Once upon a time there was an ascetic known as Kaushika. He always felt greatly proud of himself, since he felt he knew the intricacies of Vedanta in and out. He had left home to pursue study of the Scriptures and now he could confidently boast that he had mastered them all. One day, Kaushika was sitting under a tree, plunged in samadhi. Suddenly he found his concentration disturbed by a loud noise and he awoke from his samadhi.

Q.: How did Bhagavan finally persuade that boy, Vishwanatha Aiyyer, to return home?
B.: I did not. On that night when he was sleeping outside the ashram, I was sitting some distance away from the boy when I noticed that Shabarigirisan was sitting blissfully alone on the roof of the ashram, staring at the full moon in great contentment. When I looked at him, the languor [monkey] leaped down, pressed some ginger shoots into my hands and took them back; then he climbed back and was for sometime ingesting them. Then he did something nobody will believe. He came near us, poised himself on the floor in the Bakāsanam, and softly began whistling [or screeching], perfectly, the tune corresponding to ‘Endaro Mahanubhavulu…’.

Much of the content presented here, showing Bhagavan reeling off verses from the Bible and other texts, are done so with the implicit assumption that the reader would naturally give himself to understand that Bhagavan was reading out from a book; certainly Bhagavan did not burst out with these lines of prose or, as the case may be, poetry, from extempore memory – at least, not in a majority of the cases.

I flinched, for when Bhagavan is angry- an extremely rare occurrence- waves of ire are felt by his devotees to be radiating everywhere in the ether. The sarvadhikari, however, seemed to be too pre-occupied with the contents of his head to pay any attention to what he must have surmised to be a coversation going on between Bhagavan and a devotee. He rose from his prostration and went to the door.

Oh! Master of the Formidable Mountain! I was earlier like a filthy pig, consuming with eager relish the turds excreted by the sensory – organs. I came with a restless mind to impudently scrutinise your authenticity, but the moment your eyes fell on me, I became motionless like you, for you graciously annihilated my maleficent faculty of assertion – manufacture which arrogantly asseverated “I”, and immersed me in my own intrinsic inner state of Absolute Being, which in truth is only You.
I kiss the dust of your sacred feet everyday, for by drowning me once and for all in the unfathomable ocean of exultation which is verily You, you have devoured my traitorous mind forever.