How Bhagavan came to compose Ulladu Narpadu

Excerpt: five paragraphs from
Sri Ramana Teachings: Upadēśa Kaliveṇbā: the extended version of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu

https://sriramanateachings.org/blog/2...
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Sri Muruganar had collected twenty-one verses that Bhagavan had composed on various occasions, and in July 1928 he asked Bhagavan to compose some more verses in order to form a work of forty verses (like four ancient Tamil poems each of which consisted of forty verses, namely Iṉṉā Nāṟpadu, Iṉiyavai Nāṟpadu, Kār Nāṟpadu and Kaḷavaṙi Nāṟpadu) elucidating the nature of reality and the means to attain it. Accordingly on the 21st July 1928 Bhagavan began to compose more verses on this subject, and in order to arrange them into a logical order and to form them into coherent text, he and Muruganar would discuss in detail the progress of the work, where gaps needed to be filled, and which of the original twenty-one verses should be retained and which discarded.

In the end only three of the original twenty-one verses were retained in Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu, namely verses 16, 37 and 40, and of these three the original verse that became verse 16 (which is now included in Upadēśa Taṉippākkaḷ as verse 13) was modified by Bhagavan to form the present verse. The other eighteen of the original verses, along with three new verses that he composed while compiling Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu, were not retained because they were not sufficiently germane to the subject, so these twenty-one discarded verses were formed into a separate work called Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu Anubandham (the appendix or supplement to Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu). In 1931 nine more verses that Bhagavan had composed in the meanwhile were added to this Anubandham, another seven were added in 1938, and finally another four were added in 1940, so it became a work of forty-one verses, the first of which was then treated as a benedictory verse (maṅgalam) to the other forty.

Whereas most of the verses of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu Anubandham are ones that Bhagavan translated from Sanskrit or Malayalam, all of the verses of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu are his own original compositions, and most of them were composed between 21st July and 8th August 1928 in answer to Muruganar’s prayer to compose a text explaining the nature of reality and the means to attain it. On 8th August 1928 Bhagavan and Muruganar considered Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu to be completed, and at that time it consisted of a text (nūl) of forty verses in veṇbā metre, each comprised of four lines, with one benedictory verse (maṅgalam), which was a kuṟaḷ veṇbā (a two-line veṇbā) and which is now the last two lines of the first maṅgalamverse.

However three days later, on 11th August 1928, Kavyakantha Ganapati Sastri was informed that Bhagavan had composed a new work, so he asked to see it, and on glancing at it he asked why the maṅgalam verse was not a four-line one like all the others. Bhagavan then explained to him that it was actually composed in the same metre but just a briefer version of it, and that Tirukkuṟaḷ (the best known and one of the most highly revered classics of ancient Tamil literature) consists entirely of such kuṟaḷ veṇbās, because it is particularly suited to expressing aphorisms. However Kavyakantha persisted, saying that since it is the same metre it would be better if it consisted of four lines like all the other verses, so Bhagavan looked at Muruganar, who suggested that the meaning could be made more clear if he were to compose two more lines before these two, and hence Bhagavan composed the first two lines of the first maṅgalam verse, thereby transforming it into a four-line veṇbā.

Kavyakantha then asked Bhagavan to explain the meaning of these four lines, and when he found that they made no direct mention of God, he remarked that a maṅgalam verse should praise God or invoke his blessings and suggested that Bhagavan should therefore compose another verse as the maṅgalaminstead of this one. Bhagavan replied, however, that that would not be necessary, because this verse was appropriate to the aim and purpose of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu, namely to elucidate the nature of reality and the means to attain it. Kavyakantha then read the whole work and found that only one verse mentioned a name of God, namely Mahēśaṉ (‘the Great Lord’, which is a name of Śiva), so he suggested that that would be a more suitable verse to have as the maṅgalam. Bhagavan and Muruganar then discussed this suggestion and decided that since the existing maṅgalam verse explains the practice of self-investigation (ātma-vicāra) while that other verse describes the practice of complete self-surrender, it would be appropriate to use that as a second maṅgalam verse. Therefore since that left only thirty-nine verses in the main text (nūl), Bhagavan composed and added one more verse, namely verse 31. Thus on that day, 11th August 1928, Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu was completed in its present form.

Michael James

Om Namo Bhagavathe SriRamanaya
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