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| Wednesday, 30 July 2003 |
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Murugan's Circus and our multiple states of being by Manik Sandrasagra
It was German Swami Gauribala who initiated me into Saiva Siddhanta Jaffna. I first met Swami in the Colombo - 7 residence of Mike Wilson, an Englishman who, with Arthur Clarke, had made Sri Lanka their home in 1956. Mike and his beautiful Sri Lankan wife Elizabeth provided a haven for those who went 'against the stream' at their home in Barnes place. For me, a westernized oriental gentleman or wog, returning home from five years in an idealistic North America, their home was filled with intelligent discussion amidst the gathering gloom and frustration of the dowager Bandaranaike running the affairs of State. I had first heard of Swami in 1963 when I was eighteen. My informant was Soudhi Sittampalam, my friend Maya's mother. The gifted tenor Nihal Fonseka and I were regular guests in their home off Flower Road while rehearsing Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate directed by the American Bert Stimmel, at the Lionel Wendt Theatre. The Sittampalam household was unique in many ways. There was Soundhi's husband; Sitta sitting for hours with a man called Mahalingam reading people's horoscopes from ancient ola leaves. Sitta, was both Commissioner of Inland Revenue and Colombo's foremost astrologer. We never spoke to him, but could hear him as well as Mahalingam's monotonous chant in the background. Yogaswami There was also a bearded Australian houseguest in a loincloth, called Nari Kutti Swami. He was described as disciple of Yogaswami, the Sage of Jaffna. The Sittampalam home was essentially a Hindu Tamil home, while I was a Jesuit trained Roman Catholic.
There was a constant flow of visitors, any of them Yogaswami devotees. I heard of Yogaswami's other foreign disciples; German Swami of Gauribala and Yanai Kutti or Sanda Swami, the son of Viscount Soulbury, the last British Governor General of Ceylon. I heard about an old lady, called Haro Hara Amma, who lived on a tea estate, below Adam's Peak. All these stories of mystery and magic intrigued me. Many generations of Roman Catholicism was stripping away. My apprenticeship under Sri Lanka's foremost theatrical personality Arthur van Langenberg began my showbiz career. Promoting Nihal Fonseka whom I had met on this production, here and abroad would be pre-occupation for the next seven years. This too led me to Yogaswami, although I did not know it at the time. i met George Koch the photographer in 1964 at 'Lukannon' in Thimbirigasyaya, the Mack and van Langenberg family home. This was yet anther spectacular environment, where Bevis and Geoffrey Bawa, Manjusri, Richard Gabriel, Neville and Sybil Weeraratne, Harry, Lester James and Harold Peries were all part of "an endless procession of fascinating visitors," as their niece Barbara Sansoni describes in her book "The Architecture of an Island." George discovered my obsession with cinema and invited me to be his assistant. We made three trips in all. One to Adam's Peak, the second to film The Vanishing Veddas in Gal Oya and the third to Jaffna documenting on 16-mm film the Nallur festival. On this last trip our hosts and patrons were Satchit and Linga Satchithananda. Nallur Festival We went to Jaffna by train surrounded by a bevy of Hindu Tamil girls, and my obsession with refinement commenced. When we got to Jaffna we proceeded to a house very close to the temple, where we were to stay and very soon we set out to the holy precinct to hear a relation serenade the deity. However the matriarchal Linga had made me shed my western clothes and don only a white vetti before we were permitted to leave. George the Dutch-Burgher was allowed to remain as he was. I was completely transformed into a Shaivite, which is what my name signifies anyway, but dressing up like one was a brand new experience for me. Just trying to keep my cloth up was trouble enough. Now looking back, having worn eastern clothes for over twenty-five years, this was the first time of cotton and comfort, although it was Swami Gauribala in 1971 who initiated me on how to wear a vetti properly with no fear of it coming loose. At the Nallur festival I followed George everywhere. One of the places we filmed in was the chariot hall, which was full of saffron-robed swamis. At the time the swamis did not hold my interest. It was many years later, when I was very much a part of this lineage that I realized that Yogaswami and his 'kuttis' or cubs always sat here during the procession and that I had unwittingly been granted a darshan with Swami, without even knowing it. The White Swami Between 1964 and 1966 Soundhi and I joined hands promoting Nihal Fonseka's spectacular talent locally. With the help of J.R. Jayewardene, Bunty de Zoysa, Clarence Amerasinghe and Mubarak Thaha we collected just enough money to send him to train under a 'bel canto' specialist