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Srimad Rājacandra on the Necessity of a Direct Living Sad-guru
- N. M. Kansara Śrimad Rājacandra (1968-1901. AD) was a very grand soul with prodigious prenatal memory, unusually spiritual poetic tendency, and direct experience of Self-realization. His master piece work, named Atma-siddhi-sastra (ASS) composed in Gujarati, is written with the sole purpose of saving the humanity from mere ritualism and pursuance of barren knowledge that leads them but to the hell, to save them from it and show them the entirely hidden secret path of Truth. Herein is emphasized the ideal of Self-pursuit, Self-realization and Self-absorption.
In about twenty-eight dohā verses of his ASS he has made various statement that emphasize the need of a direct living good preceptor on the spiritual path of Self-realization. At the outset he bows down to the feet of the Holy True Teacher, the Adored Jina, who explained the real nature of the Soul, without understanding which he suffered infinite misery.' Emphasizing that a true teacher is essential, he adds that he who gives up his individual theories, such as whims, delusion, etc., and serves the feet of the true Teacher, finds his ideal and attains Self-realization. However low, as compared with the Arhant, a living teacher be, he is necessary to guide the seeker after truth. To this effect Srimad Rājacandra says that even the obligation to Jina who is invisible is not comparable to that of a visible living true teacher. Without attending to this fact, self-contemplation does not arise. Referring to the True Teacher, he says that these are the admirable qualities of the True Teacher, viz., knowledge of the Self, equanimous feeling at the contradictory pairs of the world, such as pleasure or pain, praise or censure, gain or loss, etc., worldly life only due to the operation of the
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