Swami Vijayânanda:
The last days
By Vigyânanand (Jacques Vigne)
Many of you probably already know that
Swami Vijayânanda left his body peacefully on Monday the 5th of
April at 5.10 PM.
He
had attended all the satsangs in a very normal way up to the day before -
Sunday evening, in spite of the fact his breath was getting shorter and shorter
and his voice more and more difficult to hear. Before, when you were very close
to him, you could hear him, but for one or two weeks, it was getting more
difficult because his breath was shorter and shorter.
Mâ’s game is really surprising : as I
was just beginning to write this message to give some details about the way
Vijayânanda “had merged into the Braman “( in Sanskrit and Hindi, you say
“ bhrama-lin ” when a sage leaves his body), I received a phone call
from a young Swami of Israeli origin connected to Bhaskarânanda and who
informed me that he left his body that morning on Thursday the 8th
at 4.55 AM at the ashram in Bhimpura, on the banks of the Narmada, Gujarat. He
was 94 and three months according to the Indian way of counting, which means 93
and three months according to the Western way of counting, what means two years
and two months less than Swami Vijayânanda. They met Mâ Anandamayî at the same
period and were both of them very close to her. Mâ had entrusted Bhaskârananda
with the task of giving initiation on her behalf. When they were sitting
together, it happened from time to time in the ashram in Khankal for some
celebrations, they did not show great emotion, but you could feel they had a
deep connection and were united in a peaceful and spontaneous joy. The fact
that Swami Bhaskarânanda “ merged into the Brahman ” just two and half
days after Swami Vijayânanda, and that they knew each other for 60 years spent
next to Mâ, is a good proof of their bond. We can assume that he heard, when he
was conscious, that Swamiji Vijyânanda had left his body and that it helped him
to leave his body.
Bhaskarânanda’s pacemaker had failed on 1st February and he was
then mostly in a coma at that time. On the 19th of February, he had
been brought back from the hospital to allow him to leave his body in the
ashram at Bhimpura. He was on a ventilator, and feeding was through a tube to
the stomach. After his return to Bhimpura he learned to breath without the
ventilator, though still with the tracheostomy; the times when he appeared
conscious with open eyes increased day-by-day. Some people heard him pronounce
“Jai Ma” quietly. He would nod Yes or No to questions asked. Moreover, on
occasions he blessed people who were visiting him, by holding their head with
his hands, and would smile. It’s touching from a symbolic point of view, you
can interpret this as the symbol of what he had done his whole life : to
give his energy in the service of Mâ, to give on behalf of Mâ. We’ll talk more
about Swami Bhaskarânanda in the next issue of Jay Mâ.
To come back to Swami Vijayânanda, we
should first evoke the successive parts of his life in a nutshell. Born to a Jewish family on November 26,
1914, at the beginning of World War I in East France, he was destined to
succeed his father who was the main rabbi of the town of Metz. As a child, he
was very pious, but during his adolescence, he studied philosophy and distanced
himself from the idea of a unique, omnipotent God and creator. He chose to
study medicine, and first followed a spiritual teacher who was a French
psychiatrist influenced by Buddhism, in Paris itself. In the end of 1950, he
took a boat from Marseille in South France to Sri Lanka and India in the hope
to find his guru. His idea was to ask instructions and to come back to practice
them in this small town of South France where he was practising as a doctor. He had hoped to meet Shri Ramana Maharshi
and Shri Aurobindo, but both had just passed away when he reached Chennai in
January 1951. He met Ma Anandamayi in
Varanasi on February 2, 1951, asked her if he could stay for two or three days
in her ashram, she said yes, and actually he spent the next 59 years in those
ashrams, and he even never left the holy land, the devbhumi of India. For the
first 19 months, he was always with Mâ, except for one day. In 1953 or 1954, She asked him to stay a
full year in Patal Devi ashram in Almora, a place She did not visit the whole
year. He did so, and then came back to Varanasi. He went again up to Patal Devi
in 1961 for a year, and then for eight years in Dhaulchina ashram, in complete
solitude. He used to come down to see
Ma for only a month every year, and still not every year. In 1970, he came back to Patal Devi ashram
until 1976, when Mâ asked him to stay in Kankhal. She arranged a room for him
on the terrace of the sadhu kutir,
and she told him : "Yahan baito! ", 'Sit here! ' and so he did for 34
years, until his last breath in the afternoon of the 5th of April
2010. He hardly left this room but for one month if we add the duration of his
different hospitalisations in Delhi. I
stayed for the first time in Kankhal for three months and three weeks in