Maestro Guido Delni. At home both Aubrey Walpole and Anandarajah Hallock had taught Nihal all they knew and had recommended an Italian voice teacher rather than a local teacher destroying his talent. In December 1966 I got to London and joined Nihal and promoting his career in the West began. In between our other activities, which included recording 'Master Sir' by Nimal Mendis with a thirty piece orchestra and attending auditions including one with the legendary Bernard Delfont I found myself visiting Mano Chanmugam in Wallington to work on a film script called 'The White Swami' with Rex Cooke who shared Mano's home with him. The script was based on the stories I had heard from Soundhi. The Beatle George Harrison, whom I had met through John Barham, a fellow sitar student under Pandit Ravi Shankar, was the first to read the script and call me at Mano's with great enthusiasm. He wanted my permission to share it with Mick Jagger. However the Indian Guru of 'Transcendental Meditation' Maharishi Mahesh Yogi arrived in London at the same time as I was pushing my script. A star-studded cast turned up at the London Hilton ballroom to hear the Maharishi and I lost my stars as they took off with the Maharishi to discover transcendental bliss in Bangor Maine in Wales. Nihal and I returned to Ceylon in 1969 on a short holiday en-route to Singapore, to perform at the fashionable Arundel Room at the Goodwood Park Hotel. I made use of the time to proceed with my search for the mythical Haro Hara Amma. In the meantime the Sittampalam household in Colombo had disintegrated with Soundhi moving to London with Maya and I had to proceed to Adam's Peak with just one clue - a most curious name. Haro Hara Amma I asked around the tea estates that lined the road to the sacred peak for Haro Hara Amma and to my surprise I found her. She was a well-known Murugan devotee who always went to Kataragama. She was now very old and sat huddled in a corner in an estate line, saying little or nothing but staring at me. I left satisfied that for some mysterious reason I had found another link in the chain, but I did not know why. Haro Hara Amma seemed like any other poor estate Tamil woman. Later on I would be told that she was an expert in 'tattvam' seeing the inner reality behind appearances. Spontaneously she named all the Yogaswami devotees who hung out with German Swami in Kataragama after animals besides Nari (fox) and Yanai (elephant), there was a Puli (leopard) - Sam Wickramesinghe, a Pandri (pig) who was also called 'Mudaliyar' and who was said to be related to Sir Chittampalam Gardiner - and a Punai (cat) - Adrian Snodgrass. German Swami himself was 'petta naay' or the bitch. I was told that he would sing an English drinking song as he walked with this pack of animals, the other 'kuttis' on the way to the Menik Ganga for a bath! "Drink puppy, drink, let every puppy drink, that is old enough to lap and to swallow. Here's to the fox and there's to the hound, and here's to the chase that we follow". The Earthman He was undoubtedly the bitch, the 'kuttis' puppies and the chase was the search for the Holy Grail. Everyone's guru was Yogaswami, and this was the only thing they agreed upon. Every one of them was distinct and each initiated according to their individual nature. Gauribala was the only one initiated as a sannyasin, confirming his earlier initiation in the north of India into the Giri Order of Dasanami Sannyasins. Maggi Lidchi has documented this period in Kataragama in her novel 'The Earthman' published by Victor Gollancz, the film Rights of which richard Boyle purchased in 1978 so that we could turn it into a movie. In fact we commissioned Tissa Abeysekera to write the screenplay, and he produced an excellent structure for a movie, which we were however unable to finance. I finally met Swami Gauribala in 1971. It was a magical moment. He was quite unlikely my idea of a Swami. He was sitting on an easy chair, bare-bodied, dressed in pure white cotton vetti, looking rather like Santa Claus and puffing at a smelly black Jaffna cigar. He had the words 'summa iru' tattooed in Tamil on the inside of his left arm. I had never met an iconoclast of his quality. He looked at what I was reading and chuckled. 