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Oppiliappan List Archive: Message 00047 Jun 2005

 
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--- In tiruvenkatam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Sudarshan K Madabushi" 
<mksudarshan2002@xxxx> wrote:

Dear members and friends,

In the "Sri Vishnu Sahasranamam" there are Sanskrit "nAmAs" for the 
Almighty so euphonious, merely listening to their beautiful sounds 
is feast enough for both the ear and soul. When you listen to them 
you don't really even want to know their meaning. Their mere sound 
is enough. (My own favourites ones are "pradAna-
purushEshwarah:", "pushpa-hAsah:" and "devaki-nandana"). 

There are some "nAmAs" whose sounds are rather intriguing to the ear 
and mind. They make you wonder what they really mean. They are 
fascinating to contemplate upon. They  make you want to reach 
immediately for a commentary, either traditional or contemporary, on 
the Sahasranama. The "nAmAs" soon enough become 'earworms' i.e. they 
keep ringing in the ears and just won't go away until you have 
whetted your curiosity about what Sri Sankara BhagavathpAda may have 
had to say about the "nAmA" or how Sri Parashara Bhattar interpreted 
it in his famous Sahasranama "bhAshya", the treatise 
titled "bhagavath-guna-darpana". 

Due to poor grounding in the Sanskrit language or inadequate 
understanding of our ancient scriptures, you may not entirely 
comprehend the full significance of a "nAmA" through mere study of 
the various commentaries ? the "vyAkhyAna" or "bhAshya-granthA-s" -- 
on the Sahasranama. Yet the sweet "nAmA" itself will go on haunting 
you even as you go about your daily life and routine. Such is its 
power of attraction that it can make part of your mind go "offline" 
to silently work away, seeking at least some sort of intuitive if 
not intellectual understanding of its real intent. Not just the 
superficial, dictionary sense of the term (which any Sanskrit 
lexicon such as the "amarakOsam" can provide), but, more 
importantly, its underlying truth and substance, without grasping 
which one may never relate the beauty of the Vishnu Sahasranama with 
one's own personal experience and appreciation in life 
('svAnubhava'). 
 
                   *************

A couple of months ago I met with a rather strange but nasty 
accident. I fractured a small bone in my back. I was changing seats 
inside my car when I plonked down very heavily on the hard metal 
buckle in the seat-belt contraption. 

For weeks thereafter I became a semi-invalid. Waves and waves of 
stabbing pain, like some malevolent tsunami, kept lashing my back. 
Unable to move normally, sit or sleep in normal postures, I found 
myself virtually crawling about the house like some giant amoeba in 
distress. The doctor, a specialist called an orthopaedician, looked 
closely at my condition. After studying test-reports (which 
consisted principally of a "digitally created high-resolution X-ray 
image" of my posterior), he diagnosed my problem to be a 
fractured "coccyx bone". I had so little idea of human anatomy to 
imagine I actually possessed a bone with such a distinguished 
sounding name. And so I asked the "ortho" what it really was. 

"You should consider yourself lucky", he said to me gravely, "that 
you did not damage your sacrum, your spinal column. The coccyx is 
only a small "tail bone" at the southern extremity of the column. 
It's what you may call a "biological left-over", a bony remnant of 
man's evolution, a tiny reminder of his earliest biological 
origins", he said. 

I do not generally care much for or comprehend medical-speak very 
well, but I quickly understood the specialist's words to mean, lest 
I forget, I had actually evolved as a species from the monkey and it 
was my "coccyx" that was proof of that irrefutably Darwinian fact. 

"Don't worry", the doctor went on to reassure me, "In a few weeks 
the fracture will heal by itself and the coccyx will reset. There is 
really no clinical cure for fractures of this kind. Only complete 
rest, complete absence of strain or stress for a few straight weeks 
can set things right. Go home now and rest. Trust your body and in 
the deep and unseen powers of self-healing it possesses".

                   *********************

I left the doctor's clinic that evening with deep misgivings -- not 
to mention a duly stamped receipt for a hefty sum of money paid 
towards "doctor consulting fees". First, the bone-specialist had 
added insult to my injury by reminding me of my simian ancestry. 
Next, he had also left me clinically high and dry: abandoned me to 
the mercy of such airy, mysterious things in life that he had 
called "self-healing powers of the body". 

I went home that afternoon severely distressed in body and mind. I 
was in abject pain; I had no idea of the cure; I had no reasonable 
basis on which to expect I'd be alright again. I feared I'd just 
been made victim of an elaborate fraud by modern medicine: instead 
of clinically treating me, my pain, my misery? my whole medical case 
instead had just been nonchalantly turned over to some great, 
invisible and anonymous "faith healer" believed to be residing 
within me and who had curative powers far greater, far more 
miraculous than any known to man or medical science!   

                     *************

Physical illness is frustrating life-experience especially when it 
lays you low, down and bed-ridden for prolonged periods of time. But 
the abject passivity it imposes upon you can at times be a disguised 
blessing. It urges the patient's mind, even if only very briefly, to 
turn to spiritual or religious contemplation. In this narrow 
respect, illness can indeed be said to be a sort of "tapas", a very 
special and Vedantic form of meditative penance. The inertia of 
lying in bed with a broken back ? a broken "coccyx" to be more 
accurate ? and being unable to do anything for a whole fortnight, 
made me reach for my favourite bedside scriptural book, the Sri 
Vishnu-Sahasranamam.

Desperate to ward off boredom and creeping depression, I kept 
silently repeating in bed the sacred "sahasranAmAs" when, all of a 
sudden out of the blue, four specific "nAmAs" that seemed 
particularly appropriate to my distraught physical condition, caught 
my attention. As I kept repeating them over and over again I became 
truly fascinated by them. I could not then wait to learn what 
exactly the 4 enchanting names of the Lord truly signified. 

Picking up the standard commentaries of Sankara and Parashara 
Bhattar, I reflected long and hard upon the 4 divine names, 
savouring both their sound and substance, again and yet again, in my 
mind until, finally, I thought I had perhaps intuited, even if it 
was in the foggiest sort of way, the essential crux of the 4 "nAmA-
s". In my fevered mind, I believed I had gleaned some deeper nuance 
of the truth behind the 4 "nAma-s".

                    ******************
  
The 4 delightful "nAmAs" in the Vishnu-Sahasranamam, the sacred-4 
that kept me constant, soothing company all through my painful 
illness, are the following:  

          "vaidyah:" 

          "oushadham", 

          "bhEshajam" and 

          "bhishak".

We will discuss them in the next posting.
              
Regards,

dAsan,
Sudarshan
--- End forwarded message ---







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