Life of Sri Ramanujacharya - Part 1

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In September 2006, I led a group of 25 students from Amrita University on a tour of Rameswaram, Madurai, Thanjavur and Trichy as part of the university's cultural education programme. At Trichy, we visited the famous Rangathaswamy temple in Srirangam. After having darsan of the presiding deity Sri Ranganathaswamy, we were led by a colleague into a smaller shrine called 'Sri Ramanuja Sannidhi.' The shrine was small, almost like a cave, and poorly lit. The priest in charge of this shrine gathered all of us in front of the sanctum sanctorum and made a stunning revelation that the 870 yr old physical body of Sri Ramanujacharya, (A.D. 1017 - 1137), the patron saint of the Vishishta Dvaita school of Vedanta, was being preserved in this shrine. In fact, the image in the shrine was not a stone image but the actually physical body of the saint! The students were sceptical and demanded further 'proof.' So, the priest lit a camphor lamp and passed it over the image, part by part and pressed the shoulder to demonstrate that it was not made of stone.

He further explained that every year in the month of Thula (October / November), the body is anointed with a special paste called 'thirumanjanam' which acts a preservative, something akin to the way the Egyptians preserved the remains of their Pharaohs. The discovery led to a heated debate amongst the students and personally, my curiosity about Sri Ramanuja intensified with this visit. I remembered a life sketch I had read a few years ago and resolved to study the life and teachings of the saint again in greater detail. The more I read, the more I was struck by the impact His life has had on the spiritual life of the whole of South India.

Swami Vivekananda paid glowing tributes to Sri Ramanuja during his lecture tour in the South after his return from the Parliament of Religions at America:

"Ramanuja is the leading dualistic philosopher of later India, whom all the other dualistic sects have followed, directly or indirectly, both in the substance of their teaching and in the organisation of their sects even down to some of the most minute points of their organisation. You will be astonished if you compare Ramanuja and his work with the other dualistic Vaishnava sects in India, to see how much they resemble each other in organisation, teaching, and method..." (Lectures from Colombo to Almora, p. 209)

"Then came the brilliant Ramanuja. Shankara, with his great intellect, I am afraid, had not as great a heart. Ramanuja's heart was greater. He felt for the downtrodden, he sympathised with them. He took up the ceremonies, the accretions that had gathered, made them pure so far as they could be, and instituted new ceremonies, new methods of worship, for the people who absolutely required them. At the same time, he opened the door to the highest spiritual worship from the Brahmin to the Pariah. That was Ramanuja's work..." (p.190)

In another paper on 'The Historical Evolution of India,' Vivekananda comments:

"Ramanuja, on the other hand, with a most practical philosophy, a great appeal to the emotions, an entire denial of birthrights before spiritual attainments and appeals through the popular tongue, completely succeeded in bringing the masses back to the Vedic religion."

That is a glimpse of the vastness and the profundity of the life that we seek to condense into a few columns here. I will present some highlights of his divine life, personality and core teachings and if that awakens the curiosity in some of you to know more about Sri Ramanuja, then our purpose is served.