Swami Rama Tirtha

The man

He was a professor of mathematics at Lahore who signed his letters “Your Own Self” and spoke of himself, always, in the third person, as “Rama.” He stood first in the Punjab at every examination he sat, lived for a month on three pice a day, kept a wife and two children on a scholarship, and at twenty-seven walked out of the Lahore railway station singing a farewell to his mathematics, his river and his God. He was a monk for five years. In that time he crossed to Japan and America with no organisation behind him and no money in his pocket, lectured from San Francisco to Buffalo on what he called Practical Vedanta, refused every fee, threw the steel boxes containing the typed copies of his own lectures into the sea, came home, learned Sanskrit grammar from the beginning because the pandits of Benares told him he knew none, and on the day of Dewali 1906 — the festival on which, nine years earlier, he had written to his father that he had gambled his body away and won God — went down to bathe in the river below the Maharaja of Tehri’s house and did not come up. He was thirty-three.

Swami Rama Tirtha belongs on this site for a reason that is easy to state and hard to live: he is the clearest case in the modern history of Advaita Vedanta of the teaching arriving not as calm but as joy. The Upaniṣads call the Self ānanda, bliss, and most of the teachers on these pages express that as steadiness, clarity, an untroubled peace. He expressed it as laughter. Sardar Puran Singh, who met him in Tokyo in 1902 and wrote the only full-length life by someone who knew him, says he “was gay like a wild bird. He leapt like a fawn”, and that the Japanese shop-girls of the Kankoba bazaar left their stalls and followed him down the aisles saying he was more beautiful than themselves. That same friend also wrote, with a candour that is rare in the literature of saints, that the joy went out of him in his last two years, and asked why.

Two more things make him distinctive. He is one of very few Advaitins whose formation was as much Persian as Sanskrit: Hafiz, Rumi and the Urdu poets were in his blood before Śaṅkara was, and he read the wine of the Sufis as divine intoxication to the end. And he is, in a literal, family sense, the beginning of another page here. His younger sister’s son was Hariwansh Lal Poonja — Sri H. W. L. Poonja of Lucknow, who as a boy tried to borrow a book about his uncle from a lending library and was refused because the librarian thought a child should not be reading such things.

The sources, and how this page uses them

Four kinds of record survive, and they do not always agree. The first is his own writing: letters, in Urdu and English, to his friend and guide Dhanna Mai of Gujranwala, to his father, to his uncle, to his American disciples, and to friends in India; the articles he wrote for his Urdu periodical Aliph; poems; and the notes of his lectures. The letters to Dhanna Mai run from his student days in 1888 and are, in effect, a diary: Puran Singh prints them at length and calls them “the best autobiographical notes of such as he”. They are quoted here as the nearest thing to the man’s own voice.

The second is the lectures. The American talks were taken down as he spoke by a stenographer, Mrs Pauline Whitman, and were never revised by him; after his death Swami Narayana, his disciple, and Puran Singh spent about four years gathering what could be recovered from America and published it as In Woods of God-Realization. The Pratisthan’s own note in the first volume is frank about how little was saved: “The lectures that he delivered and the talks that he gave in America during this period have been collected and published under the title ‘In Woods of God-Realisation’. They were taken down just as he talked by a lady steno-typist, Mrs. P. Whitman, a great admiring disciple of the Swami, and on account of his sudden death, they were published just as they were taken down without being revised.” A reader should therefore hold the lectures a little loosely: they are what a stenographer heard, not what he would have printed.

The third is Puran Singh’s The Story of Swami Rama: The Poet Monk of the Punjab, published in 1924. Puran Singh was a chemistry student in Tokyo who met him at the Indo-Japanese Club in September 1902, shaved his head for him, and was with him at Muttra, Pushkar, Hardwar and Vasishtha Ashram after his return. His book is loving, opinionated, uneven and indispensable: it contains the letters, the newspaper cuttings from Denver and Portland, the Tokyo lecture on “The Secret of Success,” the letters from his American disciples, and the only eyewitness-adjacent account of his death, given to Puran Singh by Swami Narayana. Where this page says “Puran Singh writes,” it is because his judgement, not just his facts, is being reported.

The fourth is the institutional record: the short biography of him by Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, from Lives of Saints, which the Rama Tirtha sites reproduce; the Swami Rama Tirtha Pratisthan of Lucknow, the successor of the Publication League that Swami Narayana founded, whose website gives a life “at a glance,” a page of tributes, and the publications list; a 2000 feature in the Tribune of Chandigarh; and the account of his nephew in David Godman’s biography of Sri Poonja. These are used for dates and for what his own tradition says of him, and the page says so when it leans on them.

Nothing on this page is invented. Every passage in quotation marks is copied from one of these sources and can be checked against it through the links at the foot of the page. The text of Puran Singh used is the Internet Archive’s scan, in which a few letters were misread by the machine — a “b” taken for an “h,” an “l” for an “H”; where the printed word is obvious it has been restored in the quotations, and nothing else has been altered. Where the sources differ — and on his village, his marriage, the year he took the ochre robe, the number of volumes of his works, and even the manner of his death, they do — both versions are given.

Where the life was lived

The map is the Punjab and the Himalaya, with two excursions beyond the frame. He was born in a village of the Gujranwala district, in the western Punjab that is now Pakistan, and went to school at Gujranwala; his student and teaching years were at Lahore, with a spell at Sialkot; his devotion was practised on the bank of the Ravi outside Lahore, and his holidays at Hardwar and Rishikesh, where the Ganga leaves the hills. When he left Lahore in July 1900 it was for the state of Tehri Garhwal, and the last six years of his life were spent, when he was not travelling, in the forests above Rishikesh and around Tehri: at Gangotri and Jamnotri, on the road to Kedarnath and Badrinath, at the Beas Ashram on the Ganga above Rishikesh and at Vasishtha Ashram in the Tehri hills. Muttra and Pushkar, Lucknow, Allahabad and Benares were the places he came down to. Tokyo, San Francisco, Mount Shasta, Denver, Portland, Chicago, Buffalo, St Louis and a mosque in Egypt lie beyond the frame.

Present-day coastlines are used and only India’s outline is drawn; the neighbouring coast is shown faintly so that the western Punjab can be pinned honestly. The birthplace is pinned at Gujranwala, the district town, because the village of Muraliwala is not on ordinary maps, and the pin’s note says so.

Muraliwala, 1873

He was born Tirath Rama, of a Goswami family — Brahmins who, Swami Sivananda says, traced their descent from Gosain Tulsi Das, the poet of the Hindi Rāmāyaṇa — in the village of Muraliwala in the Gujranwala district of the Punjab. The Pratisthan gives the day as 22 October 1873, “the day after Deepawali”; Puran Singh gives only the year. His mother died when he was a few days old. Puran Singh, who had it from the family, is brief: “Of Swami Rama’s early life there is hardly much to be recorded. He was born at the village of Muraliwala a village in the district of Gujranwala, Punjab, in 1873. His mother passed away when he was but a few days old, and he was brought up by his elder brother, Goswami Guru Das, and his old aunt.” The Tribune feature of 2000 says instead that his mother died “when he was hardly a year old” and that his father was “a poor priest who brought up his son in penury”; the discrepancy is small and is left as it stands.

The child Puran Singh describes is not the laughing monk. “As a child he was very fond of the sound of the conchshell. He was a gloomy sort of child, fond of solitude. He would ask his teacher to give him leave for a little while to go to the temple to hear sacred recitations and offer that much from the time of his meals instead. He revered his Moslem village teacher like a devoted pupil. Once he asked his father to give his milch-buffalo to the Maulvi, as he gave so much higher food to his little son.” The detail about the Maulvi is worth keeping. His first teacher was a Muslim, and he wanted his father to give the man the family buffalo; the boy who would later say that his religion had no nickname began, at the village school, with a teacher of another faith whom he loved.

The name of the village is itself a small disputed fact. Puran Singh spells it Muraliwala; Swami Sivananda and the Pratisthan spell it Murariwala; and the reason is in a letter the young man wrote from Lahore on 12 February 1893, printed by Puran Singh: “I propose to make my native village Murari-Wala and not Muraliwala (Murari means God).” He renamed his birthplace after Kṛṣṇa. Both spellings are used by his own tradition, and both are used on this page.

He was married as a small boy, at the village of Viroki. Puran Singh says only that it was “when he was quite a small boy”; Swami Sivananda says he was “barely ten years old when his father got him married”. There were, in time, two sons.

Dhanna Mai of Gujranwala

After the village school he was sent to the high school at Gujranwala for his Matriculation, and it was there, in his early teens, that he met the man who would matter most to him for the next ten years. Puran Singh: “It was here that he was brought in close contact with that uncanny sort of person, Dhanna Mai, whom the boy began imagining as his God, his spiritual master. It seems he made to this man an offering of his body and soul in deep spiritual devotion.” Swami Sivananda tells the same story with a different emphasis and a different spelling: “His father left him under the care of his friend, Bhakta Dhana Rama, a man of great purity and simplicity of life. Rama regarded him as his Guru, and offered to him his body and soul in deep devotion. His surrender to his Guru was so complete that he never did anything without first consulting him. He wrote numerous loving letters to him.” The Tribune calls him “Bhagat Dhanna Ram, a coppersmith of Gujranwala”. The site follows Puran Singh’s spelling, because the letters are printed under it, but the reader should know the three names are one man.

The letters are a remarkable document: a boy of fifteen, then a man of twenty-five, writing to a tradesman as to God. He calls him “uncle,” asks his permission for everything, begs his forgiveness for offences he cannot name, and reports his marks. The tone is set in a letter Puran Singh dates to 10 March 1890: “It is said God is merciful and peaceful. Then why are you angry? Why don’t you forgive me? I fancy you’ve learnt from the House of God that I have some defect which will stand in my way of seeing Him, and having learnt that, you are disregarding me, for the world would laugh at you that Tirath Rama being yours could not see God. But my attitude is — forgive me, and look not at my defects. If you call me in, I know but this one door.” Puran Singh, who did not think much of Dhanna Mai, says the boy “began imagining as his God, his spiritual master”; Swami Sivananda says plainly that “Rama regarded him as his Guru”. This page does not adjudicate. What the letters show is a temperament: the total surrender that he would later give to Kṛṣṇa, to the Ganga, and finally to the Self, was practised first on a coppersmith of Gujranwala.

