Swami Chinmayananda: He Went to Expose Them

Sivananda did not keep him.

He sent him to Swami Tapovan Maharaj at Uttarkashi, on the grounds that what the new sannyasi needed was Vedanta taught properly, and that Tapovan was the person for it.

Tapovan Maharaj

1889 to 1957, from Kerala like Chinmayananda, a Sanskrit scholar of the first rank and a renunciant of severe austerity, who lived at Uttarkashi on the upper Ganga, walked the Himalaya, and wrote about it.

His Himagiri Viharam and Kailas Yatra are among the best travel writing produced by an Indian renunciant, and he was, by every account, extremely hard.

What the training was like

Cold, poor, long and unglamorous.

Uttarkashi in the late 1940s had no comforts. The winter is severe, the accommodation was a hut, the food was minimal and there was very little of it, and the student's day was study, service, and more study.

Tapovan did not flatter. The accounts describe a teacher who corrected without softening, who was unimpressed by his student's education and journalism, and who ran a curriculum rather than a relationship.

Chinmayananda stayed about eight years.

Which is the detail that answers the obvious objection to everything he did afterwards.

Because the objection was going to be that he was popularising, that a man giving Vedanta lectures in English in rented halls to office workers could not know the material properly, and that this was Upanishads for beginners run by a former journalist.

Eight years under Tapovan Maharaj at Uttarkashi is the answer to that, and he gave it whenever it was raised.

And he wrote about his teacher afterwards with the specific affection of somebody who had been treated hard and knew why.

What he took from it

A curriculum.

Not an experience, not a transmission, not a state, but the actual thing: the prasthana traya, the three foundations, being the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, with the traditional apparatus around them, taught in the traditional order.

And when he came down in 1951 he did not adapt the content.

He adapted the delivery, the language and the audience, and left the material alone, which is the distinction that matters and is the one most popularisers get wrong.

In December 1951 he began a series of public lectures at Pune.

He called it a Jnana Yajna, a sacrifice of knowledge, deliberately using the vocabulary of ritual for a series of talks in a hall.

The first one had very few people in it.

What he was doing that was new

Four things at once, and each of them was contested.

One. Vedanta to householders.

The classical position attaches conditions. The adhikari, the qualified student, is expected to have the fourfold qualification, and in the strictest reading the study of the Upanishads with a view to liberation belongs to the renunciant.

He taught it to people with jobs, mortgages, children and no intention of renouncing anything.

Two. In English.

Which offended people and was the entire point.

A generation of Indians had been educated in English and cut off from the tradition by that education, and they were not going to learn Sanskrit and did not read the vernacular commentaries either, and Chinmayananda's argument was that a text nobody in the room can read is not being preserved but embalmed.

Three. In public halls, advertised, on a schedule.

Not in a temple, not in a matha, not by invitation. Posters. Dates. A start time. Anybody could walk in.

Four. Systematically, over weeks, text by text.

A Jnana Yajna was not one inspiring talk. It was a course: a full text, taken in order, over a series of consecutive evenings, with the commentary, and the expectation that people would come back tomorrow.

The objection, stated fairly

That this is exactly how a tradition gets thinned.

Material that requires preparation, a teacher's judgment about readiness and years of preliminary discipline is handed to a hall of people on a Tuesday, and what they take away is a vocabulary rather than a practice.

And the objection is not empty: a person can acquire the ability to use words like maya and adhyasa in conversation without any of it touching how they behave, and Vedanta is particularly prone to this because it is intellectually satisfying.

His answer

That the alternative was not careful transmission but no transmission.

That the qualifications had become a wall, that the people who would have qualified were now in offices in Bombay and Madras, and that a diluted contact with the Upanishads was better than the complete absence he had grown up in.

And that he had done the eight years at Uttarkashi precisely so that what he handed out would be the actual material and not a summary of it.

What it became

He gave over five hundred and fifty Jnana Yajnas over forty years, across India and then across the world.

And the Chinmaya Mission, founded by devotees in 1953, grew into something very large:

• Hundreds of centres across India and in more than twenty other countries
• Sandeepany Sadhanalaya, from 1963, a residential two year Vedanta course training full time students, which is the serious end and is where the mission's teachers come from
• Chinmaya Vidyalayas, a network of schools
• Bala Vihar for children and Chinmaya Yuva Kendra for young people, which is how most Indian families actually encounter the mission
• CORD, the Chinmaya Organisation for Rural Development, from 1985, working on rural health, water and women's self help groups
• Hospitals and clinics

The two honest notes

One. It is a class specific ministry, and that is worth naming.