'An autobiography of a Yogi! A yogi annihilates selfhood. How then can a yogi who is a nobody write an autobiography?" This was his opening line. He also ridiculed the production I was engaged in called "New Age" introducing to Ceylon the music of Bob Dylan and a variety of modern American musical crusaders. He chuckled, "New Age - all balderdash! It was completed long ago. All finished". Mahayana Sigiriya Swami also introduced me to Sigiriya in 1971. Our party included Jocelyn Rouleau, a niece of the then Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Carol another Yogaswami devotee and wife of James George, the former Canadian High Commissioner in Ceylon, India and Iran, with whose assistance the photographer RollofBenny produced several breath taking volumes. We were given a rare treat with Swami being our guide in a place that he knew intimately. In fact he called himself King Kassapa while I became the 'White Rabbit' and Jocelyn 'Alice' in this voyage of discovery. It was this introduction to the Mahayana version of Sigiriya that resulted in the 'God King' in 1974, the biggest epic film in the life of Lester James Peries, which I co-produced with the legendary British producer Dimitri de Grunwald. On this production I landed on the summit in an Air Force Helicopter carrying a statue of the Goddess Tara for a Temple, a view that has now been confirmed in the scholarship of former Archaeology Commissioner Raja de Silva in 'Sigiriya and its Significance' (2002). He too attributes his change of mind on Sigiriya to Swami. Swami's notebooks on his research are still with me and will one day be made available maybe as a book or even as the basis of an interactive online computer game set in Sigiriya. Technology is daily getting cheaper and presenting Sigiriya in real time as a timeless initiatic centre with multiple meanings will be the challenge. It will be creating a virtual Sigiriya. At present we take our perspective to the public with our very popular Living Heritage website www.sigiriya.org. The teaching Swami read my first script of 'The White Swami' written together with Rex Cooke in England with great interest. He confirmed a few events that we had described in the script as fact, and this amazed me. These incidents known only to him, which even the 'kuttis' had learned from Gauribala, were in the script. Manik Sandrasagara and its meaning in Saivism (which I did not know), my father's lineage, my meetings with Haro Hara Amma and Yoga Swami and the script made Swami look at me with greater interest. The other so-called coincidence that I was told much later was that Gauribala was performing a series of Hom Pujas under the patronage of Wilmot Perera at Sri Palee in Horana in 1954 at the same time that I was schooling there. All this made our relationship special. For Gauribala, Yogaswami was alive and like the Buddha, was the Dhamma he taught. Reading the netebooks he meticulously kept of his meetings with Yogaswami, it was obvious that we were taught in the same manner. The transmission of knowledge is through mudra or a silent show of hand speechlessly spoken. This tradition of 'speechlessly spoken' transmission Swami also presented through a collection of verses in the limited edition book he compiled in Tamil called Summa Irruka Suttiram, which he presented to me much later on, with the inscription to "Bala from Bala". Bala in Tamil is child. A few verses in this compilation I too helped translate into English but it is yet to go into print. It presents the multiple meanings of an initiatic mantra of the tantric siddhas of Tamil Nadu in the light of the Perennial Philosophy. Included are Yogaswami's own contribution to this literature - the four maha vakyams or Great Sayings which were given by Chellappa Swami, the great siddha and jnani of Nallur to his disciple Yogaswami in the course of four years. Here are two parallel translations. Whatever happens, happens right/All is well ever Primordially perfected are all things/It is completed long ago We know nothing/I don't know The entirety of life only is truth\truth, truth everywhere. Sacred utterances in old languages like Tamil and Sinhala has multiple meanings, and what matters is only what we make of it in the present. Yogaswami joined the Holy Feet of his Guru on 24th March, 1964 and Gauribala became our thread to Yogaswami. This Eelam of Siva Siddhantha culture has the Himalayan Mountain Kailasa in the North and Kataragama in the South as its axis. It is not a nation state but a state of being or awareness. It exists along every single spinal cord. It is also referred to as 'remembrance' or memory and according to Tantric beliefs it is Kundalini - the coiled serpent of power that lives at the base of our spines. This Eelam is not just one world but also many worlds. Modern aspiring people, however - Tamil or Sinhala - know nothing of these worlds. In this world the only war is internal and victory liberation from delusion. Such worlds still exist in rural regions at the bottom of the social structure, where bhakti (devotion) and gnanam (wisdom) rule. I have lived in such a world myself for over six years. This is not a utopian fantasy of a happy pluralistic past as urban cynics describe it but today's living heritage understood only by those who live it. Cultivators, fisher folk, toddy-tappers, tom-tom beater, palanquin bearers and all the little people who live a cyclic existence worship Amma or the Earth Mother. They are summa. They do not believe in human rights or rights of any sort. They accept life as Karma. Their lifestyle is summa. Summa is a state of being, where tranquility and serenity replace paranoia and fear. It was Swami Gauribala who gave me entrey to this