Chandraśekhara Bhāratī III

The full-length study of this teacher is still being written. What is below is the complete short life, and it is accurate as far as it goes.

The life

Śṛṅgeri sits in the Malnad, the rain country of the Karnataka hills, where the Tuṅga comes down through forest so dense that the maṭha's own records speak of tigers. He was born there in 1892, educated at the local school and then at the Pīṭham's Sanskrit college, and on 7 April 1912, at twenty, he became the thirty-fourth Jagadguru of the seat. He held it for forty-two years, and by every account of the period he held it reluctantly. He completed the renovation of the Śāradā temple and did what the office required, but he withdrew for long stretches into solitude, and in 1931 initiated a successor so that the administration could pass out of his hands. People who met him in his own lifetime described him as a jīvanmukta — liberated while living — which is not a word the tradition uses loosely. What survives best is the Dialogues with the Guru: visitors' questions and his answers, taken down as they happened. They are startlingly free of flattery in both directions. He does not console, he does not perform, and he frequently tells a questioner that the question is the wrong one. He died in 1954, in the river at Śṛṅgeri. For a site like this one he is the corrective to the idea that an institution and an awakened person are incompatible: he was both, and found the second far easier than the first.

The turn it rests on

He treated the office as an obstacle to be borne rather than a position to be enjoyed.

What was taught

Renowned for immersion in the Self while holding the seat; his dialogues were collected as Dialogues with the Guru.