Sri Chandraśekhara Bhāratī III

The India he was born into

He was born on Sunday, 16 October 1892, in Śṛṅgeri itself — the village on the Tuṅgā in the hills of the western Deccan where Sri Śaṅkara had founded his first seat eleven centuries before — and was named Narasiṃha. His parents, Gopāla Śāstri and Lakṣammā, were a pious Brahmin couple of the village who had lost child after child; the Śṛṅgeri tradition records that he was their twelfth, and that he was born after they had gone to the shrine of the goddess Śāradāmbā — the presiding deity of the maṭha — and prayed. India in 1892 was fifteen years into the reign of Victoria as Empress. The Indian National Congress was seven years old. Swami Vivekananda was a wandering monk in the south that year, about to sail for America; in Tiruvaṇṇāmalai a boy of twelve named Veṅkaṭarāman had not yet had the experience that would make him Ramaṇa. In the little world of Śṛṅgeri none of this was heard. The maṭha's thirty-third head, Sacchidānanda Śivābhinava Nṛsiṃha Bhāratī, was rebuilding it — he had found and restored Śaṅkara's birthplace at Kālaḍi, founded a Sanskrit college, and gathered around him the scholars who would train the next generation — and the village boy who would be the thirty-fourth grew up within sight of his door.

He went to the maṭha's school, the Sadvidyā Sañjīvinī Pāṭhaśālā, and the accounts agree that he was from the beginning quiet, exact and inward, a boy who preferred the Sanskrit texts to games and the temple to the street, and who was noticed. The thirty-third Jagadguru noticed him, and in time chose him. What follows is the life of a man who never sought anything, was given the most venerable seat in the tradition at nineteen, held it for forty-two years, and spent as much of that time as he could in a hut across the river, alone.

Where the life was lived

His life was lived almost entirely at Śṛṅgeri, with a year of study in Bangalore, four years of touring through the south in the 1920s, and — for the last decades — the hermitage of Narasiṃhavana on the far bank of the Tuṅgā, a few hundred yards from where he was born. The map shows these on present-day coordinates.

Bangalore, and the summons

In 1911 the Jagadguru sent the young man — he was eighteen — to the Śaṅkara Maṭha in Bangalore to complete his studies in Vedānta and the allied sciences under the great scholar Virūpākṣa Śāstri, who was himself the Jagadguru's pupil. It was the first and almost the last time he lived away from Śṛṅgeri. The Jagadguru, meanwhile, was failing; he had already made his intention known, and he died on 20 March 1912 while Narasiṃha was still in Bangalore. In accordance with the instructions he had left, the young man was brought back, given sannyāsa, and installed as the thirty-fourth head of the Śāradā Pīṭham on 7 April 1912, under the name Chandraśekhara Bhāratī. He was nineteen and a half. He had not asked for it, and there is no evidence that he ever came to want it. He accepted it as what the tradition calls svadharma — one's own duty, the thing that has fallen to one — and he taught for the rest of his life that a person's first business is to do exactly that, without asking whether something else might have suited them better.

The young Jagadguru

The first decade of his headship was the decade of building. In 1916 he performed the kumbhābhiṣeka — the consecration — of the new temple of Śāradāmbā at Śṛṅgeri, which his predecessor had begun, and which stands today with its golden finials above the river. He completed the scholarly training his predecessor had begun, and he taught: the maṭha's scholars in those years remember a young man who could recite the whole of a commentary from memory and who corrected their Sanskrit gently. He kept the maṭha's traditional round of worship, teaching and audience with a rigour that had not been seen for generations, and he was known, from very early, for the quality that the tradition prizes above learning and that it calls anubhava — direct experience. Visitors who came to consult a scholar found a man who seemed to be somewhere else, and who came back to answer them with a precision that showed he had heard every word.

The Śṛṅgeri tradition tells the story of those years carefully, because the two sides of him — the head of an institution and the man who wanted only to sit — were already pulling in different directions, and the tradition has never pretended that this was easy for him or for the maṭha. He did his duty. He also began, from the early 1920s, to spend long periods across the river.

