There is a liquid beauty in the rising sun, there is a royal splendour in its mid-day blaze and there is an exquisite grace in its setting glow. So it is with the life of a great person like Shrimad Sudhindra Thirtha Swamiji of Shri Kashi Math Samsthan, who, aged 90, attained Maha Samadhi on January 16th, 2016. In the Guruparampara of Shri Kashi Math Samsthan, a Dharma Peetha of the Goud Saraswath Brahmin community — a religious institution with glorious traditions and a hoary past — Swamiji was the 20th Yati and a guiding light.
Culture is what remains with us even after we may have forgotten all that we have learnt. Tradition is an enormous magnifier. Each generation will have to cherish and carry it forward. Change is the law of nature. How to reconcile what is ever changing and the enduring values and verities is a daunting task. It is here that we are guided by the Dharma Guru, whose role in this regard is substantial and significant. Swamiji was one such pre-eminent Guru. Born on 31st March 1926 and named Sadashiv Shenoy, he was marked by destiny. He had his school education at St. Albert’s High School, Ernakulam and was in the Intermediate class in Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam when the call came from the Samsthan. It was in 1944 that the die was cast. It was a defining moment. The journey began.
Srimad Sukrathindra Thirtha Swamiji, that great saint initiated him into sanyasashrama and renamed him Sudhindra Thirtha. The relationship between the Guru and the Sishya was unique. In July 1949, on the Guru’s Samadhi, Swamiji ascended the Peetha of Shri Kashi Math Samsthan. Swamiji’s reign was long, eventful and fruitful. He headed the community and guided it for about five generations.
Swamiji’s journey through life is the story of our times and of the onward march of the community. By his life and work, by precept and example, he taught what was Dharma and how to be in this world but not of it. Swamiji was a truly divine personage. Even in the most disturbing situations, he always maintained an equipoise — having deep and abiding faith in God and the Guru and in the truism that truth and right will always triumph. Many were the occasions when people went to him highly perturbed and agitated about the turn of things only to be calmed down with a smile that everything would turn out alright. It is easy to talk of these things and to be in awe and appreciation of such a personality. But that attitude and conduct comes from years of practice and meditation. As Swamiji always said even if you cannot be affectionate and loving to one and all, ensure that you do not dislike or hate others; even if you cannot generate empathy, do not engender aversion; and never hurt others by thought, word or deed. There can be no greater philosophy of life. These are indeed the hallmarks of a holy man — a Sthithaprajna.
You are never lonely when alone — that is the sign of a cultured, evolved mind. Swamiji never felt bored or lonely. He was in the midst of books and thoughts. Indeed like all great persons, he always kept with him ‘the company of great thoughts, the inspiration of great ideals, the example of great achievements, the consolation of great failures’. He was an unfailing and appreciative patron to scholars and a loving and sympathetic mentor to those in quest of truth.
Swamiji was a great unifying force and co-ordinating factor. Like Shri Adi Shankara in the earlier times, he travelled across the sub-continent, endeavouring to infuse and preserve culture and religion in the true sense. His Mathadipathya spanned a period of time, beginning with the end of World War II and the dawn of our independence, the birth and rising of the Third World — a time when iconoclastic winds were blowing across the world and everything traditional was questioned and was under siege. It was an age of cataclysmic changes.
To carry a people in such a situation was no easy task. It called for a happy synthesis between idealism and pragmatism, between self-assertion and self-abnegation — an apt amalgam of what is good in the past and the present. Swamiji was conservative to conserve and preserve what is good and liberal to make necessary changes to keep pace with the changing times. His orthodoxy was not incompatible with modernism.
Swamiji endeavoured to achieve expansion without diminution or dilution of the core. Renaissance signifies change and reform to keep pace with the demands of time and society — to preserve, to conserve and to reform. Every institution and society has to adapt itself and be resilient so as to be relevant to meet from time to time the altering conditions of a changing world with its shifting emphasis and differing needs.
To adapt without sacrificing the core values is success and effective leadership. Swamiji achieved this splendidly and is truly the Renaissance Saint of Shri Kashi Math Samsthan. Swamiji’s life and work illustrate the importance of influence — wise and honourable persuasiveness — gently exerted. The range and depth of his personality and influence were great. His resourcefulness and will could fuse many discordant notes to make possible many impossible things. So many people with such great diversities of temperament and outlook, ideas and ideals, resources and attainments were brought together to work for some common cause, to achieve some common goal. This was possible only because of his effective leadership and dynamic personality.
It behoves the great to be ever active. Swamiji was active physically and mentally almost till the end. One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Swamiji belonged not merely to his generation, but to a line, which reflecting the genius of the human race and the spiritual ethos of our great seers, has moved with unbroken continuity through the ages.
If our heritage is to survive and our society is to endure, we need to remember and draw inspiration and sustenance from persons like Swamiji who have a lesson to teach us, if only we care to pause and learn, a lesson quite at variance with most that we practise and much that we profess.
The author is a lawyer specialising in Constitutional law.
E-mail: vsudhishpai@gmail.com