1985. At that time, Swamiji used to
come down every day for the evening puja, but not to stay long, hardly five or
ten minutes after which he used to go back to his room. Only after Atmânanda left her body in
October 1985, he started to see more visitors, especially Westerners, because
Ma had asked him to care for them. He
did that as a seva. We have a French quarterly called Jay Ma. Atmananda did her last work of editing by revising the
first number in September 1985. In the following years, until perhaps 2005,
Vijayananda continued to read the proofs and answer in writing the question of
devotees. These answers have been put on the internet, as well as the replies
to many oral questions during the satsang, and articles on Ma that he wrote
mainly in the 50’s. at www.anandamayi.org/devotees
Let us now describe what happened in the
last few months. At Christmas 2009, he
had bad flu that handicapped him and he missed the satsang for a few days. Afterwards he came back and gave satsang as
usual up to Sunday 4th of April in the evening - that was his last
meeting with the devotees. Mâ had asked
him to take care of the Westerners and he was doing it as a seva, selfless work. I am personally very moved because it was my
birthday. Our birthdays were 51 years apart.
Thanks to the Kumbh Mela where I was since the beginning of February, I
attended the two last months of satsangs of Swamiji almost continuously, except
a few days, amongst which were the last four days. On Sunday evening, we were
in Rishikesh with the last group who had spent 5 days with Vijayânanda in
Khankal. We attended the arati on the edge of Ganga in Parmath Niketan with the
Dalaď Lama. Several members of the group met the Dalaď Lama for first time,
they were very impressed.
On Monday morning, Izou, who was close to
him for more than twenty years, went to his room because he was feeling unwell.
He was tossing and turning in bed so as to find a position that would alleviate
his pain, but in vain.
The
nape of the neck, the back of the head and his chest were very painful. He
vomited several times. An Indian doctor from the village came, diagnosed
gastro-enteritis and prescribed some medicines. Vijayânanda did not take them
because he had understood that the diagnosis was wrong. In fact, it was
probably the symptoms of an intracranial hypertension with the beginning of an
engagement of the basis of the brain in the spinal canal: this results in
depression of the breathing function that makes breathing weaker and weaker,
and leads to death. For Swamiji, it was probably due to the considerable
bending of the nape of the neck through osteo-arthritis, and the vertebral
compression that was pressing the spinal cord and that had paralysed the lower
limbs when he wanted to walk a few steps.
In
fact, for a few months, his breath had been getting shorter and shorter, and
his voice was very weak during the satsangs. As we said before, for two or
three weeks, he had difficulty in finishing long sentences. Beforehand, we
could understand his words by getting very close to his mouth, but more
recently there were some times when even when doing so, we were not able to
hear him. Consequently, at the end of March, I said to my hermit neighbour in
Dhaulchina, Swami Nirgunânanda, and to another friend of mine on the phone,
that is seemed that Swamiji would not stay much longer in his body.
On Monday around noon, his breathing
became more difficult, but he could communicate and even stand up to go to the
toilet. At 5.OO PM, the breathing got even more difficult. Gonzague was next to
him and Izou was calling the air- ambulance that was supposed to carry him to
Delhi urgently. Izou went up to his room, to be with him and after 10 minutes,
he breathed his last. What is surprising is that he had predicted to her that
she would be present when he would leave his body, in spite of the strict rules
that prohibit women from entering the sadhu kutir, which is reserved for male
ascetics. He left his body in his usual position of meditation, resting against
some cushions with the hands brought together and the legs stretched out; it
had been difficult for him to cross his legs for several years. He was always
very encouraging to people, for when Narayan came back from the exams he had on
that day, he was very happy to see him and asked him with much interest if he
had done well. Narayan did not realize that he was at the point of death and
that he had only one hour to live. Izou, and Sonia from Delhi, had done their
best to charter an air-ambulance in order to transfer Swamiji to the
Delhi. He expressed his appreciation
for their efforts by saying: “ It’s great ! ”. They were almost
his last words, He passed away a little after. Izou could contact the plane
that was already on the take-off runway and cancelled it. It was better that way. Vijayânanda had been
living in that room for 34 years where Mâ had installed him telling him :
“ yahan baito ! ” “ Sit down here ! ” Indeed he died there
after some decades of intense sadhâna.
