Anandamayi Ma
Wed, 08/15/2007 - 21:50 — Shane Magee
Anandamoyi Ma (sometimes spelt Anandamoyi Ma), is one of the greatest female saints, or yoginis - perhaps the greatest - that ever lived. She travelled all over India, and huge crowds travelled to see this woman in mystic commune with God.
She was born with the name Nirmala in Bengal in 1896 to pious Vaishnavaite parents, and at an early age began to disply remarkable spiritual tendencies, often going into trance when she would hear spiritual music being played. As was the custom, she was married at the age of 13 and spent the next five years at her husband's brothers house, mixing frequent trancelike states with practical service to the family.
When she moved into her husband's home, her husband quickly realised theirs was not to be the normal relationship of man and wife. She would often be lost in spiritual ecstasy whilst the cooking got spoiled. One interesting incident illustrates how outwardly unattached she was to the outer forms or worship, focusing instead on their inner essence: Bholanath once asked her why she chanted the name of Hari (from the Vaishnavite tradition) when his own family was Shaivaite. To please him, she then began chanting Siva - she would follow a Shaivaite path for the rest of her life, with no obvious effect on her spiritual depth. Soon, her husband asked for initiation and became her first disciple, taking the name Bholanath.
Bholanath and his wife moved to Shahbag to manage the gardens of the Moslem Nawab in 1924. Here people first took notice of this girl with a constantly blissful countenance, and began coming just to catch a glimpse of her in meditation. Around this time, she stopped consciously feeding herself, and her newfound disciples would insert the food by hand. When spiritual music was played, she would go into high trance and lie down in samadhi for many hours, lost to the world. This was when she first began to be called Anandamayi Ma - the Bliss-Permeated Mother. She began attracting disciples from all castes, and from the Hindu and Moslem community alike - the outward forms of cast and religion had no hold on her.
Over the next forty years she would travel all over India, visiting all the old places of worship and injecting new life into them. Once Mahatma Ghandi asked her why she moved from place to place so frequently. She merely replied, "But Pitaji, I am really at the same place. There is just one garden, and I move around within its premises." She met some of the most famous spiritual teachers of the twentieth century, for example Sri Ramana Maharshi and Paramhansa Yogananda - the latter gives a particularly reverent account of the meeting in his book 'Autobiography of a Yogi'. She broke down the artificial barrier of her being a woman to be accepted into the council of sadhus, and the heads of many monastic orders accepted her word as veritable scripture. She was practically illiterate, but her breathtakingly clear answers to seekers' questions have been preserved for posterity. In the 1970's, when she was in her late seventies, she began to see people less and less, and would not take food for months at a time - her attendenance would only give her some drops of cold water from time to time. On August 27th 1982, uttering the words 'Om Shivaya Nama' her soul left its mortal frame.