Sri Sadāśiva Brahmendra

The man

Of all the teachers on this site, Sri Sadāśiva Brahmendra is the one who said least and is sung most. He took a vow of silence as a young man and, the tradition holds, kept it for the rest of a very long life. He wrote a handful of short Sanskrit works and perhaps two dozen songs. He held no seat, founded no monastery, trained no line of pupils that anyone can name. And yet three centuries after he walked into a pit of his own choosing on the bank of the Kāverī at Nerur, his songs are sung in concert halls across South India, his shrine is maintained by a maṭha three hundred miles away, and a Jagadguru of Sringeri could say of him, in 2012, that “Sri Sadasiva Brahmendra is a perfect example of a Mahayogi and a Maha Vedantin. He led his life in such a way that it was astonishing that such an ideal could be seen even in this Kali Yuga.”

The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha’s volume on the preceptors of Advaita opens its chapter on him with the sentence that fixes his place: “Sadasiva Brahmendra Sarasvati, the mahayogin and jivan-mukta, became a legend in his own lifetime.” A legend in his own lifetime is a difficult thing for a page like this to handle honestly, and the chapter says why in the next breath: “Many miraculous tales are told about him, but few concrete facts are known.” The oldest English life of him, printed in 1909 at the front of the first edition of his commentary on the Brahma-sūtra, is franker still: “For the details of his life we have to draw mainly upon tradition, but there is every reason to believe that much of it is very reliable.”

This page holds both halves of that sentence. It tells the traditional life fully, story by story, because it is the only life there is and because the tradition that tells it — the Kanchi and Sringeri seats, the court of Pudukkottai, the villagers of Nerur — is a living one with records of its own. It also marks, at every point, what is record and what is story. He is an unusual case for this site: a teacher whose life is nearly all legend but whose books are entirely real, printed, and freely readable. The books are the firm ground, and the page keeps returning to them. In them a man who would not speak explains, with great clarity, what the silence was for.

The sources for this page, and what each can bear

Eight kinds of document stand behind this page. They are of very unequal weight, and the reader should know which is speaking at each point.

• His own works. The Ātmavidyāvilāsa, sixty-two verses in the Āryā metre, in the Sanskrit (here given in Roman transliteration) and in the English translation of S. N. Sastri published on the Sanskrit Documents site; the kīrtanas, as printed with their rāgas on the same site; and, for the prose, the descriptions given by the two lives below, since the Brahmatattvaprakāśikā and the Yogasudhākara exist only in Sanskrit. The 1899 Kumbakonam printing of the Ātmavidyāvilāsa, the 1911 Śrīraṅgam printing of the Yogasudhākara, the 1927 Vāṇī Vilās printing of the Brahmatattvaprakāśikā and a Vāṇī Vilās printing of the Siddhāntakalpavallī are all scanned and linked at the foot of the page.
• The 1909 life by T. K. Balasubrahmanyam, printed as the preface to the Vāṇī Vilās Press edition of the Brahma-sūtra-vṛtti and reprinted in the 1927 edition. It is the fullest early telling of the stories, and its author says he owed several of them to the then Jagadguru of Sringeri. It is a scanned book, and the machine copy has been corrected as the closing note explains.
• The Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha’s Preceptors of Advaita (1968), chapter 49 on Sri Sadāśiva Brahmendra himself, chapter 47 on his guru Sri Paramaśivendra Sarasvatī, chapter 48 on his fellow-disciple Nallā Kavi, and the Pīṭha’s own table of its ācāryas. Chapter 49 is the best short study of his writings anywhere and is quoted at length.
• The Pudukkottai State Manual (volume I, 1938) and Gazetteer (volume II, part II, 1944), official publications of the princely state that recorded, as administration rather than devotion, the shrines, grants and charities the state kept in his name. These are the nearest thing to contemporary documents, and they are scanned and linked.
• The Sringeri Śāradā Pīṭham, on its own site: the page on its Nerur branch, the account of the 36th Jagadguru’s visit to Nerur, the report of the annual singing of his compositions, and the record of the Kannada notation book of his songs released in 2023. The Sri Vidyatirtha Foundation’s volumes on the 35th Jagadguru record two earlier visits to Nerur.
• The Karur district administration, whose tourism page describes the shrine as it is today.
• Later scholarship, used sparingly and cited by name where not free to link: the introductions to the modern editions of the Siddhāntakalpavallī and the Advaitarasamañjarī, which raise the questions of authorship discussed below.
• The living tradition of Carnatic music, in which his songs have a place no other Advaita teacher’s do, recorded here only where a maṭha or a public body has put it on paper.

Every quotation on the page is taken word for word from one of these, and each is linked at the foot of the page where it is free to link. Where the scanned books have been misread by the machine that copied them, the printed words have been restored and every restoration is recorded, as the closing note explains. Where the sources disagree — and on this life they disagree about his dates, his birthplace, and which of the works under his name are his — both accounts are given, and neither is quietly dropped.

Where the life was lived

His geography is a river. Every source that places him at all places him on the Kāverī or its tributaries, and the two ends of the life are two villages on its banks about a hundred and thirty miles apart. The beginning is in the Tanjore delta. The 1909 life says: “It was at Tiruvisanallur, a village in the Tanjore District, on the banks of the sacred stream Kaveri, embowered among groves of mangoes and cocoanuts, that Sadasiva’s student days were cast.” The Kanchi chapter sets his father a little west of there, in the scholars’ village a Maratha king of Tanjore founded and named after himself: “Many of them, including it is believed Sadasiva’s father, were settled in Sahajirajapuram, a royal grant for the encouragement of learning”. No source gives a birthplace, and the card for this page does not invent one.

The end is at Nerur, near Karur, where the Kāverī briefly runs south. The Karur district’s own page says the shrine “is located in a Oasis of cauvery river bank. Here Cauvery river running towards south is a very special feature.” The Sringeri Pīṭham gives the distance: “Nerur is located at a distance of 10 km from Karur and 323 km from Chennai.” Between the two ends lie the places of the wandering years: the banks of the Amarāvatī and the Kāverī in what was then Coimbatore district, the river-bed at Kodumudi where the flood story is set, and the forests near Tiruvaraṇgulam outside Pudukkottai where the ruler of that state found him. His guru’s seat was at Kanchipuram, and he is said to have returned there for the Guru-ratna-mālikā; the tradition also carries him, in its stories, to Madurai, Śrīraṅgam, Benares and further, but those journeys are the stuff of the legend and the map marks only what the written lives assert.

Two things should be said about this geography before the story is told. The first is that it is the geography of a river-country in a particular century. The Kanchi chapter describes it: “The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a great flowering of the spirit in the Tamil country, especially in the Tanjore region under the enlightened rule of the Nyak and Maharashtra dynasties.” Sri Sadāśiva was one of a cluster of saints and scholars — Sri Bodhendra Sarasvatī, Sri Śrīdhara Veṅkaṭeśa Ayyāvāḷ, Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita, Gopālakṛṣṇa Śāstrī — who lived within a few miles of one another along the same stretch of water. The second is that he left it. Everyone else in that cluster stayed in the delta, wrote, taught, and died at home. He walked upstream, out of the country of learning and into the country of the avadhūta, and the tradition remembers the leaving as the turning-point of the life.

The names: Sadāśivendra, Brahmendra, Brahmam

He is known by a name and several titles, and the differences are worth a moment. Sadāśivendra Sarasvatī is the monastic name, in the form the Kanchi order gives its sannyāsins: the ending -indra, “lord,” and the order-name Sarasvatī. It is the name on the title-pages of his books and the name under which the 1899 and 1927 printings catalogue him. His guru was Sri Paramaśivendra Sarasvatī, his guru’s guru Sri Sarvajña Sadāśiva Bodhendra, his fellow-disciple Sri Ātmabodhendra; the pattern is the pattern of a lineage.

Sadāśiva Brahmendra is the name the tradition prefers, and the 1909 life explains the shorter form in its opening line: “Sadasiva Brahman, as he is more familiarly known, was a great Sannyasin and was the last genuine representative of the school of Rajayogins that flourished in Southern India.” Brahmendra, “lord among knowers of Brahman,” and the Tamil Brahmam or Brahmendrāḷ are not monastic titles at all. They are what people called him, and they mark the difference between a member of an order and a saint. The Pudukkottai Manual, an administrative document, uses the popular name without ceremony when it lists “the several charities enjoined on the State by the Sage Sadasiva Brahmam”, and the Gazetteer calls the shrine at Nerur “the Adhistanam of Sri Sadasiva Brahmendra at Nerur”.

The Kanchi chapter uses Brahmendra when it speaks of his inner life and Sadāśiva when it speaks of his books, and this page follows it. One more title should be noted, because he gave it to himself. The colophon of the Ātmavidyāvilāsa and the salutation his fellow-disciple Nallā Kavi addressed to him both use the word avadhūta: Nallā Kavi bows, in the Kanchi chapter’s transcription, to “vande avadhūtamārgapravartakaṃ śrī sadāśivabrahma” — “I salute Sri Sadāśiva Brahma, who set going the path of the avadhūta.” The avadhūta is the renouncer who has shaken off even the forms of renunciation: no robe, no staff, no fixed dwelling, no speech. That is the name under which the songs and the stories know him.

The age he lived in: Tanjore under Śāhajī

The Kanchi chapter is careful to set him in a place and a time before it tells a single story, and the setting matters, because it explains why a man of his gifts became a silent wanderer rather than a court scholar. “Under the aegis of Sahaji (1684-1711) flourished a brilliant galaxy of poets and makers of music, scholars and thinkers who were noted alike for their personal purity and acuteness of intellect.” Śāhajī was the Maratha ruler of Tanjore, and the village he founded for scholars — Śāhajīrājapuram, now Tiruvisanallur — was a royal grant of houses and land to Brahmin families of learning, of whom, the chapter says, Sri Sadāśiva’s father is believed to have been one. “Great saints sojourned among them, providing the inspiration to the higher life. In Sadasiva, all the varied talent of that time of awakening seems to have met and blended harmoniously.”

The 1909 life names the company he kept there as a student, and it is an extraordinary list for one small village. There was Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita, “a scholar of no mean repute and the famous author of the drama the Janaki Parinaya”; there was the young Sri Śrīdhara Veṅkaṭeśa, “whose name under the more respected and familiar title of Ayyaval, is invoked even this day by hundreds of devotees in Southern India with grateful strains and uplifted hands”; and there was Gopālakṛṣṇa, “who came to be known as Mahabhashyam Gopalakrishna Sastri, so styled because of his learned commentary on the Patanjalis Mahabhashya and who was afterwards to become the spiritual preceptor of the Tondamans of Pudukota”. And, the life says, “there was Sadasiva, the subject of our sketch, a student yet, the most gifted of a gifted set, the most brilliant of a glorious band of students”.