Lahore: three pice a day

He passed the Matriculation in March 1888, thirty-eighth in the whole Punjab and with a scholarship, and on 18 May 1888 joined the Mission College at Lahore — the Forman Christian College, as it is also called in the sources — renting a house at one rupee a month. His father had wanted him to earn; he went to college against his father’s wish, and for a year did not go home. Puran Singh says he was helped by his maternal uncle Raghunath Mal and by Dhanna Mai.

The poverty was real and it was long. “ONCE he had with him but three pice a day to himself for a whole month. ‘Never mind,’ he said ‘God wishes to put me to the test. It will suffice for me.’ And in these days he used to go to a Punjabi baker’s shop and take his morning meal costing two pice, and his evening meal costing one pice. But after a few days, the baker said: ‘Get away, you come daily and take bread worth three pice from me and pay nothing for the pulses I give you. You take my pulses free. Go, 1 would not sell you any bread.’ The boy then lived only on one meal a day.” The letters record thefts of his clothes and his books, a krait in his room, and a running battle with a college that wanted him in the hostel. On 23 January 1893 he wrote to Dhanna Mai: “When I went to the college, the college peon came and told me that Professor Gilbertson wanted me. The class bell had just gone. Professor Gilbertson gave me a small packet and I took it and ran to the class. To-day I had not a single pice with me. After three hours when I opened the packet, I found Rs. 30 enclosed in it. I went to the kind Professor and told him that I didn’t want so much money and wished to return Rs. 20 to him, but he insisted on my taking the whole amount.” He wanted to give part of it to his mother — his stepmother, presumably, since his own had died — and asked his uncle’s leave to do so.

His father, “impatient of his settling in life, and wild with his resolution to go up for still higher education came and left his wife at Lahore with him, and declined all help in supporting this ardent student”. So the scholarship boy became a householder in his teens. “In such poverty, he managed to educate himself, winning University scholarships, taking private tuitions and supported his wife and children, served Dhanna of Gujranwala and helped his parents too.” Anyone who has read the Poonja page will recognise the pattern that runs in this family: the spiritual life carried on top of, not instead of, the duty to feed people.

He passed the Intermediate in 1890 first in the Province. He passed the B.A. in 1893, again first in the Province, and Puran Singh preserves the story that the mathematics examiner “had set thirteen problems and given a note to the candidates to attempt any nine. Swami Rama did all the thirteen with a note to the examiner that he may examine any nine.” The letters of that spring are a young man’s: “Got my roll number. In the house examination, I got 148 marks out of 150 in mathematics.” And on 17 April 1893, from a friend: “Congratulations Tiratha Rama! You stand first in the Province in B.A. examination.” That July, loitering on the boat bridge over the Ravi, he met Mr Bell, the Principal of the Government College, who “met me with great courtesy. Had a long talk with me.” He went on to the M.A. at the Government College, and his benefactors — Professor Gilbertson, Principal Bell, Jhandumal the sweet-seller who bought him two kurtas and a pair of trousers — are named in the letters with a gratitude that never left him.

The letters to Dhanna Mai are printed, with their dates, in chapters VI and VII of Puran Singh’s The Story of Swami Rama (1924), which is on the Internet Archive and linked at the foot of this page.

Sialkot, and the professor of mathematics

In 1895 he went to Sialkot as second master in the Mission High School, borrowing ten rupees to get there and repaying ten rupees a month until it was cleared. It was at Sialkot that he first stood up in public to speak about religion, and the letter home is the first sign of the lecturer he would become: “To-day I gave a religious lecture under the auspices of the local Sanatan Dharma Sabha. Though they had given no public notice, the compound was full of men, even Deputy-Collectors and other big officials attended. I spoke also on patriotism. I saw the eyes of people full of tears.” To his uncle he wrote: “The Sanatan Dharma Sabha of Sialkot has got some new life from my presence. I get intoxicated after I do my little work for them. Before this intoxication, the very kingdoms seem valueless.” The word intoxication is his, and it will recur.

On 21 December 1895 he could write: “I have got an appointment as Professor of Mathematics at Lahore in my own college” He was twenty-two. Swami Sivananda says he held the chair for two years and then, for a short time, a Readership at the Oriental College; Puran Singh says he gave it up because its duties “were incompatible with his desire for a life of contemplation and communion with nature. He then took up the Readership in the Oriental College which meant only 2 hours’ work a day, and gave him the sufficient leisure and detachment that he desired.” The Tribune records that his salary was a hundred rupees a month and that “he cut down his personal needs to the minimum and his generosity always outstretched his scanty means”.

He was, by every account, a superb teacher of a subject that does not usually produce saints. But even in the classroom the other life was showing through. Puran Singh records that “In the Mission College, he would address every student of his class” as “O Krishna” — a footnote explains that Krishna was also the name of his youngest son — and go on: “All Beloved! You know everything; what is it that I am to teach you.” If a boy pleaded ignorance he would repeat it, and, Puran Singh says, “He would thus inspire the boy with the solution”. His colleagues remembered a different joke. “In Lahore, during the days of his Professorship, he played with his watch. Whether it was morning, noon, evening or midnight, whenever anybody asked him the time of day, he would seriously take out his watch, look at it intently, and then look at the face of the inquirer and just say:‘ Dear one, it is just one’ and show him the watch. Those who happened to make this enquiry at different times asked him: ‘ Goswamiji! Strange whenever we ask you the time, you say it is just one*’ ‘O Dear One, Rama’s watch is such; it is always one by this watch.’ And he would laugh and pass.”

Kṛṣṇa on the bank of the Ravi

The professor of mathematics was, in his twenties, a devotee of Kṛṣṇa of the most consuming kind, and the years 1895 to 1898 at Lahore are the years of that devotion. Swami Sivananda summarises: “It was at this stage that his spiritual life began to blossom. He began to read the Gita and became a great devotee of Lord Krishna. His intense longing gave him a vision of Sri Krishna. He used to deliver lectures on Bhakti under the auspices of the Sanatana Dharma Sabha of Lahore.” Puran Singh, who calls this state Krishna Avesh — possession, or inspiration, by Kṛṣṇa — describes it from the reports of friends, and does not soften it. He would go out to the Ravi at night and weep. “his lips parted in a loud scream, and a cry leaping forth in the air on the bank of the Ravi, his arms fully spread, quivering with passion, his bosom heaving, his tears streaming! The very trees vibrated with him, the breezes played with him, the stones talked to him! He went almost senseless to the Oriental College as the reader of mathematics, and he knew not where his body was.”

One episode should be given as Puran Singh gives it, because it shows the temperature of the thing. After a night of crying to Kṛṣṇa he fainted, and “When he awoke, he saw a cobra with his upspread hood before him. He leapt towards it saying: ‘O Lord! Come, Thou comest to me in the shape of a serpent. O Lord! I wish to see Thee in that beauty to which Gopikas came attracted like poor moths.’ Saying this he again fainted. A friend who was seeing all this entered his room and said, ‘Swamiji! Krishna is within you! What are you seeking?’ ‘In me!’ said the mad man and tore his shirt and began tearing his bosom with his nails!” The friend’s remark — Krishna is within you — is the Advaita answer, and he was not yet ready for it. Within two years he would be.

An Advaita reader should not pass over this period as a preliminary. In this tradition’s own account of itself, devotion of this intensity is not a lower stage but the same movement seen from the side of feeling: the whole of the self thrown at one object until the object and the self both give way. That is what happened to him, and the site’s page on Sri Ramakrishna records the same passage in another man. He never repudiated Kṛṣṇa. At the end of his life, Puran Singh says, “Bhakti was predominant in his bosom” again.

“Today is Dewali. I have lost my body in the gamble”

The turning is dated by a letter. Puran Singh prints a letter to his father written on Dewali 1897 — 25 October by the calendar — and it is the first document in which the monk speaks, though he would not wear the robe for three more years: “My dear father! Salutations to you! Your letters came and with them great joy! The body of your son, Tirath Rama is now sold, it is sold to God! It is no more his own. Today is Dewali, I have lost my body in the gamble, and I have won the Lord God! I congratulate you. Now whatever you may need, ask from my Master. He will provide you with it or will make me send it to you. But for once call upon Him with faith. For the last 19 or 20 days. He has come and taken upon Himself all my tasks, duties and debts. Why will He not do yours too?” And then, to a Brahmin father who wanted his brilliant son to earn: “This wealth of Realisation of Life is the wealth of us Brahmans, it is not becoming of us to renounce our inner wealth and go after the outer. Just enjoy once the pleasure of your inner Self.”

Dewali is the festival of gambling as well as of lamps; on that night, by old custom, people play for stakes. He had staked his body and lost it, and counted the loss a win. That he died on Dewali nine years later, in the act of bathing, is a coincidence the sources notice and this page merely records.

A second letter, of 23 August 1898, from “near Rishikesh above Hardwar”, answers a plea from Dhanna Mai to come home: “You have persuaded me in your letter to come home. Your letter has been thrown into the running waters of the Ganges. Strange if you ask me whether I feel no pain for not keeping up to my duties! Pain of what? Unknown are the beginnings of these things. Unknown are the ends of these things. And just known is a little middle of the things that seem at present. And so unknown when all is. What pain is there? What shall the people say?” The man who had asked his uncle’s permission for everything was now throwing his letters into the Ganga. The guru of his boyhood had become, in the language of the Upaniṣads, one more thing to be let go.

Swami Vivekananda at Lahore, 1897

In November 1897 Swami Vivekananda came to Lahore on his tour of the north after his return from America, and the professor of mathematics organised his lectures. Puran Singh was a schoolboy in the crowd and remembered it all his life: “The Swami was put up at Dhyan Singh’s Haveli and I distinctly remember to this moment the huge number of the turbanned masses of Lahore that had assembled in the large hall to listen to the Swami.” The hall overflowed and Swami Vivekananda spoke in the courtyard, from the raised platform of a temple-like structure at its centre, “robed in orange, like a Rishi of old”. One lecture, on Bhakti, was given in a circus tent. “There was in those days one Professor Bose’s circus playing in Lahore and one of the lectures of Swami Vivekananda was on ‘Bhakti’ in Bose’s circus tent. I did not know Swami Rama then, but it was he who arranged all those lectures and he was of opinion that Swami Vivekananda was at his best while speaking on Vedanta for that was his subject.” He told Puran Singh afterwards that on the walk back to the Haveli he had told the great man to his face that in the Bhakti lecture “he was not yet at his best”.

