Hindu

Totāpuri

Totāpuri was a wandering Advaita Vedanta master of the Naga order, remembered with reverence as the teacher who initiated Sri Ramakrishna into the path of non-dual knowledge and guided him to the supreme realization of nirvikalpa samadhi.

Totāpuri, known affectionately to Sri Ramakrishna as Nangta, "the naked one," is honored in the modern devotional history of India as one of the great teachers of Advaita Vedanta, the path of non-dual wisdom set forth in the age of the Upanishads and given classic form by Adi Shankaracharya. He belonged to the austere Naga order of sannyasins, renunciates who set aside every possession and worldly tie in the single-minded pursuit of the Absolute. Tradition records that he was born of devout parents around the late eighteenth century, by custom in the Punjab, and that he was given to the monastic life while still a small child. In time he came to be looked to as the head of a monastery in that province and as a guide to a large community of fellow monks, a man of towering inner stature whose whole being was bent toward liberation. The sources lovingly preserve the memory of his long discipline. Totāpuri is said to have practiced sadhana for many years in solitude on the wooded banks of the sacred Narmada River, withdrawing his mind from every passing object until, after that long and patient labor, he realized his identity with Brahman, the one Reality. Having attained the highest Advaitic experience, the unconditioned absorption the tradition calls nirvikalpa samadhi, he lived thereafter as a free and unfettered soul, clad only in a loin-cloth, subsisting on alms, and roaming the length of the land. A monk devoted to the purest discipline, he made it his rule never to remain in any one place for long, lest attachment of any kind should take root in a heart wholly given to the eternal. It was this rule that he gently set aside, in an episode cherished by all who love the story of Sri Ramakrishna. Travelling along the Ganges, and led, as the tradition tells it, by an inscrutable Divine purpose, Totāpuri came around the year 1864 to the temple garden of Dakshineswar, near Calcutta. There he met the young priest of the Kali temple and recognized at once a soul ripe for the teaching of Vedanta. With the blessing of the Divine Mother whom Ramakrishna worshipped, and with a loving care to spare the feelings of Ramakrishna's aged mother, Totāpuri initiated him into the holy order of sannyasa and into the mysteries of non-dual knowledge. In the early hours of the morning, in the quiet of the Panchavati grove, he guided his disciple through the rites of renunciation, teaching him that Brahman alone is the Reality, ever pure, ever illumined, ever free, beyond all limits of time, space, and causation. What followed astonished even this seasoned master. Instructing Ramakrishna to gather his whole mind upon the formless Absolute, Totāpuri watched as his disciple, after a brief and luminous effort, passed into the very nirvikalpa samadhi that he himself had reached only after long years of devoted practice. "Is it possible," he is said to have marveled, "that he has attained in a single day what took me many years of strenuous practice to achieve?" In that wonder we glimpse the greatness of the teacher, for it is the mark of a true guru to rejoice without reserve in the flowering of his student. Totāpuri, who had never been one to linger anywhere, remained at Dakshineswar for the better part of a year. The tradition observes, with quiet beauty, that this meeting blessed the teacher as richly as the disciple. In the company of Sri Ramakrishna, the devoted votary of the formless Absolute came to behold the living power and grace of the Divine Mother, the Shakti through whom the one Reality expresses itself as the manifold world. Thus their meeting became a blessing flowing in both directions: the disciple received the crown of non-dual realization, and the teacher came to cherish ever more fully the loving, personal face of the same one Divine. In this gracious exchange, the two great currents of Indian spirituality, the path of transcendent knowledge and the path of devotion, met and embraced in a single sacred friendship, each illumining the other. Little is known with certainty of Totāpuri's later wanderings or of his passing, as befits a man who left no fixed home and sought no remembrance for himself. Yet through his luminous gift to Sri Ramakrishna, and through Ramakrishna to the worldwide spiritual movement that flowed from him, the wisdom Totāpuri carried out of the forests of the Narmada continues to enlighten countless seekers. He is remembered with deep gratitude as a master of self-mastery, a teacher of the highest realization, and a soul wholly absorbed in the one boundless Reality.