The Kanchi chapter measures him against two of these: “His output as a poet and writer in the Vedantic tradition was slender. But he touched the imagination of the people in a unique way, only Bodhendra and Sridhara Venkatesa, affectionately known as ‘Ayyaval’, being comparable to him in this respect.” Sri Bodhendra, the fifty-ninth ācārya of the Kanchi seat, and Ayyāvāḷ were the great teachers of the nāma-siddhānta, the doctrine that the divine Name alone saves in this age; their shrines at Govindapuram and Tiruvisanallur are still places of pilgrimage. It was an age, the chapter says elsewhere, “of keen theological controversy”, when Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava argued sharply and when, as the chapter says, “Appayya Dikshita’s works had great influence in that age of intellectual ferment and vigorous polemic.” Sri Sadāśiva would take the whole of Appayya’s survey of Advaita and turn it into verse; he would also walk out of the controversy altogether.

The student at Tiruvisanallur

The 1909 life is the only source for his student days, and it presents them as tradition. “Sadasiva is represented to have been exceptionally smart and brilliant in his student days.” Two traits are recorded, and both will matter. The first is that he argued: “He is said to have been much given to arguing, to raise topics of discussion with his teacher who invariably seems to have come out only second best on these occasions.” The Kanchi chapter says the same in fewer words: “He mastered all the Sastras at an early age and was a formidable debater.” The second is that he was married young, in the way of his community, to a girl still a child, living with her own family in another village.

The turn came, in the 1909 telling, over a delayed meal. “Towards the close of his student life, news came that his young wife had come of age in a distant village and accordingly his happy mother was preparing a few extra dishes in honor of the occasion. When Sadasiva returned from his teacher’s quarters he found his dinner delayed an hour in consequence.” And, waiting, he thought:

“Married life has just shown the symptoms of dawning and I have already to pay for it with an hour’s fasting. This is but a prelude to the misery of the family life to come.”

“So he immediately made up his mind against the married state and accordingly went in search of a spiritual preceptor.” The life then describes the young man as the village saw him, before he had a teacher: “From this day he began to display an utter aversion to the so-called pleasures of the world and his heart melted for the suffering millions. His habits became cosmopolitan. He cared for neither caste nor creed. All were equal in his eyes. He would eat anything that was given him and that from the hand of any one without distinction.” “People did not understand the true Mahatma that was hidden behind his appearance and Sadasiva was to them only a crazy youth.”

Whether the meal happened as told, no one can say. What the story preserves is the tradition’s sense of the man: that the renunciation came early, came whole, and came from a temperament rather than a tragedy. There is no bereavement, no vision, no crisis in this account — only a quick mind reasoning from an hour’s hunger to the whole of household life, and acting on the conclusion the same day. It is the same quickness that made him a feared debater, and the same quickness that, a few years later, a rebuke from his guru would turn into a lifetime of silence.

When he lived: the reckonings, and why they differ

No document of his own time gives his dates, and the card for this page gives a span of two centuries rather than pretend to more. The sources give three different fixes, and the reader should see all three.

The Kanchi reckoning: born in the early seventeenth century. The chapter argues from the company he kept. “Paramasivendra seems to have been a contemporary of the great poet Nilakantha Dikshita (born in 1612 A.D. or earlier); for his disciple Ramanatha was a contemporary of Ramabhadra Dikshita, the accomplished poet and grammarian, who was a pupil of Nilakantha and won his praise. And Ramanatha’s pupil Nalla Adhvari, a younger relation of Ramabhadra Dikshita, acknowledges in his Advaita-rasamanjari Sadasiva as his spiritual preceptor after his Guru Paramasivendra. So we may take it that Sadasiva was born about the same time as Ramabhadra, in the early years of the seventeenth century.” On this reckoning he was a young man when Śāhajī came to the throne in 1684, and the chapter adds: “He seems to have lived far beyond the Vedic span of a century and attained beatitude at Nerur near Karur on the Kaveri.”

The 1909 reckoning: the early eighteenth century. Balasubrahmanyam writes that he “lived in the beginning of the 18th Century, more than a hundred and fifty years ago, near the modern town of Karur”, and anchors the one date he has to a document: the Pudukkottai copper-plate. “It was about 1738 A. D that Sadasiva roamed into the forests adjoining Tiruvarangulam a few miles off Pudukotah.” The ruler he met there, Vijaya Raghunātha Tondaimān, the life dates 1730–1769, and the grant made at the sage’s direction to Gopālakṛṣṇa Śāstrī is by a copper-plate “dated 1738 A.D. that still exists”. The Kanchi chapter also records that he blessed, through a court scholar, the childless king Serfoji of Tanjore, whom the printed page dates with an obvious slip in the century: “Malhari Pandita, who requested him to bless his patron Serfoji (1911-29), who was childless, or Vijaya Raghunatha Tondaiman of Pudukkottah”. Serfoji I of Tanjore reigned in the early eighteenth century; the page’s “1911” is a misprint for 1711 and is left as printed. The two royal contacts, Tanjore in the 1710s and Pudukkottai in the 1730s, are the only dated events in the life.

The Kanchi seat’s table. The Pīṭha’s own list of its ācāryas gives Sri Paramaśivendra, the fifty-seventh, a tenure beginning in 1586 and lasting fifteen years, with his successor Sri Ātmabodha from 1638. Taken literally that would place the guru’s death before 1640 and push Sri Sadāśiva’s youth into the sixteenth century, a full generation earlier than the chapter’s own argument from Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita and a century earlier than the copper-plate. The tables of the maṭhas are lists of succession, compiled long after the fact, and the Kanchi chapter on Sri Sadāśiva does not use them; this page records the table and follows the chapter.

What this page does with the difference. The two written lives can be reconciled only by the Kanchi chapter’s remark that he lived far beyond a hundred years: born early in the seventeenth century, he would have been a very old man by 1738. Whether that is history or the tradition’s way of honouring a saint whose life could not be measured, no one can now say. The card gives “c. 17th–18th century CE,” which is what both lives together support, and this section gives the rest.

The teacher: Sri Paramaśivendra Sarasvatī of Kanchi

He found his teacher, the 1909 life says, quickly: “He soon found his preceptor Paramasivendra Sarasvati and began under him his apprenticeship in Yoga. He made great progress alike in his studies and practice.” Who the teacher was is not in doubt, because the pupil named him in nearly everything he wrote. The Kanchi chapter: “He was the disciple of Paramasivendra Sarasvati, the fifty-seventh head of the Kanchi Kamakoti Sankaracharya Pitha, whose greatness he repeatedly extols.” The Pīṭha’s own chapter on the teacher puts the relationship the other way round: “He had several sishyas. One of his sishyas was the famous jivanmukta of our land Sri Sadasiva Brahmendra Sarasvati.”

Sri Paramaśivendra was a scholar and a controversialist. The Kanchi volume names his works: “(1) Daharavidyaprakasa, (2) Sivagita-tatparyaprakasika and (3) Vedanta-nama-ratna-sahasra-vyakhya or Svarupanusandhana”, and describes the last as “in the nature of an encyclopedia of the words that are applied to Brahman in the Upanishads”. The chapter on the pupil describes the teacher’s temper: “His own Guru was a master of polemic. In his Dahara-vidya-prakasika and his commentary on the Siva-gita, Paramasiva, while paying his homage to Vishnu, vigorously maintains the supremacy of Para-siva, as “the Paramatma seated in the heart”.” It is from this teacher that the pupil took his one lasting scholarly habit, the collecting of the names of Brahman: “Sri Sadasiva Brahmendra Sarasvati in his Atmanusandhana has dealt with several names that were described by Paramasivendra in his work referred to above.”

And it is to this teacher that the pupil’s gratitude is addressed in the second verse of his best-known poem, which S. N. Sastri renders: “I salute the holy sandals of the noble Paramasivendra which are the effulgent boat that rescues the people who have fallen into this limitless ocean of transmigratory existence, and which are adept at refuting the wrong views of others.” The last clause is a pupil’s tribute to a debater. The Kanchi chapter draws the contrast that the rest of this page will keep meeting: the teacher fought the sectarian battles of his age with vigour, and the pupil, who “remained unshaken in his Advaitic conviction, which is incompatible with the kind of sectarian mentality that depreciates Vishnu at the expense of Siva and vice versa”, left the battles alone.

“When will you learn to keep your mouth shut?”

The story on which the whole life turns is told in two sentences by the Kanchi chapter — “But a mild word of rebuke from his Guru, says tradition, made him a mauni.” — and at length by the 1909 life, which presents it as tradition:

“Tradition has it that Sadasiva used to worry with a number of questions all persons who came to his preceptor and thus shame them into silence. This practice was so much resented by the people that they one day reported it to Paramasivendra Sarasvati who on hearing it became a bit annoyed and exclaimed “Sadasiva, when will you learn to keep your mouth shut?” The student perceived his folly and to effectually prevent the transgressions of that unruly member, his tongue, took thenceforth a vow of life-long silence.”

“He prostrated himself before his teacher, begged forgiveness for his fault, took leave of his master and went out a homeless, speechless mendicant, trying to realise in himself the lofty ideals he had set forth in the Atmavidya Vilasa.”

Three things in this account deserve notice. The first is that the fault was not error but victory: he was silenced for winning too often. A tradition that prizes debate as much as Advaita does — Sri Śaṅkara’s own life is told as a sequence of disputations won — here remembers a saint whose sanctity began when he stopped. The second is the phrase mauni. The vow was not a temporary discipline but a settled state: “Henceforth he lived the life of a wanderer never staying anywhere for any length of time, never once opening his mouth, but when absolutely necessary expressing his thoughts by gesture or by writing on the ground.” Every later story on this page assumes it; the sage instructs a king by writing on sand, and tells the villagers of Nerur the date of his death, in the only ways a mauni can. The third is the order of events in the 1909 telling: the Ātmavidyāvilāsa, the poem of the perfected yogin, was already written when he went out to become the man it describes. The 1909 life puts it plainly: “Such a glorious life was now his ideal and he expresses in the poem his ardent thirst for the realisation of his ideal which was not long in coming.”

The tradition also preserves, in the same place, the teacher’s own second thoughts. Years later, “it was reported to Sri Paramasivendra Sarasvati that his disciple was wandering thus like a mad man, he seems to have regretted that such madness did not overtake himself”. The 1909 text prints a Sanskrit verse in which the teacher says so, too badly copied by the machine to reproduce here; the life’s own summary is that “His realisation of the Supreme Brahman was such that even his Guru praised and envied him.” Whether the rebuke was ever spoken, no one can say; what the tradition wants remembered is that the teacher who gave it lived to wish he could follow.