What passed between them beyond that is recorded by his own tradition rather than by Puran Singh. The Pratisthan’s page states that Swami Vivekananda told him, “Tirtha Rama… you are to become a Torch-bearer of ‘Advaith Vedanta’ (Non-Dualism)”, and that “This prophecy became true when Rama became a Sanyasi and renounced his professorship, his family and all worldly ties to devote himself fully to Self Realization”. Swami Sivananda is more measured: “A great impetus was given to his spiritual life by Swami Vivekananda, whom he saw for the first time at Lahore. The sight of the great Swami as a Sannyasin kindled in him the longing to don the ochre robe.” This page reports the “torch-bearer” words as the Pratisthan’s, not as an established saying; there is no contemporary record of them. What is not in doubt is that he had already, on Dewali of that year, sold his body to God, and that the sight of Swami Vivekananda in orange showed him the shape his own life would take.

The other teacher of these years was Sri Madhava Tirtha of the Dwarka Math — the Śaṅkara seat on the western coast. Swami Sivananda: “Rama Tirtha commenced his spiritual life as a Bhakta of God and then turned to Vedanta, studying under the inspiration of Sri Madhava Tirtha of the Dwaraka Math.” And later: “Swami Madhava Tirtha had already allowed him to take Sannyas whenever he wished.” The Pratisthan’s timeline dates the meetings with both men to 1897. It is from the Dwarka Math’s head, therefore, that his sannyāsa name descends: Tirtha, the suffix of the Dwarka line, and the reversal of his own name, Tirath Rama becoming Rama Tirtha, was a joke he made himself and is told below.

‘Aliph’, and the Bliss Press

In 1898 he did a thing that no other teacher on this site did before taking the robe: he started a magazine. “In 1898, he started his quaint periodical ‘Aliph’ (the letter A of Persian) and called his press, ‘Ananda Press’ or Bliss Press.” Alif is the first letter of the Persian and Urdu alphabet, a single upright stroke, and in Sufi poetry the letter that stands for the One. Puran Singh describes the magazine as “the chief vehicle of his rhapsodic writings in which he set in his gem-like collections from Persian, Punjabee, English and Sanskrit literatures. It is the characteristic symbol of his all-embracing mind”. The Tribune names the constant companions of these years: “Sufi poets like Hafiz, Attaar and Maulana Rumi, saint poets like Guru Nanak, Tulsi and Surdas were his constant companions. The mystery of Krishna and Shiva and the thought of Emerson, Kant, Goethe, Carlyle, Whitman and Thoreau constantly fed his liberal mind.”

This matters for understanding the teacher he became. When he stood up in Denver in 1904 and said that his religion was “the religion without a nickname”, he was not improvising a phrase for Americans; he was a Punjabi who had grown up between a Muslim village schoolmaster, a Christian mission college, the Sanatan Dharma Sabha and the ghazals of Hafiz, and who had been putting all four into one magazine for two years. The Urdu articles of Aliph were later translated and fill two volumes of his collected works.

July 1900: the ghazal on the platform

He had been going up to Hardwar and Rishikesh in every vacation, and to Kashmir and Amarnath; the letter of August 1898 was written from the forest above Hardwar. In July 1900 he went for good. Puran Singh: “And in 1900, in the month of July, he left Lahore for the woods of the Himalayas for good. His friends and admirers gathered in number on the platform of the Lahore Railway Station, and as Swami Rama stood ready to depart from them they sang an Urdu Gazal of adieu composed by him.” The ghazal, in Puran Singh’s translation:

“Adieu! My Mathematics, adieu! Adieu my Ravi! Adieu! Farewell my wife, farewell! Farewell my children, farewell! Adieu O Friends, O foes, adieu! Adieu books and teachings all, adieu! Adieu my heart! Adieu my God! Lo! God! Adieu! Adieu! Adieu!” The last lines say that he is lost to his country and his country to him; that henceforth he lives in forests, “Away from all, in His Love!”

He did not, in fact, go alone, and the page should say so plainly, because the fact is uncomfortable and his tradition does not hide it. Swami Sivananda: “Rama soon resigned his post and left for the forest. His wife and two children and a few others accompanied him to the Himalayas. Owing to ill-health, his wife later returned with one of her sons. The other was left at Tehri for his schooling there.” A wife and two boys went up into the Tehri hills with a man who had already, in a letter to his father, sold his body to God. What became of them is discussed in the section on the difficulties of his life, below. The ghazal’s farewell to wife and children was not a figure of speech.

The Pratisthan’s timeline says that in 1899 he “Takes to the life of a renunciant”; Swami Sivananda says “In the year 1900, Rama Tirtha went to the forest and soon became a Sannyasin”; the Tribune says he “became a sanyasi in 1900”. Puran Singh, who has the railway platform and the month, is followed here for the departure, July 1900; the robe came later, and its date is the next disputed fact.

Tehri, and the orange robe

He went to the hill state of Tehri Garhwal, where the Bhagirathi comes down from Gangotri, and for the better part of three years he lived in its forests. Puran Singh, who did not know him then, describes the period from what he was told: “Swami Rama Tirath in those days, was living in the neighbourhood of Tehri Garhwal. His days and nights passed in incessant thought. He lived in the wild, unrestrained, joys of Vedantic consciousness. Most of his poems were composed in those days, and the greatest poem was he himself.” And: “He called the river Ganges, as ‘my Gangi’. He had given pet names to his papers, pencils, pens and he lived in the society of his own creation.” He would lie in a cave for days without food; “He would sit on the banks of the Ganges and tears of joy would stream out of him, and he loved to say the three rivers, two of his eyes and one of the eye of Heaven, came and mingled there at Tehri!” The Maharaja of Tehri became his devotee and, in the end, his last host: it was in the Raja’s house at Simlasu that he died.

When he put on the robe is the first serious disagreement in the record. Puran Singh: “Early in 1901, after the year’s sojourn in the hills, he turned a monk, and donned the orange robe.” Swami Sivananda: “Rama Tirtha took Sannyas a few days before the passing of Swami Vivekananda.” Swami Vivekananda died on 4 July 1902; if Swami Sivananda is right, the robe came eighteen months later than Puran Singh says, and only weeks before the voyage to Japan. The Pratisthan’s timeline, which puts the renunciation in 1899 and Japan in 1901–03, agrees with neither. This page follows Puran Singh for the year, because he had it from the man’s companions and gives the sequence of journeys that depends on it, but the reader should know that his own tradition dates it differently. What no one disputes is that he took the name Rama Tirtha — the Tirtha of the Dwarka line to which Sri Madhava Tirtha belonged — and that he explained it as a joke. Puran Singh asked him in Tokyo why he spoke of himself in the third person: “Look here, just as the order of life is changed, from a householder to a monk, from the world to God, so the order of names of this body (meaning himself) is reversed. In pre-monk days, it was Tirath Rama now it is Rama Tirath”. “Later on, he deleted playfully the little ‘i’ out of the last word, and began signing himself as ‘Rama Truth’.”

Gangotri, September 1901

In August 1901 he set out on foot for the four great shrines of the Uttarakhand Himalaya, and the letter he wrote from Gangotri that September is the earliest piece of his prose that reads like the lectures. Puran Singh: “In August 1901, he took a long trip and visited Gangotri, Jamnotri, Kedarnath and Badri Narayan living on the pure bosom of the Himalayan snows in continuous rapture.” The letter: “The holy Ganges could not bear Rama’s separation. She succeeded at last in drawing him to herself after a little more than a month’s absence. Notwithstanding all her culture, she began to rain sweet tears of joy on meeting him. Who can describe the nascent beauty and playful freaks of the dear Ganges at Gangotri? Very praiseworthy is the upright character of her playmates, viz. the White Mountains and innocent Deodar trees.”

He had come from Jamnotri, the source of the Yamuna, by a shepherds’ route over the ridge between the two rivers, and he is proud of it in the way a young man is proud of a hard walk: “Pilgrims after leaving Jamnotri, usually reach Gangotri in not less than ten days. In three days after leaving Jamnotri did Rama arrive at Gangotri. He came by a route as yet untrodden by any inhabitant of the plains. This route is called the Chhayan Route by mountaineers. Three successive nights were passed in lonely forest caves.” The route, he explains, is so called because it is almost always in shade — “The shade of trees, did I say? The route is for the most part enveloped by clouds.” The tour ended at Bhim Tal in the Kumaon lakes, from where he wrote: “To-day is finished a pleasant tour, trip, or a short walk of 600 miles over the Uttra Khand hills.” Six hundred miles on foot, over passes, with the Ganga for a mother and the deodars for playmates: the Himalayan letters are the record of the happiest year of his life, and Puran Singh thought so too.

Muttra, December 1901

He came down from Badrinath to Muttra — Mathura, Kṛṣṇa’s city on the Yamuna — in the winter of 1901, and there presided over what Puran Singh calls “a miniature kind of Parliament of Religions organised by Swami Shiv Guna Acharya” at the Shanti Ashram across the river. It was his first public appearance as a monk, and the Free Thinker of Lahore reported it; Puran Singh reprints the report: “Every man’s man, thoughtful and serious, lively and severe by turns, keeping the whole audience composed of heterogeneous shades of opinions spellbound, as it were, for hours together, until late in the evening. He is a quiet, modest unassuming young man, in the heyday of youth, well versed in ancient and modern philosophy as well as in modern sciences, and is withal made of a stuff of which persons of honest convictions ought to be made. Gentle and amicable, childlike, innocent in manners and behaviour, he yet has the iron hand inside the silken glove, for while scrupulously regardful of the feelings of others, he is far more outspoken in expressing his opinions”. The phrase about the iron hand in the silken glove is worth remembering when the American cuttings are read.

