Swami Krishnananda Shashtyabdapurti Mahotsava Commemoration Volume
A Souvenir released on Swami Krishnananda's 60th Birthday
A Marvellous Web of Spiritual Texture
by Swami Murugananda
At a critical moment in our history, when a serious challenge is posed to religion, which has to be evaluated, re-defined and equated with science, we have amidst us a fitting challenge to the sceptics in the wondrous personality of Sri Swami Krishnanandaji. In history, we have had but a few occasions to meet a human being of his intellectual stature. Swami Krishnananda is one of those pious souls who exemplify through their daily lives how we should cultivate the search for God and realise the Absolute Truth. Grand and infinitely sweet is his life!
The vastness of his outlook embraces the bizarre multiplicity of all orders and faiths and discovers therein a unity. It is evident that he has grasped the very kernel of the truth underlying all major beliefs, which are but different facets of one great mirror. From personal experience gained by long and varied Sadhana, he is able to assert that the direct unmediated knowledge of the Absolute, which is also identical with the illuminated consciousness of the spiritual unity of man and the universe, is the core of all religious disciplines. As a result of his realisation, he adores all sects and creeds which have honeycombed the religious life of India and the world.
Pujya Sri Swamiji, whom we all revere, belongs to the glorious lineage of Bharata-varsha's seers and sages, who have appeared now and then on the world arena with the message of the Eternal Man. Endowed with a synthetic intellectualism, an aesthetic intuitionism, and a living ecstatic faith, Swamiji is a wonderful integration of all that is noble and best in the realm of the spirit. To us, this transcendental spiritual genius appears to be an explorer par excellence of the inner realm. We see in him the hunger for a regenerating and re-awakening of the essentially spiritual values of human life. I prostrate to this sanctifying personality, through whom the soul of India has started to speak more fervently and eloquently that ever before.
It is no exaggeration to say that Swamiji's life is one of utmost simplicity serious Sadhana. It has attracted the admiration, respect and reverence, not only of all those who have had the bless opportunity to be near him, but also of many distinguished scholars in far-off lands. Whenever invitations were extended to Swamiji to visit those foreign countries, he has very politely turned them down, saying that there is no necessity for such movement, as "everything is everywhere at every time in every form".
Revered Swamiji's life is a manifestation of the working of the gospel of Vedanta. It shines as a crystal-clear self-expression of a person thoroughly impregnated with the dynamic Divine Power operative in the whole cosmic process. Swamiji is a preacher of the gospel of Divine Life—dynamic universal love and selfless service—and the essential divinity of all created beings. This the seers, savants and sages of Bharat have been teaching the world even from the Vedic times, the aim of the teaching being to raise man from out of the deep waters of egoism, sectarianism, dogmatism and fanaticism.
This wonder-child of worshipful Gurudev H.H. Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj is one of those rare spiritual flowers that has blossomed in this sacred land. The fringe of his life may touch the material environment about him, and this may be mistakenly interpreted in terms of the sense world; but the bulk of his life's contents wherein light beauty, grandeur, power and significance belongs to a region beyond the ken of the ordinary biographer. The grandeur and majesty of his life lies more in the unfathomable depths of the mind. Though he breeze the same air as we do, his thoughts and feelings well up from the super-sensuous depths of his mind and make his whole personality resplendent with divine glow of beatitude his entire being, from the centre right up to the ever-enlarging circumference, is a marvellous web of spiritual texture, and unraveled mystery. However, when an ordinary lay visitor comes to meet him, within moments, Swamiji scales down from the Himalayan heights of his intellectual roaming's, and with his subtle humour, taunts and retorts as though he too is a simple, ordinary common man. What a marble he is!
The present-day crisis-written world requires Swami Krishnanandaji's master-minded erudition and for many, many decades to come. May Lord fish would not endow him with perfect health, long life and opportunities to serve the world of spiritual seekers.