The wanderer: the head on the embankment, and the couplet

The first story of the wandering years is told against him, and the 1909 life tells it without softening. “One morning he was found lying in a field, resting his head on the embankment that divided field from field. The labourers that passed by remarked that one who had given up the world still found it necessary to have a support for the head. The next morning the labourers passed by the same way and saw Sadasiva lying in the same place but without any support for the head this time. Thereupon they wondered how one who professes to scorn all earthly things, could still be so sensitive to criticism”. The incident reached his old schoolfellow Ayyāvāḷ, “who is said to have given vent to his thoughts in the following couplet”, which the 1909 life translates:

“Even to those who hold the world as valueless as a straw and who have mastered all the secrets, even to such it is difficult to cease to be slaves to the strumpet fame.”

The life draws its own moral — “Such little failures as these were however only stepping stones which led him to the highest heights of Yoga.” — and the tradition’s willingness to keep the story is itself a kind of evidence. A legend built only to glorify would not remember the morning the saint moved his head because farm labourers had laughed at him. This one does, and it remembers what he did next: “He now finally left the scenes of his youth and spent his days on the lovely banks of the Amaravati and the Kaveri in the Coimbatore District. His days he would spend in the bed of the river meditating on the unknowable and the unknown.”

The picture the 1909 life gives of those years is the picture the songs give of themselves. “Many a time and oft would he be seen wandering aimlessly, as it were, like a mad man with a strange far off look in his upturned eyes, his mind perfectly unconscious of what passed around him and his energies concentrated on Self”. “Now would he be seen to plunge into the groves far and wide that lay stretched on either side of the sacred stream and remain lost to view for many a day. Now would he be seen lying upon the white undulating sands of these rivers.” The Kanchi chapter compresses the same years into a sentence: “He spent his time mostly in the secluded peace and charm of the Kaveri banks as an avadhuta; only occasionally emerging, to bestow his grace on some fortunate individual”, “or passing through the country-side like a silent benediction, radiating kindliness and compassion”.

The flood at Kodumudi

Of the many stories, one is told of a named place and is worth giving whole, because it is the story the tradition uses to say what his samādhi was. The place is Kodumudi, a temple town on the Kāverī between Erode and Karur.

“Once while thus reposing on the sands of the Kaveri near Kodumudi, one of those sudden floods that often rush through the stream without notice, came and carried off the unconscious Yogi and buried him on the sands in its onward sweeping course. The villagers on the banks who were the spectators of the scene were quite powerless to help the Yogi and quietly returned to their homes deeply regretting the calamity which they thought had befallen the great Sage whom they looked upon with awe and reverence. Three months passed by and when the freshes in the river subsided and water became scarce, the village officers went to the river for erecting the usual Korambu. While one of the labourers plunged his spade into the bed, lo, it came into contact with some obstruction. The surprised workman drew out the spade and beheld with consternation a few drops of blood tripping down his tool.”

“All the officers and workmen now gathered around him and dug a deep pit round the spot and wonder of wonders! they found buried deep in the sand our great Mahatma, his several limbs lying in different directions and himself lost in Samadhi. They carefully dug him out complete and thus roused into consciousness, this mighty Saint whose ‘soul was like a star and dwelt apart’ looked about him as if just risen out of deep slumber and after a few minutes, went his way as if nothing in the world had happened to him.”

The page does not ask the reader to believe that a man lived three months under river sand. It asks the reader to notice what the story is for. In the Yoga tradition that Sri Sadāśiva wrote about in his Yogasudhākara, the deepest samādhi is the one in which the mind’s modifications cease entirely and the body is left, so to speak, unattended. The flood story is the tradition’s way of saying he had that. It is told of the river he lived by, in the language of the people who farmed its banks — a spade, a dam, a drop of blood — and it ends not with a miracle claimed but with a man walking away “as if nothing in the world had happened to him”. The quotation the 1909 author reaches for is from Wordsworth, and it is apt: the saint of this story is not in the world’s time at all.

The stories: what the tradition tells, and how this page holds them

The 1909 life tells eight more stories, and warns its reader before it starts: “It may be hard to believe all these anecdotes whose number is legion (only a few of them being given here), but they persist in living.” They are summarised here, not to be believed or disbelieved, but because they are the form in which the Tamil country has kept him for three hundred years, and because anyone who visits Nerur will hear them.

• The paddy heap. Near Karur, a farmer’s eight watchmen ran at a stranger sprawled on the night’s harvest “with sticks in their uplifted hands”, and found their arms fixed in the air until morning, when the sage rose and left and they could move again.
• The bundle of fuel. Village watchmen, short a porter, loaded a firewood bundle on the head of a passing avadhūta and marched him to their officer’s camp; when his bundle was thrown on the heap, the heap caught fire.
• The children and the festival at Madurai. Children who liked to tease him — “Children especially liked him much” — asked, in “frolicsome derision”, to be taken that night to the Vṛṣabha-vāhana procession at Madurai; the tradition says he carried them there and back before dawn, with sweets to prove it. It is the story most often told of him, and the one by which children in the Tamil country still know his name.
• Seen in several places at once. “On several occasions such as Mahasivaratri, Gokulashtami etc., he was seen simultaneously in several places”, by pilgrims returning from Benares, Mathurā and Rāmeśvaram.
• The illiterate brahmacārī. A follower who could not read was taken, eyes shut, to see the deity at Śrīraṅgam and found himself back at Nerur; years later the sage “blessed him with some Mantras”, after which he could expound the Purāṇas, and “grants of several plots of land were made to him at Nerur for his proficiency in the Puranas”. This is the one story with a footing in land records, and the 1909 life adds that “his descendants are still enjoying these lands”.
• The severed arm. Wandering into the camp of a Muslim chief, among the women of his household, he was struck with a sword and lost an arm; he “went his way as usual without even noticing that his arm has been chopped off”. The chief, awed, followed and begged forgiveness; only then, the story says, did the sage learn what had happened, “and when he passed his other arm over the maimed one, the latter also became whole”. The 1909 life notes that the Sringeri Jagadguru’s hymn to him refers to this incident.
• Flowers at the archanā. In temples, “for every Archana that he uttered a flower would of its own accord fall on the head of the Deity”.
• Travel. “He is supposed to have travelled even as far as Turkey in Europe.” The 1909 life offers no support for this and neither does any other source.

What the stories have in common is more telling than any one of them. In nearly every case the sage does nothing. He does not curse the watchmen, punish the chief, or perform for the children; things happen around a man who has stopped acting on the world, and the world, in the tradition’s telling, rearranges itself. That is a portrait of the avadhūta as the Ātmavidyāvilāsa describes him — the one who, in Sastri’s translation of verse 15, “roams about in the interiors of forests ever revelling in the Self, appearing outwardly like an idiot, or a deaf or blind man”. The stories are the poem made into folklore. This page reports them as the tradition tells them and claims nothing more for them; the 1909 author’s own last word on the matter is the fair one: “Even without the help of the traditional anecdotes narrated above, we can from a perusal of his poems alone, unhesitatingly say that he was a great siddha of very high spiritual attainments.”

The Tondaimān of Pudukkottai and the writing on the sand

One episode stands apart from the rest, because a state kept records of it. The 1909 life dates it: “It was about 1738 A. D that Sadasiva roamed into the forests adjoining Tiruvarangulam a few miles off Pudukotah. While wandering in these extensive forests he was seen by the then ruler of Pudukotah State—Vijaya Raghunatha Tondaman (1730-1769) who was known by his more familiar name Sivajnana Puram Dorai. This Tondaman was a religious man and spent much of his time in pious meditations in the forests adjoining a lake which still bears his name.”

“Pleased with the single-minded devotion of the Tondaman who clung to the Sage for about eight years with a steadfastness which precluded all chances of evasion, Sadasiva wrote down on the sand certain religious instructions and by the same method directed him for further information to his fellow-pupil Gopalakrishna Sastri who was then living in Bhikshandarkoil in the Trichinopoly District.” The Śāstrī was invited to court and settled there with a grant of land, and “The Dusserah celebrations as well as the worship of Dakshinamurti in the Palace Temple were now instituted on the lines laid down by Sadasiva. The sand on which the Sage had written the instructions was carefully brought to the palace shrine and is still preserved there with religious veneration and worshipped as the holy relic of the great Sage.”

The State’s own publications, written by its administrators two centuries later, confirm the institutions if not the miracle. The Manual of 1938 records that “Vijaya Raghunatha Raya Tondaiman (Sivagnanapuran Durai), the disciple of the Sage Sri Sadasivendra instituted the Dassara festival at Pudukkottai and built the Shrine of Sri Dakshinamurti within the old palace.” It goes on: “It was he who built the famous Adhistanam (shrine over a tomb) of Sri Sadasivendra at Nerur in the Trichinopoly district and granted two villages in the State for its maintenance.” In its chapter on the palace it lists, among the duties of the household establishment, “the worship in the Sri Dakshinamurti temple in the Old Palace, and the several charities enjoined on the State by the Sage Sadasiva Brahmam, such as the distribution of doles to girls on Fridays, and to Brahmins during Navaratri”. The Gazetteer of 1944 records the relic: “Within the Sri Dakshinamurti temple in the Old Palace is preserved the holy sand on which Sri Sadasiva wrote his instructions to Vijaya Raghunatha Raya.” It notes that at Sivagnanapuram the ruler built a palace “which the then Raja used both as a Palace and a hermitage, and where it is believed that Sri Sadasiva came to initiate him”, and that in the town’s great temple, “At the base of a Bakula (Mimusops elengi) tree within the temple is a small image of Sri Sadasiva Brahmendra.”

Two points follow. The first is that the Pudukkottai connection is the firmest ground in the whole life: a dated copper-plate, a festival, a shrine, two endowed villages, a household charity and a relic, all recorded by a government that had no reason to invent them. The second is what the tradition says the sage taught the king. Not Advaita in its technical form — that he sent the king to a scholar for — but the worship of Dakṣiṇāmūrti, the silent teacher, the form of Śiva under the banyan tree whom the Ātmavidyāvilāsa salutes in its first verse. A mauni pointed a ruler to the god who teaches without speaking. The Kanchi chapter’s phrase for his occasional emergences is exact: he came out of the forest “to bestow his grace on some fortunate individual”, and went back in.