It’s probably relevant to say that at
the moment when Swamiji left his body in Kankhal, our group of French people
was just coming back from the pilgrimage of Surdanka Devi, 3,000m high, in the
Himalayas. Among the 52 pilgrimages to the goddess that represent 52 parts of
the body of Mahadevi spread out on the land of ” Mother India ”,
this one corresponds to the highest one, to the “ bulb, kanda, of the head, sur ”. This evokes the area from where the soul leaves the
body.
Swamiji often said that the function of a
guru is not to give an intellectual teaching but to transmit energy. That’s
what he was doing in a way through several channels, sometimes very direct
ones, but mostly very subtle ones. Those who have spent time in Kankhal, in
particular during the last year, can testify personally. He himself had a lot
of energy; for several months, he was sleeping very little. Despite that, he
was giving much of his time to attend regularly the satsangs. When he knew that
the people had important questions and a strong desire to spend more time with
him, he was staying more than the two usual hours, in spite of his old age and
the removal of the prostate that forced him to go and urinate quite often. He
was never complaining about his health.
For this reason, we had not expected his imminent departure. When he was
asked about his health, he could not lie to say that he was going well, so he
replied : “ As usual ! ”. He almost did not take any
medicine. He had often said that to live to be very old was not always a blessing
and could be a disadvantage. He probably meant that the handicap was a weight
for oneself and for the others.
Narayan, Pushparaj’s nephew, who was brought up at the ashram in Almora,
has taken care of Swamiji daily for the last two or three years, while he was
studying. His departure is for him a very big change and it’s even more
beautiful to see how quiet he has remained and how helpful he was for all that
has to be done during these last days. We can see the direct and stabilising
influence of Swamiji, beyond the superficial changes of life and death.
Vijayânanda’s special way of transmitting
energy arose when he was asked to bless something. If it was a rosary, he would
take it in his hands and began to recite it; if it was a book, he would leaf
through it; if it was a photo of Mâ, he would comment briefly on the
particularity of the face, holding the photo in his hand; and if it was a
meditation mat, he would usually put it on his head before putting it on the head of the person who was expecting the
blessing. On the 21st of February, the satsang was unusually full of
energy : the Italian Federation of Yoga came with its president, E.
Selvanizza and his wife Antonietta. She is a devotee of Swami Chidânanda, who
was, up until his death, the successor of Shivânanda at the head of the Divine
Life Society, and who was also close to Mâ Anandamayi. The group consisted of
more than sixty people and we could have been concerned about the satsang
because of Swamiji’s weak voice and the
fact he persisted in holding the satsang at the noisiest time of the day,
during the puja in Mâ’s temple, with the loud speakers, whose volume was
regularly turned high. Nevertheless, there were many questions, and as I
repeated Swamiji’s sentences loudly, with Antonietta’s translation of course,
the group could follow the satsang, ask some questions, and have the
appropriate answers. Moreover, Swamiji offered to each member of the group,
(most of them are yoga teachers), a small meditation mat made in Gandhi’s
ashrams. As there were no more questions at that point, each of us was more
sensitive to the vibrations of the moment, and we can say it was a magic
moment. Vijayânanda took his time, kept the mat a long time on his head or on
the head of the person to whom he
offered the mat. It was the last evening of this big group in the area of
Haridwar/Rishikesh, and we can say that they left with “ something ”,
not only the meditation mat but also and above all with a subtle and keen
energy. The Kumbh Mela gives the opportunity to meet some sages and these
Italian people have met one of them in Vijayânanda. Even if you can‘t fully be
aware of his level, you can receive directly love from him, this is the
experience of many people who came to visit him.