Japan, 1902: “The world is my country”

The journey to Japan began with a piece of false news, and he knew it. Puran Singh explains that some Bengali friends of Kakuzō Okakura, the Japanese art scholar then visiting Calcutta and Sister Nivedita, announced prematurely that a second Parliament of Religions, like Chicago’s in 1893, would be held in Tokyo; the Tokyo press was against it, Okakura was still in India, and “the proposal was born dead”. But the announcement reached Tehri. A Raja brought him the news and said that if he left at once he could be in Tokyo in time; “Swami got ready and in about a week’s time he was on board bound for Japan.” He travelled with his disciple Swami Narayan, was received at the ports by Sindhi merchants, spent a night at Yokohama as the guest of the firm of Wassiamall Assomall, and the next day walked into the Indo-Japanese Club in Tokyo, of which a twenty-one-year-old chemistry student named Puran Singh was the secretary.

Puran Singh’s account of the meeting is the most quoted passage in his book and deserves to be: “As the man from Yokohama introduced two orange-robed monks into the club, a thrill of joy went round and most enchanting was the effect of the bird-like warbling of ’OM, OMY by the elder of the two Swamis. Swami Rama was accompanied by his disciple Swami Narayan. I had gone almost mad with enthusiasm though I knew neither of them. Their language was all so strange and their glow all so spiritual that it commanded silent obeisance. As the younger Swami asked me, ‘Where is your country?’ I replied with tears in my eyes in soft, loving accent, ’’The world is my country‘. And the elder Swami looked up into my eyes and said, ’To do good is my religion." Thus we met each other in two sentences.” That same evening Puran Singh took him to a lecture he was himself due to give at the Buddhist University; the Swami spoke “shedding, as it were, sparks of fire”, and on the same platform spoke Kanzō Uchimura, the Christian writer Puran Singh calls the Carlyle of Japan.

The next day Puran Singh brought him the two volumes of the Chicago Parliament’s proceedings from an old bookshop, and told him there would be no Parliament in Tokyo. “When the Swami found that there was no such meeting, he laughed heartily and said, "With what a beautiful trick Nature has led Rama out into the world from his lonely Himalayan resort. How a false piece of news becomes so fertile! Rama in himself is a whole Parliament of Religions. If Tokyo is not having one, let it not; Rama will hold one.” The Sanskrit scholar Junjirō Takakusu of the Imperial University met him at the circus that week and told Puran Singh on the way home: “I have met many Pandits and Philosophers at the house of Professor Max Müller in England and other places, but I have never seen a personality like Swami Rama, who is so living and so significant an illustration of his whole philosophy. But in him Vedanta and Buddhism meet.” At the house of Baron Kando, the host went in and brought out his wife and children, saying he could not have such joy without sharing it, and asked him why he had renounced his own family. “Only to seek a larger one and share my joy with the whole world.”

He was in Tokyo about a fortnight. Puran Singh shaved his head and became, for a while, a monk; and he says, with the frankness that makes his book valuable, that he heard nothing his teacher said: “I loved him, I liked him, and if I were a girl, I would have given anything to win him. But one thing is certain that I heard not a syllable of what he said, yet every word that fell from him was treasured by my mind”. The Swami told him, “I came not for the Parliament of Religions, but to guide Puran”. He left for San Francisco on the ship that Professor Chhatre of Poona had chartered to carry his circus to America.

Kanzō Uchimura (1861–1930) and Junjirō Takakusu (1866–1945) are named in Puran Singh’s book as Mr. Kanzo Uchimura and Professor Takakutsu.

“The Secret of Success”: the Tokyo lecture

One lecture from the fortnight survives in full, because Puran Singh printed it. It was given at the Tokyo College of Commerce — the Pratisthan’s edition dates it 7 October 1902 — and the Russian ambassador, reading the report, asked for an interview, but the speaker had already sailed. It is the earliest complete text of his teaching that exists, and it begins with a disarming question: “Does it not appear strange for a stranger from India to speak on a subject which is evidently more intelligently grasped by Japan than India? It may be. But I stand here before you as a teacher for reasons more than one. To carry out skillfully an idea into practice is one thing, but to grasp its fundamental meaning is quite another thing.”

The first principle he offers is work, and the image he chooses is the one that lights every page of this site: “I will take for illustration the ordinary light — the lamp. The underlying secret of a lamp’s lustre and splendour is that it spares not its wick and oil. The wick and oil or the little self is being constantly consumed and glory is the natural consequence. There it is, the lamp says, spare yourself and you will be immediately extinguished.” The third principle is the one that became his best-known saying: “Forget your little self in work and entirely throw yourself into it; you will succeed. If you are thinking, become thought itself, you shall succeed. If you are working, become work itself, and thus you shall succeed. When shall I be free? When I shall cease to be” The Pratisthan prints it on its front page in the form “When shall I be free? When ‘I’ shall cease to be.”

A reader who knows only the later Advaita teachers may be surprised at the register: a philosophy of the Absolute delivered as advice to commerce students on how to get on. That was his method, and it is not a dilution. The claim of Advaita is that the little self is not real; his argument is that everything anyone has ever achieved was done in the moments when the little self was forgotten — so success and self-knowledge are the same secret at two depths. He called that Practical Vedanta, and he took the phrase to America.

The Tokyo lecture is printed in full at the end of chapter XI of Puran Singh’s book, and again, under the same title, in volume one of In Woods of God-Realization; both are linked below.

America, 1902–1904

He landed at San Francisco in the autumn of 1902 and stayed in the United States about two years. The San Francisco press, quoted by Puran Singh, described the arrival: “Out of the jungles of Upper India has come a man of astonishing wisdom, a prophet, philosopher, a scientist and priest, who proposes to play the role of missionary in the United States, and preach a new doctrine of unselfishness and spiritual power to the idolatrous worshippers of the mighty dollar.” And it gave his own account of how a man with no money proposed to live: “How do I live?‘ he said yesterday. ’That is simple. I do not try. I believe. I attune my soul to the harmony of love for all men. That makes all men to love me, and where love is, there is no want, no suffering. This state of mind and faith bring influence to me that supplies my needs without the asking. If I am hungry, there is always someone to feed me. I am forbidden to receive money or to ask for anything. Yet I have everything, and more than most, for I live largely in a world that few can attain.”

His hosts were Dr Albert Hiller and his wife, an elderly couple with a house at Shasta Springs in the mountains of northern California. Swami Sivananda: “He spent about a year and a half in San Francisco under the hospitality of Dr Albert Hiller. He gained a large following and started many societies, one of them being the Hermetic Brotherhood, dedicated to the study of Vedanta.” At Shasta he cut wood for the household, climbed the mountain, ran a thirty-mile race for the love of running and came first, and slung a hammock over the rapids. Puran Singh has it from him: “Rama had to work hard in Shasta, for he did not like to live in country like America without his share of physical labour. Rama loved his solitude.” “Rama had a hammock put up for himself across the rapids of the Shasta river, and there he sat cooing in tune with ‘his birdies’ — as he said ‘feeling happier than the President of all the United States’.” He would not take fees: “he insisted on charging no admission fees for his lectures and said to a well-to-do friend who complained that the expenses of holding the meetings could not be met on that plan. Surely you can pay the expenses of holding the meetings.” Lala Har Dayal, who wrote that in the Modern Review in 1911, called him “the greatest Hindu who ever came to America, a real Saint and sage”.

The itinerary can be pieced together from the letters and cuttings Puran Singh prints. Two months in San Francisco; Portland, where a paper headed its report “A Hindu Evangelist” and described “Small, slight, with dark, eager, bright eyes and olive skin, attired in a black suit wearing at all times a brilliant red turban”, speaking for more than two weeks “for the Women’s Club, Bishop Scott Academy, the Y.M.C.A., the Unitarian Church, the Spiritualists, the Christian Union and others”; Denver at the New Year of 1904, where the Rocky Mountain News of 4 January reported his lectures at Unity Church; Chicago in February; Minneapolis in April; two or three weeks in Buffalo in the spring and early summer, where a Rama Society was formed; the World’s Fair at St Louis, where he spoke at the Religious League and, Puran Singh says, “the local newspapers wrote that the only bright spot in the gathering was Swami Rama”; Jacksonville, Florida, in October 1904, on the way home. A letter of that summer plans Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, and then, “Next fall Rama comes to London, England.” He never did.

What he said in Denver is the best short statement of his position that exists, and the reporter took it down: “The object of this philosophy is to regulate the conduct of the present life. It has a plain, practical bearing upon the things of today. You may be disappointed, but there is nothing mystical, or occult about me, although I come from the deepest forests of the Himalayas.” Then: “My religion is not Hinduism,… Christianity, Catholicism, or Protestantism, but it is antagonistic to none.” And: “Are there any Presbyterian lilies? Are there any Methodist landscapes? So do I make no distinction of class, colour, or creed in greeting as my co-religionists the rays of sun, the beams of stars, the leaves of trees, the blades of grass, the grains of sand, the hearts of tigers, elephants, lambs, ants, men, women and children. My religion is the religion without a nickname. It is the religion of nature. I label none, brand none, possess none, but serve all like light and sun. So I call it ‘THE COMMON PATH’.”

He also spoke for India, and the American papers took that as his primary purpose: the Denver report says his “mission to America is to enlist aid in his attempt to break down the Hindu caste system”, and the Buffalo secretary remembered lectures “laying particular stress, in the Indian lectures, upon the evils of the caste system and the desirability of destroying it”. He persuaded universities to offer free places to Indian students and gave an address at one on “The World’s Debt to India.” But when the Americans wanted him to run the organisation and handle its money he declined to touch a dollar, and the schemes lapsed. Puran Singh, who disliked this whole side of the American years, says so bluntly, and his view is discussed below.

The women who came to him he judged with the same iron hand. “Of the many hundred women Rama met, only two were serious, and especially one of them Ganga” — Ganga was the name he gave to a wealthy woman who offered him her land, her house and herself for sannyāsa, and of whom he said “She had a very large heart. God bless her. A great woman” — and whose offer he declined: “But Rama needed nothing.” When Puran Singh asked him whether America cared more for his Vedanta than India, he answered: “No! America lives my Vedanta on the physical plane, Rama wants all nations to take the same Truth on the mental and spiritual planes also.” And on the question of whether any country is spiritual: “Hell and Heaven live under the same roof, nay under the same skin, and so it is everywhere in all countries, in all climes, in all persons, and it is the particular manifestation of either seen by you that determines your own attitude to that country.”