Nerur: the Bāṇaliṅga from Benares, and the descent

The end of the life is told by the 1909 life alone, and it is told, like everything else, as tradition. “After a long life of silent meditation he, one day, told the brahmins of Nerur that on a particular day (Jyeshtha Suddha Dasami in the month of Mithuna) he intended to attain Beatific Union with the Supreme Being and if the villagers were prepared for the event on that day a brahmin would be coming with a Banalinga from Benares which should be consecrated in a temple by the side of his samadhi”. “They accordingly awaited the mentioned date, when to their surprise a brahmin turned up from Benares with the Banalinga. And into the pit specially dug out, the great Jivanmukta descended of his own accord and merged with the Parabrahman.” “The people assembled performed the necessary ceremonies and had the temple erected by the side of the Samadhi and the Banalinga consecrated therein”.

Jyeṣṭha śuddha daśamī, the tenth day of the bright fortnight in the month of Jyeṣṭha, falls in May or June; the tradition keeps his ārādhanā on that day still, and the 1909 life records that “All the expenses of the celebration of the sacred Anniversary day every year are defrayed even now by the Pudukotah State.” A Bāṇaliṅga is a natural stone from the Narmadā river, worshipped as Śiva without carving; the temple beside the shrine is a Kāśī Viśvanātha temple, and the Karur district’s page today names both together: “Arulmigu Sadasiva Brahmendra Adhishtanam and Arulmigu Kashi Vishwanatha temple are located at Nerur Village (13 KM from Karur-Thirumukkudalur Road), Karur district.”

The 1909 life then adds a sentence it does not explain: “It is stated that this Jivanmukta attained samadhi simultaneously in three different places.” It names none of the other two, and this page will not name them for it; the Sanskrit verse printed after the sentence is illegible in the scan. What it does say is which one counts: “But the Samadhi at Nerur is the only one well known in Southern India and the Tondamans of Pudukotah have made extensive grants of lands for the performance, in suitable style, of the religious services in this sacred shrine.” The Pudukkottai Gazetteer confirms the arrangement from the other side, recording that the Madras endowments board once “claimed control of one of the Pararashtram institutions: the Sri Kasi Visvanatha Svami temple together with the Adhistanam of Sri Sadasiva Brahmendra at Nerur (Trichinopoly district), but after enquiry exempted it from the operation of the Hindu Religious Endowment Act. This institution is under the full control of the State.”

The word the tradition uses for what happened at Nerur is jīva-samādhi: not a burial after death but a living entry into the final absorption. The Karur district’s page uses it — “This Jeeva Samadhi is located in an oasis of cauvery river bank.” — and so does the Sringeri Pīṭham, which describes its 33rd Jagadguru identifying “the Jeeva Samadhi of Sri Sadasiva Brahmendra: an exalted Mahayogi whose resting place had remained largely unrecognized for nearly a century”. Whether one reads that as fact or as the tradition’s way of describing the death of a man who had, in his own poem, already described his life as a death to the world, the shrine is there, the liṅga is there, and the Kāverī runs south past both. The page turns now from the life to the books, which are where he speaks.

The Ātmavidyāvilāsa: a spiritual autobiography in sixty-two verses

The one book by which everyone knows him is short enough to read in an hour and has been read for three hundred years. The Kanchi chapter calls it the work in which “Brahmendra’s soul engages in its loftiest flight” and describes it exactly: “The Atma-vidya-vilasa is a spiritual autobiography, from which the merely contingent and ephemeral have been excluded. The quest, the practice and the perfection are all recorded, not systematically, but with the higher logic of poetry.” The 1909 life says the same from the reader’s side: “When we go through this work we feel as if we are reading a faithful description of Sadasivendra himself.”

The poem announces its own scope in its closing verses. Verse 63, in S. N. Sastri’s translation: “Thus, by the gracious compassionate side-glances of my Guru I have brought out the essence of the upanishads in sixty-two faultless verses in the Arya metre.” And the colophon verse: “This work, named Atmavidyavilasa, composed by Sadasivendra, the disciple of the Guru Paramasivendra is thus completed.” The Kanchi chapter notes that a second, shorter version exists — “There are two versions – one in sixty-two lovely Arya verses, which is far better known and perfect as a pearl; though the other, in forty-six verses, like another poem, the Bodha-arya-prakarana attributed to Brahmendra, is not without flashes of beauty, it is versified philosophy rather than metaphysical poetry.” It is the sixty-two-verse text that is quoted here, in the Sanskrit as printed on the Sanskrit Documents site and in Sastri’s English.

It opens with two salutations that set the two poles of the poem. The first is to Dakṣiṇāmūrti, Śiva as the silent teacher under the banyan:

vaṭatarunikaṭanivāsaṃ paṭutaravijñānamudritakarābjam | kañcana deśikamādyaṃ kaivalyānandakandalaṃ vande || 1 ||
“I bow down to the indescribable primordial Guru (Dakshinamurti) who resides by the side of a fig tree, whose lotus hand displays brilliantly the ‘jnana-mudra’ (in which the tips of the thumb and the index finger of the right hand are joined), who is the sprout of the bliss that is liberation.”

The second, quoted earlier on this page, is to the sandals of Sri Paramaśivendra. The silent god and the disputatious teacher: the poem holds both, and the third verse says what it is for — “I in whom the divine glory has been awakened by the instruction of my Guru Paramasivendra lovingly present these few passages for the purpose of abiding in my own self.” Not for teaching others; for abiding. It is the only book on this site that was written, by its author’s own account, as a private exercise.

The fourth verse is the doctrinal core, and it was the verse the 35th Jagadguru of Sringeri, two centuries later, would recall as the description of his own experience:

nirupamanityanirīho niṣkalanirmāyanirguṇākāraḥ | vigalitasarvavikalpaḥ śuddho buddhaścakāsti paramātmā || 4 ||
“The supreme Self shines as incomparable, eternal, actionless, impartite, beyond the control of Maya, free from the three gunas (sattva, rajas and tamas), formless, beyond all wrong conceptions, pure, and consciousness itself.”

From there the poem moves, as the Kanchi chapter says, not systematically but by the logic of its images. Verses 5 and 6 give the human condition and the cure in two lines each: “Bound by his own ignorance alone, performing various actions, the individual remains deluded. By good fortune he is freed from bondage by the knowledge of the self as a result of contemplation and emerges victorious.” “Sleeping because of Maya, the individual sees thousands of dreams. An exceptional individual is awakened from this sleep by the instruction of his Guru and shines in the ocean of bliss.” Everything that follows is a portrait of that exceptional individual — and, the tradition has always felt, a self-portrait.

The avadhūta of the poem

The middle of the Ātmavidyāvilāsa is a gallery of the perfected sage, and every story told of Sri Sadāśiva on this page has a verse behind it. The verse that most nearly describes his own life is the fifteenth:

avadhūtakarmajālo jaḍabadhirāndhopamaḥ ko'pi | ātmārāmo yatirāḍaṭavīkoṇeṣvaṭannāste || 15 ||
“The great ascetic, who has been cleansed of all accumulated karma, roams about in the interiors of forests ever revelling in the Self, appearing outwardly like an idiot, or a deaf or blind man.”

The word the Sanskrit uses for “cleansed of” is avadhūta, shaken off; it is the title he bore. The twelfth verse gives the manner of his wandering — “Having mentally decided that this whole world is insubstantial, being only the product of Maya, he (the enlightened person) moves about without any expectation, free from pride, conceit and envy.” — and the fourteenth gives the temper the children of Madurai are said to have found in him. The Kanchi chapter quotes it in Sanskrit as the verse that shows “the Self-realized is become as a child again”:

tvamahamabhimānahīno moditanānājanācāraḥ | viharati bālavadeko vimalasukhāmbhonidhau magnaḥ || 14 ||
“Devoid of conceits (or distinctions) in the form ‘I’ and ‘you’, happily accepting the varied behaviour of people, he sports alone, like a child, immersed in the ocean of pure bliss.”

The river-bed of the flood story is in verse 34 — “The wonderful ascetic sits on the banks of rivers, meditating on the ultimate Reality, with his eyes fixed on the tip of his nose, and his mind withdrawn from names, etc” — and in verse 36, “The great ascetic lies down in a deserted place by the side of a river overgrown with creepers, or on a bed of lovely soft sand”. The Kanchi chapter’s gloss on this verse is the best sentence anyone has written about him: “Nature — “red in tooth and claw” for us — ministers to him, the fine river sand a softer bed than eiderdown”. The nakedness the legends dwell on is in verse 35: “Victory to the sage who has for clothing only the directions, who is ever contemplative, who is adorned by freedom from desire, who is calm, who has only his hands as the vessel for receiving alms, and whose dwelling place is the foot of a tree.” And the twenty-first verse gives, in a single line, the sage who was also a composer:

tiṣṭhanparatra dhāmni svīyasukhāsvādaparavaśaḥ kaścit | kvāpi dhyāyati kuhacidgāyati kutrāpi nṛtyati svairam || 21 ||
“Immersed in the enjoyment of his own natural bliss, residing in some other abode (in the body which he does not look upon as his), he sometimes meditates, sometimes sings, sometimes dances, at will.”

Kvāpi dhyāyati, kuhacid gāyati, kutrāpi nṛtyati — somewhere he meditates, somewhere he sings, somewhere he dances. The three verbs are the three things the tradition remembers him doing, and the poem was written, if the 1909 life has the order right, before he had done any of them.

The poem ends where Advaita ends. Verse 57: “Going beyond the shackles of varna and ashrama, and beyond such limitations as fate, etc., the great ascetic remains as pure bliss and consciousness.” Verse 58: “Having brought to an end all action, and having exhausted his praarabdha, freed from association with the body, the enlightened person becomes Brahman itself.” And the last five verses drop the sage altogether and describe only what remains — verse 62, in Sastri’s rendering: “The indescribable Reality shines eternally. It has no taste, or smell or form. It is beyond the three gunas: sattva, rajas and tamas. It is incomparable (because there is no other to be compared with) and beyond all fear.” The Kanchi chapter’s summary of the whole is worth giving entire: “He no longer takes; he gives. Bringing us wisdom and joy like some supernal sun and moon, cooling the consuming fire of passion like the breeze of heaven, he realizes for us the transcendent glory that is symbolized by the song of the cuckoo, the dance of the peacock, the serenity of the swan.”

The songs

The kīrtanas are the reason a silent man is heard every day. About two dozen are printed, each with its rāga and tāla, on the Sanskrit Documents site, and the Kanchi chapter counts them: “About twenty-five of his kirtanas are available; half a dozen of these sing Rama, “He sports within me in the cave of the heart, with Peace, the daughter of Videha, for his companion”. He devotes an equal number of songs to the Vanamali, Nanda’s darling. And the bliss of the Unconditioned Absolute is celebrated in a dozen songs.” The line about Rāma is from Khelati mama hṛdaye, in the rāga Aṭhāṇā, whose refrain runs khelati mama hṛdaye rāmaḥ — “Rāma plays in my heart” — and whose last line calls him śāntividehasutāsahacārī daharāyodhyānagaravihārī, the companion of Peace, the daughter of Videha, who dwells in the small Ayodhyā of the heart.