He often drew our attention to the energy
of the Kumbh Mela that was taking place all around. He recommended that we go
to the ritual baths and meet the naga babas. These sadhus, despite their
peculiar attraction for hashish, and their pitched battles against some other
sadhus from time to time, are even so an example of renunciation with their
nudity and their simple way of life. Around the big bath of the 30th
of March, dedicated to Hanuman, the god of service and devotion, Vijayânanda
said that he was feeling his presence in particular. For two months, the region
of Kankhal and the ashram that opens directly onto the southern part of the
vishnouit camps (bairagis) was resonating with the names of Sita and Rama day
and night. Several ashrams had organised continuous repetition of mantras. I
kept watch over Swamiji’s body in his room and for sure, this name of God
continuously repeated, helped me and purified me in my meditation. The first
night, some small surges of emotion arose quite frequently with the beginning
of tears but that did not last. The second night was much more peaceful, with
the process of mourning that was happening quite quickly, at least in the first
layers of the mind. The saddest thing, when you are with the body of the person
who was the most important for you for 25 years, is to realize all that you
should or could have done and that you did not do. In this matter, it’s similar
to the psychology of the mourning of one’s dear ones in general. During almost
70 hours, I only slept three hours, but the energy was there and allowed me to care
about practical things during the day and meditate in Vijayânanda’s room during
the night. During all of this period, Izou, Gonzague, Pushparaj, Narayan and
Dinesh were particularly committed to do what has to be done; Izou’s family
also gave up everything to be there for the last rituals.
After Swamiji’s departure, I often
remembered the story of the end of a great Zen guru. He was plunged deep in
himself in the lotus position and his breath stopped. The devotees began to
wail complaining : “ Our guru died, how sad it is ! What will we
do now we are left to our own devices ? ” So that, the guru woke up
and said : “ You did not understand anything ! We’re going to
organise a big banquet to celebrate together ! ” That’s what they
did, and only afterwards the guru fell asleep forever.
Which funeral rituals for
Vijayânanda ?
Swami
Vijayânanda often said that once when Mâ had asked him what he wanted to do
with his body after his death he had answered : “ You can throw it
anywhere, I do not care about it ! ” Mâ stood up and told him :
“ Your body has done so many intense practices (tapasya), it can’t be
thrown like this ! ” We can reasonably interpret these words as
meaning that they should not put Swamiji’s body in the Ganga as it is usually
done for the sannyasis, but that it was better to make a samâdhi, a traditional
grave. Seven or eight years ago, an old western friend of Swamiji who had been
long associated with Ma had decided to buy a piece of land where they could
build a samadhi. But Swamiji had no interest in being placed in a place that
could become a temple, with morning and evening rituals. He wanted people’s
devotion to remain focused on Mâ Anandamayi’s large samadhi. Nevertheless, in
order to respond to the numerous demands, he suggested that they could put his
grave in Pushparâj’s garden, but with no daily rituals, to make matters easier
and in order that the place should not look like a sâmadhi. For the last few
months, he was saying that Pushparaj had been a monk in a former life and that
he was returning progressively to this kind of life ; for several months,
he was sleeping in Swamiji’s room, at the bottom of his bed, to be with him
when he wanted to go to the toilet, because Swamji had fallen several times
whilst doing so. In fact, since he was five years old, Pushparaj was brought up
in Mâ’s ashrams, and his current house where he usually receives Mâ’s devotees
– including the Western ones −
can be actually considered more a part of the ashram than a family home
in the literal sense of the word. This verbal suggestion of Swamiji’s was
accepted on Tuesday 6th of April in the evening by the ashram board
along with Panuda, the president of the Sangha, who has known Swamiji for 60
years. There was some resistance from a part of the ashram. Moreover, the
conservative people in the village and the sadhus connected to the Daksha
temple, the Mahanirvanî Akhara and a group of pandas (monks on pilgrimage) in
Kankhal opposed this project and began to demonstrate. When we heard this on
the 7th in the morning, we had a meeting with a special official
from the head of the police in Haridwar, Panuda, the president of the Sangha
and Debuda, the secretary-general, Izou and Gonzague, and Swami Atmananda, a
French-speaking disciple of Chandra Swami who lives in Rishikesh. Vijayânanda
had left with Izou and Gonzague a written document where he gave them the
responsibility to decide what to do with his body after his death. He did not
write down his suggestion concerning a grave at Pushparaj’s because it would
have put him in the forefront, which he did not want. We must remember that
neither Mâ’s husband Bholonath nor her faithful assistant Didi had a samadhi.