English language Vedanta for the urban educated and the diaspora is a real audience with a real need, and it is not everybody. The mission's centre of gravity has been the middle class, in India and abroad, and a person from a village in Bihar is not its natural constituency.

CORD and the schools are the counterweight and they are substantial, and the observation still stands.

Two. The political association.

Chinmayananda was among the founders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in 1964, at a meeting held at Sandipani Sadhanalaya in Powai, Mumbai, and he was its first president.

The VHP's subsequent history is a matter of live political controversy in India and this is a devotional article, which is not the place to litigate it.

What this entry will say is this. The fact is a fact and readers should have it rather than discover it elsewhere. His own public teaching over four decades was overwhelmingly textual: the Gita, the Upanishads, Shankara's works, delivered as commentary. And an organisation a person helps found in 1964 goes on to do things they did not decide, which is true of founders generally and is not an exculpation, merely an accurate description of how institutions work.

A reader who wants his Vedanta can take the commentaries. A reader who wants to assess the politics should read political history and not a devotional site.

His commentary

The Holy Geeta, his verse by verse English commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, is one of the most widely used English commentaries there is, and it is the practical legacy.

He also commented on all the principal Upanishads, on Vivekachudamani, on Atma Bodha, on the Narada Bhakti Sutras and on much else, and the Chinmaya publications catalogue is large.

A reading plan for somebody who has never read the Gita properly

Because most people own one and have not read it, and the reason is usually that they started at chapter one and stopped in chapter two.

Step one. Read it straight through once, in any decent translation, without commentary, in a week.

Do not stop to understand. You are reading it for shape: who is speaking, where it is happening, what the argument is doing. Seven hundred verses is about two hours of reading spread over seven days.

Step two. Then take chapter two.

Chapter two is the compressed version of the whole book. If you understand chapter two you have the structure and everything after it is expansion.

Step three. Then take one chapter with a commentary, slowly.

Chapter twelve is the shortest and is on bhakti, and is the most immediately usable for a devotional reader. Chapter three is on action and is the one that most changes how a working person's week goes.

Step four. Then decide whether you want the whole thing with commentary, and if you do, one chapter a month for eighteen months is a realistic pace and is how the Jnana Yajnas actually ran.

What the Gita is about, in one paragraph

A man who has to do something difficult and does not want to.

That is the situation in chapter one and it never really changes. Arjuna's problem is not metaphysical. He has an obligation, doing it will hurt people, not doing it will hurt other people, and he wants somebody to tell him he does not have to decide.

And the answer he is given is not that the obligation goes away. It is that the paralysis comes from being attached to the outcome, that the action still has to be taken, and that the way through is to do the thing that is yours to do and hand over the result.

Which is why the Gita is the text people reach for during a divorce, a court case, a dying parent, a job that has to be left or a decision that will hurt somebody.

Four verses worth having by heart

• 2.47, on action and the fruits of action, which is the most quoted verse in the book and is usually quoted to excuse laziness, which is the opposite of what it says
• 2.14, on the coming and going of heat and cold, pleasure and pain, and enduring them, which is the plainest thing in the text
• 9.22, on what is given to those who are steady, which is the bhakti verse
• 18.66, the last instruction, surrender, which is where the whole argument lands

A caution about how the Gita gets used

It is used to tell people to accept things they should not accept.

Do your duty and do not worry about the result is excellent advice to somebody paralysed by fear of failure. It is terrible advice given to a woman being beaten by her husband, an employee being exploited, or a person being told that their caste is their assigned duty.

The text does not say that, and the reading that produces it is a reading imposed by whoever benefits.

If somebody is quoting the Gita at you to keep you in something that is harming you, that is the same misuse as the Bhima Bhoi line in the previous batch: a teaching about your own conduct is being converted into an instruction about your endurance.

Women's helpline 181. Police 112. Free legal aid 15100. Labour and workplace grievance mechanisms exist and so do complaints committees under the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act 2013.

Where to go

• Sidhbari, near Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, where his samadhi is, at the Chinmaya Tapovan Trust campus
• Uttarkashi, and the Tapovan Kuti, where he studied
• Powai, Mumbai, Sandeepany Sadhanalaya
• Ernakulam, Kerala, his birthplace
• Any Chinmaya Mission centre, and there is probably one in your city, and the Bala Vihar classes and the study groups are open and are free or nearly so

A daily practice from this entry

• Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya
• One verse of the Gita a day, in order, with a translation, which finishes the book in under two years
• And the Chinmayananda question, which is the journalist's question he never stopped asking: what exactly is being claimed here, and how would I know if it were true

Who: Swami Chinmayananda, born Balakrishna Menon on 8 May 1916 at Ernakulam in Kerala, son of a judge, educated at Maharaja's College Ernakulam and Lucknow University with a degree in literature and study of law, and a journalist for the National Herald. He was not religious and by his own later account regarded the whole apparatus with the standard educated contempt of his class and period. He was involved in the Quit India agitation, was imprisoned, contracted typhus in jail, was put out onto the street near death because a prisoner dying in custody is an administrative problem, and was taken in and nursed by a woman who found him. He died at San Diego on 3 August 1993 and his samadhi is at Sidhbari in Himachal Pradesh.