The best-loved of them all is Mānasa sañcara re, in the rāga Sāma, and its whole text is four lines. The refrain: mānasa sañcara re brahmaṇi mānasa sañcara re — “O mind, move in Brahman; O mind, move.” And then, without any change of key, the verses describe Kṛṣṇa: madaśikhipiñchālaṅkṛtacikure, whose hair is adorned with the feather of a proud peacock; paramahaṃsamukhacandracakore, who is the cakora bird to the moon-faces of the paramahaṃsas; paripūritamuraḻīravadhāre, from whom the stream of flute-music pours. The Kanchi chapter’s point about the songs is made by this one: “in these, as in the kirtanas, his mind passes with effortless ease from surrender to the Divine Personality to absorption in the Bliss of Brahman”. “Move in Brahman,” says the refrain, and the only Brahman the song then shows the mind is a boy with a flute.

Others are pure Advaita set to a beat. Sarvaṃ brahmamayaṃ, in Ceñcuruṭṭi, asks a series of questions that answer themselves: kiṃ vacanīyaṃ kimavacanīyaṃ kiṃ racanīyaṃ kimaracanīyam — what is there to say and what not to say, what to do and what not to do, when everything is Brahman? — and ends with the one instruction: sarvatra sadā haṃsadhyānaṃ kartavyaṃ bho muktinidānam, everywhere and always meditate on the haṃsa, the Self, which is the cause of liberation. Tadvaj jīvatvaṃ brahmaṇi, in Kīravāṇi, is the Advaita analogies sung in a row: as two moons in water, as a reflection in a mirror, as a man in a post, as water in a mirage, as silver in a shell, as a snake in a rope — rajjau yadvat phaṇidehatvam — so is the jīva in Brahman. Brahmaivāhaṃ kila, in Nāṭhanāmakriyā, begins brahmaivāhaṃ kila sadgurukṛpayā, “I am Brahman indeed, by the grace of the true guru,” and its eight verses are a catalogue of what that Brahman is not. Cintā nāsti kila, in Navaroj, says of those who are paramahaṃsagurupadacittānāṃ brahmānandāmṛtamattānām, whose minds are at the feet of the paramahaṃsa guru and who are drunk on the nectar of the bliss of Brahman, that for them cintā nāsti kila, there is no anxiety at all. And Pibare rāma rasaṃ, in Yamunākalyāṇi, tells the tongue — pibare rāmarasaṃ rasane — to drink the juice of Rāma’s name, jananamaraṇabhayaśokavidūraṃ, which puts far away the fear and grief of birth and death.

Nearly every song has the signature paramahaṃsa in it somewhere — the word for the highest order of renouncer, and the word he used of himself. The Kanchi chapter’s judgment on them is the one this page adopts: “It is not possible to explain in words, the charm of songs like ‘manasasanchara re’, ‘sarvam brahmamayam’, or ‘chinta nasti kila’. They rain down a gentle influence on the heart, laying all doubts, lulling the ego and bringing the passionless peace that rejoices the sophisticate and the simple alike.” The 1909 life, sixty years earlier, said the same in fewer words: “His songs are so lyrical, his rhythm so perfect that one is not tired of reciting them over and over again.” The Sringeri Pīṭham has made the singing of them an annual event, described later on this page.

The song texts above are given as printed on the Sanskrit Documents site, in Roman transliteration made for this page from its Devanāgarī. The short English glosses of song lines are this page’s own and are not quotations; the only translated quotations on the page are from S. N. Sastri’s Ātmavidyāvilāsa and the two written lives.

The Brahmatattvaprakāśikā: the whole of Sri Śaṅkara in the fewest words

The scholar’s book, the one that made his name among pandits rather than singers, is his gloss on the Brahma-sūtra. The 1909 life was written to introduce its first printed edition, and its author’s estimate is high: “Of these the Brahmasutra Vritti is the most important.” “But none of them equals this Vritti in the simplicity of style, clearness of exposition, closeness of reasoning and subtlety of thought.” He describes the method exactly:

“The clear statement of the Purvapaksha and the Siddhanta in each Sutra, the concise presentation of the Phalabheda in the Purvapaksha and Siddhanta of each Sutra the introduction to each Sutra showing its consistent relation with the previous Sutra, the exposition of the connection between each Pada and between each Adhyaya are all peculiarly characteristic of this Brahma Sutra Vritti. Written in a lucid style, chaste and easily understandable by all, this Vritti gives the essence of the whole of Sri Sankara’s Bhashya in as few words as possible.”

The Kanchi chapter, sixty years later, agrees and gives instances. “This is found to be eminently the case in the Brahma-tattva-prakasika, the brief but splendid gloss on the Brahma-sutra. While faithfully adhering to the Bhashya, Sadasiva makes no attempt to follow the master into the fascinating by-paths.” Its example is the sūtra on the five functions of prāṇa (2.4.12), where Sri Śaṅkara considers and rejects several reasons for the number five: “Sadasiva skips the discussions and simply states the conclusion and he brings out the Bhashya view of the sutra in these pithy words: “Because of its special and manifold functions, prana is subsidiary to the soul, resembling the mind in this respect.”” Its second example shows him supplying what the master left out: on a sūtra where Sri Śaṅkara leaves a word unexplained and where “the Bhamati and its sub-commentaries simply pass over the word”, “Sadasiva, following the ratnaprabha, elucidates karmani as dhyanadyupadhau karmani” — and the chapter enjoys the thought that “Apparently he anticipated that there might be people like Thibaut”, the nineteenth-century European translator who was puzzled by the same word.

The chapter’s general description of the method matches the 1909 one, and is worth having because it tells a modern reader what the book is for: “His method of exposition is to set out under each sutra the subject, the doubt that necessitates the enquiry, the consequences that would flow from either of two possible conclusions and the leading arguments in support of the prima facie view and the view that is ultimately arrived at. In beautifully simple verses he sets out the kernel of every major section. The Vritti is thus an ideal handbook for the student.” And the chapter notes one place where the handbook takes its own line. On the sūtra refuting those who make the Lord only the efficient and not the material cause of the world, Sri Śaṅkara includes the Sāṅkhya and Yoga schools in the refutation; “Sadasiva in his gloss does not refer to them but takes the attack as mainly directed against the Maheśvaras”, for reasons that come from his other commentary. “If the view here put forward is right, it should be clear that Sadasiva could take an independent line when he felt it necessary.” The 1927 Vāṇī Vilās printing is scanned and linked below; it is in Sanskrit only.

The Yogasudhākara: a Vedāntin reads Patañjali

The book that makes him unusual among Advaita teachers is his commentary on the Yoga-sūtra of Patañjali. Most Advaitins of his age wrote on the Upaniṣads, the Gītā and the Brahma-sūtra, and treated Patañjali’s system, with its eternal plurality of souls, as a rival to be refuted. He wrote a gloss on it. The Kanchi chapter: “The Yogasudhakara, an extremely valuable gloss on the Patanjala-sutras, is undoubtedly Brahmendra’s work. But this is the one major work of his, in which he does not anywhere mention Paramasivendra Sarasvati as his Guru. He pays homage, instead, to an unnamed Guru by whose grace, he says, he got the vidya and having “churned it in his mind” (vilodya), wrote this Vritti.” The chapter’s inference is that “Brahmendra may have studied Ashtanga-yoga under some other Guru”, and it defends the combination: “We need not be surprised that one who attained the summits of Vedantic realization should have practiced Ashtanga-yoga, for the Bhagavatpada repeatedly points out that the Advaitin accepts such teachings of the yoga and other similar ‘smritis’ as are not opposed to the Vedanta”.

What he did with Patañjali is the most original thing in his writing, and the chapter sets it out at length. Where the classical commentators read Īśvara-praṇidhāna in two different sūtras in two different ways, “Brahmendra, however, interprets the term in the same way in both contexts, as meaning loving devotion only.” He arranges the sūtras on the subject into a ladder of three grades of aspirant, from the man who “cannot free himself from the lure of the world” to “the man who has fully succeeded in that”, and puts devotion at every rung: “When the mind is purified by devotion to “the Paramaguru who has in sport assumed an exceedingly winsome form”, says Sadasiva Brahmendra (on yoga-sutra II-1), prema-bhakti, the intensified and exclusive devotion referred to in I-23, comes naturally. Pleased with that, the Lord grants the devotee the one-pointed concentration he yearns for and that leads in due course, to kaivalya.”

The chapter then gives his account of how the repetition of Oṁ works, and it is the nearest thing to a description of his own practice that survives:

“Intense and sustained pranava-japa, which is the praise of the Lord, when accompanied by loving concentration on Him, leads successively to the cessation of verbal activity (including japa), the inclining of the mind, by the grace of the Lord, towards quiescence and the detachment of the mind even from Him, for it achieves direct perception of the self (pratyasatti). Recognising the similarity (sadrisya) between the self, “its own master”, which in its pristine state is free spirit (asanga-chidrupa) and Isvara, who is eternally and unchangeably that, it reminds the self of its true status; and then, its task done; it sinks down, like fire that has consumed its fuel.”

The conclusion the chapter draws is that “Brahmendra’s view of kaivalya is closer to the Vedantic conception of mukti, which is eternal bliss, than that of the Sankhya-Yoga, where it means a passionless and passive isolation for the purusha”. That is to say: he read Patañjali as an Advaitin, kept Patañjali’s eight limbs, and quietly replaced Patañjali’s goal with his own. It should be said, from the Advaita side and with respect, that this is a reading and not the classical Yoga school’s own account of itself; the Sāṅkhya-Yoga tradition holds its plurality of souls and its kaivalya on its own authority, and the Yogasudhākara is an Advaitin’s appropriation of a text he loved, not a refutation. The chapter also records his debt to the Bhāgavata: “Sadasiva was a student of the Bhagavata and wrote a Bhagavata-sara. This probably had a decisive influence on his taking to the avadhuta life.” The 1911 Śrīraṅgam printing of the Yogasudhākara is scanned and linked below.