Even for Mâ in August 1982, the devotees were about to put her body in the
Ganga and it was the head of Mahânirvâni Akhara in Khankal who insisted and he
took matters upon himself for building a samadhi. We were very aware that Vijayânanda would not like having any
conflict with the villagers. We have decided that the best way to respect Mâ’s
will concerning the body preservation was to repatriate it to France. There was
the theoretical possibility to bury the body for the time being in a garden and
find another place far away from Haridwar and its pandas, and to quietly build
a samadhi for Vijayânanda. We even thought of Daulchina and this area of Kumaon
where he had spent 17 years. But it would have been a problem to look after the
samâdhi from a great distance and we finally decided on repatriation to Paris.
In fact, it will be a blessing for the French people to have the body of this
great sage close to them. For Indian people, it would not make a big
difference, as with jal samâdhi (in
the Ganga) the body would not be there anymore anyway. I know only one example
of a sage in the Indian tradition who has a samâdhi in France; this is Ranjit
Mahâraj, who had the same guru as Nisargadatta Mahâraj. He left his body in
2001 and his long-time devotee Laurence Le Douaré built him a samâdhi with a
part of his ashes in a beautiful garden in her house that overlooks the
Douarnenez Bay near Brest.
Sonia Barbry has been visiting Kankhal for
ten years. When she finished at the French school of political science in
Paris, she asked Swamiji if he felt that a diplomatic career would suit her, as
she liked India very much, and Swamiji greatly encouraged her. Nowadays she is
a political consultant in the French ambassy in Delhi. She came and visited the
Kumbh Mela from the 27th to the 31st, for herself and
also to write a “ telegram ”, which means a report for the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, about this great event of India. She felt that Swamiji
wanted to say goodbye to her when he asked her to come for two private
interviews, included on her last day in Kankhal just before taking the train to
Delhi. A few days later she was very helpful in organising emergency assistance
just before the death, and afterwards for the formalities and the organisation
of the repatriation of the body to France.
She was the one who signed the death certificate in the name of the
French Republic. May we thank her for her service to Vijayânanda. The people
who want more information about the date or place of the burial ceremony, or
the testimonies which came about Swamiji from devotees after he left his body
can ask from Mahajyoti : koevoetsg@wanadoo.fr
04 93 44 63 82, she will act as a link.
Did Vijayânanda know that he
would leave his body ?
Sandrine
Oubrier spent 15 months almost continuously at the ashram in Kankhal and
attended almost all Swamiji’s last satsangs. She says that twice during the
last year, some visitors told Swamiji that they would come back for the Kumbh
Mela and he answered that maybe he would not be there. As they were very
surprised, he made up for it saying that maybe he would not leave his room for
the satsang. Moreover some travellers, despite the fact Kankhal was not
included in their trip, decided to come and visit Vijayânanda.
When Izou arrived in Kankhal on the 28th
of March, just after her father’s burial on the 19th, Vijayânanda
asked her not to leave. So she booked her plane ticket for after the big bath
on the 14h of April, the last one of the Kumbh Mela. Izou’s father and Vijayânanda were born the same year in 1914; in
age they were just one month apart; they had been in the same regiment during
the Campaign of May 1940 without knowing each other.
I should mention that another great Swami
of Mâ, Shivânanda, left his body just 4
days after Vijayânanda, on Friday the 9th of April in the morning.
He had been to hospital two days before. My feeling is that the spiritual
atmosphere of the Kumba Mela in Kankhal was getting stronger and stronger as
the big bath of the 14th of April, Mesh
Sankranti, approached, which marks
the end of one cycle of 12 years and the beginning of another one. Those who
consider they have made enough cycles on this earth tend to choose this
auspicious period to leave their body.
We must point out that despite everything, on
the morning of his last day, Vijayânanda, was concerned about the papers for
the annual renewal of his visa. Maybe he thought that anyway it was his duty to
do it.
