Overview

Nataraja Guru’s guruhood is pure and philosophically correct, making as few concessions as possible to relativistic or social notions. He is a guru of absolutist truth. It is too rare to be popularly understood. It is not the popular conception of the Upanishadic or the ashramic pattern. It is a new form of guruhood, made for a really global world. The Guru Narayana did the initial spadework here in breaking through the fixed Indian orthodox patterns, as far as he was able in his own lifetime to do so, without entirely destroying the background. His work was experimental, and his success showed the way to the one disciple, Natarajan, to plunge ahead on a wider and entirely universal scale. Nataraja Guru therefore has grafted guruhood on to a global background. For this work the absolutism of guruhood has to be stressed more than the religious or even the conventional yogi aspect as known to India.

Nataraja Guru never wanted a following, least of all of blind believers. He only asks for reasonable understanding of the pure principles for which he stands and not in any cloud-soaring sense either, but in immediately applicable relationship with any or every given actual situation; nor in works but in understanding alone.

His discoveries in the field of philosophy open up a new age in human understanding. Through his genius, for the first time clear sense emerges out of the hitherto baffling expressions of Indian thought, while the ways of Indian spirituality cease to be a mystery. So at one stroke minds are cleared and much delusion and superstitions trickery in the philosophic-religious field are destroyed. How bold and wonderful is his genius in restating yoga as a modern perennial science of dialectics applicable in all fields!

Meet the Author

Nataraja Guru

1895-1973

Nataraja Guru is the disciple-successor of Narayana Guru (1854-1928), whose dialectical revaluation and restatement of Sankaracarya’s Advaita Vedanta conformed for the first time to the requirements of a normative or experimental science, to the extent that will probably ever be possible. Sankara himself may be said to be a continuator of Vyasa, who in his turn revised and restated the wisdom of the Upanishads as understood in his time. Nataraja Guru is thus a representative of the same pure, direct and vertical line of succession of philosophical revaluators extending back through time to the most ancient phase of the recorded history of human thought. The Guru may thus be seen to be uniquely qualified to undertake the present work, which he did at the instance of Narayana Guru himself. Sent by Narayana Guru to study in the West, Nataraja Guru was awarded the D. Lit. degree from the University of Paris. In 1923 he established the Narayana Gurukula, with headquarters at Varkala in Kerala State, a Guru-disciple foundation which welcomes all who seek the wisdom of the Absolute in open and living terms. The Guru has translated into English and commented on all of the major works of Narayana Guru, and has written on a wide variety of subjects, employing throughout a protolinguistic or structural approach which could be said to be his unique contribution to the perennial wisdom heritage of mankind.