution of existential questions the spirit daily grapples with: Who am I? Where do I come from? And where am I going?’

And I asked myself further too, ‘If I cannot find answers to such questions within the system of philosophy into which I have been born—this ancient body of available, inherited wisdom hailed as Sri Vaishnavism—then of what avail is the natural advantage accruing to me by the fact of my birth amongst this community and in the ancient land called India?’

It was thus for years that I, as a rather rootless and footloose international expatriate worker, came to experience the loneliness of being a Sri Vaishnava disconnected in spirit from nativity, from rich natal heritage, from philosophical moorings; it was a disconnect—I explained to myself often, as the poet did, in ‘vacant or in pensive mood’—brought about largely by modern education, by career choices in life I had made and by the vagary of circumstances that had similarly afflicted a whole generation within my community.

The Mind as Your Best Friend and Worst Enemy

As time went by, and as I progressed through my secular career in life, the ‘disconnect’ between self and identity—I had by now come to recognise it as the broken identity of the unknown Sri Vaishnava—it began to also gradually arouse in me a great subliminal desire. It was a strange desire that lasted all through the decade of the ’90s and well into the new millennium too. It was a sudden big desire to exert every sinew I could to somehow regain spiritual connection with my lost Sri Vaishnava ancestry, past, and heritage.

Looking back, I believe the desire was an instantaneous trigger inside the mind brought about as I was flipping desultorily, one Friday afternoon at home in Bahrain, through the pages of the Bhagavath-Gita when a verse caught my attention. It struck me with the force, I must admit, of a minor revelation:

uddharet atmanatmanam

natmanam avasadayet

atmaiva hy atmano bandhu:

atmaiva ripu: atmanah

The Bhagavath Gita 6.5

‘Reshape yourself through the power of your will; never let yourself be degraded by self-will. The will is the only friend of the self, and the will is the only enemy of the self too.’

I suddenly decided that very day that I had just about had it with being spiritually stunted and sterile. In a moment of rare self-clarity, I saw I simply had to ‘reshape myself through the power of my will’ and elevate my mind ‘uddharet atmanatmanam’ as the Gita put it. I recalled a famous expression of William James: even if I had to grope, stagger, and stumble, I wanted to find a way out of the ‘dark night of the soul’. I resolved, almost reflexively, to embrace my past because therein lay, I believed, the best hope for me to find a seeker’s path to the future of my own spirit. It was resolution that is perhaps best described through the French phrase: ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’. A few steps in retreat are sometimes necessary to perform the great leap forward!

From dithering about in the ‘tokenism’ of my spiritual quest and remaining mired in an existential rut (the Gita called it ‘avasadayet’) I had myself created over the years by giving it a fanciful title, making it seem real and calling it the existential condition of the ‘unknown Sri Vaishnava’—I wanted to turn and transform myself instead into a hopeful Sri Vaishnava, someone who perhaps might never fully measure up to it at all, but then would not be utterly unworthy either of the great titles his ancestors of yore once bore viz. ‘Ayyangaar’: that tribe of men, the followers of Sri Ramanuja, given much indeed to scholarly and perennial pursuit of truth in life.

I remembered instantly what I had read in the Britannica too: that Sri Ramanuja was the first of many great Vedantic philosophers to ‘emphasise that discursive thought is necessary in man’s search for the ultimate verities, that the phenomenal world is real and provides real knowledge and that the exigencies of daily life are not detrimental or even contrary to the life of the spirit’.

I resolved then firmly to go find for myself my own ‘discursive’ methods to explore and plumb the depths of Sri Vaishnavism, and conduct my own modest enquiry into its ‘ultimate verities’ as revealed by Sri Ramanuja. The ‘exigencies of my life’, I told myself, that had turned me into an ‘unknown Sri Vaishnava’ were never again going to be allowed to be ‘detrimental or contrary to the life of my own spirit’.

The Impulse for Self-Learning

It was about this time in my life, well into middle-age, that I set for myself an intense program of self- learning in the traditions of Sri Vaishnavism.

