Nisargadatta Maharaj

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A flight of stairs above a lane in Khetwadi, in the crowded Girgaon quarter of Bombay, led to a low loft over a shop that for decades sold hand-rolled beedis. Twice a day, morning and evening, the room filled. The man who sat there received whoever climbed up — Marathi-speaking neighbors, a widening trickle of Europeans and Americans with notebooks — and spoke, often sharply, in the local idiom of a shopkeeper rather than a pandit. He cited scripture rarely. He asked, instead, that each person attend to the one fact none of them could doubt: that they are; that prior to every name and role there is the bare sense “I am.” From that single datum he drove the whole inquiry, and beyond it, toward what stands before even that.

Nisargadatta Maharaj was born Maruti Shivrampant Kambli on 17 April 1897, into a poor and devout family of the Maharashtrian countryside; he grew up in the village of Kandalgaon, in what is now the Sindhudurg district, among parents who kept the Varkari devotion to Vithoba of Pandharpur. After his father’s death he followed his elder brother to Bombay in 1915 to support the family, took a junior clerkship, and soon set up on his own account. The business that fed him for half a century was small and concrete: a leaf-tobacco trade, a string of beedi shops in the Girgaon lanes. In 1924 he married Sumatibai; children followed. By every outward measure he was an ordinary urban tradesman of his generation, neither monk nor scholar, with no apparent appetite for the contemplative life.

Vithoba (Vitthal), the Pandharpur form of Vishnu venerated by the Varkari tradition of Nisargadatta’s family — here the murti at the Nivdunga Vithoba Temple, Pune — Rohan Pawar, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

A meeting and a method

The decisive turn came in 1933, when a friend, Yashwantrao Baagkar, brought him to Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj, the head of the Inchegiri branch of the Navnath Sampradaya. The association lasted barely two and a half years — Siddharameshwar died on 9 November 1936 — yet it set the entire course of what followed. Within that brief span Maruti received the lineage’s initiation and its core instruction, and took it with a literalness that became characteristic: he simply did what his teacher told him, attending continuously to the consciousness of being, the felt “I am,” to the exclusion of the mental commentary that ordinarily occupies that consciousness. He later dated his liberation to those years, not to any long austerity but to an unwavering fidelity to one pointer. After the teacher’s death he traveled for a time across India in 1937, then returned to Bombay and to the shop in 1938, and took the name by which he is known — Nisargadatta, the one given over to, or established in, the natural state.

The lineage he had entered is worth placing precisely, because it shaped both his method and his vocabulary. The Navnath Sampradaya traces itself to the nine legendary Naths and, behind them, to Dattatreya; its Inchegiri (or Inchageri) branch — also called the Nimbargi Sampradaya — was founded in late-nineteenth-century Maharashtra and Karnataka by Bhausaheb Maharaj, the Saint of Umadi (c. 1843–1914), and carries a Lingayat as well as a Nath inheritance. Its discipline was, in the first generations, a sustained meditation on a given name or mantra. Within this current a sharp distinction came to be drawn between two routes. The way of Bhausaheb Maharaj and the scholar Gurudeo Ranade was called the Pipilika Marg, the Ant’s Way — the patient, incremental crawl of long meditative repetition. The way of Siddharameshwar and his disciples was named the Vihangam Marg, the Bird’s Way: a direct flight to the goal, dispensing with the slow ascent in favor of an immediate turning of attention upon the sense of being itself. Nisargadatta and his fellow disciple Ranjit Maharaj (1913–2000) carried the Bird’s Way forward, and it is the Bird’s Way that the visitor to the Khetwadi loft encountered — abrupt, frontal, impatient with preliminaries.

For two decades after his teacher’s death Nisargadatta lived the life of a tradesman who happened also to be a realized man, keeping the shop, raising a family, conducting bhajans and giving instruction to a small circle. He began formally to initiate others in 1951, following an inner prompting he attributed to Siddharameshwar. In 1966 he retired from the business and gave himself fully to the twice-daily discourses. The room was tiny, the talk unhurried and combative by turns; he would press a questioner, contradict, scowl, refuse the comfortable formulation, until the question turned back on the questioner and dissolved the position from which it had been asked. He had little patience for borrowed certainties, and less for the role of holy man; what he transmitted was less a body of doctrine than a single act of attention performed over and over from a hundred angles.

The sense “I am”

The hinge of the teaching is the sense “I am” — in Marathi, the felt knowledge of one’s own being, prior to any specification of what one is. Nisargadatta treated this not as a trivial truism but as the one accessible doorway. Everything a person knows, he held, is known only because, and after, this sense of presence has dawned; consciousness is the precondition of every experience, every world, every god and every doubt. So the instruction was to hold to the “I am” itself, stripped of all that is added to it — not “I am this body,” “I am this name,” “I am a seeker” — and to abide in the bare fact of being until its nature discloses itself.

