Remembering Guru Nitya Chaitanya Yati

 

Many years ago I was having tea with a friend, Dr. Nelson Wu, a Chinese art historian. As he explained the organic growth of Indian epic literature over centuries, he went on to say something I’ve never forgotten: “commentary gives life.”

 

Guru Nitya’s life was a living commentary on ancient Indian wisdom. A modern, living commentary, in every instant of his behavior.

 

Nitya and Nataraja Guru before him were both yogis with an extraordinary depth of attainment; they were also “free thinkers” who could express the truths of their Vedantic tradition with great originality and novelty. Nitya’s teachings, shaped by his intuitive psychological grasp of the values and cultures of every one of his students as individuals, transformed their lives through the decades with organic naturalness. A master of oblique instruction, Nitya would sow seeds, water them by putting his students into learning situations, and then stand back as they grew and flowered. His nature as an educator was to cultivate: this resonates so well with my image of him standing in his garden, or on a walk, tenderly caressing the leaves of flowering plants. Thanks to his profound understanding, his teachings took a thousand forms. All of them were commentaries on a freedom you knew he had discovered within himself.

           

When we first met, I was expecting a stern zen master, but he completely shattered that expectation. As he gently scolded the cauliflowers he was roasting, encouraging each of them to brown just so, he seemed to glow with an odd conspiratorial pleasure, about to burst out laughing at the simple fact of being alive, a feeling he knew you shared somehow...To be in his presence for any length of time was to be conscripted into an extraordinary spiritual fellowship, the family of the Guru, the gurukula.

 

Shortly after my initial encounter with him, I began to attend very early morning classes on the Atmopadesha Satakam held in Portland Oregon. The record of those talks has been published as That Alone, his wonderful English commentary on that key work of Narayana Guru. However, no written transcription could convey the profound atmosphere of those early morning wisdom talks; the silent pre-dawn atmosphere was part of the teaching. I began to realize at that point that I had been blessed to receive the instruction, in the ancient manner, of a genuine master of an ancient spiritual tradition. Such an initiation matured slowly in all who then participated over decades. 

 

From that point on, I made considerable efforts to spend as much time with him as I could. It soon became apparent, however, that “relating” to Guru Nitya could be quite complex. Often it felt like riding an emotional roller coaster. He declared more than once in my presence that he had no friends. How to interpret such a statement? Here was a man with a gigantic correspondence, who spent hours each day dictating personal letters to troubled followers who sought his advice, who supported those in need, financially and emotionally, who nourished artistic, poetic and musical achievements of his followers, and who was famous in his native Kerala as a spiritual master and public intellectual: how could he say he was without friends?

 

There were periods when I believed I was a close friend. Even so, intervals of intimate instruction could often be followed by periods of distancing, and on occasion, outright rejection. Corrective rejection, what Guru Nitya sometimes called “psycho-surgery,” required that absolute trust on the part of the student be met with a clear and deep psychological diagnosis of the needed correction on the part of the instructor. It was my great good fortune that I had that trust in him. To this day I remain profoundly grateful for his interventions on my behalf. The overall message of such behavior was always the same: turn from the teacher you think you know and look within. Indeed the role of the human Guru has always been and will always be to introduce the student to their deepest Self, the true Guru. This demands of the teacher that he be, in the words of Shankara’s Vivekachudamani, “an ocean of love that knows no ulterior motive.” Nothing was asked of the student other than their sincere interest. That interest was the student’s business; he had no concern to artificially manufacture it, or to supply it for them.

 

To his great credit, Guru Nitya always required a healthy measure of independence and social self-reliance from his students. While he showed his students how their own innate interests (svadharma) could form the basis of a healthy social integration, at the same time, he was adept at demolishing, where necessary, unhealthy identifications a student had with their social role, ones that led on to ego-expansion. This positioning of seemingly opposed attitudes in a kind of neutral mutual cancellation typified everything he did. A consummate sannyasin, or renunciate, he always walked free of institutional or ideological commitments or prejudices, a neutral follower of the middle way. It was sometimes alarming, but often fun, to have one’s habits or prejudices “neutralized”: for example, having your artistic prejudices dismantled, or watching a well-meaning host be told that he, Guru Nitya, preferred his ice-cream boiled.

           

Experiencing daily life with Guru Nitya, over time, provided the foundation for a proper reception of his teaching. This, I imagine, resembled the educational pattern of children growing up with their spiritual preceptors in the gurukulas of traditional India. How to shape or describe the cumulative effect of witnessing the countless transactions of someone who knows the world and the self to be one?  Beyond skills at day-to-day transaction and interpersonal relationship, something else was being imparted. At odd moments, you would become aware that he was using personal pronouns in a weirdly polyvalent way. Once I asked him: “wasn’t there a time when you were like us and you were struggling to achieve your realization?” He replied, without hesitation and even a bit flippantly: “I was always a good boy.” On another occasion, when I had been put up on stage on the spur of the moment to deliver remarks to a large crowd of Malayali followers, he leaned over and said to me at the reception that followed: “You know, all this fuss is about you.” The fuss was certainly not about me, a hippy nitwit. Just who were the “I” and “you” in these statements? A boundary-challenging, tantalizing question.

 

Though they were largely products of the 1970’s American “counterculture,” Nitya’s American students were gradually led into an ever more serious consideration of these issues, not via any mechanistic program of culturally exotic ritual or meditation then current with the popular yogi figures of the day, but via a normal human relationship with a real spiritual master. This teaching was embodied not only in the study of texts: the works of Narayana Guru, Patanjali and the Bhagavad Gita, but as teachings lived and modeled by someone we knew. Neither Nitya nor his teaching ever seemed exotic or foreign. They seemed universal and totally meaningful and appropriate on a personal level, and not just some recipe.  

 

For a long time I wondered at the apparent absence of any formal instruction in a meditative technique, even though guided meditative talks were frequently part of Nitya’s engagement with groups. As a much older person, I have come to see that the form of meditation into which the student naturally evolves is at the silent heart of everything he ever wrote or taught. One afternoon near sunset, I was sitting alone with Guru Nitya at the Gurukula on Bainbridge Island. The telephone rang. Nitya snapped: “Don’t answer it; its karma.” For the next 40 minutes, he and I were wrapped in deepening silence, as the room descended into the total darkness of the evening.

 

It was a moment I will never forget, not because I achieved any exalted state of samadhi, but because it was a living initiation into the universally shared Awareness that is the source of all experience. A living enactment of Verse 10 of Atmopadesha Satakam:

 

                        “Who is sitting in the dark? Speak you!

                        In this manner one speaks; having heard this, you also

                        to know, ask him, “And who are you?”

                        To this as well, the response is one.”

 

I have been teased by Indian friends, who tell me that as a Westerner, I’m addicted to saying “thank you, thank you.” For a Vedantin, this is supposed to be a relativistic, unconscious habit. But I cannot cure myself of it. I will never adequately find the words to express the thanks that are in my heart, for having had the luck to meet Guru Nitya, and to partake of his spirit, alive within me to this day.