The four years of travel

In 1924 he set out on the vijaya-yātrā — the tour of the country that the heads of Śṛṅgeri have made since Vidyāraṇya's time, visiting the towns and villages of the maṭha's following, receiving their devotion, settling their disputes, and teaching. He was away four years. The tour took him through Karnataka and into the Tamil country and beyond, from town to town, at the pace of bullock carts and the demands of hospitality: everywhere he stopped there was worship, an audience, questions, gifts, and a crowd. It was in these years that the conversations were recorded which became, after his death, Dialogues with the Guru — a lawyer, R. Krishnaswami Aiyar, took them down — and they show him as he was on tour: patient, precise, unwilling to be flattered, and interested in the practical question the person in front of him actually had. In 1927 Gandhi came to Śṛṅgeri, and the two men met and talked; the Jagadguru, who had views on the reform of Hindu society that were not Gandhi's, said what he thought, and the meeting is remembered at Śṛṅgeri as an exchange between equals.

He came back in 1927, and the tour was the end of something. He had done what the seat required. From then on he did as little of it as the seat would allow.

Narasiṃhavana

Across the Tuṅgā from the maṭha, reached by a bridge, is a wooded bank called Narasiṃhavana, "the forest of Narasiṃha", where the Jagadgurus have their residence and where the samādhis of several of them are. It was there that he withdrew. From the late 1920s onward he lived for long periods — years at a time — in almost complete seclusion, coming across the river for the great festivals and for the most necessary duties and otherwise sitting, in a small room or under the trees, in what the tradition describes without embarrassment as samādhi: hours and days in which he did not speak, did not move, and could not be reached. The maṭha's affairs were managed by its officers and, increasingly, by the young successor he chose. Visitors who had travelled far for his darśan were sometimes told he could not be seen, and sometimes saw him and were not sure he had seen them. The Śṛṅgeri tradition treats these years not as a withdrawal from duty but as its fulfilment — as the thing the seat exists to make possible, and had not, for many generations, seen.

On 22 May 1931 he gave sannyāsa to a boy of thirteen named Śrīnivāsa, whom he had chosen as his successor, and installed him as Abhinava Vidyātīrtha. From then on the boy — and then the young man — bore more and more of the seat's public duties, and his teacher trained him in the way Śṛṅgeri had always trained its heads: by having him sit, listen and learn the texts by heart, and by his own example of what the texts were for. The reader who wants to know what Chandraśekhara Bhāratī was like in those years should read what his successor said of him, and it is on this site under Abhinava Vidyātīrtha's own page.

How he taught

He taught in two registers, and both are on record. To the scholars he gave his one book: a Sanskrit commentary on Śaṅkara's Vivekacūḍāmaṇi, the Crest-Jewel of Discrimination, which is the most systematic thing he wrote and which the maṭha published; it takes the five hundred and eighty verses of the poem one by one and shows, with a precision that surprised the pandits, how each fits the whole. It was translated into English by P. Sankaranarayanan and published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, and it remains one of the two or three indispensable commentaries on the text.

To everyone else he gave conversation, and the conversation was of a particular kind. He did not lecture. He asked what the person's difficulty was, and he answered it from where they stood, in their terms, without moving them to his. A man worried about whether God exists was not given a proof; he was asked what use God would be to him, and led from there. A lawyer who thought his profession incompatible with religion was told that a profession that trains the intellect and teaches one to see both sides is a training ground for the discrimination the Upaniṣads demand, and to get on with it. A young man who wanted to give up ritual and go straight to Advaita was told, with great firmness, that Advaita is "a matter for realisation" and not for talk, and that the sandhyā worship he wanted to abandon "is as useful to the highest aspirant as it is to the beginner" and that it is "a folly to belittle its value or to neglect it in practice". A questioner who asked whether fate or free will governs a life was told to "start with boundless hope and with the presumption that there is nothing in the way of your exercising the free-will" — and then shown, with a lawyer's care, exactly what that presumption does and does not commit one to.