The Denver and Portland cuttings, and the letters from Chicago (15 February 1904), Minneapolis (3 April 1904) and Jacksonville (1 October 1904), are printed in chapters XII and XVI of Puran Singh’s book.

The boxes thrown into the sea

The story of how his lectures survived is told by the Pratisthan in its note to the first volume of his works, and it explains why so much is lost. “Some of the ardent American devotees of Rama had collected from various sources his lectures, delivered in America, and, at the time of his departure from that country, had even tried to present to him on the ship their typed copies, nicely packed in a few steel boxes, along with the concerned cuttings of the American newspapers. Rama, however, refused to accept them, saying that he was not the beast of burden to carry those boxes with him all the way to India. To the astonishment of all, he even got them immersed in the sea joyously saying ‘Jai Gange’.” — Jai Gange, victory to the Ganga. Har Dayal, from America, remembered the same habit: “how he used to throw into the sea the laudatory comments on his lectures that appeared in the local press”.

So when he died there was almost nothing. “The typed copies of only a very few of his lectures which were brought from America to India by Mrs. Wellman, one of his American admirers, were found in one of the boxes in his room.” Swami Narayana, “assisted by Sardar Puran Singh”, spent about four years writing to America, and “was ultimately successful in collecting only these few lectures which have later been incorporated in the three volumes”. “It was Sardar Puran Singh who had suggested the name of ‘In the woods of God Realization’ for Rama’s works.” The money to print them came from “Master Amir Chand of Delhi, who was also a great patriot and had to be hanged in 1914 by the then British rulers in India, for the alleged throwing of a bomb on Lord Hardinge in 1912”, and who “came forward and offered the entire earnings of his whole life” to the printing. The Tribune says the works were “first published in four volumes in Delhi by Amir Chand in 1909-10”.

Puran Singh’s preface to the first edition explains what the reader is and is not getting: “Excepting the articles referred to above, that were published in his life-time and which also have been included in the present collection, all other lectures have not had the advantage of his revision. So much that he might have eliminated is still there and so much more that he might have added is absent.” He had meant, Puran Singh says, to rewrite everything as “a systematic exposition of his teachings”, and did not, for two reasons: the two years he gave to Sanskrit and the Vedas, and the silence of the last months, in which “his mind soared higher and higher till it lost its foot-hold by his daily increasing absorption in the Infinite”. The seven volumes the Pratisthan now publishes — older editions ran to more — are therefore a salvage, and a reader should read them as one.

Egypt, and home: 8 December 1904

He came back by way of Egypt, and Swami Sivananda preserves a detail no one else has: “In Egypt he was accorded a hearty welcome by the Mohammedans, to whom he delivered a lecture in Persian in their mosque.” Puran Singh has the same story from him — “In Egypt he was given a welcome, by the Egyptians where he delivered a lecture in Persian in their own mosque.” The paper next day, he told Puran Singh, called him a Hindu genius whom it was a privilege to meet — and Puran Singh adds that he “admired a Bahai whom he heard lecturing somewhere in Egypt or America” for punctuating his speech with the name of his Beloved. A Hindu monk lecturing in Persian in a mosque, and admiring a Bahá’í for his devotion: the boy who wanted to give the Maulvi the buffalo had not changed.

Puran Singh gives the date of the return precisely: “In 1902, he left for Japan, And after 2 years’ residence in the United States, he returned to India on 8th December, 1904.” (His own first chapter says, more loosely, that he “returned in 1905”; the December date is the one he gives when he is being careful.) He landed at Bombay, where Swami Shiv Guna Acharya of Muttra came to receive him and, in a private room, dedicated his life to him. Within a few weeks that alliance had broken, and the man who came home was, his friend thought, not quite the man who had left.

Muttra and Pushkar, 1905

Puran Singh came down from Lahore to see him at the Shanti Ashram across the Yamuna from Muttra in the winter of 1904–05, after three years apart, and found the door locked from inside at eight in the morning. “He got up and opened the door. I met him after three years. It was winter. He was clad in an orange-coloured blanket, and he met me impersonally, bade me sit by him as he started, and there was a flash of light from his eyes as he said: ‘Sacrifice will secure the freedom of this country. Rama’s head must go, then Puran’s, then of a hundred others before the country can be free. India, mother India, must be free.’ I was astonished. This was not the talk he gave us at Tokyo where I first met him.” Two men in black caps and mufflers then arrived, and the Swami greeted them with peals of laughter: “My countrymen! You have come to detect Rama. Rama opens his heart to you. The best thing in the world is to detect Rama. Detect him, find him, the world is under your feet.” They fell at his feet and confessed they were from the Criminal Investigation Department.

The stay with Swami Shiv Guna Acharya did not last; Puran Singh says the older monk wanted to use him to found a sect with princely money, and that he “quietly slipping away to Pushkar from Muttra” wrote to say he “wished to work on his own lines and not to think of Princes and wealth and missions at all”. At Muttra he sat on the sands of the Yamuna doing nothing, and when a boatload of Indian Christians came over for a picnic he asked Puran Singh to arrange a talk: “Rama thanks Christianity for having elevated you. What Hindus could not do for you, the Christians have done. Your elevation to a social dignity and your happy looks delight Rama. Rama belongs to you. You are Rama’s.”

At Pushkar, in the Kishangarh state house on the lake, he had reduced his possessions to a hollow bamboo. “You have not seen this bamboo piece. It is wonderful, it is Rama’s magic wand to drive the alligators away, it is Rama’s portmanteau for keeping his pencils and papers (and here he showed me many such things safely lodged in the hollow), and this is Rama’s everything. Rama has reduced his physical wants to this” — and he laughed, and added, “One becomes a veritable king, when his travelling kit is reduced to this and his wants confined to the narrow space of its hollow”. He slept on the roof: “Rama dislikes rooms, they look like graves”. He took his young friends tramping over the Pushkar hill every evening and would not let them stop chanting Om; he bathed in the crocodile-haunted lake with the bamboo floating ahead of him; and at night he read the Urdu poet Nazir by an earthen lamp and laughed. He told them the old Pushkar story of the grass-cutter of no caste whose blood ran green with grass because he was so lost in God, and without whom the great sacrifice of the gods could not be completed, and ended it, as he ended every such story, “This is Vedanta‘ Swami Rama ended. After relating any beautiful story of self-realisation, he would say, ’This is Vedanta.”

One rule of his company should be recorded, because it is an Advaita discipline as much as a courtesy. “He did not permit any one to speak to him against any one.” When the talk drifted into criticism of some public man, “he would chant OM and say, ‘The temple bell has gone. Hush! No personal criticism’. And make us repeat OM again.” Later, at Vasishtha Ashram, when Swami Narayan defended himself — “No, Swamiji, I am not criticising him. I am only studying the psychology of his mind” — the whole hut laughed for a long while.

“India, mother India, must be free”

The patriotism needs a section, because it is real, because it got him watched by the police, and because his closest friend thought it was a mistake. The evidence is not in doubt. In America he spoke for India as well as for Vedanta; Buffalo remembered “strong appeals on behalf of India”; the Denver paper thought his mission was to break the caste system. At Muttra his first words to Puran Singh were about the country’s freedom. At Vasishtha Ashram a letter reached him that the police suspected him of sedition, and his reply is the whole man: “Tell them I do not defend myself. They may treat me as they like. I cannot be other than what I am. I wish as an Indian that my country should be free. Free it shall be one day, but whether this Rama secures its freedom or a thousand other Ramas, no one knows”. The Tribune quotes his conviction that “the future religion of educated India must be Practical Vedanta or renunciation through love in Action... Vedanta printed in books and placed in shelves to be eaten by the worms wont do”. Puran Singh records that after a retreat in the Darjeeling forests he said that in the deepest samādhi “came the Sankalpa — ‘Let India be free — India shall be free’”.

Puran Singh’s judgement is severe and should be read as his. He believed the Tilak school of nationalists had drawn a mystic into a field that ill became him: “As he was unworldly by temperament and by inspiration, certainly he was the last person to be used as a tool for petty political ends.” He reports the Swami saying that his secretary in San Francisco “goaded Rama to do something for India”, and concludes that the “Appeal to Americans” “and his adding India to his programme of work in America is the weakest thing he ever attempted, it was an after thought and certainly not his own.” He also notes that when Americans wanted him to lead their organisation he “washed his hands clean by refusing to take up the working of the financial side, refusing to touch any gold, and the scheme had to fall through”.

Two things can be said from the Advaita side without taking Puran Singh’s view or rejecting it. The first is that a love of one’s country is not, in this tradition, a fault; Swami Vivekananda, whom he arranged the lectures for, made it a religion, and the Bhagavad-gītā’s teaching of action without attachment was read by Tilak, by Sri Aurobindo and by him as a national duty. The second is that a man who said “Rama’s head must go” and meant it, and who would not touch money for the cause, was practising the self-sacrifice he preached at Tokyo, not abandoning it. Whether it cost him his joy is Puran Singh’s question, and it is taken up in its place. His own tradition does not treat it as a fault: the Pratisthan’s page of tributes quotes Swami Shraddhanand, the Arya Samaj reformer, as saying “Swami Rama Tirtha is a spirit of actual liberation from material control. He is free as air.” and Vinoba Bhave as saying that he “symbolized Indian spirit”.

Lucknow, and the plains

Between the forest years he came down to lecture, and when he did, his base was Lucknow. The Pratisthan’s note explains why its institute is there: “The Institution was established at Lucknow, because Swami Rama, whenever he came down to the plains, chose to make Lucknow his usual Headquarters and stayed with Rai Bahadur Ganga Prasad Varma, the editor of ^^Advocate^\ who, being a very great devotee of Rama, would not let him” stay anywhere else. “It was from Lucknow that Swami Rama visited, from time to time, various places in U. P., like Faizabad, Allahabad, Varanasi, Ghazipur, Balrampur, Agra, Mathura etc.” The letters of 1905 place him at Pushkar in February, Jaipur in March, and in the hills in July and August; the plan to go to Kashmir was dropped. Swami Sivananda summarises the period: “On his return to India, Swami Rama continued to lecture in the plains, but his health began to break down. He went back to the Himalayas and settled at Vasishtha Ashram.”