I reckoned that with my family and busy career preoccupations, it would be impossible for me to do so in any other way but self-instruction. The old Hindu tradition of one seeking out a personal spiritual guru on full-time or formal basis seemed to me an unaffordable luxury. Furthermore, no traditional Sri Vaishnava guru in India would ever willingly accept me as student-disciple given my secular, almost Western and utterly non—Sri Vaishnavite lifestyle and my professional peripatetic commitments abroad as well. So, I boldly proceeded to formulate my own program of home-based, self-study, and self-learning in Sri Vaishnavism. It was nothing but a leap of faith.

I reckoned that even with my woefully meagre knowledge of Sanskrit and Tamil languages, if I could somehow succeed in undertaking an extensive study of the following principal scriptural texts of India, I could perhaps gain a modicum of knowledge and understanding of their subject matter, and that would just about be enough to help me reclaim not only my Sri Vaishnava identity but also find some degree of release out of the deep spiritual morass into which I knew the ‘unknown Sri Vaishnava’ had sunk. With such resolve in mind, I set out to construct for myself the following informal, basic curriculum of self-study:

The Principal Upanishads (timeless)

The principal works of philosophy of Sri Ramanujan (twelfth century AD)

The devotional Sanskrit poetry of Swami Venkatanathan, (another great Sri Vaishnava Acharya, a.k.a. Vedanta Desika, AD 1268—1369)

The Bhagavad-Gita

The Ramayana and Mahabharata (c. first millennium BC)

The lives of the twelve Dravidian mystic saints called Azhwars (c. seventh to ninth century AD), the authors of the four thousand hymns in classical Tamil (called ‘naalaayira divya prabhahdham’)

The Tamil Tiruppaavai of Sri Andal, the sole woman amongst the twelve Azhwars

Standard commentaries and exegesis of all the above (from fourteenth to seventeenth century AD), some in Tamil, others in Sanskrit.

A few miscellaneous aspects of ‘Sanatana Dharma or ‘the Hindu Way of Life’ (contemporary works)

I then went about putting together a formidable medley of a bibliography covering broadly all the above subject matters. I set myself what I thought was a realistic timeline, about three years in all, and promptly plunged headlong into my adventure.

I struggled. I laboured. I trudged, heaved, and huffed.

For month after month I read and re-read. I took down notes. I copied references and looked them up wherever I found them. I read the Azhwars and tried to make head and tail of the archaic Tamil. I read the sparkling Sanskrit ‘stotra’ (hymnology) of Sri Vedanta Desikan and tried to rekindle my taste for Sanskrit poetry. I read the gloss on Sri Ramanuja’s ‘Sri Bhaashya’ (commentary on the Vedantic aphorisms of Sage Vyasa). I grappled with the Upanishads.

After six months of sweat and toil, I gave up. I was utterly, thoroughly frustrated, and I knew I was getting nowhere at all in a journey of the spirit whose course I had made bold to chart out (foolhardily I soon realised) and to navigate on my own. I was truly at my wit’s end. Lost and forlorn.

An Authentic Sri Vaishnava Guru, at Last

It was then, by sheer stroke of good fortune, that I came across a true and authentic Sri Vaishnava guru.

His name was Sri Lakshmi-Narasimha Acharya. He hailed from the small village of Mukkur, near Kanchipuram, and was popularly referred to as ‘Mukkur Swamy’.

Sri Lakshmi Narasimhan was a Vedic adept, a scholar extraordinaire steeped in the traditional scriptures and literature of Sri Vaishnavism. At the relatively young age of 40, he had earned acclaim and renown, far and wide amongst the community as a great exponent of Sri Ramanuja’s Visishta-advaitic school of philosophy. Equally facile and felicitous were his popular lectures and public discourses on the mystic literature of the Tamil Azhwars, the great epics, Valmiki Ramayana and Mahabharatha, the Upanishads and the Vedantic treatises of Sri Ramanuja and Sri Vedanta Desika. By the age of 56, when he suddenly passed away in the year 2000, Sri Mukkur Laskhmi-narasimha Acharya had earned eminence and commanded high respect from peers, scholars, and laymen alike in the Sri Vaishnava community. His brilliant and illuminating commentaries on the popular works of Sri Vaishnava religion, theology, and philosophy were held by both pundit and plebeian to provide refreshingly contemporary perspective on Sri Vaishnava thought and faith. (I have devoted a separate chapter at the end of this book as my personal tribute to this remarkable Sri Vaishnava Acharya.)