What discloses itself, in his account, is first that the “I am” is impersonal and universal, not the property of the individual it seems to belong to. The body and its personality are, in the lineage’s vivid phrasing, the product of the food consumed — the consciousness rides on the chemistry of the “food-essence body,” appears with it at birth and lapses with it at death, as a flame depends on the wick and the oil. The taste of being, “I am,” is thus a temporary condition, arising from material causes, however intimate and self-evident it feels. To identify with it as one’s final identity is already a subtle error. Nisargadatta named this very sense of presence the primary illusion, the mula-maya — not because being is nothing, but because it is conditioned, a first imposition upon a reality that does not require it.

Here the inquiry sharpens beyond what is usually meant by “non-dual awareness.” Most teaching that travels under that name rests in pure consciousness as the absolute — the witnessing presence behind all objects. Nisargadatta accepted that station and then refused to stop there. Consciousness, however vast, is still something that appears; it has an opposite in unconsciousness, a beginning and an end, a dependence on the body that sustains it. What he pointed toward, especially in his last years, was the awareness prior to consciousness — the state that does not know itself as “I am,” that needs no being to be, and to which the whole spectacle of consciousness, with its worlds and its witness alike, is finally extraneous. He called it by the old Vedantic names — Brahman, Parabrahman, the nirguna or attributeless absolute — and insisted that the genuine seeker’s identity lay there, beyond beingness, untouched by the arising and the setting of the sense “I am.” The self that one truly is, on this telling, was never born and so cannot die; it is the silent ground in which the knowledge “I am” briefly flickers and is reabsorbed.

This is the move that distinguishes him within the Vedantic family of non-dualisms. His was a jnana teaching — a path of discriminating knowledge rather than devotion or graded discipline — and its idiom is recognizably Advaitic: the dismantling of the ego as a substantive entity, the identity of the innermost self with the absolute, maya as the spreading of apparent multiplicity over a reality without a second. But the order of his exposition was distinctively his own. Where the classical scholastic begins from the great Upanishadic sentences and reasons toward the identity of self and absolute, Nisargadatta began from the one fact in front of every listener — that they are — and worked backward through it, dissolving first the person, then the world, then consciousness itself, until nothing was left to be dissolved.

Not the silent sage, not the world-teacher

It is easy, and inaccurate, to fold him into a single modern “Advaita guru” type. The contrast with Ramana Maharshi — the sage of Arunachala, with whom he is most often paired — is instructive precisely because the two are genuinely close in aim and far apart in manner. Ramana taught largely through silence and stillness, and his characteristic instrument was self-inquiry, the wordless tracing of the “I”-thought to the Heart, its source on the right side of the chest. Nisargadatta’s instrument was relentless dialectic — a verbal, argumentative pressing on the “I am” until the questioner’s footing gave way. Ramana abided in the Self and let presence do the work; Nisargadatta interrogated presence itself and drove past it. They belonged to different lineages, taught in different languages and registers, and located the decisive move at different depths. To merge their methods is to lose what is sharpest in each.

Ramana Maharshi, the sage of Arunachala, with whom Nisargadatta is most often paired — portrait by G. G. Welling, 1948 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Equally instructive is his relation to Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Theosophy-reared teacher who renounced the office of World Teacher and spent his life dismantling all spiritual authority. The two shared a corrosive distrust of accumulated belief and a refusal to let seekers lean on tradition for its own sake. But where Krishnamurti dissolved authority and method alike and offered no positive metaphysics, Nisargadatta stood squarely inside a transmitted lineage, used a precise inherited vocabulary, and asserted, without hedging, a final reality prior to consciousness. The resemblance is one of temper, not of teaching.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, who renounced the office of World Teacher and spent his life dismantling spiritual authority — Bain News Service photograph, c. 1920s — Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

I Am That and the world that climbed the stairs

The event that carried him beyond the Bombay lanes was a book. Maurice Frydman — a Polish-Jewish engineer and humanitarian long settled in India, who spoke Marathi — became a close devotee in the 1960s, and proposed recording the talks before they were lost. Tape recorders were brought to the loft; Frydman translated the Marathi dialogues into English, and the philosopher Sudhakar S. Dixit revised and edited them. The result, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, was published in two volumes in 1973 by Chetana Publications of Bombay, with a Marathi original verified by Nisargadatta issued separately.

The book’s effect on his life was disproportionate and not entirely welcome. Word of it spread through the Western spiritual subculture of the 1970s, and the trickle of foreign visitors became a flood; he is said to have remarked that the volume had turned his quiet home into the platform of a railway station. He adapted accordingly, dropping scriptural reference for those who had none and meeting each visitor at the point of their own confusion. I Am That has remained in print continuously and has been translated worldwide, becoming, with Ramana’s recorded talks, one of the two texts through which twentieth-century jnana-Advaita reached a global readership.