It was at Allahabad and Benares that the thing happened which, in Puran Singh’s telling, changed the last two years. “Swami Rama while lecturing on his Vedanta at Allahabad and Benares was cut to the quick by the challenge of the Sanskrit Pandits of these places, that without being a Pandit of Sanskrit, how dared he preach the Philosophy of Vedanta?” The mathematician who had done all thirteen problems answered in character: “The poet in him was bitten, the student in him rose supreme in reply and determined that he would now know by sheer dint of hard labour, every one of the Vedic Mantrams, and he would go through the Sanskrit literature on Vedanta according to the orthodox system. And so he did.”

Beas Ashram: the beard of Vyāsa

He chose a plateau on the far bank of the Ganga above Rishikesh, on the pilgrim road to Badrinath, called Beas Ashram after the sage Vyāsa, and lived there about a year, growing a beard — “Rama has got the beard of Vyasa”, he told visitors. “Here he began the systematic study of Sanskrit Grammar and literature including Shankara’s Bhashya and the Vedas.” Puran Singh wrote to protest that his critics were not worth it, and got the reply: “Rama has a lot of energy left and why not spend it in learning Sanskrit.” The pandits who met him afterwards, Puran Singh admits, “saw the miraculous change, he was a scholar imbued with the orthodox spirit of traditional interpretations of Vedas, combined with his acquaintance with the methods of Western criticism and research”.

What he concluded about reading the Veda is worth having, because it is a position on scripture that an Advaita reader will recognise from Śaṅkara himself: the text means what it traditionally means, and one’s own experience of it is a separate thing. “Every one has the right to interpret for himself anything as he likes. For example, Rama takes the wine of Hafiz to mean divine intoxication and, taking it in this way, Rama enjoys the divine wine of Hafiz in his own way. But he has no right to give this meaning to the word used. Similarly, no one has any right to depart from the traditional meanings of the Vedic Sanskrit.” Puran Singh adds that “Swami Rama considered Sayanacharya to be the sole guide to the Vedas”, that he “admired the method of the European scholars”, and that he laughed at the fashion of proving the Vedas to be textbooks of modern science. He planned a book of the Veda’s finest hymns “giving all the beautiful pieces both with the traditional meanings and with Rama’s own interpretations”. It was never written.

Puran Singh’s verdict on the whole enterprise is the most contested sentence in his book, and it is given here because the page has promised to report him honestly: “But this study of Sanskrit killed Swami Rama, it benumbed his gay bird-like spirit, it made a poet into a moody philosopher.” He believed the doctrine of māyā, taken up in earnest, “had sapped the foundations of that living joy in him”. An Advaita reader is entitled to disagree: Śaṅkara’s teaching that the world is appearance is not a pessimism, and the teachers on this site who lived longest in it — Sri Ramana, Swami Nikhilananda, Sri Satchidānandendra — were not sad men. But Puran Singh knew him and we do not, and what he saw at Vasishtha Ashram is described next.

The passage about Hafiz is printed by Puran Singh with the punctuation of the scan slightly disordered; the stray marks have been removed and no word changed.

Vasishtha Ashram: “I am now in my roots”

From Beas Ashram he moved higher, to Vasishtha Ashram in the Tehri hills near a place Puran Singh calls Vashoon, where the hill-men built him a hut in a day, brought him milk and fruit, and told his visitor, “Swami is a Deo (God) — not a man.” Puran Singh brought him a duplicating machine and found him writing articles, and found him changed: “HE was now quite changed; that hilarity had gone! — that bursting, bubbling flow of cheerfulness had sunk deep!” He would slip on the paths and say, “Ah! Rama had just forgotten his Beloved, so he has fallen, otherwise there can be no fall. We slip first within and then we fall without. The outward fall is only contingent. Always take care within. Not a breath to pass without the Beloved. Fill your breath with Him.” In the evenings “he would burst forth singing and clapping his hands and dancing. He looked a veritable Vaishnava”.

Puran Singh asked him straight out why he was sad, and the answer is the best thing he ever said about silence: “The world is concerned only with my blossoms, and they taste me when I appear before them in my flowers. But they do not know, how much I have to labour underground, in the dark recesses, in my roots that gather the food for the flowers and the fruits. I am now in my roots. Silence is greater work, than the fire-works of preaching and giving off our thoughts to the world. It is the silence of Gaurpada and Gobind Acharya, that was at the back of the brilliant success of Shankara Acharya.” Gauḍapāda and Govinda were Śaṅkara’s teacher’s teacher and teacher, both of them silent men; the site has pages on both. He was placing himself, deliberately, in the line of those who are not heard.

He would say, Puran Singh reports, “Who says there is a world? It never was, never is, and never shall be.” and in the same breath, “You people come and make Rama believe in you as realities and forget Him. All relations are means of forgetting the Lord.” He could no longer read: “the book would drop from his hands, tears would roll down from his eyes and a few sweet sad words come out and say ‘Rama cannot read any more’. Was it self-exhaustion or deeper self-absorption?” Swami Narayan thought it was dyspepsia and the wrong food, and argued with him about it until he was asked to live apart. In the preface to the collected works Puran Singh gives the Swami’s own name for the state: “When questioned, he would expound to us the secrets of his state of consciousness, this supreme silence he called then by the name of Death-in-Life. He would tell us, the more one dies in Life, the greater is the good that naturally and spontaneously comes out of such a man for the benefit of others.” And his reason for not writing his book: “Rama may not seem to finish the task in hand, but Rama knows it will sometime be done all the better when he is gone. The ideas that saturate Rama’s mind and have guided Rama’s life, will gradually in the fullness of time filter down to society and can work their destiny properly when Rama loses himself now in the Divine, foregoing all plans, wishes and aims.”

The farewell is told as Puran Singh lived it. On the morning he left, the Swami asked to be bathed. “I took his cocoanut bowl and his towel and followed him to the stream. He was very reluctant to do anything himself. I took off his clothes and made him bare. He got into the stream and I bathed him with my own hands.” Then: “Wherever you go, live in the Golden Land, in the inner light. Carry on the work that Rama has begun, for the time has come for Rama to take the vow of silence — maun ho jayega”. Puran Singh joked that he would come back and tickle him into speaking. “His eyes grew red and he became quite serious and said, ‘Who can make the silent one speak again’.” He walked his friend a long way down the hill in the drizzle, in a loin-cloth, and then “suddenly and speedily ran back up the hill without casting back even a look, snapping so to say, with the suddenness all his own, all personal ties with me”. A month later he gave Swami Narayan the same message and the same farewell. “Swami Narayan never saw him again. Nor did I. Both these farewells were the farewells of his approaching death.”

Dewali, 17 October 1906

He came down to Tehri and was given Simlasu, a house of the Raja’s above the Bhilangana, the river that joins the Bhagirathi at Tehri; Puran Singh calls it the Billing Ganga. He had asked Swami Narayan to have a hut built for him on the Ganga and sent him away to supervise it. He was writing articles for the press; the last was called “The stamped deed of the progress (of men and nations),” and its last paragraph was in pencil. He had hurt his knee some days earlier, jumping into the current from a rock after swimming across, and had been bathing with water carried up. Puran Singh, from Swami Narayan’s account: “On the Dewali day, he again thought of bathing in the river. The last para in pencil was written and laid aside and he went down. He never came up, for he went into the river in breast-deep waters, and as was his wont, closing his nostrils with his fingers, he plunged under the surface of the waters. It seems he lost his foothold. Weak and exhausted physically as he was, by his abstinence from solid food for months and by the painful knee, he could not swim up nor hold his own, especially as he got into a whirl of waters there under the surface. It was after some time that he rose to the surface, and he was seen putting out a little struggle, but it was soon over. His body floated down the river”.

The pencilled paragraph, in Puran Singh’s translation from the Urdu: “O Death! Take away this body if you please! I care not. I have enough of bodies to use. I can wear those silver threads, the beams of the moon, and I live. I can roam as a divine minstrel putting on the guise hilly streams and mountain brooks. I can dance in the waves of the sea. I am the breeze that proudly walks and I am the wind inebriated. All these shapes of mine are wandering shapes of change. I came down from yonder hills, raised the dead, awakened the sleeping, unveiled the fair faces of some and wiped the tears of a few weeping ones. The bulbul and the rose both I saw and I comforted them. I touched this, I touched that, I doff my hat and off I am. Here I go and there I go, none can find me.”

He was thirty-three, and it was Dewali, nine years to the festival after the letter to his father. The Pratisthan’s note: “On the 17th October 1906, on the Dipawali day, while taking bath in the Bhilang-ganga, below the Simlasu palace of the Maharajah of Tehri, Swami Rama Tirtha’s mortal body was swept away in the current of the swift flowing hilly river and disappeared in the nearby whirlpool.” The Punjab poet Iqbal wrote a dirge; the Tribune quotes its image of him as “a precious jewel, a restless crystal drop who has merged with the mother stream”.

The pencilled paragraph is given in Puran Singh’s own translation, exactly as he prints it. The Bhilangana is called the “Billing Ganga” by Puran Singh and the “Bhilang-ganga” by the Pratisthan; it meets the Bhagirathi, the Ganga’s headstream, at Tehri, and every source calls the water he died in the Ganga.

Two accounts of a death

The reader should know that his death is described in two ways by people who honour him equally, and this page will not choose between them. His tradition says that he gave up his body. Swami Sivananda: “He gave up his body in the Ganges on 17 October, 1906, when he was only thirty-three.” The Pratisthan: “Swami Rama Tirtha attained Mahasamadhi on 17th October 1906 — the day of Deepawali — merging into the ocean of Infinite Consciousness at the young age of 33, by the sacred banks of the Ganga at Tehri, Uttarakhand.” The Tribune: “In 1906, he laid himself to rest in the cold, gurgling waters of the Ganga at Tehri.” His nephew Sri Poonja, as a boy, knew him as “a Hindu saint who went into se­clusion in the Himalayas in his twenties and who died there when he was only thirty-four”.

