At an auspicious moment during the around-the-world 1972 Indian Odyssey, Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami (Gurudeva) gave diksha in Sri Lanka to several of his devotees. One, a teacher, received the mission to remain with his wife and pre-teen son in the village of Alaveddy near Subramuniya Ashram in order to collect oral and written histories about Yogaswami’s lineage of gurus. The timing was critical. Yogaswami’s Great Departure had happened in 1964, and the memories of those who were close to him were still fresh. They saw the need to chronicle their guru’s life, so they put aside their usual distrust of outsiders and eagerly shared their experiences. It was important to capture their recollections at this time, for it assured a faithful telling of Yogaswami’s life and teachings. To wait for decades would invite a sketchy history and stories forgotten. §
It was discovered during this one-year sojourn that years earlier Yogaswami had told devotees: “My biographer is coming. He’s in a white body, and he’s coming here to tell my story.” Once when an Englishman arrived in Jaffna, devotees ran to Swami, saying, “This is your biographer.” Yogaswami retorted curtly, “No. He is coming later, much later.” During the devotee’s stay, more than a few of the villagers had dreams indicating that the American schoolteacher living in Alaveddy was the biographer Yogaswami had spoken of. Word swept through the Jaffna peninsula. One by one visitors came to the humble home of Swami’s biographer to share their stories of their guru, Sri Lanka’s lion of dharma, and of his guru, Chellappaswami, and his guru’s guru, Kadaitswami. The teacher sat on a mat listening to hundreds of narratives, carefully penning them by hand. Later he wove them into a 120-page manuscript entitled Soldiers Within, which he presented to Gurudeva after returning to America. §
This book began with those papers. In fact, Soldiers Within was studied within the monastery for decades and shared with only a few close devotees. It remained unpublished until now. In the intervening years, Gurudeva asked his monks to undertake further research. We collected more oral histories and written biographical material, translating as needed from Tamil in consultation with Tamil elders. Finally we assembled the material into this tome. In 1998 Gurudeva sat with his editing team of monks to review, line by line, a preliminary 400-page version, which did not include his own biography.§
Pass a sentence around a room of people, and you may be amused by the difference between the first iteration and the last. Similarly, real-life stories told again and again are naturally altered, and ultimately distorted. Yet much of history has been chronicled in this manner. It’s not completely reliable, but often it is all we have. This biography of seven mystics contains their actual writings, which is the bedrock of the book, alongside stories by their contemporaries, some of which are probably not perfectly accurate. But they are the stories told. This was a primary and persistent challenge confronting the editors of this book. §
For years we compared hundreds of sources, working hard to assure the nearest thing to historical fact. In particular, recorded details are scarce for the book’s earliest gurus—Maharishi Nandinatha, Rishi Tirumular and the nameless rishi from the Himalayas. Tirumular’s history, for example, is known only in its broadest details, derived primarily from references in the ancient Periyapuranam and Tirumular’s few cryptic autobiographical references in his Tirumantiram. §
To fill in the historical lacunae in those sections, we adopted a free-flowing style of embellishment to bring light and detail to lives that would otherwise be hidden in the oblivion of non-history. The stories of those early gurus, as told in this book, are a partially fictionalized recreation of events based on rudimentary historical facts supplemented with a modern historian’s understanding of life in that region in those days. The closer our story comes to now, the more founded in fact it becomes.§
For the chapters about Gurudeva’s life, the situation was completely different; we had a surfeit of resources. The challenge was to identify the five percent of his biographical material that we had room for. To allow him to tell his story in his own words as much as possible, we referenced a his 1970 talk called “Making of a Master,” in which he detailed the mystical experiences of his youth. We also transcribed videos of seven classes he gave aboard a ship during the 1999 Alaska Innersearch Travel-Study Program, one on each decade of his life. Details of his early life were found in the monastery archives. We examined certificates of birth and death, old passports, newspaper clippings and other documents, childhood photo albums, letters he wrote from Sri Lanka in the late 1940s, and letters later written to him and his monks relating the events of his visit there from the observers’ point of view. Gurudeva’s own handwritten notes from those days proved indispensable. §
To structure the storyline of his life from the time he began teaching, we consulted an exhaustive monthly chronology kept by his monks over the years, along with the personal testimonies of those who lived and studied with him. Many events of the historic early Innersearches were recovered from participants’ diaries. Other facets of Gurudeva’s life were drawn from our April/May/June 2002 memorial edition of Hinduism Today. But still there were many gaps in the history—briefly worded bullet points in the chronology and partially disclosed memories of Gurudeva’s monks—that represented stories needing to be told. Thus, for five years, beginning in 2007 until the completion of this book, Gurudeva’s editing team of monks set most other work aside, writing those stories and weaving them into this first full account of the life of this modern-day rishi.§
Gurudeva placed tremendous value on the use of artwork for its ability to convey teachings and tell stories. The extensive paintings in this book were created with that principle in mind, to bring these stories to life, to capture visually the places and events seen only by a few. They are the masterful work of Tiru S. Rajam (1919-2009) of Mylapore, Tamil Nadu. Though his first gift was music, his art was equally remarkable, created in a unique style rooted in the purely South Indian genre. He spoke of it as his worship, and he regarded himself as a kind of aesthetic monk, which made his work with us, the ascetic monks, especially effectual, as these pages reveal. When others went to the temple, he adjourned to his canvas, always to paint something spiritual. In a somewhat dusky second-story studio, Rajam worked at his easel up to fourteen hours a day from 2002 to 2003 to create fifty-six canvases for this book, each with multiple stories. His brush was guided by descriptions, photos and illustrations that we, the sannyasin editors living at Kauai’s Hindu Monastery in Hawaii, provided. The creative genius and cultural nuances are all his. §
The book you hold in your hands took some thirty-eight years to complete; but it is a first edition, and first editions are seldom perfect. We welcome additional stories, photos, corrections and ideas, which will make for fuller and more flawless future editions. You can send your stories and changes to sadasivanatha@hindu.org. This book is available in PDF and e-book formats at www.himalayanacademy.com.§