Rishikesh, 1947: he went as a reporter to expose the sadhus, his stated intention being to demonstrate that the renunciants of the Himalayan ashrams were frauds living off the credulity of the poor, which was a reasonable working hypothesis in 1947. He met Swami Sivananda, did not write the article, stayed at the ashram, and on Mahashivaratri, 25 February 1949, took sannyasa. Conversion narratives are told by the converted and this one has been retold many times by an organisation with an interest in it, but the checkable parts check: he was a National Herald journalist, he did go, he did stay, and there is a documented life on both sides of that date. The useful part is not the drama but that the man who spent forty years explaining Vedanta to sceptical educated urban Indians had been one professionally.

Uttarkashi: Sivananda did not keep him but sent him to Swami Tapovan Maharaj, 1889 to 1957, a Sanskrit scholar of the first rank and a renunciant of severe austerity who lived on the upper Ganga and whose Himagiri Viharam and Kailas Yatra are among the best travel writing by an Indian renunciant. The training was cold, poor, long and unglamorous, in a hut, with minimal food, and a teacher who corrected without softening and was unimpressed by his student's education. Chinmayananda stayed about eight years, which is the answer to the obvious objection that a man giving Vedanta lectures in English in rented halls could not know the material. What he took was a curriculum: the prasthana traya, the Upanishads, Brahma Sutras and Bhagavad Gita, taught in the traditional order. When he came down in 1951 he adapted the delivery, the language and the audience and left the material alone.

The Jnana Yajna: from December 1951 at Pune, a series of public lectures he called a sacrifice of knowledge, deliberately using ritual vocabulary for talks in a hall. Four things were new and each was contested: Vedanta to householders when the classical position attaches adhikari qualifications and in the strictest reading reserves it for renunciants; in English, which offended people and was the entire point, since a generation had been educated in English and cut off from the tradition by that education; in advertised public halls on a schedule that anybody could walk into; and systematically over weeks, text by text, as a course rather than one inspiring talk. The objection, stated fairly, is that this is how a tradition gets thinned, since material requiring preparation is handed to a hall on a Tuesday and what people take away is a vocabulary rather than a practice, and Vedanta is prone to this because it is intellectually satisfying. His answer was that the alternative was not careful transmission but no transmission, that the people who would have qualified were now in offices, and that he had done the eight years precisely so that what he handed out would be the actual material.

What it became: over five hundred and fifty Jnana Yajnas across forty years, and the Chinmaya Mission founded in 1953, with hundreds of centres in more than twenty countries, Sandeepany Sadhanalaya from 1963 running a residential two year Vedanta course, Chinmaya Vidyalayas, Bala Vihar for children and Chinmaya Yuva Kendra for young people, CORD for rural development from 1985, and hospitals. Two honest notes: it is a class specific ministry centred on the urban educated and the diaspora, with CORD and the schools as a substantial counterweight; and Chinmayananda was among the founders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in 1964, at a meeting at Sandipani Sadhanalaya in Powai, and was its first president. The VHP's subsequent history is a matter of live political controversy and a devotional article is not the place to litigate it. The fact belongs here so readers have it, his own public teaching over four decades was overwhelmingly textual, and an organisation somebody helps found goes on to do things they did not decide, which is true of founders generally and is a description rather than an exculpation.

The Gita, practically: read it straight through once in any decent translation without commentary in a week, for shape rather than understanding. Then take chapter two, which is the compressed version of the whole book. Then take one chapter with a commentary slowly, chapter twelve being shortest and on bhakti, chapter three being the one that most changes a working person's week. Then decide about the whole thing, at one chapter a month for eighteen months. The Gita is about a man who has to do something difficult and does not want to, and the answer is not that the obligation goes away but that the paralysis comes from attachment to the outcome. Four verses worth having by heart are 2.47, 2.14, 9.22 and 18.66. And a caution: do your duty and do not worry about the result is excellent advice to somebody paralysed by fear of failure and terrible advice given to a woman being beaten, an employee being exploited or a person told their caste is their assigned duty. Women's helpline 181, police 112, free legal aid 15100.