Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Householder sage of Bombay
1897–1981 · Kindred Voices
- When
- 1897–1981
- Born
- Bombay, India; childhood in Kandalgaon, Maharashtra
- Where the life was lived
- Childhood at Kandalgaon in Maharashtra; moved to Bombay in 1915 after his father died; kept a small shop there; after his teacher's death in 1936 he set out for the Himalaya and turned back; taught in the upper room of his house at 10 Ketwadi Lane, Bombay, for the rest of his life.
- What is left of it
- I Am That — dialogues recorded in that room — and the later collections Seeds of Consciousness and Prior to Consciousness.
An unlettered man who received mantra initiation from Siddharāmeśvar Mahārāj, and whose recorded conversations became one of the most widely read modern statements of non-duality.
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
He was born Maruti Shivrampant Kambli in 1897 and grew up at Kandalgaon in rural Maharashtra with little schooling. His father died in 1915 and he moved to Bombay, where he kept a small shop selling cigarettes and paan, married, and raised a family — one of several million people in that city doing exactly the same thing. A friend took him to a teacher of the Navnāth lineage, Siddharāmeśvar Mahārāj, who gave him initiation and one instruction: you are not what you take yourself to be. He took it with total literalness. He did not change his circumstances, did not go anywhere, did not read anything much. He simply held on to it, and within a few years, by his own account, the question was closed. When his teacher died in 1936 he set out for the Himalaya on foot — and turned back. Whatever he had been going to find was, he concluded, not somewhere else. So he went back to the shop, and for the rest of his life he taught in the small upper room of his house at 10 Ketwadi Lane, Bombay — a low ceiling, mats on the floor, traffic noise, visitors from all over the world climbing a narrow stair to be asked, more or less rudely, what exactly they thought they were. Those conversations were recorded and published as I Am That. He died in 1981. He is here because he demonstrates that this is not a monastic privilege.
The turn it rests on
A shopkeeper took one sentence seriously and never needed a second.
What was taught
Ran a small shop and taught non-duality upstairs in plain Marathi; his talks were collected as I Am That.
Read the originals
Primary texts and the records kept by the teacher's own institution.
Every daily message names the teacher it came from. Read the messages, or see the whole line this teacher stands in: all fifty-one teachers.