Puran Singh, who had the story from the one disciple in a position to know, describes an accident, and refuses to make it a prophecy: “I don’t think now, as I thought then, that in this paragraph he was forecasting in any sense his own death. He was writing an article in his own style. But it is remarkable that he should think of death; he thought of it and there he died!” He goes further, and says that the drowning “cannot be dissociated from the pessimistic system of thought he had begun to harbour” — that is, from the depression he believed the Sanskrit years had brought on. That is one man’s opinion about another man’s inner life, and it is reported as such.

From the Advaita standpoint there is less between these accounts than there seems. The tradition does not hold that a realised person chooses the manner of the body’s end, or that a slip in a river says anything about the Self; Sri Ramana died of cancer, Śaṅkara young, Swami Vivekananda at thirty-nine of a body worn out. What mahāsamādhi means, in the strict sense his tradition uses it, is that there was, by then, no one left in that body to die: he had said as much in the pencilled paragraph and in the poem printed at the front of his works, “I have no scruple of change, nor fear of death. Nor was I ever born.” Whether the foot slipped is a question about a knee and a current. The reader who wants the fact should hold both accounts and notice that they do not actually contradict each other: a man weak from fasting lost his footing in the Ganga on Dewali, and the man had already said that he could not be found there.

“Rama” in the third person

Everyone who met him noticed that he did not say “I.” He said “Rama,” as a man might speak of the weather, and the habit was not a mannerism but the whole teaching in a pronoun. The little self that says “I want,” “I fear,” “I am tired,” is the thing Advaita denies; the one who watches Rama walk and fall and laugh is what remains. Puran Singh collected his word-games, and they are worth having together, because a reader who has only the solemn lectures misses the man. He explained the name-change as an inversion of the order of life; then “Later on, he deleted playfully the little ‘i’ out of the last word, and began signing himself as ‘Rama Truth’.” “He gave his whole thought to mental healing, when he said ‘Disease is only dis-ease’. Be at ease with your God, with yourself and be whole, holy, and you cannot have any dis-ease. He changed atonement and always wrote and pronounced it as at-onement. He said understanding is standing under, diving deep into your own Real Self.”

The title Swami, which means Lord and “carries in it the sense of superiority over others”, he spelt “So-am-I” — whatever you are, so am I — and signed his letters “So-am-I Rama Truth”. His mantra he explained the same way: “OM, he would say, is O’am; O is the Persian word which means He, M stands for I am— He I am, or "I am God”. “He once said that God is neither Mr. nor Mrs. nor Miss but mystery.” He “always addressed his audience as ‘My own self in the form of Ladies and Gentlemen’”. He called himself Rama Badshah, King Rama, and at Port Said, offered a passage home on the same ship as the Viceroy, he refused: “Two kings cannot travel in the same boat.” When Puran Singh introduced a Punjab graduate named Khudadad — “God-given” — he said, “Rama does not understand your name. Khuda (God), Dad (Given), it ought to have been only Khuda, God.” The graduate answered, “For those who have eyes this, for others that.” — and was delighted him for the rest of the day.

Behind the play is the plainest statement of Advaita he ever made, the poem the Pratisthan prints at the front of his works under the title “I Am That”: “I have no scruple of change, nor fear of death. Nor was I ever born. Nor had I parents. I am Existence Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, Bliss Absolute, I am That, I am That,” The Sanskrit behind it is sat-cit-ānanda, and the Upaniṣad behind that is the Chāndogya’s tat tvam asi; but he had learned it first, he said, from a Persian couplet and a coppersmith.

The poem “I Am That” is printed in full on page 24 of the Pratisthan’s edition of In Woods of God-Realization, volume one, linked at the foot of the page. The quotation above gives its opening lines.

What he taught

He called it Practical Vedanta, and he meant two things by the adjective. The first is that Advaita is to be lived, not stored: “Vedanta printed in books and placed in shelves to be eaten by the worms wont do”. The second is that it can be tested in the ordinary business of life, and that the test is joy. The Denver statement is the shortest form: “The object of this philosophy is to regulate the conduct of the present life. It has a plain, practical bearing upon the things of today.” The three sayings the Pratisthan puts on its front page are its summary of him: “When shall I be free? When ‘I’ shall cease to be.” “Deny little self: Assert Real Self; And you are liberated.” “Have more regard for TRUTH than any thing else. TRUTH belongs to none, everybody and everything belongs to IT.”

The method is the lamp’s. The little self is the wick and oil; it is consumed in work, in love, in attention to anything other than itself, and what it leaves is light. “Forget your little self in work and entirely throw yourself into it; you will succeed.” That is why he could speak to commerce students, to the women’s club of Portland, to Egyptians in a mosque and to hill-men who took him for a god, and say the same thing: whatever you are doing, do it so completely that no one is left doing it. The Advaita teacher will recognise karma-yoga as the Gītā teaches it and as Śaṅkara accepts it — a purification, not a substitute for knowledge; but he did not separate the two, and did not think a man who had truly lost himself in his work was far from knowing what he was.

He was not sentimental about the last step, and his deepest sayings are as uncompromising as anything in Gauḍapāda. “Who says there is a world? It never was, never is, and never shall be.” “All relations are means of forgetting the Lord.” The reconciliation of these with Practical Vedanta is his own: the world is not to be fled but to be seen through, and the man who has seen through it works harder than anyone, because nothing is at stake for him. “Hell and Heaven live under the same roof, nay under the same skin”, he told Puran Singh; the attitude of the seer decides which is seen. And what he asked of his own words was the test he asked of everything: the Pratisthan quotes him, “Have more regard for Truth, than anything else. If the words of Rama do not stand the test — do not stand the scrutiny — do not accept them.”

On method in the narrow sense — how a person is actually to do this — he taught the repetition of Om, out loud, in company, on the march; he taught it to the Pushkar boys and would not let them stop, and he taught it to himself, “the bird-like warbling of OM, OM” that Puran Singh heard the first evening. He taught what he called simrin, the ceaseless remembrance of the Beloved, and treated a slip on a hill path as a lapse in it. And he taught by cheerfulness, which he regarded as a discipline and not a temperament: “Rama loved his solitude.” “He would laugh and laugh for minutes together in his informal talks, in reply to some philosophical and theological questions, and say nothing in reply, as if saying that this beaming, bubbling personality was enough reply to all the pretentious enquiries about man and God.”

The lamp passage and the three principles of success are from the Tokyo lecture of October 1902, printed in Puran Singh’s chapter XI and in In Woods of God-Realization, volume one. The Denver statement is from the Rocky Mountain News of 4 January 1904, printed in chapter XII.

Other faiths, from the Advaita standpoint

This site holds, as he did, that Advaita belittles no one, and his life is one of its best demonstrations. He was taught his letters by a Muslim schoolmaster and “revered his Moslem village teacher like a devoted pupil”. His first scripture was Persian poetry, and he took “the wine of Hafiz to mean divine intoxication” while insisting that this was his own reading and not the poet’s meaning. He read the Christian Bible daily in youth, was educated at a Christian college, and told a boatload of Indian Christians at Muttra that “Rama thanks Christianity for having elevated you.” He preached in Persian in a mosque in Egypt. He admired a Bahá’í for punctuating his speech “not with commas and colons and semi-colons, but with the Name of His Beloved — Baha! Baha! Baha!” And he told Denver, “My religion is not Hinduism,… Christianity, Catholicism, or Protestantism, but it is antagonistic to none.”

The Advaita ground of this is not that all religions are the same, which he did not say, but that the Self they address is one, and that a man who has found it in himself cannot fail to recognise it in another’s devotion. His “Common Path” — “I label none, brand none, possess none, but serve all like light and sun.” — is Śaṅkara’s position stated for a Denver church: the Absolute is not a Hindu, and the paths that lead a person to forget the little self are honoured by the tradition whatever name is on the door. Where he differed from other schools he said so plainly — the Muttra report noted that he was “far more outspoken in expressing his opinions” than his gentleness suggested — but he never made a religion his opponent. The reader who wants to see how this site treats the other Vedāntic schools, which he studied at Beas Ashram from their own texts, will find that page on the same principle.

The difficulties, honestly

A page that quoted only his admirers would not be worthy of a man who said, “If the words of Rama do not stand the test — do not stand the scrutiny — do not accept them.” There are four things a reader should weigh.

The first is the family. He was married as a child, had two sons, and left them, and Puran Singh — who saw what it cost — tells one scene that his tradition does not. At Hardwar in 1905, when the Swami was recovering from fever after his return from America, “his wife and his step-mother and his little son hardly of about six years of age came from the Punjab at great personal expense to have his Darshanam”. Puran Singh explains that “The whole family was not very well off, as their ablest wage earner had cut himself off from them”, and that they had spent their spare money on the journey. He carried the news in. “Please take them to the Railway Station and get them a return ticket to the Punjab, Let them have their bath in my Ganges and let them return. They cannot see me.” Puran Singh lost his temper — “If you cannot see them, it is cruel.” — and had half opened the door to leave for good when “the Swami laughed heartily and called me back and said: "All right! Let them come in.” The child asked to recite his lessons and was given a bunch of grapes; “Swami’s wife stood all the while looking at him and speechless. Not a word passed between them.” Puran Singh’s comment is his own and is given as such: “I thought how tragic is the association of little minds with the great, and how the relations of one with the other end in pathetic separations while both live breathing the same air and seeing the same sun.” This site records the scene because it is true, and because the man had said at Tokyo that he renounced his family “Only to seek a larger one”; the reader may hold both. A year later, on the hill at Vasishtha Ashram, he told Puran Singh that “Rama never knew that this ochre garb is no more the symbol of freedom in this country.” and had, in fact, laid the orange robe aside for a grey blanket and a turban.

The second is what Puran Singh calls his sadness. The joy of Tokyo and Shasta is on every page of the early record, and the man of Vasishtha Ashram who said “Rama cannot read any more” is not the same man. Puran Singh blames the Sanskrit years and the doctrine of illusion; the Swami himself said “I am now in my roots” and called the state Death-in-Life. The reader has both accounts above and must weigh them. What can be said with confidence is that he was fasting, injured and alone in the last months, and that his friend, who loved him and saw him last, believed the depression was real and unrecognised. That is a caution to every seeker who confuses withdrawal with attainment, and his tradition would not disagree with the caution.