world which hooked me into defending this silent majority the real Sri Lanka. I went to Jaffna on May Day last year to celebrate the eighteenth anniversary of Swami Gauribala's samadhi and announce the revival of the Pada Yatra from Nagadipa to Kataragama with Kingsley Perera, an ex-JVP activist now working with Sewalanka Foundation. My association with this lineage permitted me after all these years to once more enjoy the hospitality of simple people everywhere that know and share this worldview. At places like Selva Sannidhi, Vallipuram and Mattuvil, the view is the same. Bhakthi (devotion) and gnanam (wisdom) still rule. Gauribala's several notebooks on his meetings with his Guru contain the essence of this tradition. These observations have not been printed and are available only close to the lineage. This is quite unlike the other publications on Yogaswami in print, including the bowdlerized version authored by the one-time American dancer turned guru Subramuniyam and his Siva Siddhanta Church. Living the Life The Gauribala notebooks are manuals for a Sannyasi disciple, not just compilations of sayings and utterances quoted out of context. Gauribala never converted Yogaswami into a saint or an icon. He himself did not collect disciples nor sought popularity by good deeds and public acclaim. He danced until he died, living as Yogaswami had taught him. He was Yogaswami's only disciple who renewed life instead of becoming a sanctimonious and serious bore. Swami had the advantage of not being understood by a middle-class urban mentality and this anonymity made it possible for this 'nobody' to be anybody at any time. Here was the freest spirit I had ever witnessed. Free of even the doctrine. He had crossed the stream and had no need for a canoe any more. Even in death he succeeded, since he made sure that he was free of a tomb or samadhi. Yogaswami's samadhi created by lay-devotees that missed the whole point of his subtle exposition of the Dharma was once an Army Camp. Gauribala who escaped middle-class adulation on Yogaswami's explicit instructions had no samadhi. Soon after he passed away his ashram was over-run by the military and reduced to rubble. Swami wanted it just that way. A great hunter leaves no trail and Gauribala was the perfect disciple. Documenting a tradition I asked Dominic Sansoni to photograph Swami. He was getting old and one day the pictures would be invaluable. When Dominic sought his permission to do so Swami agreed on condition Dominic photographed what he wanted revealed. There was also another condition: I was not to be shown the pictures. After Swami passed away on May Day in 1984 under more magical circumstances Dominic told me the story and gave me the pictures that he had taken. The pictures made complete sense mostly to me. Together with his letters in my possession it was proof of the legitimacy of the experience I had had in 1971, which bordered between reality and fiction - lucid dreaming while awake. The lineage I had been initiated into - is a paramparawa in which our teacher is God Kataragama himself and as Siva Dakshinamurti he teaches silence. Only after Swami joined the feet of his own Guru was there confirmation that he was aware of what had taken place between us. I was a Kataragama convert for life. Kataragama I did not succumb however to the initial invitation to walk from Jaffna to Kataragama in 1972 although several others did including the American Patrick Harrigan who also visited Swami for the first time in 1971. Swami himself first walked the Yatra in 1950, having met Yogaswami in 1947. Swami and I were now on the road to becoming firm friends and he succeeded in arousing my interest and passion in the Kataragama tradition early in our relationship. He used every opportunity to guide my reading and kept insisting that the mature Ananda Coomaraswamy and the Frenchman Rene Guenon were the only worthwhile authors left while scoffing at "traditionalists" trying to give a new brand name to the Eternal Doctrine, and seeing problems where none existed. In the meantime, Mike Wilson who was delightfully crazy in his own inimitable way decided to swap his householder role and become a swami, calling himself Siva Kalki, and believing that he was the last avatar of Vishnu. He left his home with the Swiss artist Aiyar, who subsequently became the Bhikku Sumedha and together they made their home in a cave on Vallimalai, one of the seven hills of Kataragama. This cave became my other place of pilgrimage and reflection and swami Gauribala, Chitrasena and I would visit our friends who were in the process of being transmogrified into holy men. The Pada Yatra These visits enabled me to fall in love with the wonderful mystery tradition what was said to hold sway in Deviyange Kaele or the 'God's own Forest' and meet up with a variety of individuals, including Matara Swami, who remains my fast friend to this day. (To be continued) |
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