Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I on the other hand had made a pilgrimage to Tiruvannamalai in a body that would have been taxed by a visit to Canterbury, for no other purpose than to pay my respects to my guru, and been rewarded with an unquiet mind and a craving for lentil dumplings.

Then Mrs Osborne came out with another book of Maugham’s. In her way she was quite a persistent director of studies. I had done the basic reading, and was to be rewarded with an advanced text. This second book was a collection of essays called Points of View , actually Maugham’s last book, dating from the 1950s. What she wanted to show me was the piece called ‘The Saint’, which was a portrait of Ramana Maharshi written long after the meeting which had fed the silly fantasies of The Razor’s Edge . Maugham had remembered Bhagavan over all those years, and considered him a great spiritual figure. His understanding of Hinduism seemed pretty erratic to me, and a guru is not a saint, but I had to admit that he hadn’t entirely missed the point. That seemed to be my privilege.

I knew that I was supposed to become a Cambridge undergraduate that September, but apart from the kick of outdoing Dad (ignoble triumph, since his chance of university was scuppered by a world convulsion) it meant nothing to me. My life as I wanted it to be went only so far as this visit to Tamil Nadu, then it became incomprehensible. I hadn’t foreseen having to come home. I had planned a sort of Indian rope trick all of my own. I would climb up into union with the guru and pull the rope ladder up after me. No one I knew could follow. I would simply disappear, leaving behind the return portion of my Air India ticket and a half-smile like the Cheshire Cat’s, half-way up a tamarind tree.

Now I felt I was seeking self-realisation against the clock, and finding the necessary states of mind even harder to achieve. Of course ‘achieve’ gives the wrong impression. There can be no question of making something happen. That’s what makes it so hard for the Western mind, and my mind was Western to its fingertips. I had built myself a carapace of brittle willpower, laboriously secreting the chitin from which an exoskeleton is constructed, and now I wanted it cracked open, pierced and raked by the loving beak of enlightenment.

Flakes of powdered glory

One afternoon I was in the Old Hall trying to meditate, and becoming aware as usual that my attention was skittering off in all directions. Then I noticed an old man brushing Bhagavan’s couch. This must have been a particular privilege, since there was a small wooden fence round the couch. Clearly he had permission to pass inside. His eyes were milky with cataracts, and he worked from very close to the fabric, using a brush that was more like a fly whisk than a serious instrument of housework. Nevertheless he kept at it, drawing the little brush down the fabric in reverent strokes, turning the chore into a ritual of sustained attention. I found myself following his movements, fascinated. It took him the best part of an hour to brush the whole upper part of the couch, and then he started on the back, with the same slow meticulous pace. Then it was the turn of the underside, though he had to lie down at odd angles to reach every square inch. Then he turned his attention to the legs of the couch.

The little brush he held was only a step up from the imaginary one which Granny had told me to use as a child to beguile insomnia, patiently cleaning the cells of a beehive which was no less imaginary.

I have to say that at the end of this old man’s prodigious grooming the couch looked exactly the same as it had at the beginning. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to sit on it anyway. It was no more than a stand for a portrait, and a prop from a long-ago photo session. If anyone had asked to take the couch away Ramana Maharshi would very likely have said yes, just as he had with the tiger skin. Nevertheless I was very struck by the devotion of the man with the little brush. From the eerily patient way that he coaxed notional dust from that couch, you would think that it was covered in the most fragile living tissue, like the flakes of powdered glory that make up a butterfly’s wing.

It was only afterwards that I realised how far I had fallen from my own hopes of pilgrimage. The point of pressurising Dad into getting the airline ticket, the whole idea of coming all this way, was to take possession of my spiritual life, not to be impressed by someone else’s. I was estranged from my own devotion. I had failed to establish a primary connection with either of the complementary entities which fed the hunger of so many, the mountain and the ashram. I was turning into a sort of spiritual parasite. I had less of a real relationship with Ramana Maharshi now that I was spending time in rooms that his body had occupied, and spending every day with people who had met him, than when I had been stuck at home in Bourne End, with no stronger inspiration than a book borrowed from the local library.

Ganesh no longer did me the honour of pushing the wheelchair from Aruna Giri to the ashram. Rajah Manikkam delivered me to the gate, and then I would be ferried to the appropriate room by an American devotee who had a sonorous, almost mantra-worthy name: Caylor Truman Wadlington. Of course Ganesh had a lot to do in terms of ashram admin, and he never saw me without giving me his full smile and bidding me once again welcome. But I was rather nostalgic for the good old days earlier in my visit to India, before we had begun to be friendly. Then the obstacles to spiritual progress seemed reassuringly external. Now the resistance was pretty clearly coming from inside me. In an analogy which Ramana Maharshi took from the movies (a particularly rich source of teaching for him), if while you are watching a film a gigantic flickering hair obscures the heroine’s profile, it is futile to attempt to dislodge the monster fibre from the back wall of the cinema. It is of normal size and inside the projector. Inside you, who project so unrelentingly.

In the last week of my stay, Mrs Osborne came up with an inventive solution to one aspect of my impasse, relating specifically to pradakshina . Since it wasn’t possible to go round the mountain under my own steam in the prescribed manner, I should be assisted to climb it. She said, ‘You may not be able to climb Arunachala yourself, but that is no reason for you not to be as high up as we can possibly get you. Not as high as Brahma, I dare say, but high enough to take a small visitor’s breath away.’

The story goes that Vishnu and Brahma were once quarrelling over which was the greater, until Shiva was brought in to settle the question. He appeared as an infinite column of fire, a tejolingam , and challenged the rival gods to find its upper or lower extremity. Vishnu became a boar and burrowed down in search of the base, while Brahma became a swan and soared up in search of the summit. Brahma tried to cheat (he caught a falling flower and claimed to have picked it on the summit) and consequently Vishnu won. The column of fire was too bright to be looked at, so in consideration of the limitations of human vision, Shiva manifested himself instead as Arunachala, on the same spot. It’s the sort of lively story that monotheism rules out of bounds. I do like a large cast of characters, even if they’re only there on the stage, all singing, all dancing, to tell me that existence is one and indivisible.

There may have been some religious symbolism in Mrs O’s suggestion. Why are there many faiths, when there is only one truth? The mountain analogy again, with many routes to the summit, over different types of terrain. Ramana Maharshi’s way has always been considered as a sort of direct ascent of a precipice, as simple as it is difficult. This accounts for the idea (mistaken, I’m sure) that the task is easier with lesser gurus — hence for instance, Raghu’s family’s adherence to Paramahamsa Yogananda. The vichara path being too ‘high’, too ‘exalted’, a ‘lower path’ is chosen until the disciple is ready. I’m truly sorry, but bollocks! It isn’t presumption that chooses the direct approach, it’s faith.