The Siddhāntakalpavallī, the Advaitarasamañjarī, and the doubtful attributions

Two more works are printed under his name, and the question of who wrote them is one the sources themselves raise. The first is not in doubt. The Siddhāntakalpavallī, “the wishing-creeper of the doctrines,” is his verse compendium of Sri Appayya Dīkṣita’s Siddhāntaleśa-saṅgraha, the great survey of the disagreements among Advaitins after Sri Śaṅkara. The Kanchi chapter: “Sadasiva made a verse compendium of it, evidently to serve as a refresher to the serious student engaged in manana. His commentary, Kesaravalli is an integral part of the work. It supplements the text, as well as elucidating it. The verses convey, as the author justly claims, a depth of meaning in simple words.” The chapter gives one instance of his method — how nine varieties of a single view are reduced to five verses and a note — and remarks, “In such summary statement there is naturally no room for scholastic subtleties. But this may have the advantage of highlighting the main threads of argument.” It is a scholar’s book by a man who had been the best student of a brilliant set, written for other students. A Vāṇī Vilās printing is scanned and linked below.

The second is disputed. The Advaitarasamañjarī, a short poem of about forty-five verses on the essence of Advaita, was printed with his works, and the 1909 life, listing his minor writings, already notes the doubt: “Advaitarasamanjari is a short and sweet poem of about forty-five stanzas describing the essence of the Advaita Philosophy. Some say that a certain Nalla Dikshita, a disciple” of Sri Sadāśivendra “wrote this poem. We reserve a discussion of this topic for a subsequent volume of the works of Sadasivendra”. The Kanchi volume settles the matter against him, in its chapter on the other candidate: “Nallakavi’s authorship of the Advaitarasamanjari is doubted and it is attributed to Sadasivabrahmendra, but there appears to be no reason to doubt the explicit statement of Nallakavi as the author of this work and his special respect for Sadasivendra whom he salutes as he commences his work.” Nallā Kavi, or Nallā Dīkṣita or Nallā Adhvarin as the sources variously call him, was a fellow-disciple of Sri Paramaśivendra who “thus came in contact with and obtained the blessings of the most renowned of the disciple of Paramasivendra”; the salutation with which he opens the poem is the one quoted in the section on names above. This page therefore treats the Advaitarasamañjarī as Nallā Kavi’s, in Sri Sadāśiva’s honour, and not as Sri Sadāśiva’s own.

Of the rest, the record is thinner. The 1909 life says “Sadasiva appears to have written Dipikas for about a dozen Upanishads, which we hope to publish one after another at no distant date”; the Kanchi chapter does not mention them and this page has not seen them. The chapter lists the shorter devotional pieces — the Navamaṇimālā in praise of his guru, ““who from the purest compassion bestowed on me the dazzling gem of the Atmavidya””; the Svapnoditam, in which “he describes how the duality of seer and seen disappeared, “when by the grace of the moon, my Guru, I was submerged in the swelling sea of the chit and I saw naught but Self””; the Dakṣiṇāmūrti-dhyānam; the Ātmānusandhāna, his selection from his teacher’s thousand names of Brahman; the Navaratnamālā, the Svānubhūti-prakāśikā and the Śiva-mānasa-pūjā, which “show the ecstatic devotion” to Śiva. And it singles out one more as the most important of this class: “his brilliant Guru-ratna-malika in eighty-seven verses which he wrote at the instance of Atmabodha, his fellow-disciple and successor of Paramasiva on the Sankara pitha”, in which, “Following the Punyasloka-manjari of his parama-guru, Sarvajna-sadasiva-bodha, fifty-sixth head of the Kanchi pitha, he celebrates that long and brilliant succession of yogis and jivan-muktas”. It is the Kanchi seat’s own succession list in verse, written by its most famous non-successor, and the seat has treasured it accordingly.

How he taught Advaita, without a pupil

He had, so far as anyone knows, no disciple in the formal sense. He held no seat and gave no initiations that the sources record; he sent the one king who asked him for teaching to another man. Yet the tradition treats him as a teacher, and the reason is in the books. Read together, they show a single and quite definite way of teaching Advaita, which this page will try to describe.

The doctrine is Sri Śaṅkara’s, condensed and never argued. The Brahmatattvaprakāśikā gives, in the 1909 life’s phrase, “the essence of the whole of Sri Sankara’s Bhashya in as few words as possible”; the Siddhāntakalpavallī condenses Appayya; the Ātmavidyāvilāsa claims to be “the essence of the upanishads in sixty-two faultless verses”. He is a compressor of received doctrine, not an innovator in it, and the Kanchi chapter’s phrase for his gloss — “his main aim in his gloss is to give the student a bird’s-eye view of the system” — describes all his prose.

The practice is dissolution. The eleventh verse of the poem gives the only technique it contains, and it is the old Vedāntic one of running creation backwards:

janiviparītakramato buddhyā pravilāpya pañcabhūtāni | pariśiṣṭamātmatattvaṃ paśyannāste muniḥ śāntaḥ || 11 ||
“The calm contemplative who has merged the five elements mentally in the order opposite to that of creation realizes the Self which is what is left.”

That is the whole of the method: not a new experience to be gained but a subtraction until “the Self which is what is left” stands alone. Verse 13 gives the result of the subtraction as a conviction rather than a vision — “In the pure Self there is no Maya or its effects at all. The yogi who has come to this definite conclusion is full of supreme bliss within.” — and the song Tadvaj jīvatvaṃ gives the same doctrine as a chain of analogies anyone can sing.

Devotion is not a rung below knowledge but the form knowledge takes in a life. This is the point on which he differs, in emphasis, from many Advaita scholastics, and the Kanchi chapter states it as the key to everything he wrote: “This impersonal joy that goes with super-consciousness is in fact the key-note of all the creative work of Brahmendra. His poems and songs represent this totality of experience. Flashes of poetry illuminate the philosophical poems, even as mystical ecstasy communicates itself through an unforced lyricism in the kirtanas. And the golden thread of bhakti runs through them all.” The Yogasudhākara makes loving devotion the engine of concentration; the songs to Rāma and Kṛṣṇa sit beside the songs to the Absolute with no sense of descent; and the poem’s sage, in verse 56, is what he is “by the side-glance of his Guru”. There is no tension in his work between the personal God and Brahman without qualities, because he never argues the relation; he sings both and lets the singing be the argument.

The teacher is silent, and the teaching is the life. The first verse of the poem is to Dakṣiṇāmūrti, who teaches by a gesture of the hand; the last thing he is said to have taught anyone was written on sand. The Kanchi chapter’s remark that “in a sense all his poems are in adoration of the Guru, whom he looked upon as his God” should be read with the chapter’s other remark, that he became a mauni at a word. He had learned Advaita as a debater and then unlearned the debating; what remained was a man who demonstrated the doctrine by living as though it were true, and who set the demonstration to music so that others could carry it. That is why a tradition that ordinarily measures a teacher by his pupils counts him, who had none, among its preceptors.

Sringeri, and the rediscovery of Nerur

For most of the nineteenth century the shrine at Nerur was a local matter. The Pudukkottai state paid for its anniversary; the villagers of the Kāverī bank kept it; and the rest of the Tamil country knew Sri Sadāśiva as a name in songs. What changed that was the interest of one man, the 33rd Jagadguru of Sringeri, Sri Saccidānanda Śivābhinava Nṛsiṁha Bhāratī (1858–1912), and the tradition of the Sringeri Pīṭham is that he did more than take an interest. The Pīṭham’s page for its Nerur branch says:

“The 33rd Jagadguru Shankaracharya of Sringeri, Sri Sacchidananda Shivabhinava Narasimha Bharati Mahaswamiji, played a decisive and historic role in rediscovering the sacred Adhishthana of the great saint Sri Sadasiva Brahmendra. During a Vijaya Yatra, divine intuition guided the Jagadguru to the quiet village of Nerur near Karur in Tamil Nadu. There, He identified the Jeeva Samadhi of Sri Sadasiva Brahmendra — an exalted Mahayogi whose resting place had remained largely unrecognized for nearly a century.”

“Largely unrecognized for nearly a century” must be read alongside the 1909 life, written in the Jagadguru’s lifetime, which says that the Pudukkottai rulers “have made extensive grants of lands for the performance, in suitable style, of the religious services in this sacred shrine.” The two are not in conflict if “unrecognized” means unrecognised by the wider Advaita world rather than by the village and the state that endowed it; and the Sringeri page is the Pīṭham’s own summary of its tradition, which this page reports as such. What the 1909 life does record, from its own knowledge, is the Jagadguru’s devotion. Its author was “gratefully indebted to the gracious condescension on the part of His Holiness Sri Sachchidananda Sivabhinava Nrisimha Bharati Swami who now adorns the Mutt of Sringeri and whose high regard for Sadasiva Brahman may be gathered from his precious little work known as ‘Sadasivendra Stuti’ — a collection of stotras in praise of Sadasivendra Sarasvati — composed by His Holiness while on a visit to the great Rajayogi’s Samadhi at Nerur.” Several of the stories on this page — the flood, the sand, the Bāṇaliṅga — are told in that hymn, and the 1909 life took them from it.

And the life ends with a portrait of the devotee that is as remarkable as anything in it, because the devotee was the most eminent Advaita teacher then alive:

“His Holiness the present Sri Jagadguru of Sringeri than whom it is impossible to come across a holier Personage, a truer Mahatma, a nobler Saint and a more rigorous Ascetic, even such a marvellous Mahapurusha, divine incarnation itself as he appears to be, has this Sadasiva Brahmendra as his Ideal. He has Sadasiva’s picture always before him and it is only a copy of this picture that is given here as frontispiece. He longs for the day when he will be as free as Sadasiva.”

The picture the Jagadguru kept before him is the one that has been copied ever since: the naked sage seated by the river, of which the painting on this page is a modern descendant. The Sringeri connection has continued through every Jagadguru since. When the 36th, Sri Bhāratī Tīrtha, came to Karur and Nerur in 2012, his address explained what the 33rd had done in terms of the Pīṭham’s own discipline:

“Sri Sadasiva Brahmendra is a perfect example of a Mahayogi and a Maha Vedantin. He led his life in such a way that it was astonishing that such an ideal could be seen even in this Kali Yuga. Traditionally, the Acharyas of the Sringeri Sharada Peetham offer prostrations only at the Adhishtanams (Samadhi Shrines) of their Gurus. They do not offer prostrations at other Adhishtanams. However, our Parameshti Guru, Jagadguru Sri Sri Sacchidananda Shivabhinava Narasimha Bharati Mahaswamiji created an exception to this rule at the Adhishtanam of Sri Sadashiva Brahmendra.”

An Advaita ācārya prostrating at the tomb of a man who held no seat and left no pupils: that is the measure the tradition has taken of him, and it has held for a hundred and thirty years.