Empathy from a Teacher

Every year throughout the ’90s I used to take my annual vacation for a whole month from my expatriate job in the Arabian Gulf to visit my home in India. In the four weeks I thus got to spend at home in Madras, I made it a point to attend every public lecture of Mukkur Swami held in and around the city. With his permission, I sometimes even visited him at his home on several occasions. He always treated me with extreme kindness and cordiality.

Our personal meetings were devoted mainly to casual discussions about the state of my own advancement in learning, understanding, and living out Sri Vaishnavism. He took a mentor’s interest in me but with no real explicit understanding of any kind of guru-disciple relationship between us. The Swami would simply enquire what I had been able to gather from listening to his public discourses; what I had been reading; what were my thoughts and feelings about a variety of subjects that dealt with the works of Sri Ramanuja, the Azhwars, or of later Sri Vaishnava Acharyas. I shared with him, with due regard to objectivity and discretion, a bit of my inner turmoil and frustration with my efforts at self-study and growing disappointment with its results.

Mukkur Swamy was a truly empathetic teacher. He could acutely intuit the almost Sisyphean nature of the utterly misguided program of self-study I had embarked upon and my struggles with it. He knew I had no formal grounding in Sanskrit and Tamil scriptures; the ancient Vedantic texts and Sri Vaishnava treatises and commentaries had proven to be quite beyond me. Without me having to confess to him, he easily sensed that there was confusion swirling about in my mind. It was clear to him I was grappling with abstruse concepts and doctrines. I was failing to sift dogma from the fundamental tenets of Sri Vaishnavism, solid principles from mere doctrinal interpretation. He could also silently judge—but in a very gentle and non-judgmental manner—that mentally I was experiencing severe conflict too in all sorts of complex ways while trying to reconcile everything I felt was tradition-bound in the Sri Vaishnava belief system with what I saw as contemporaneous secularity of real life around me in my personal world.

He knew . . . and I knew he knew . . . I was simply going around in absurd circles, much like a dog chasing its own tail.

Nine Guidelines for an ‘Unknown’ Sri Vaishnava

As months and years rolled on, I kept trudging on. I kept studying as well as I could to the best of my modest ability; I lurched from one Sri Vaishnava text or Vedantic treatise to another, trying to make sense of it all as best as I could with the help of scholarly articles and dissertations, which I picked up along the way just as they appeared in religious magazines and sundry publications put out by various Sri Vaishnava sects and missions in India.

But the greatest help of all came to me via listening to scores of Sri Mukkur Swami’s public discourses, which I got recorded on tape and then went repeatedly over for months and years. Those tape recordings were excellent and simple tutorials that provided a wonderful supplement to my self-study regimen. Meanwhile, at the end of each public lecture of his that I attended, I would button-hole him briefly to seek clarity on doubts and elaboration on specific questions of doctrine or principle. The Swami was so kind to spare me time so I could share my notes with him. Later and more sporadically, whenever we got to meet at his house, he would be more generous with his time and provided me some of the most expansive, most valuable nuggets of personal counsel and mentoring that I could ever hope to have received throughout my program of self-study.

Looking back on those days, I am sure it was Mukkur Sri Lakshmi-Narasimha Acharya’s wise, patient, and empathic counsel that enabled me, finally after so many years, to come to terms with the method and purpose of the quest in life I had made my very own. Drawing from distant memory, I paraphrase below in my own words the sage counsel received from this venerable Acharya in nine simple yet illuminating