[Advaita-l] Sannyasa and Ramana (was Re: Sankara on sannyAsa for Steadiness in GYAna)

[S Jayanarayanan]

--- On Fri, 10/23/09, Dr D Bharadwaj <dr.d.bharadwaj at gmail.com> wrote:

[..]

> *On one occasion he was asked by a Govt official,*
> *on record,  what 'ashrama' he belonged to  if
> not the sannyaasaahrama.  He
> said, on record, that he belonged to the ateetaahrama. *

Ramana said that he belonged to ati-varNa-Ashramam: beyond all varNa and Ashrama.

> As for the description in the Ramana Leela, the views were
> entirely the
> author's. That it was written while Bhagavan was in the
> physical body does
> not mean that
> *every page whetted, verified or approved my him.*

“We are poor sannyasis, we survive on what others give us. We never had any money at all,” said Bhagavan.

The above is Bhagavan himself speaking, not the author's opinion.

> That it was written while Bhagavan was in the physical body does
> not mean that
> *every page whetted, verified or approved my him.*
> *
> *
> *There are a few biographical works on him written by stalwarts in
> Bhagavan's life time, that were read out to him and were scrupulously
> corrected based on his comments. The Leela unfortunately was not one of
> them.*

That is indeed strange, because Sri Ramana Leela is almost universally acknowledged to be an accurate record of Ramana's life. For instance,

http://sri-ramana-maharshi.blogspot.com/2008/05/authenticity-of-bhagavans-writings-and.html

"Bhagavan replied that the authors of Self-Realization and Sri Ramana Vijayam had left shortly after completing their works, whereas Krishna Bhikshu had stayed and updated his book from time to time. I would take this to imply that Bhagavan thought that Ramana Leela was more accurate than the others because the author had taken the trouble to check the revisions with Bhagavan himself."

Regards,
Kartik