The third is politics, treated above: his own words leave no doubt that he wished India free and said so from an ashram under police watch, and his friend’s judgement that this was “certainly not his own” is one man’s opinion. The fourth is the caste system. In America he attacked it, and the Denver and Buffalo reports say so; Puran Singh regarded these lectures as the weakest thing he did, not because they were wrong but because they were borrowed. Some of the statements he made abroad about Indian society were made to American audiences in the language of 1903, and a reader who finds them today in the collected works should read them as a patriot’s appeal in a foreign country, not as the teaching.

One more thing belongs here because his admirers usually omit it. Puran Singh believed that the renunciation itself was hurried, and says so in his first chapter: “it was certainly a step taken as the result of an extraneous impulse, rather than the immediate outcome of his own normal inward mental or spiritual advancement”. He is thinking of Swami Vivekananda’s visit and Sri Madhava Tirtha’s. The Pratisthan quotes Swami Vivekananda as saying “Tirtha Rama… you are to become a Torch-bearer of ‘Advait Vedanta’ (Non-Dualism).” Both may be true. A man may be pushed and still go where he was going.

Legacy

He founded nothing, refused to found anything — “Rama lays no claim on any mission. All the missions are His. Why to add one more. Only realize Truth and that you are to do by yourself.” — and left no book he had finished. What exists is the work of three men. Swami Narayana, the disciple who followed him from Lahore to Japan and to the last hut, spent the rest of his life collecting and printing what survived, and founded the Rama Tirtha Publication League at Lucknow, “founded at Lucknow in 1919 and registered in 1920” according to the Pratisthan’s own note, though its website gives both 1920 and 1923. It is now the Swami Rama Tirtha Pratisthan at 9 Vishnupuri, Aliganj, Lucknow, and it publishes the seven volumes of In Woods of God-Realization and the Urdu and Hindi works. Puran Singh (1881–1931), who became the Punjab’s great essayist and poet, gave the collected works their name, wrote their preface, and in 1924 wrote the biography from which most of this page is drawn; his own writing never lost the sound of the man he met in Tokyo. Master Amir Chand of Delhi paid for the first volumes with everything he had.

The tradition continued in the hills. The Swami Ramtirth Mission at Rajpur, above Dehradun, says on its own pages that it was founded in 1948 by Swami Hari Om, and it runs a school and hospital and holds an annual Vedanta gathering named for his village. C. F. Andrews, the Christian missionary who befriended Gandhi and Tagore, wrote the introduction to his public writings; the Tribune quotes him in 1909 promising “to do all in my power to preserve the memory of Swami Ram fresh and green”, and Puran Singh quotes his judgement that “A vein of true poetry ran through his character, and his buoyant joyfulness of disposition carried him through the severest hardships and privations.” The Pratisthan’s page of tributes gathers what later India said of him: Mahatma Gandhi, that he “was one of the greatest souls, not only of India, but of the whole world”; Sri Ramana Maharshi, that he “represents True Atman”; Swami Sivananda, that he “lived Practical Vedanta. He is Soul Incarnate.” These are given as the Pratisthan gives them, without their original sources, and the reader should take them as tributes and not as documents.

And there is the nephew. In the Punjab, a generation later, a boy went to a lending library and tried to borrow a book about him. “I had a special reason for borrowing this book: he was my mother’s elder brother, so I naturally wanted to find out more about him.” The librarian refused — “This well-meaning librarian probably thought that I was taking my religion too seriously, and that I might end up like my uncle.” — and the boy did end up, in his way, like his uncle: he was Sri H. W. L. Poonja, whose page on this site is the one before this. Sri Poonja’s mother, the Swami’s sister, was a Kṛṣṇa devotee whose sādhanā shaped her son’s childhood; the family devotion that produced the boy of Muraliwala produced, two generations on, the man of Lucknow. The two teachers never met — one died four years before the other was born — but the line from the Ravi at Lahore to the Gomti at Lucknow runs through the same house.

For the seeker

Read him for the joy first, and let the metaphysics come after; that was his own order. The Tokyo lecture “The Secret of Success” is the right beginning, because it asks nothing of the reader but attention to a lamp, and the Himalayan letters of 1901 come next, because they show what the joy looked like when no one was watching. The lectures in the first volume of the collected works are the teaching proper; read them knowing that he never revised them and that the stenographers were American. Puran Singh’s biography should be read whole, including the chapters its author calls “His Sadness” and “Swami Rama and Politics,” because a teacher is best learned from a friend who did not agree with everything.

Two cautions, in his spirit. The first is his own: “If the words of Rama do not stand the test — do not stand the scrutiny — do not accept them.” He was a mathematician who would not skip a problem, and he did not want disciples who skipped the test. The second is Puran Singh’s, and it is about the end: the withdrawal into silence and fasting that his tradition honours as Death-in-Life was seen by the one friend who watched it as an illness no one diagnosed. Both may be right; a seeker who is drawn to solitude should hold both. What is not in doubt is what the hill-men of Vashoon saw, what the Tokyo students saw, what the tram-car passengers in the Ginza heard from a young man singing Om against the window: a person for whom the little self had, for long stretches, simply stopped mattering. “Rama in himself is a whole Parliament of Religions.”

A note on pictures, names and dates

The photograph at the top of this page is a genuine photograph of Swami Rama Tirtha: it shows the shaven-headed, bare-chested seated figure that the Pratisthan itself reproduces on its website, and the same face as the portrait on the older Pratisthan site, and it is in the public domain by age. His pre-monastic name is written Tirtha Rama, Tirath Ram and Tirtha Ram Goswami in the sources; the village is Muraliwala in Puran Singh and Murariwala in the Pratisthan, the Tribune and the Dehradun mission, and the Swami himself, in a letter of 12 February 1893, proposed to make it Murariwala. His guru is Dhanna Mai in Puran Singh, Bhakta Dhana Rama in Swami Sivananda, and Bhagat Dhanna Ram, a coppersmith, in the Tribune. His parents are named by the Dehradun mission as Pandit Hiralal and Nihal Dei. His disciple is Narayan, Narayana and Narayan Swami in different sources, and signs himself Swami Narayana in the collected works.

The dates disagree more than a reader might expect for a man who died in 1906, and the page has reported each disagreement where it arises. In summary: his mother died when he was “a few days old” (Puran Singh) or “hardly a year old” (the Tribune); he was married “quite a small boy” (Puran Singh) or at ten (Swami Sivananda and the Tribune); he left Lahore in July 1900 (Puran Singh) and became a renunciant in 1899 (Pratisthan timeline) or 1900 (Swami Sivananda, Tribune); he took the robe early in 1901 (Puran Singh) or a few days before Swami Vivekananda’s passing in July 1902 (Swami Sivananda); he was in Japan and America from 1902 to 1904 (Puran Singh and the collected works) or 1901–04 (Pratisthan timeline); he returned on 8 December 1904 (Puran Singh, chapter X) or in 1905 (Puran Singh, chapter I). The Publication League was founded in 1919 and registered in 1920 (the Pratisthan’s note in the collected works), or established in 1920 or 1923 (its website). He died at thirty-three by every source but one; his nephew Sri Poonja remembered him as “only thirty-four”. The river was the Bhilangana at Tehri, called the Billing Ganga by Puran Singh and the Bhilang-ganga by the Pratisthan; an earlier version of this site’s summary said the Bhagirathi, into which the Bhilangana flows a few hundred yards below, and that has been corrected. Where this page has had to choose a date for the sake of narrative it has followed Puran Singh and said so; where it has not had to choose it has not.

Timeline

• 22 October 1873 — Born Tirtha Rama at Muraliwala (Murariwala), Gujranwala district, Punjab, the day after Deepawali; his mother dies within days.
• c. 1883–91 — Village school under a Muslim teacher; Gujranwala Mission School; meets Dhanna Mai; married as a boy.
• 1891–95 — Forman Christian College and Government College, Lahore, on a scholarship of five rupees; B.A. 1893, top of the Punjab in mathematics; M.A. 1895.
• 1895–1900 — Teaches at Sialkot, then Professor of Mathematics at Forman Christian College (1896); founds the Alif magazine; the “Today is Dewali” letter (1897).
• November 1897 — Receives Swami Vivekananda at Lahore and arranges his lectures; meets Sri Madhava Tirtha of Dwarka the same year.
• July 1900 — Leaves Lahore for the Himalayas with his wife, sons and disciple Narayan; Tehri Garhwal.
• 1901 — Takes the orange robe as Rama Tirtha (early 1901 per Puran Singh; July 1902 per Swami Sivananda); walks 600 miles to Gangotri, Jamnotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath (August–September); presides at Muttra (December).
• September–October 1902 — Japan; meets Puran Singh in Tokyo; “The Secret of Success” (7 October).
• 1902–04 — United States: San Francisco, Shasta, Portland, Denver (January 1904), Chicago, Minneapolis, Buffalo, St Louis World’s Fair, Jacksonville; throws the boxes of his lectures into the sea.
• 8 December 1904 — Returns to India by way of Egypt; Muttra, Pushkar (February 1905), Jaipur, Lucknow.
• 1905–06 — Beas Ashram above Rishikesh: two years of Sanskrit and the Vedas; then Vasishtha Ashram in the Tehri hills; police enquiry; farewells to Puran Singh and Swami Narayan.
• 17 October 1906 — Dewali. Drowns in the Bhilangana below Simlasu, Tehri, aged thirty-three.
• 1909–10 — First volumes of In Woods of God-Realization published at Delhi with Amir Chand’s money; C. F. Andrews’s introduction (1909).
• 1919–20 — Rama Tirtha Publication League founded and registered at Lucknow by Swami Narayana (its website says 1920; its footer says 1923).
• 1924 — Puran Singh publishes The Story of Swami Rama.
• 1948 — Swami Ramtirth Mission founded at Rajpur, Dehradun, by Swami Hari Om, according to its own site.