What these have in common is a refusal to let the highest teaching become an excuse. He held, with the whole of the Śṛṅgeri tradition, that Advaita is the truth and that the person who has realised it is beyond all injunction; and he held, with equal firmness, that almost no one who says so has realised it, and that for the rest of us the path is svadharma — the duties of one's station, performed as worship, with the mind kept fixed on the goal — and that any attempt to skip that is self-deception. He said it to Brahmins who wanted to drop their rites, to reformers who wanted to drop the tradition, and to seekers who wanted to drop the world, and he said it in the same voice to all of them. It was not conservatism. It was a jīvanmukta's judgement of what the rest of us are actually capable of, and he had earned the right to it.

What he built

He built less than his predecessor and less than his successor, and the tradition counts that in his favour. The thirty-third Jagadguru had rebuilt the maṭha's fabric — Kālaḍi, the college, the temple; the thirty-fifth would carry the maṭha out into the modern world with tours across India and institutions in every southern city. Between them, Chandraśekhara Bhāratī built the thing neither buildings nor institutions can supply: the reputation, restored after generations in which it had been more a title than a fact, that the seat of Śṛṅgeri is held by a knower of Brahman. He completed the Śāradāmbā temple and consecrated it. He wrote the one commentary. He chose and trained the successor who would do the building. And he sat, across the river, for thirty years, so visibly what the texts describe that the tradition could point at him and say: that. The scholars, the pilgrims and the reformers who came to Śṛṅgeri in those decades went away having seen a man in whom the tradition's claim was not a claim, and the maṭha has lived on that ever since.

The difficulties, which he did not hide

He was a man of almost complete inwardness set for forty-two years in the most public seat in the tradition, and the Śṛṅgeri tradition's own account of him does not hide the cost. There were years in which he could not perform the seat's duties and others did; there were devotees who came and did not see him; there were, within the maṭha, the ordinary strains of an institution whose head has largely withdrawn. He did not explain himself. He did what he could, chose and trained a successor early so that the seat would not suffer, and let the rest be.

The tradition's judgement is that this was exactly right — that the seat exists to hold a knower of Brahman, and that if the knower is in samādhi across the river the seat is doing its job — and that the institution's inconvenience is a small price. Not everyone at the time agreed, and the tradition records that too. What no one disputed, then or since, is what he was. The people who saw him in those years — scholars, officials, ordinary pilgrims — use the same words the Upaniṣads use for the knower: unmoving, without fear, "the same to all", a man in whom something had stopped that in the rest of us does not stop. The Śṛṅgeri tradition speaks of him as a jīvanmukta, one liberated while living, and it does not use the word of many.

The last morning

He died as he had lived, in a way that the tradition records without dressing it up. On the morning of 26 September 1954 — the new-moon day of Mahālaya, when Hindus make their offerings to the ancestors — he went down to the Tuṅgā at Narasiṃhavana before dawn, as he did every day, for his bath. The attendant who was with him saw him enter the river. He did not come back. His body was recovered from the water a little downstream, seated, the accounts say, in the posture of meditation, and it was brought to the bank and given the rites due to a head of the maṭha. The tradition does not call it drowning and does not call it a death; it calls it his entering the Tuṅgā, and treats it as a final withdrawal into the river beside which he had been born, studied, been installed, and sat for thirty years. His samādhi is at Narasiṃhavana, and his successor, Abhinava Vidyātīrtha, who had been at his side since he was thirteen, became the thirty-fifth Jagadguru.

The sayings, and what they were for

The following are his words as recorded in Dialogues with the Guru, from the conversations taken down by R. Krishnaswami Aiyar during his tours in the 1920s; the chapter is given for each.

The sayings are for the seeker who has understood the conclusion of Advaita and is in a hurry to act on it — to drop the practices, the duties and the forms as things a knower does not need. He had the standing to say what he said to that person, because he was the knower, and what he said was: not yet; do your duty; keep the practice; the understanding will ripen inside it. The last chapter of the Dialogues, on Advaita itself, is the exception that proves it: the one place he speaks of the goal directly, and he speaks of it as "a matter for realisation", not for discussion, and then turns the questioner back to "our immediate duty".