Nerur since: the Ācāryas at the river

The Sringeri Pīṭham’s tour-records for the 35th Jagadguru, Sri Abhinava Vidyātīrtha, show what the exception became in practice. In March 1962, during a long tour of the Tamil districts, “On the 21st of March, His Holiness performed pūjā at the adhiṣṭhāna of Śrī Sadāśiva Brahmendra at Nerur before leaving for Coimbatore.” Three years later he came back and stayed. The record for the summer of 1965 has him camping at Pugalur for four days and then walking: “From there, He proceeded by foot to Nerur on the 29th of June. At Nerur, the Jagadguru worshipped at the adhiṣṭhāna of Śrī Sadāśiva Brahmendra. The kumbhābhiṣeka of Visalakshi Vishwanatha Temple, in front of the samādhi of Śrī Sadāśiva Brahmendra, was performed by the Jagadguru on the 1st of July.” The tour-record’s own date column, which runs into the sentence in the printed table, has been removed from the quotation.

The record explains the temple in words that match the 1909 story exactly: “In accordance with the instruction which had been given by Śrī Sadāśiva Brahmendra during his life time, a Śiva-liṅga had been brought from Benaras and installed near the site of the samādhi. His Holiness also personally performed the pūjā at the samādhi of Brahmendra.” The Bāṇaliṅga that a brāhmaṇa from Benares is said to have carried to the river on the tenth day of Jyeṣṭha was still there, in the temple beside the pit, when the Jagadguru re-consecrated its shrine on the 1st of July 1965; the Karur district administration’s page today lists “Arulmigu Sadasiva Brahmendra Adhishtanam and Arulmigu Kashi Vishwanatha temple” together at Nerur, “13 KM from Karur-Thirumukkudalur Road”, and adds a detail the pilgrim notices at once: “This Jeeva Samadhi is located in an Oasis of cauvery river bank. Here Cauvery river running towards south is a very special feature.”

Under the 36th Jagadguru the shrine acquired a maṭha of its own. The Sringeri page: “Sringeri Jagadguru Shankaracharya Sri Sri Sri Bharati Tirtha Mahaswamigal performed Bhoomi Pooja for a New Math and Temple in 2012. The Mahakumbhabhisheka was performed by Ubhaya Jagadgurus of Sringeri Sharada Peetham in 2017 on Vaishakha Shukla Dwadasi.” The branch has daily worship at half past eight and in the evening, and the deities it lists are Śāradāmbā, Sri Ādi Śaṅkara and the 33rd Jagadguru himself — the rediscoverer honoured beside the rediscovered.

The songs, too, have been made an institution. On the 3rd of February 2021, “kritis composed by the renowned Jivanmukta, Sri Sadashiva Brahmendra as well as by Saint Tyagaraja were rendered in the divine presence of Sri Sannidhanam by a group of devotees led by renowned musician, Rudrapatnam Sri R. N. Thyagarajan.” The Jagadguru’s remarks that day placed the singing within the practice: “While a number of ways exist for Sadhakas to tread the path of Adhyatma, keertanam and nama sankirtanam are available for all mankind.” And the record notes that “this rendering of the Kritis composed by Brahmendra had become an annual event that is held during Chaturmasya”, postponed that year by the pandemic to the day after Tyāgarāja’s ārādhanā. In November 2023, among the books released at Sringeri for the fiftieth anniversary of Sri Bhāratī Tīrtha’s sannyāsa, was “Paramahamsa — A Kannada book containing musical notations for the compositions penned by Sri Sadashiva Brahmendra” — a notation book, so that the songs can be learned as well as heard, under the title he gave himself.

Pudukkottai has kept its side too. The 1938 Manual records the Tondaimān’s foundation of the Dasarā festival and the Dakṣiṇāmūrti shrine “within the old palace” at the sage’s instance, and the 1944 Gazetteer describes the sand relic still kept there and a branch of the Theosophical Society in the town “called the Sri Sadasiva Brahmendra Lodge” — a modern society that took his name. The Kanchi Pīṭham, whose fifty-seventh head was his teacher, published the fullest scholarly chapter on him in its 1968 volume. Three seats and a princely house, none of which he ever held or served, have looked after his memory between them.

What can be said for certain, and what cannot

This page has told the stories at length because they are what the tradition has, and because the Kanchi chapter is right that “Many miraculous tales are told about him, but few concrete facts are known.” It is only fair to the reader to separate the two at the end. The following rest on documents or on the author’s own words:

• He called himself Sadāśivendra Sarasvatī and the disciple of Sri Paramaśivendra Sarasvatī, whose sandals he salutes in the Ātmavidyāvilāsa; the Kanchi Pīṭham identifies that teacher as its fifty-seventh head.
• He wrote the Ātmavidyāvilāsa, the Brahmatattvaprakāśikā, the Yogasudhākara, the Siddhāntakalpavallī with its own commentary, the Guru-ratna-mālikā and a body of shorter hymns; a corpus of about two dozen Sanskrit songs is transmitted under his name.
• His fellow-disciple Nallā Kavi, in the eighteenth century, saluted him at the head of the Advaitarasamañjarī as the one who set the avadhūta path in motion.
• The Pudukkottai state held, in 1909, a copper-plate grant connected with him dated 1738; the state’s own Manual and Gazetteer record the Tondaimān’s Dasarā festival, Dakṣiṇāmūrti shrine, the sand relic, the endowment of the Nerur shrine and the standing charities.
• His samādhi is at Nerur on the Kāverī near Karur, endowed by Pudukkottai and visited by the Jagadgurus of Sringeri from the 33rd onward, with documented visits in 1962, 1965, 2012 and 2017.

The following rest on tradition alone, and the sources say so: his birth in the Tanjore country and his father’s settlement at Śāhajīrājapuram; his schooling with Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita and Śrīdhara Ayyāvāḷ; his teacher’s rebuke and his vow of silence; the flood, the paddy, the fuel, the arm, the children of Madurai; the manner of his passing and the Bāṇaliṅga; and his dates, on which, as the section on chronology shows, the Kanchi table, the Kanchi chapter and the 1909 life give three different answers. The Kanchi chapter’s own way of holding the two kinds of evidence together is the best guide. It does not rest his standing on the tales; it rests it on the books and on the man the books show. “His output as a poet and writer in the Vedantic tradition was slender. But he touched the imagination of the people in a unique way, only Bodhendra and Sridhara Venkatesa, affectionately known as ‘Ayyaval’, being comparable to him in this respect.” And its closing portrait is drawn from the poem, not the legends: “He knows samadhi with and without object, he has practiced tapas and vairagya; he has borne without resentment the jeers and flouts of the ignorant. But all that is past. He neither praises nor blames, neither rejects nor requests. He is always and everywhere at home, nothing is alien to him.”

The other schools, seen from this life

Sri Sadāśiva lived in, and was trained for, an age of controversy, and then declined to take part in it. The Kanchi chapter sets the scene: “The age in which Sadasiva lived was one of keen theological controversy. His own Guru was a master of polemic.” It then records that the pupil did not follow the master into the lists. “His heart was drawn to Siva, ‘yoginam paramam gurum’, even as Appayya’s was; but he remained unshaken in his Advaitic conviction” — a conviction the chapter calls incompatible with any sectarian depreciation of one form of God at the expense of another. The one work in which he engages other views at all, the Brahmatattvaprakāśikā, does so by stating each opposing position in a sentence and Sri Śaṅkara’s answer in another, without heat; and the Siddhāntakalpavallī is a survey of disagreements among Advaitins themselves, treated with the same evenness.

His relation to the Yoga school is the most instructive, and it is a model of how an Advaitin may use another darśana without disparaging it. He wrote a full commentary on Patañjali; he practised, on the tradition’s account and on the Kanchi chapter’s inference, the eight-limbed yoga under some teacher other than his Vedānta guru; and he read Patañjali’s goal in an Advaita sense. The Sāṅkhya and Yoga schools hold, on their own authority, that souls are many and that release is the isolation of each; Advaita holds that the Self is one and that release is the recognition of what is already so. The Yogasudhākara does not argue the point; it takes the eight limbs as “such teachings of the yoga and other similar ‘smritis’ as are not opposed to the Vedanta” and leaves the rest. A reader who follows him should be clear that this is an Advaitin’s reading of Patañjali and not the Yoga school’s own, and should honour the school for the discipline it gave him.

The songs show the same courtesy to the theistic schools. Half of them are to Rāma and Kṛṣṇa, and there is nothing in them that a Vaiṣṇava could not sing; the Kanchi chapter notes the “decisive influence” of the Bhāgavata on his life, and the Bhāgavata is the scripture of the devotional schools. The Advaita view, which he held, is that the personal Lord and the attributeless Brahman are one reality seen with and without the veil of qualities, and that devotion to the one is not a lower path than knowledge of the other but its natural form in a life. The Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva schools hold, with equal seriousness and on their own scriptures, that the Lord’s personhood is ultimate; the songs of Sri Sadāśiva do not contradict them, and this page does not use him to do so. He wrote to Śiva as Dakṣiṇāmūrti and to Kṛṣṇa as the flute-player in the same year and the same metres, and the tradition’s memory of him — a man for whom everything was Brahman and who therefore sang to every form of it — is the best comment on sectarian quarrel that Advaita has produced. As the song says, kiṃ bhajanīyaṃ kim abhajanīyam: what is to be worshipped and what not, when all is Brahman?

Legacy

He founded nothing, and three institutions keep his memory. The Kanchi Pīṭham, whose head he might have been, treasures the Guru-ratna-mālikā he wrote for its succession and gave him the longest chapter in its 1968 volume. The Sringeri Pīṭham has prostrated at his tomb since the 33rd Jagadguru and has built a maṭha beside it. The Pudukkottai house that sheltered him kept his sand and his festival. None of this was arranged; it happened because, as the Kanchi chapter says, “he touched the imagination of the people in a unique way”.

In the history of Advaita his place is a particular one. The teachers on this site are mostly scholars, and their monuments are commentaries. He wrote commentaries too, and good ones, but his monument is a life, and a life understood by the tradition as the demonstration of what the commentaries describe. The Ātmavidyāvilāsa describes the jīvanmukta; the stories describe a man who, on the evidence of everyone who saw him, was one; and the songs let people who will never read a commentary carry the teaching in their mouths. The Kanchi chapter’s phrase for the songs — that they bring “the passionless peace that rejoices the sophisticate and the simple alike” — is the phrase for his whole legacy. In the Carnatic tradition he is counted among the composers, and a concert that ends with Pibare rāma rasaṃ or Mānasa sañcara re is, whether the audience knows it or not, ending with a lesson in Advaita.

