Totapuri:

 

Totapuri, sometimes Tota Puri, was a parivrajaka, a wandering monk who followed the path of wisdom taught by Advaita Vedanta as well as being the teacher-guru that brought the full fruit of Awakening to Sri Ramakrishna. He was a member of the Naga sect of sannyasins, a highly austere and uncompromising monastic order.

 

Nagas normally live with only "space as clothing" (Digambara), refusing to submit to any comfort the body or mind might enjoy. Totapuri was an adept of the formless reality, the cloudless sky of the absolute. He, like Swami Trailanga, was, it has been claimed by some, to be over 250 years old when he died.

 

He regarded the worship of divine forms as childish. Naked and smeared with ashes, Totapuri strolled through Dakshineswar Temple Garden and noticed Ramakrishna seated there, clapping his hands ecstatically and chanting the name of Mother Kali.

 

Totapuri recognized at once that Ramakrishna, despite his appearance as a simple devotee of the Goddess, was inwardly prepared to receive initiation into the knowledge of the absolute, in which all forms and all emotions are left behind.


Totapuri approached Ramakrishna with the proposal that he receive initiation into Advaita Vedanta. Ramakrishna replied, "I must ask my Mother Kali." He entered the temple and received permission from the living divinity that he experienced pulsatiing through the stone image enshrined there. That evening, Toatpuri began instructing him in Formless Meditation.

 

But as Ramakrishna concentrated deeply, the radiant figure of the Goddess appeared to his inner eye. When he reported this to Totapuri, the austere naked monk took a sharp stone and pressed it firmly against Ramakrishna's forehead, instructing him to concentrate on the pain and assuring him that he could transcend the divine form and merge into the infinite expanse of the absolute. Once more, Ramakrishna meditated and, as he later expressed it, "with the sword of wisdom, I cut through the divine form of Kali." Her form dissolved, and his individuality completely disappeared into Her formless aspect.

 

For three days Ramakrishna was completely lost to the world in a near state of suspended animation called Nirodha, seated in the small Meditation Hut, motionless, all breathing and body functions slowed to a standstill.

 

Totapuri was amazed, because, like the Buddha's brother or cousin Ananda, Totapuri had practiced for forty years to achieve the same level of experience -- nirvikalpa samadhi -- the disappearance of individual identity in the Absolute. It occurred to Ramakrishna in a single sitting.

 

Ramakrishna remained silent for six days and finally, when he opened his eyes he thanked Totapuri saying "If you had not come, I would have lived my whole life with the hallucination. My last barrier has fallen away." He became Enlightened after he had cut the last barrier.

 

But even the followers of Ramakrishna don't mention the incident because it makes the whole effort of worshipping futile.
Totapuri as an orthodox wandering monk never remained more than three days in one location. However, he became so awed by Ramakrishna's ability in Samadhi to remain 'rigid as a corpse for days on end', that he broke his longstanding rule, resulting in him staying eleven months at Dakshineswar hoping to learn from the man who had previously been his disciple.


 

Dakshineswar Temple seen from the river

During this long stay he contracted serious dysentery. There was prolonged and severe pain, which was distracting Totapuri during meditation. Since he considered the body just a medium, essentially unnecessary after the realization of the Absolute, he decided to give up his body by drowning in the Ganges. He walked out into the river, but, even though the river should have been extremely deep, at least in the middle, no matter how far he went the water never got above his knees. He ended up without ever reaching deep water.

 

Eventually he came upon the bank on the far side and when he turned to look back, he saw the Kali temple gleaming in moonlight and experienced a sudden deep Awakening. He recognized sheer divine power and consciousness, moving through all beings and controlling all events, including his own attempt to discard the body.

Totapuri thus accepted the manifest universe and its energy as a radiant expression of the Absolute. The demarcation between form and formless no longer existed for him. Although his whole life had been spiritual in nature, Totapuri, without any verbal teaching, had opened beyond he experience of the formless absolute into the continuum of consciousness, from which no divine, human, or natural forms are excluded and to which no particular doctrine exclusively applies.

 

The most interesting facet of the whole Ramakrishna-Totapuri Awakening phase is, that although Totapuri was a highly attained monk or guru at the time, he himself, as the above account seems to testify (and is verified in other accounts), may not have been Enlightened to the nth degree at the time he was coaching Ramakrishna.