The books, and how to read them

Dialogues with the Guru, by R. Krishnaswami Aiyar, is the book to start with, and a copy is on the Internet Archive, linked below. Its twelve chapters — on Hinduism, modern education, happiness, fate and free will, the legal profession, marriage reform, religious neutrality, religious propaganda, the utility of God, the sandhyā worship, true devotion and Advaita — are each a conversation with a particular questioner, and can be read in any order; read the one nearest your own question first. His commentary on the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi, in P. Sankaranarayanan's translation from the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, is the serious book, and should be read alongside the text itself, a few verses a day, over a year. The maṭha published a small collection of his sayings as Golden Sayings, and its own life of him, on the Śṛṅgeri site, is linked below and is the source for the dates on this page. There are recordings of none of his teaching; there are photographs, which the maṭha keeps, and there is the river.

The timeline, plainly

• 16 October 1892 — born at Śṛṅgeri, a Sunday, twelfth child of Gopāla Śāstri and Lakṣammā, after their prayer to Śāradāmbā; named Narasiṃha.
• c. 1900–1911 — educated at the maṭha's Sadvidyā Sañjīvinī Pāṭhaśālā; noticed by the thirty-third Jagadguru, Sacchidānanda Śivābhinava Nṛsiṃha Bhāratī.
• 1911 — sent to the Śaṅkara Maṭha in Bangalore to study under Virūpākṣa Śāstri.
• 20 March 1912 — the thirty-third Jagadguru dies, having named him successor.
• 7 April 1912 — given sannyāsa and installed as the thirty-fourth Jagadguru of Śṛṅgeri, Chandraśekhara Bhāratī, aged nineteen.
• 1916 — consecrates the new Śāradāmbā temple at Śṛṅgeri.
• 1924–27 — the four-year vijaya-yātrā through the south; the conversations later published as Dialogues with the Guru; Gandhi's visit to Śṛṅgeri in 1927.
• Late 1920s onward — increasing seclusion at Narasiṃhavana across the Tuṅgā; long periods of samādhi.
• 22 May 1931 — gives sannyāsa to his thirteen-year-old successor Śrīnivāsa, who becomes Abhinava Vidyātīrtha.
• 1930s–40s — the Sanskrit commentary on the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi; the successor takes on the seat's public duties.
• 26 September 1954 — on Mahālaya new-moon morning, enters the Tuṅgā at Narasiṃhavana and does not return; his body is recovered seated in meditation. Samādhi at Narasiṃhavana. Abhinava Vidyātīrtha becomes the thirty-fifth Jagadguru.
• 1957 — Dialogues with the Guru published.

For the seeker now

He is the teacher on this site for people who have read the Advaita conclusion and want to know what it looks like when someone has actually arrived — not a teacher of it, but a man who had it. The Śṛṅgeri tradition does not use the word jīvanmukta lightly, and it uses it of him. What the tradition wants you to notice about him is that the man who had it did not tell anyone to skip the path. He told them to do their duty, keep their practice and wait. The impatient will find that hard to hear from someone who could have said anything. That is why it is worth hearing.

He is also the teacher for people whose duty has been given to them rather than chosen. He was made head of a great institution at nineteen without being asked, and he did it — the building, the touring, the audiences — because it was his, and then he did the other thing that was his, across the river, because that was his too. The Gītā's word for this is svadharma, and he is its clearest modern example: the life you have been given, done completely, is the path, and there is no other one waiting somewhere else.

A note on the pictures and the dates

No portrait of him is used on this page; the maṭha keeps photographs. Dates follow the Śṛṅgeri tradition's own account of him: his birth on 16 October 1892, his installation on 7 April 1912, the consecration of 1916, the sannyāsa of his successor on 22 May 1931 and his entering the Tuṅgā on 26 September 1954. The duration and route of his tour in the 1920s are given as the tradition gives them, in general terms. The sayings are verbatim from Dialogues with the Guru, chapter as noted. The map is drawn on present-day coordinates.