His other legacy is the type he fixed. Nallā Kavi’s salutation, in the Kanchi volume’s transcription, is “vande avadhutamargapravartakam sri sadasivabrahma” — I bow to Sri Sadāśiva Brahma, the one who set the avadhūta path in motion. The naked, silent, wandering sage who is nevertheless a scholar and a poet, who owns nothing and is at home everywhere, who does not teach and is followed: the Tamil country’s picture of the perfect renouncer has looked like Sri Sadāśiva ever since. When the 33rd Jagadguru of Sringeri, the most learned man of his generation, kept “Sadasiva’s picture always before him” and “longs for the day when he will be as free as Sadasiva”, he was saying what the tradition has said since: that this is what the doctrine looks like when it is finished.

For the seeker

A reader who wants to take something from this life rather than only to admire it might begin with the poem, because that is where he began. The Ātmavidyāvilāsa can be read in an hour in S. N. Sastri’s translation, linked below, and its author says what to do with it: “By meditating on this Atmavidyavilasa composed (by me) everyday the wise man acquires knowledge of the supreme Self and attains to the Reality.” It was written, its third verse says, “for the purpose of abiding in my own self”, and a reader who uses it for the same purpose is using it as intended.

Three things in it are practicable. The first is the technique of verse 11: the dissolution of the elements in reverse order until what is left is the one who was doing the dissolving. The second is the temper of verse 14: “happily accepting the varied behaviour of people”, which is the whole of his ethics and was, on the evidence of the stories, the whole of his conduct. The third is the resolution of verse 13, which is a matter of conviction rather than of experience: “In the pure Self there is no Maya or its effects at all. The yogi who has come to this definite conclusion is full of supreme bliss within.” None of these requires nakedness, or silence, or a river. He took the vow of silence because a teacher told him his tongue was in the way; the lesson is not the vow but the willingness to hear the rebuke.

Then the songs. They exist to be sung, and the Sringeri Jagadguru’s remark of 2021 is the permission: “keertanam and nama sankirtanam are available for all mankind”. Mānasa sañcara re is four lines and can be learned in an evening. A reader who has it by heart has the one instruction he ever gave in his own words that everyone can follow: mānasa sañcara re brahmaṇi, mind, move in Brahman. And then, if the reader is in the south, Nerur: a small temple on the Kāverī where the river runs south, thirteen kilometres from Karur, open in the morning and the evening, where the Ācāryas of Sringeri prostrate and where the pit he is said to have walked into has a Śiva-liṅga from Benares standing beside it. The tradition says he is there. Whatever the reader believes about that, the place teaches what the poem teaches, in the way he preferred: by saying nothing.

A note on pictures, names and dates

The picture on this page is a modern devotional painting released under a free licence, showing the sage as the tradition has pictured him since the copy the 33rd Jagadguru of Sringeri kept: seated, naked, by the river. It is not a portrait from life. No likeness of him made in his lifetime is known to exist, and the reader should not take the painting as one.

His names are given on this page as the sources give them: Sadāśivendra Sarasvatī in his own colophons, Sadāśiva Brahmendra in the tradition’s usage, Sadāśiva Brahmaṁ in the Pudukkottai records, Sadāśivendra in the hymns. “Sri” has been added before his name and his teacher’s throughout, as this site does for every teacher, and is not in the sources. Sanskrit is given in the standard Roman transliteration; the Kanchi chapter’s and the 1909 life’s own spellings are kept inside quotations from them.

His dates are given on the site’s cards as “c. 17th–18th century” because that is the most the evidence bears. The section on chronology gives the three accounts: the Kanchi Pīṭham’s table, which puts his teacher’s accession in 1586; the Kanchi chapter, which places his birth in the early seventeenth century and his teacher in the seventeenth; and the 1909 life and the Pudukkottai copper-plate, which put his active years in the eighteenth century. This page reports all three and chooses none. Two misreadings in the sources have been left as they stand and noted where they occur: the Kanchi chapter’s “(1911-29)” for Serfoji’s reign, which should be 1711–29, and the 1909 life’s reign-dates for Vijaya Raghunātha Tondaimān, whose own state records give different years.

Quotations from the 1909 life are taken from a machine-read copy of the scan, and obvious machine misreadings of single letters have been silently corrected in the text and are listed in the page’s working notes; nothing has been added to a quotation that is not on the printed page, and where the scan was too damaged to read the passage has been summarised rather than quoted. Quotations from the Kanchi volume are taken from the Kanchi Pīṭham’s own website, whose spacing around punctuation has been regularised. Sanskrit verse and song texts follow the Sanskrit Documents site. English translations of the Ātmavidyāvilāsa are S. N. Sastri’s; the short glosses of song lines are this page’s own.

Timeline

Dates in this list are as the sources give them; where sources disagree, both are given. Most dates in his life are traditional, and the reader should hold them loosely.

• 1586 CE (Kanchi table) or 17th century (Kanchi chapter): Sri Paramaśivendra Sarasvatī, his teacher, becomes fifty-seventh head of the Kanchi Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha.
• Early 17th century (Kanchi chapter) or beginning of the 18th (1909 life): birth, by tradition in the Tanjore country; his father is believed to have settled at Śāhajīrājapuram, later Tiruvisanallur.
• Youth: student at Tiruvisanallur beside Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita, Śrīdhara Ayyāvāḷ and Gopālakṛṣṇa Śāstrī; renounces early and joins Sri Paramaśivendra.
• Undated: the rebuke, the vow of silence, and the composition of the Ātmavidyāvilāsa and the Navamaṇimālā at his teacher’s instruction.
• Undated: writes the Guru-ratna-mālikā at the request of Sri Ātmabodha, fellow-disciple and fifty-eighth head of the Kanchi Pīṭha (accession 1638 by the Kanchi table).
• Years of wandering: the Kāverī, the Amarāvatī, Kodumudi, Madurai; the stories told in the sections above.
• About 1738 (1909 life): met in the forests near Tiruvarangulam by the Tondaimān of Pudukkottai; the copper-plate of that year; the sand instructions; the Dasarā festival and the Dakṣiṇāmūrti shrine.
• Undated, at Nerur on the tenth day of Jyeṣṭha: the samādhi; the Bāṇaliṅga from Benares; Pudukkottai endows the shrine.
• 18th century: Nallā Kavi opens the Advaitarasamañjarī with a salutation to him.
• 1899, 1909, 1911, 1927: the Ātmavidyāvilāsa, the Brahmatattvaprakāśikā with the first written life, the Yogasudhākara and the Vāṇī Vilās Brahmatattvaprakāśikā are printed.
• Between 1879 and 1909: the 33rd Jagadguru of Sringeri (in office 1879–1912) visits Nerur, composes the Sadāśivendra Stuti there, and, in the Sringeri tradition, brings the neglected shrine to the notice of the Advaita world.
• 1938, 1944: the Pudukkottai Manual and Gazetteer record the state’s festival, shrine, relic and charities.
• 21 March 1962; 29 June – 5 July 1965: the 35th Jagadguru of Sringeri worships at Nerur; re-consecrates the Viśālākṣī-Viśvanātha temple before the samādhi on 1 July 1965.
• 1968: the Kanchi Pīṭham’s Preceptors of Advaita gives him its forty-ninth chapter.
• 2012: the 36th Jagadguru of Sringeri visits Karur and Nerur and lays the foundation of a new maṭha and temple.
• 2017, Vaiśākha Śukla Dvādaśī: the two Jagadgurus of Sringeri perform the mahākumbhābhiṣeka at Nerur.
• 3 February 2021; November 2023: his songs sung before the Jagadguru at Sringeri, an annual event; a Kannada notation book of his compositions, Paramahamsa, released at Sringeri.

Questions a reader may ask

Was he a real person? Yes. The books exist, with his name and his teacher’s in their colophons; a fellow-disciple saluted him in the eighteenth century; a princely state kept a copper-plate connected with him and endowed his tomb; and the tomb is there. What is uncertain is almost everything else about his life, and the sources say so.

When did he live? The sources disagree by as much as a century and a half, and this page gives all of them in the section on chronology. The one document with a date, the Pudukkottai copper-plate of 1738, favours the eighteenth century for his active years; the Kanchi chapter’s reasoning from his classmates favours a seventeenth-century birth; the Kanchi table’s date for his teacher would push everything earlier still. “Seventeenth to eighteenth century” is the honest answer.

Did the miracles happen? This page reports them as the sources report them, which is as tradition. The Kanchi chapter, written by devout Advaitins for the Kanchi Pīṭham, says plainly that “Many miraculous tales are told about him, but few concrete facts are known” and rests his standing not on the tales but on the fact that “he touched the imagination of the people in a unique way”. A reader may take the stories as history, as parable or as both; the poem, which is his own testimony, does not depend on them.

Was he a Kanchi teacher or a Sringeri one? Neither, and both honour him. His teacher was the fifty-seventh head of the Kanchi Pīṭha, by the Kanchi Pīṭham’s account, and he wrote the Kanchi succession into verse; the Sringeri Pīṭham’s 33rd Jagadguru made his tomb a place of pilgrimage and the Pīṭham has kept it since. He held no seat and belonged to no institution.

Did he really keep silence for life? The tradition says he became a mauni at his teacher’s rebuke and remained one. The stories that follow are consistent with it: he writes in the sand, he gestures, he is spoken to and does not reply. His songs are not evidence against it; a man may compose without speaking, and the tradition does not say when they were written.

Why does an Advaita teacher have so many songs to Kṛṣṇa? Because in Advaita the Lord with form and the Brahman without form are one reality, and devotion to the first is not a lower path than knowledge of the second. The Kanchi chapter’s phrase is that his mind “passes with effortless ease from surrender to the Divine Personality to absorption in the Bliss of Brahman”. He never argued the relation; he sang both.

Did he write the Advaitarasamañjarī? Probably not. It is printed with his works and the doubt is old, but its author names himself as Nallā Kavi and opens by saluting Sri Sadāśiva as his master; the Kanchi volume sees “no reason to doubt the explicit statement of Nallakavi as the author”. This page treats it as Nallā Kavi’s tribute to him.

Where is Nerur and can it be visited? Nerur is a village on the Kāverī about ten to thirteen kilometres from Karur in Tamil Nadu, reached by road from Karur; the nearest railway station is Karur and the nearest airport Tiruchirappalli. The shrine and the Kāśī Viśvanātha temple beside it are open morning and evening, and the Sringeri maṭha next to them has daily worship. The Karur district and Sringeri pages linked below give the details.

What is the one thing to read? The Ātmavidyāvilāsa, sixty-two verses, in S. N. Sastri’s translation linked below, with the Sanskrit beside it if the reader has any. It is the only account of his inner life in his own words, and it was written for the purpose the reader will be using it for.