A PILGRIMAGE TO INDIA
Ananda Mayee Ma
Ananda Mayee Ma
As the sun set, we boarded a rowing boat to take our group up river to the temple dedicated to the woman guru Ananda Mayee Ma (1896-1981). The life of this woman saint is a fascinating story. As a young girl she displayed an extraordinary spiritual awareness. Her parents made her marry at 13 but her husband Ramani Mohan Cakravarti or Bholanath as he was known was soon to realise that this was not to be a traditional marriage. Whenever her husband tried to touch her in an intimate way he would either be thrown to the ground by electric shocks or Ananda Mayee Ma’s body would fall into a corpse like state. Initially fearing what was happening, Bholanath took his wife to an exorcist but was told that she was not mad in the conventional sense. The healers advised him that she had a kind of ecstatic god intoxication - a divine madness for which there was no cure. (Eventually Bholanath became a devotee of his wife)
She was known for her siddhis or yogic psychic powers. Before devotees could voice a question she would read their thoughts and give an answer before they spoke. Her telepathic powers were very advanced and she could also intuit devotees’ thoughts and feelings from a great distance. She could make her body shrink and expand in size, cure the sick and brought one devotee back from the dead after a car accident. The devotee claimed that the saint grasped her "life substance" and brought it back into her dead body. Ananda Mayee Ma was also guided by inner voices that advised her about what actions to take, her body would spontaneously contort into advanced yoga positions without her ever having had any formal training and at festivals she was known to materialise religious objects and produce spontaneous fires.
Despite her miraculous powers, Ananda Mayee Ma remained a deeply humble and pious woman. To Sri Ma, everyone was father and everyone was mother for she always considered herself to be a little girl, a child of God.
By the time we docked at the ghat at this, the bad end of town; it was night. The temple/ashram was hidden in a network of dark, somewhat sinister lanes full of ‘turbaned ruffians’ (to quote Vivian Stanshaw). After some searching we eventually found the temple door tucked away in an obscure alleyway. Here, in honour of the guru, we joined in with the Aarti, chanted some of the saints favourite mantras and sat in meditation to absorb the darshan of this sacred place. |
Ananda Mayee Ma
The boat was waiting for us to take us back down river to our guest house. The moon lit surface of indigo waters of the Ganges was now a mass of floating candles that drifted past us like the spirits of the dead on their way to heaven. To our left I counted fifteen funeral pyres flickering against the backdrop of a carved temple stained jet black with smoke and looking as if had been lifted from a scene of Dante’s Inferno. Illuminated in the orange light of the fires we could see people tending the gold shrouded dead and heard the solemn chant of requiem mantras with the occasional crashing of bells and cymbals. Large and small wooden boats creaked past us, some being rowed, some motor driven and other being pushed by boating poles with young children swimming alongside in the filthy waters.
We gently chanted Shiva mantras as one of our group solemnly beat his tabla in rhythm to the oarsman. Here by the burning Ghats of Varanasi there was certainly the feeling of being at a place where the world of the living met the world of the dead. As we passed again through another group of floating lights and the mantras echoed from the buildings, I commented that I felt like a soul on its journey across the river of Styx to Hades, the land of the dead. For a time I silently contemplated my own mortality and also the story my father had told me about how his grandfather, a fisherman, had spoken on his deathbed: “The boat’s drifting portside Don. There’s fog on the water and I have to go now….” And with these words my Great Granddad Daniel died.
I searched my money belt to pay my share to the boatman.
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