In many ways, Vijayânanda was turning his
back on many things and prepared people for his departure. Before he would
often ask visitors who were about to leave, to come back later, but recently he
did not do that. He often related one of his last private meetings with Mâ, in
the hall of the ashram in Kankhal. She told him as she was showing him her
body : “ This is just a cloth, I am omnipresent ! ”. He
concluded saying that he believed Ma.
Vijayânanda liked quoting a
transcendentalist poet of the XIXth century, maybe Emerson, who explained that
for the one who was at a high spiritual level, death became a laughable
eventuality. Swamiji said that the
bodies were like leaves that were falling from the tree, while the Self was the
tree itself and remained the same in any season. He did not dramatize death and
said that there were two possibilities : either you were a believer and
you would melt in the spiritual light, or you were a non-believer and you would
fall asleep. It was useless to make a big drama of it or to be always talking
about death and becoming “ a specialist ”. He noticed that the thing
that frightened people about the big passage was the prospect of endless
suffering. But this supposedly endless
suffering could be alleviated by medicine or at the most they caused a fainting
fit or the death itself, so they were not endless. As a general rule, the
simple way Vijayânanda considered death often reminded me of a sentence from
Montaigne in his Essais :
“ Each day brings us closer to death and the last one gets us there.”
We will gather together all the notes of
Swamiji’s satsangs of this last period. Many people, for one reason or another,
had not much time when they came to see
Swamiji. Still, he was suggesting that the real encounter with a sage was not a
question of quantity, but of quality. In this sense, he used to tell often the
following story about Kabir :
“Kabir was a weaver. He lived in the 15th
century Banaras. He was clad as a poor man. One day, it so happened that an
ill-tempered and arrogant rich man had a big bundle to carry home. He called
Kabir who was passing by : “ You! Come
here! There is this bundle to carry
home, can you do it?" Kabir said
"Yes! " The rich man said:
“How much?" "As you want
!". The bad rich man then got furious: "You, coolies, you always say
that, and afterwards you ask ten times the price!" Kabir replied: "All this does not
matter, since when you reach to your door, you will fall flat dead!" At this point, the rich man became still
more furious : "You will see when I am at the door of my house that I am
not dead, just by the sound beating I will deliver to you!" Kabir smiled, took the bundle and went with
the rich man towards his house. While walking, he only remarked: "Just a
piece of advice: when you reach the door of paradise, and when the angels of
death will judge you, if they propose to you a day in paradise before many
centuries in hell, accept their offer!”
Everything happened as Kabir had predicted. When the bad rich man was spending his only day in paradise, Kabir was having a walk around; the sage
recognized him and whispered in his ear the taraka
mantra, the mantra which saves from the round of birth and death. From that very moment, the angels of death
haven't been able to take him down to hell, and he could stay in paradise... “
To conclude, here is a request: those who would like to make a record of
some anecdotes or some sentences that are imprinted on their memory about their
contact with Vijayânanda are invited to do so. We’ll put their testimony on the
Internet, probably on the web site anandamayi.org, and will make a selection
for ‘Jay Mâ’. It’s not necessary to be a good writer, you just need to feel it
deeply inside. It will allow Swamiji’s memory and presence to be felt and
remembered in the consciousness of the writer and the readers. Vijayânanda
clearly said that talking about spiritual experiences was a way of losing
them. Nevertheless, it’s possible to
relate some anecdotes or words that strike you and that could spiritually
inspire some other people. It’s very different from relating a spiritual
experience in detail. For sure, it’s impossible to tell everything about such a
deep and subtle relationship with Swamiji, but you can relate some things. Swamiji was actually doing just that during
satsang when telling us some cherished memories of Ma.…
Some of the notes of
satsangs that I made in the last few months, appeared in the last issue of the
quarterly ‘Jay Mâ’, but I have still several of them to publish. I will gather
them and send them to you, it may be only at the beginning of May after the group
in Nepal have left. Vijayânanda told clearly that the Guru does not die and
that his words have the same value before and after he leaves his physical
body.
I hope the report of the last period of Swamiji’s terrestrial life will
help you to deepen the relationship you had with him. If you want to transfer
this text to some more people that could be interested, just do it.
Vigyânanand,
Kankhal, Delhi, 8-11th of April 2010