A small body of further teaching survives from the period around his death. He had cancer of the throat in his final years, and the talks of 1980 and 1981 — recorded as the illness advanced and gathered by his appointed disciple Jean Dunn into Seeds of Consciousness, Prior to Consciousness, and the posthumous Consciousness and the Absolute — press the inquiry to its furthest reach, dwelling on the absolute that precedes the arising of “I am.” An earlier and rarer book, Self Knowledge and Self Realization, had appeared in his own words in 1963, before any Western audience existed. He died in Bombay on 8 September 1981.

Reception and the lineage forward

His circle scattered into a long roster of teachers and translators, and through them his influence ramified far beyond the Inchegiri Sampradaya. Ramesh S. Balsekar (1917–2009), a retired bank president who served as translator in the master’s last years, went on to teach a distinctive doctrine of total causality and non-doership; Jean Dunn edited the final talks; others — Sailor Bob Adamson, Alexander Smit, Robert Powell, Stephen Wolinsky among them — carried the “I am” inquiry into Europe, North America, and Australia. Within his own line, the work passed to figures such as Ranjit Maharaj’s and his own later disciples, sustaining the Marathi lineage alongside its international diffusion.

That diffusion fed, but should not be conflated with, the looser Western current of Neo-Advaita — the satsang-centered teaching, descended chiefly from Ramana through H.W.L. Poonja, that holds non-dual recognition to require no preparation, lineage, or path. Nisargadatta is frequently invoked there as an authority, and the I Am That aphorisms circulate freely in its literature; yet his own teaching was rooted in a transmitted initiation, a precise sequence of insight, and a fierce insistence on actually abiding in the “I am” rather than merely affirming non-duality in words. He is a source the movement quotes, not a member of it. He is likewise distinct from the nineteenth-century Neo-Vedānta of the reformers and Vivekananda, with its program of social engagement and universal religion; Nisargadatta built no institution, advanced no program, and addressed the single seeker in front of him.

Texts and study

The primary corpus is recent and almost entirely under copyright, owned by his publishers and editors, so a public-domain archive can point to it but not reproduce it. The cornerstone remains I Am That (Chetana, 1973); the full text circulates in scanned form, for instance the Internet Archive copy of the first volume at archive.org/details/dli.ernet.236343. The final-period dialogues edited by Jean Dunn — Seeds of Consciousness (1982), Prior to Consciousness (1985), and Consciousness and the Absolute (1994) — carry the late teaching on the awareness prior to being and are the indispensable supplement to the 1973 talks.

The scholarly literature situates him within the modern transformation of Advaita rather than within the classical commentarial tradition. Philip Charles Lucas, the principal academic student of the satsang networks, treats Nisargadatta and Poonja as the two great transmission-sources of the contemporary non-dual current and maps the split it produced between “traditional” and “non-traditional” modern Advaita; see his “Non-Traditional Modern Advaita Gurus in the West and Their Traditional Modern Advaita Critics” (Nova Religio 17, no. 3, 2014, online.ucpress.edu/nr/article-abstract/17/3/6/70296) and the companion study “When a Movement Is Not a Movement: Ramana Maharshi and Neo-Advaita in North America” (Nova Religio 15, no. 2, 2011, jstor.org/stable/10.1525/nr.2011.15.2.93), which frames the whole field as a contest internal to a single living tradition. Thomas A. Forsthoefel’s work on the Western appeal of Ramana and his heirs, in the SUNY volume Gurus in America (2005), provides the comparative frame for the kind of cross-cultural reception I Am That exemplifies.

For the classical pole his idiom presupposes, the deeper textual record long predates him: Śankara’s commentary on the Brahma-Sūtras, where the discipline of discrimination and the identity of self and absolute are argued in full, and the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi, the instructional poem on discernment and the inquiry into the self, set out in English the metaphysics whose conclusions Nisargadatta restated in the plain speech of a Bombay shop. Read against them, the loft’s dialectic is a vernacular and experiential compression of an ancient argument — the same destination reached by holding, with a tradesman’s stubbornness, to the one thing each visitor could not deny: that they are.

There is, in the end, a place where even that fact lapses. The sense “I am” arose with the food-essence body and will subside with it; consciousness, for all its luminous extent, is itself a guest, come and going. What remains when the knowledge of being is no longer kept — the awareness that requires no “I am” to be aware, that was there before the first stirring of presence and is unmarked by its passing — is what the Khetwadi talks circle back to at the last. To stand as that, prior to consciousness and prior to the world it lights, was for Nisargadatta the whole of the matter, and the only identity he would finally grant his listeners.

→ In the library: Shankara's Vedānta-Sūtra commentary (Thibaut, 1896) · The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom (Vivekachūdāmani, Johnston, 1925)

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