 

His Attainment may have been somewhere near, between, or similar to or akin to, what in Zen is refered to as Ken-chu-shi or possibly Daijo or maybe even Saijojo. You may recall, at the beginning of the Buddha's spiritual quest, before Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, he studied under two teachers. The first teacher taught him the first seven Jhanas.

 

The second teacher taught him the Eighth Jhana. Both teachers told him they had taught him ALL there was to learn. But Siddhartha still didn't know why there was suffering, so he left each of these teachers and wound up doing six years of austerity practises. These too did not provide the answer to his question and he abandoned these for what has come to be known as Sunyata or the Middle Way.

 

The Sutras indicate that on the night of his Enlightenment, he sat down under the Bodhi Tree and began his meditation by practising the Jhanas then moving to product of his own making, Vipassana Meditation. When his mind was "concentrated, purified, bright, unblemished, rid of imperfection, malleable, wieldy, steady and attained to imperturbability" he direct it to the "true knowledges" that gave rise to his incredible breakthrough in consciousness known in the sutras as Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi, beyond the beyond of the Eighth Jhana.


 

Meditation Hut as it appeared in Ramakrishna's day

 

The rebuilt Hut as it appears today


Totapuri's full and total Enlightenment transpired AFTER Ramakrishna's full Awakening when he walked out into the river and saw the Kali temple gleaming in moonlight and experienced a sudden deep Awakening. He recognized sheer divine power and consciousness, moving through all beings and controlling all events, including his own attempt to discard the body.

 

Totapuri thus accepted the manifest universe and its energy as a radiant expression of the Absolute. The demarcation between form and formless no longer existed for him.Not in the least unlike the same or similar type moonlight driven event FORETOLD by the Wanderling's Zen Mentor and described in Dark Luminosity:

"...the moon's pale-soft beams fell into my eyes unaware of my existance nor me of it, the light thereof poured on it's own down through my pupils and lightning like, a fist size feeling of something akin to bliss began to build and radiate..."

 

However, Totapuri's Enlightenment or lack of same notwithstanding, Ramakrishna was still able to reach Full Attainment under his auspices anyway -- not unlike the Buddha -- whose teachers had not attained the ultimate either. A similar example of reverse causality is recorded regarding the Awakened American spiritual teacher Lee Lozowick whose Attainment through his guru occurred one full year BEFORE he even met his guru.

 

Of course, the venerated Indian sage the Baghavan Sri Ramana Maharshi would say and is on record for saying, "Abiding in the Self there is no space-time," which would seem to indicate for a spiritual master at the level of the Buddha, Ramana, Totapuri, or Ramakrishna, there's no such thing as the past, the present or future.

 

Because of certain connections with other swamis and gurus, Totapuri, through word of mouth, has often been associated with the mysterious secret hidden city, the so-called home of immortals high in the mountains of Tibet known as Shambhala, sometimes called Shangri-La.

 

As for living or staying alive a very long time it does not always happen in remote areas of the Himalayas. For those who may be so interested, there is reported in western cultures, especially so as related to the desert southwest and Mesoamerica cultures, a being known as a Death Defier that is said to have an incredibly long life span. The following explains:


"It has long come down to us from out of the ripples of shamanistic lore that the quasi or semi organaform-being called the Death Defier was a human from long ago who, on becoming a shaman-sorcerer, used his powers to try and escape death. He managed to alter his form so he would more closely resemble inorganic beings. However, in the process, he was trapped by the lure of power from those same inorganic beings.

 

Eons later he managed to escape. Existing on a thin threshold between the not-fully human and the inorganic he couldn't eat, yet still needed energy. To evade his former captors and sustain his form, he needed to constantly search for energy. In the year 1725 AD the Death Defier, addicted to living and needing energy, down on power, in his last dying moments, cornered a then minor shaman from a long line of minor shamans by the name of Sebastian.

 

In a noticable weakened state he was able to extort energy from him --- but only through a deal. To stay alive each generation of shaman-sorcerers in Sebastian's lineage would GIVE the Death Defier some of THEIR energy in exchange for knowledge --- knowledge and secrets gained or learned by the Death Defier over thousands and thousands of years.

 

Thus the Death Defier "earned" the name tenant and by doing so, a new lineage was born. The secret is, in making the deal, the crafty Sebastian and those that followed, have given the the life-addicted Defier only enough energy to survive."