Picture credits

Every portrait, credited

This page is about photographs and paintings only. Every image on this site is in the public domain or published under a free licence that permits reuse with attribution, and each licence requires that the artist, the licence and the file record be named — which is what the list below does.

The photographs and paintings below were published in a public media repository under the free licences named; the licence link is the licence itself, and the file name is given as published so that any rights-holder can identify it. No teaching, story, translation or quotation anywhere on this site is taken from a general-purpose encyclopaedia. Every text points instead to the lineage’s own publication of it: a maṭha’s edition, an ashram’s own account, the order’s own translation, or a commentary by a recognised teacher within the tradition. Where the two disagree, the tradition’s own record is what this site follows, and where the record itself is uncertain the page says so.

Licence keys: PD public domain · CC0 no rights reserved · CC BY / CC BY-SA Creative Commons attribution, share-alike where stated · GODL-India Government Open Data Licence – India · FAL Free Art Licence. Where a teacher has no freely licensed portrait, this site shows a symbol rather than a generated or misattributed face.

Background and texture images on this site were generated for it and are not portraits of any person. So were the illustration that accompanies each daily message and the changing landscapes behind the home page — painted impressions, not photographs, and none of them shows a real person. If you hold rights in any image here and believe it is used incorrectly, reply to any daily message and it will be removed at once.

Devotional artwork

The images made for this site

These are not photographs, not reproductions of any existing painting, and not portraits of any living or historical person. They were made for this site so that each page opens the way a class in this tradition opens — with the form one loves placed in front of the thinking, because in these lineages devotion and enquiry were never two separate practices. Each carries the reason it sits where it does.

**Dakṣiṇāmūrti — the teacher who teaches in silence**Śiva seated under the banyan, facing south, four aged sages listening. The tradition's own image of instruction: the highest teaching is transmitted without a word, and the student's readiness does the rest.

**Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna — the conversation in the middle of the crisis**The Gītā is not spoken in a monastery. It is spoken to a man who has put down his bow and cannot see how to act. Every teaching in it is meant to be used inside an ordinary, difficult day.

**The Divine Mother at the river temple**Sri Ramakrishna's whole path began at a Mother temple beside the Ganga. In this lineage the Absolute is first approached as a person one can love, and only then recognised as one's own Self.

**Aruṇācala before sunrise**The hill Sri Ramana walked to at sixteen and never left. He called it the Self in the form of a mountain — something that simply stands there while everything around it changes.

**Gaṇeśa — the one invoked before anything begins**Every study of every text in this tradition opens by asking for obstacles to be cleared. Not the obstacles outside; the ones in the mind that is about to read.

**Naṭarāja — motion held perfectly still**The whole appearing world as a dance in a ring of fire, and the dancer's face entirely at rest. Appearance and the unmoved ground of appearance in one figure.

**Nārāyaṇa on the waters**The universe pictured as something dreamt by one who never wakes into effort. Sleep, dream and waking as three conditions of one consciousness — the ground the Māṇḍūkya works from.

**Śāradā — knowledge that plays rather than accumulates**The goddess of the Sringeri seat holds a manuscript in one hand and a vīṇā in the other: the text and the music of it, learning and delight, never separated.

**One lamp, one day**A single steady flame before a yantra. Where no freely licensed portrait of a teacher exists, this site shows this lamp rather than an invented face.